Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label statistics. Show all posts

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Obama Wins ~ GOP Goes Bonkers ~ Update 2

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pic via Kevin Drum on Mother Jones


Fox News Slowly Loses Its Mind Over Election Results
~ Headline on New York Mag

The white establishment is now the minority. And the voters, many of them, feel that the economic system is stacked against them and they want stuff.
The demographics are changing. It's not a traditional America anymore.
If Obama wins, Sandy will have something to do with it. He got more currency from Sandy than he got negative currency from Libya. That to me is amazing.
. . . If Mitt Romney loses Ohio, the president is re-elected.
~ Bill O'Reilly on Fox News


Election 2012: Karl Rove raving mad on Fox News Channel after his own network declares President Obama the winner
~ Headline on New York Daily News

Mediaite: Karl Rove Causes Fox News Chaos
"We have got to be careful about calling things when we have like 991 votes separating the two candidates and a quarter of the vote yet to count,” Rove warned the Fox anchors, much to their dismay. “Even if they have made it on the basis of select precincts, I would be very careful about intruding in this process.”
. . . Several minutes later, (Megan) Kelly took the initiative to head over to the “Decision Desk” and hear from the network’s own number crunchers that Rove is wrong and Ohio most certainly belongs to President Obama in the 2012 election. She walked the cameras over to a conference room down the hall, and asked several analysts to confirm Fox’s surefire decision to call the election for Obama.
“You tell me whether you stand by your call in Ohio, given the doubts Karl Rove just raised,” she said.
“We are actually quite comfortable with the call in Ohio,” they responded. “We’re quite comfortable with the idea that Obama will carry Ohio.”
Chris Stierwald added: “There just aren’t enough Republican votes yet for Mitt Romney to get there.”
When Kelly asked the two analysts what percentage certainty they have that Obama has won, they responded: “99.95%”



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I don’t mean to cross-advertise here, but on the conservative cable news network Fox News Channel – Fox News Channel called Ohio for Obama, but the on-air talent at Fox News Channel is refusing to concede that they believe it...
. . . (Rove) is now trying to get on air the Fox News Channel to rescind its call in Ohio in favor of the candidate that he has bankrolled to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This is a remarkable thing.
. . . It’s worth looking at close races and I do not begrudge the Romney campaign for saying that they’ve got issues with what’s gone on with Ohio. But to decide that a result isn’t a result as long as you don’t like the outcome is something that means that we cannot work together as a country anymore. And we can’t go down this road very much further.
~ Rachel Maddow on MSNBC

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I think the real story here is that Obama won, but he’s got no mandate. He won but by going very small, very negative, and we are left as a country exactly where we started but a little bit worse off.
~ Charles Krauthammer on Fox News

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The realization at this point is that those Bain Capital ads that voters just got inundated with early on in Ohio, and some of these other areas as it pertained to the auto bailout, I think really hurt Romney.
This really is a catastrophic set back to our economy. And to any opportunity that we would have for Supreme Court justices to be appointed who strictly adhere to the Constitution.
. . . A win is a win. I cannot believe that the majority of Americans would feel okay with incurring more debt, not balancing the budget and and relying on foreign energy.
It’s a perplexing time for many of us right now, if things continue in this trend that we have seen earlier tonight.
~ Sarah Palin to Greta Van Susteren on Fox News

Donald Trump's Twitter:













Deleted Tweets Calling for "Revolution" Via Salon.com

TrumpRevolution2

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Now we're the shallowest country in the history of man. One photo-op walkin' over a two-by-four and all of a sudden he's handling a storm, which by the way hasn't been handled well.
~ Clueless Brian Kilmeade on Fox and Friends, cue SNL


Ted Nugent Twittery









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Update 2

Charlie Daniels







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Rush Limbaugh

Women. Let's start our own abortion industry. Let's go out and get the women's vote. The point is - I just want you to think about this - would that work? In this America today, would that work? It does for the Democrats.
~ Rush Limbaugh, 11-7-2012, audio here

Women voted Obama 55 to 43 for Romney. Massive gender gap. Unchanged from 2008. Unmarried women backed Obama 68% to 30%. They thought Romney was going to take away their birth control pills. Obama treats them like vaginas and they say 'He's my man.' Go figure.
~ Rush Limbaugh, 11-7-2012, audio here

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Jennifer Rubin ~ Blame Everybody

Until October it was the Perils of Pauline campaign. It moved in fits and starts on foreign policy. The message was rarely consistent from day to day. Gobs of ads were aired to no apparent effect. The convention speech was a huge missed opportunity. Romney made a lunge now and then in the direction of immigration reform and an alternative health-care plan without giving those topics the attention they deserved. The communications team was the worst of any presidential campaign I have ever seen — slow and plodding, never able to capitalize on openings. It was hostile, indifferent and unhelpful to media, conservative and mainstream alike.

. . . Romney’s operation suffered from too many cooks in the kitchen, too much hesitation and too little creativity. For that the candidate ultimately bears responsibility. He did not direct a campaign with the single-minded focus needed to win, at least not until it was too late in the game.

. . . In the future, Republicans will have to find a way to appeal to the non-married, nonwhite, non-religious parts of the electorate. They must find a messenger or a message that is more than a standard conservative laundry list. They must figure out how conservatism can be presented as more than an abstract theory of the free market and as a compelling approach to addressing complicated problems.

. . . Republicans in this election cycle had many good candidates who chose not to run. Jeb Bush, Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie and Rubio did not put themselves on the line, for a variety of reasons. No one can be forced to run for president, but they should be spared no criticism for preferring to sit out a winnable race. Of the candidates who did run in the primary, only Romney had any appeal to speak of beyond the Republican base. Really, does anyone imagine that Rick Santorum or Texas Gov. Rick Perry or, goodness gracious, Herman Cain, could have made it through the debates or presented an inclusive message? The Republican electorate selected the most plausible candidates from the available choices; the non-candidates bear some of the responsibility for an Obama second term.
~ Jennifer Rubin of Washington Post via her column which was used shamelessly to campaign for Romney, whom she still refuses to blame for his own problems


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Sunday, November 4, 2012

Republicans Predict Romney Landslide

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Peggy Noonan on Romney Quietly Catching Up with Obama:

Romney’s crowds are building—28,000 in Morrisville, Pa., last night; 30,000 in West Chester, Ohio, Friday It isn’t only a triumph of advance planning: People came, they got through security and waited for hours in the cold. His rallies look like rallies now, not enactments. In some new way he’s caught his stride. He looks happy and grateful. His closing speech has been positive, future-looking, sweetly patriotic. His closing ads are sharp—the one about what’s going on at the rallies is moving.

All the vibrations are right. A person who is helping him who is not a longtime Romneyite told me, yesterday: “I joined because I was anti Obama—I’m a patriot, I’ll join up But now I am pro-Romney.” Why? “I’ve spent time with him and I care about him and admire him. He’s a genuinely good man.” Looking at the crowds on TV, hearing them chant “Three more days” and “Two more days”—it feels like a lot of Republicans have gone from anti-Obama to pro-Romney.

Something old is roaring back. One of the Romney campaign’s surrogates, who appeared at a rally with him the other night, spoke of the intensity and joy of the crowd “I worked the rope line, people wouldn’t let go of my hand.” It startled him. A former political figure who’s been in Ohio told me this morning something is moving with evangelicals, other church-going Protestants and religious Catholics. ...

. . . There is no denying the Republicans have the passion now, the enthusiasm. The Democrats do not. Independents are breaking for Romney. And there’s the thing about the yard signs. In Florida a few weeks ago I saw Romney signs, not Obama ones. From Ohio I hear the same. From tony Northwest Washington, D.C., I hear the same.

Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.

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Friday, November 2, 2012

Pundits "Wagering" War on Nate Silver - Updated Sat. Nov 3



Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight Blog on New York Times



UPDATE ~ FRIDAY NOVEMBER 2





Interview on MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show
Rachel Maddow: You have been the subject of a lot of criticism this last week in particular, as if the polling model that you built at the New York Times and the way you've explained the polling is somehow biased or wrong or evil. I feel like you are waging a one-man war against innumeracy, in terms of explaining to people how polling works and how averaging works. How has this week been for you?

Nate Silver: It's been kind of a trip in some ways, right, in which you become the topic of conversation yourself. And there's this kind of celebrity level attached to it that's very new for me. But there are other websites that do the same thing that we do, even RealClearPolitics and Pollster.com and three or four others. And they all show basically the same thing.
There's no way you can slice and dice the data in Ohio or Iowa or Wisconsin right now and say that Romney's winning there. In fact, the polls would have to mess up by quite a bit for that to occur. And that could happen - there have been years like 1980 in which the race when way differently from the polling. But we're now in the phase when it's no longer a question of who's ahead in the electoral college in the polls so much as will the polls have a really bad year? And they could, and we account for that possibility.
But that's why you see some conservatives now - the smart ones - are no longer bothering to say we're winning in these states. They're saying the polling's just categorically wrong. And every now and then that's right, but usually that's just wishful thinking.

Rachel: Nate Silver you are a man at the center of the storm in a way that you did not expect to be, but thank you for continuing to be cogent and rational and patient through all of this.

Nate: Thank you, Rachel.

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Nate Silver: Patron Saint of Confirmation Bias
When the history of the 2012 election is written, Silver deserves prominent attention. In the aftermath of Obama's debate debacle, Silver has been the left's oracle, reassuring them that everything is fine. His influence has been such that the Obama campaign didn't make any real course corrections in response to Romney's momentum. When the left wakes up on Wednesday, surveying the electoral wreckage around them, they may regret allowing themselves to be lulled into such a false sense of security.
Silver cut his chops on analyzing baseball stats. He has tried to apply that discipline to the messy world of American politics. But, as Dave Weigel with Slate noted to me in reference to Silver, "politics isn't baseball." No it isn't and we will be reminded of that on Tuesday.
~ Mike Flynn on Breitbart


What Silver has become is a handy resentment symbol for the right. They need a few every election. Last time it was Acorn and Bll Ayers. Now it's Silver. Someone to blame if and when things don't go their way on Election Day. I don't know how they're going to blame Silver; by insistently calling Obama the favorite, he somehow willed it to be so, I suppose. They always come up with something. They might blame it on Sandy this time around, too, of course. And pollsters generally.
Unskewedpolls.com, the right-wing site that sprang up a few weeks ago to "correct" liberal "bias" in the polls, right now has Romney at 321 electoral votes, including Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania (what, no Minnesota?!). Silver has Obama at 299. I know which one seems more plausible to me. But you see how this works--predicting Romney at 321 instead of a more realistic 275 or 280-ish number gives them that much more to be pissed off about next Wednesday. They must be kept in a state of sustained outrage.
~ Michael Tomasky on The Daily Beast

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'New York Times' Bully Knocks Stack Of Polls From Nate Silver's Hands
NEW YORK—As part of his continued effort to torment the 34-year-old statistician and blogger, feared New York Times bully Derek Kriesel reportedly slapped a stack of opinion polls from Nate Silver’s hands Friday, scattering the surveys across the floor of the organization’s newsroom. “Pick them up, you little f***in’ dweeb,” said Kriesel, who eyewitnesses confirmed kicked the papers down the hallway before Silver could gather them up. “Hey, Silverdork, I got a poll for you. It says there’s a 90 percent chance that I’m going to beat the shit out of you, what do you think of that?” At press time, sources said Silver was hiding in a supply closet and analyzing the latest electoral data as a menacing voice from across the hall called out, “Oh, Silver! Where are you, Silver?”
~ The Onion

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I'm sure that I have a lot riding on the outcome. I'm also sure I'll get too much credit if the prediction is right and too much blame if it is wrong.
~ Nate Silver quoted on BuzzFeed

Silver’s strong showing in the 2008 election, coupled with his consistent predictions that Obama will win in November, has given Democrats a reason for optimism. While there is nothing wrong with trying to make sense of the polls, it should be noted that Nate Silver is openly rooting for Obama, and it shows in the way he forecasts the election.
~ Josh Jordan on National Review

Silver’s facts are being fired like bullets into the heart of the Romney campaign.
~ The Telegraph UK

...the right — and we’re not talking about the fringe here, we’re talking about mainstream commentators and publications — has been screaming “bias”! They know, just know, that Nate must be cooking the books. How do they know this? Well, his results look good for Obama, so it must be a cheat. Never mind the fact that Nate tells us all exactly how he does it, and that he hasn’t changed the formula at all.
This is, of course, reminiscent of the attack on the Bureau of Labor Statistics — not to mention the attacks on climate science and much more. On the right, apparently, there is no such thing as an objective calculation. Everything must have a political motive.
This is really scary. It means that if these people triumph, science — or any kind of scholarship — will become impossible. Everything must pass a political test; if it isn’t what the right wants to hear, the messenger is subjected to a smear campaign.
~ Paul Krugman on NYT



...if Obama wins, the right will insist that stories saying Romney was losing caused Romney to lose. There'll be right-wing books with titles such as In the Tank: How the Mainstream Media Stole the 2012 Election for Barack Obama. Large portions of these books will be devoted to the notion that Nate Silver, above all others, ruined Romney's chances with his evil math-based objective propaganda.
~ Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog

Now we’re seeing the emergence of ‘Nate Silver truthers,’ who attack the numbers-cruncher as if he’s a pundit expressing a personal opinion rather than a statistics geek who developed a very robust computer model. And they’re using the same tactics they deploy to deny climate change – launching ad hominem attacks on an expert — calling him corrupt — rather than offering a criticism of the methodology of his model, a criticism they don’t have the technical knowledge to come up with.
~ Joshua Holland on Alternet





Nate Silver is a man of very small stature, a thin and effeminate man with a soft-sounding voice that sounds almost exactly like the “Mr. New Castrati” voice used by Rush Limbaugh on his program. In fact, Silver could easily be the poster child for the New Castrati in both image and sound. Nate Silver, like most liberal and leftist celebrities and favorites, might be of average intelligence but is surely not the genius he's made out to be. His political analyses are average at best and his projections, at least this year, are extremely biased in favor of the Democrats.
Apparently, Nate Silver has his own way of “skewing” the polls. He appears to look at the polls available and decide which ones to put more “weighting” on in compiling his own average, as opposed to the Real Clear Politics average, and then uses the average he calculates to determine that percentages a candidate has of winning that state. He labels some polling firms as favoring Republicans, even if they over sample Democrats in their surveys, apparently because he doesn't agree with their results. In the end the polls are gerrymandering into averages that seem to suit his agenda to make the liberal Democrats candidates apparently strong than they are.
~ Dean Chambers, owner of Unskewed Polls, on The Examiner (update: this paragraph has since been edited out of the article



Nate Silver could be a one-term celebrity.
~ Dylan Byers on Politico

In short: Conservatives are outraged at Silver for “predicting” an Obama victory, and nonpartisan (but fiercely ideological) political press elites are all chuckling at his curious notion that fancy math can be used to determine what is most likely to happen in an election.
. . . But in a war between Politico and a funny baseball nerd who is good at math, I choose the baseball nerd.
What Silver does is actually fairly simple and many of the most prominent of his detractors seem disturbingly (and hilariously) incapable of figuring it out.
. . . don’t be scared of Nate Silver and his wizard numbers, Washington hacks. He can’t hurt you.
~ Alex Pareene on Salon

. . . I should treat polls as a fuzzy snapshot of a moment in time. I should not read them, and think I understand the future. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that even experts with fancy computer models are terrible at predicting human behavior.
. . . If you tell me you think you can quantify an event that is about to happen that you don`t expect, like the 47 percent comment or a debate performance, I think you think you are a wizard. That`s not possible/ The pollsters tell us what`s happening now. When they start projecting, they`re getting into silly land.
~ Political Pundit David Brooks, quoted by Politico

Then there’s the backlash from more traditional media figures. Some of the arguments here have been downright weird, as when Politico’s Josh Gerstein wrote, “Isn’t the basic problem with the Nate Silver prediction in question, and the critique, that it puts a percentage on a one-off event?” Or when Politico’s Jonathan Martin wrote, “Avert your gaze, liberals: Nate Silver admits he’s simply averaging public polls and there is no secret sauce.” Or when Politico’s Dylan Byers wrote, “So should Mitt Romney win on Nov. 6, it’s difficult to see how people can continue to put faith in the predictions of someone who has never given that candidate anything higher than a 41 percent chance of winning.”
Come to think of it, a lot of the odder critiques of Silver have been coming out of Politico. But that makes a kind of sense. Silver’s work poses a threat to more traditional — and, in particular, to more excitable — forms of political punditry and horse-race journalism.
~ Ezra Klein on Washington Post

Nate Silver says this is a 73.6 percent chance that the president is going to win? Nobody in that campaign thinks they have a 73 percent chance — they think they have a 50.1 percent chance of winning. And you talk to the Romney people, it's the same thing. Both sides understand that it is close, and it could go either way. And anybody that thinks that this race is anything but a tossup right now is such an ideologue, they should be kept away from typewriters, computers, laptops and microphones for the next 10 days, because they're jokes.
~ Joe Scarborough on MSNBC's Morning Joe

We can debate how much of a favorite Obama is; Romney, clearly, could still win. But this is not wizardry or rocket science. All you have to do is take an average, and count to 270. It's a pretty simple set of facts. I'm sorry that Joe is math-challenged.
~ Nate Silver's reply to Morning Joe, via Politico


















Joe is so stupid...I mean, we knew that already, and he's condescending as hell, but it's worse when you're condescending AND stupid.
He's comparing apples and oranges.
50.1% support Obama nationally in polls. If Obama gets 50.1% of the national vote, he has nearly a 95% chance to win the election (provided there is no split between electoral college and popular vote, which I think Nate puts at 5.1% likliehood.)
The probability of Obama winning is at 79%. That means, Joe, that 79 out of 100 times that the test is run (the statistical test that Nate uses), Obama wins. It also means that 21% of the time, Romney wins, which is just scary. 20% odds are not that bad, actually. But I like ours better. :-)
Joe is mixing his polling data (50.1% of respondents said they were voting for Obama) with the probability tests that Nate is running.
~ comment by Wendy in FL on Daily Kos

Lets not forget this is the same honest Joe who said, mark my words, if Hillary isn't nominated, the Democrats can kiss the White House goodbye.
~ comment by King George the Turd on Daily Kos

But whatever the motivation behind it, the wager offer is a bad idea – giving ammunition to the critics who want to paint Mr. Silver as a partisan who is trying to sway the outcome.
It’s also inappropriate for a Times journalist, which is how Mr. Silver is seen by the public even though he’s not a regular staff member.
~ Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor of The New York Times

Clearly a very compelling reason for Silver to leave the NYT after the election.
His product was far better back in 2008.
~ comment by Theodore on NYT

You said that "When he came to work at The Times, Mr. Silver gained a lot more visibility and the credibility associated with a prominent institution. "
The fact is, his credibility comes from the reliability and trustworthiness of his work, not from his association with the New York Times. It is because of his credibility that you solicited his posting on the NYTimes website.
Mr. Silver is defending himself against attacks on his credibility, and is justified in doing so. He is defending his work, not Obama.
Your comments reek of taking the New York Times and its stature as a "prominent institution" too seriously.
~ Bill Towne, in reply to Margaret Sullivan


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Friday, October 5, 2012

Jack Welch Says "Chicago Guys" Created 7.8% Jobless Rate for Obama

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(Scroll Down for complete transcript of Chris Matthews Interview with Jack Welch w/video at bottom of post)

Anybody, any serious person who has any familiarity with how these numbers are tabulated understands that these are career employees at the Bureau of Labor Statistics that are responsible for compiling and analyzing these numbers and they do that on their own.
~ White House Spokesman Josh Earnest

I think it would be impossible to really manipulate the numbers. Certainly, it would be impossible to manipulate the numbers and not be found out.
. . . At turning points, sometimes the household survey turns a little quicker than the payroll survey does. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t give out false signals
~ Keith Hall, former Head of Bureau of Labor Statistics, on LA Times
. . . There’s nothing wrong with the numbers. The only issue is the interpretation of the numbers. The numbers are what they are.
~ Keith Hall on Wall Street Journal

Listen, I would never send a tweet like Jack Welch, and I respect Jack - he's a great guy. That's why last month I said it would be below 8% before the election. That's why I said it. I don't say things I can't prove - that was my prediction. I will leave it at that.
. . . Of course a lot of people are staying home working on their computers, selling things on Ebay, and they're probably part of that 800,000 number. It's not the kind of jobs I want, but I can't prove that it was fudged. I do find that that's the kind of question I'm finding on the Trading Floor. It is what it is. I'm on record last month saying it would be below 8 and if you look at interest rates, they all popped. I told you they'd get it under 8 percent -- they did! You can let America decide how they got there!
~ Rick Santelli on CNBC


These numbers don't add up, they don't make sense.
~ Joe Scarborough on Morning Joe



If you go just based on Twitter right now, and the people I follow who are conservative - they're about to make a huge mistake. They're gonna say BLS numbers are horrible, some people are already saying the numbers are made up to help the president politically. They have to find a way to talk about the economy and why Governor Romney would be better, not to try to - it's exactly what they did with the polls the last two months, to attack the methodology. These numbers are good. They're not only good symbolically, they represent the economy moving in a better direction.
~ Mark Halperin of Time on MSNBC's Morning Joe, via MMFA


























I agree with former GE CEO Jack Welch, Chicago style politics is at work here. Somehow by manipulation of data we are all of a sudden below 8 percent unemployment, a month from the Presidential election. This is Orwellian to say the least and representative of Saul Alinsky tactics from the book "Rules for Radicals"- a must read for all who want to know how the left strategize. Trust the Obama administration? Sure, and the spontaneous reaction to a video caused the death of our Ambassador......and pigs fly.
~ Congressman Allen West on Facebook


We’ve hit that moment in the election when people begin to lose their minds. Case in point, within minutes of the jobs report, Twitter filled with Republicans claiming the books were somehow cooked, the numbers aren’t real, etc.
Let’s take a deep breath. Jobs reports are about the economy, not about the election. Confusing the two leads to very bad analysis.
. . . The fact is that there’s not much that needs to be explained here. We’ve seen drops like this — and even drops bigger than this — before. Between July and August the unemployment rate dropped from 8.3 percent to 8.1 percent — two-tenths of one percent. November-December of 2011 also saw a .2 percent drop. November-December of 2010 saw a .4 percent drop. This isn’t some incredible aberration. The fact that the unemployment rate broke under the psychologically important 8 percent line is making this number feel bigger to people than it really is.
~ Ezra Klein on Washington Post

Martin Bashir: Republicans appear to have more conspiracy theories than L. Ron Hubbard produced in his lifetime.
Goldie Taylor: I don't know if there's anything that this particular Republican Electorate believes in, whether it's global warming or the unemployment numbers . . .
Martin Bashir: Conspiracy. Conspiracy. Conspiracy. Out to Chicago. Conspiracy.
Goldie Taylor: As Toure said earlier (on the Cycle), "White Folks be Trippin'".
~ Martin Bashir Show in MSNBC

Trustworthy economic data is a very valuable public good that serves as a useful production input for tons of private businesses. It also helps smaller-scale government agencies and nonprofits make smarter decisions. And last but by no means least, precisely because the BLS is credible presidents know that they'd take an enormous political hit if they were seen as manipulating it.
~ Matt Yglesias on Slate:

The way things are going, if the GOP doesn't win this election, I'd say there's a 20% chance of a congressional investigation into vote fraud and a 5% chance of an Avignon Presidency set up by those who refuse to believe the election was lost.
~ David Weigel on Slate

Today’s full-scale freakout over a decent jobs report is a sight to behold. Spare me the false equivalence: yes, you occasionally find people on the left claiming that the numbers have been faked or the truth hidden, but not leading figures in the media and major-league plutocrats. (Next time people try to portray Jack Welch as an icon of success, a man we should listen to, remember this moment)
. . . The thing is, although such antics are funny in a way, they’re also menacing. By attacking anyone who presents awkward facts, the right exerts an intimidating effect. It won’t get the BLS to retract today’s jobs report, but it might bully news organizations into avoiding objective economic analysis, and maybe even into blurring their reporting right now.
So this is crazy and stupid; but it’s also scary.
~ Paul Krugman on The New York Times

Jack Welch Interview on Anderson Cooper October 5, 2012
COOPER: Well, you said these Chicago guys will do anything.
WELCH: A question mark might have been better. Last night I had a question mark.
COOPER: So you wish you would have --
WELCH: A question mark would have been better.
COOPER: So, you don't really stand by the notion --
WELCH: I stand by it. I stand by that these numbers have to be examined.
...
WELCH: Somebody ought to be investigating. Somebody should have looked at this and said wait a minute, we just dropped the GDP this much. How can we have the greatest economy since June of '83?
COOPER: But, there are legitimate questions about how the house - I mean, it seems like your problem is how the household survey is done and that's very legitimate. There are always questions and they're always revising the numbers.
WELCH: I want to have a long discussion about it.
COOPER: Right. And certainly, your tweet certainly has provoked discussion but again --
WELCH: It's to important. This election is too important for one number based on 60,000 phone calls and 100 million plus people to determine the outcome.
COOPER: But again -- to say these Chicago guys will do anything --
WELCH: That's what I tweeted.
COOPER: Right. But, you don't stand by that tonight?
WELCH: What do you mean, I don't stand by it? I've got a tweet out there. I stand by it.
. . .
ALI VELSHI: There are two great facts you make, Jack. You know, as the best CEO America has ever had, there are two very powerful things you can say here. One is let's take a look at how the BLS, bureau of labor statistics and department of labor measures unemployment, number one, and b, maybe you think Barack Obama's not doing a good job and Mitt Romney should be replacing him.
But to honestly suggest that there's corruption, that the Obama campaign may have had something to do with cooking these books, why do you need to do that at a time when U.S. trust for government and institutions is at an all-time low. That is not good for society. What does Jack Welch gain by introducing this? There are so many CEOs who talk nonsense. What do you gain from this, Jack? Why don't you take this opportunity to take it back?

WELCH: Ali, I love you. I'm not talking nonsense, OK?

VELSHI: I love you more, Jack, but fix this.
WELCH: Wait a minute. Wait a minute before we have this love- fest. I told you that these numbers are implausible. We don't have a five percent GDP growth in this quarter. We don't have it, Ali. We revised the second quarter down, I'm involved in 14 businesses, I've been looking at them over the last week. The third quarter is not strong. It's not strong, from restaurants --
VELSHI: OK. Let me ask you this. Let me ask you this, Jack.
I agree with you. This is a lousy economy. 1.3 percent GDP growth is lousy and yet on Wednesday night, Mitt Romney said again and by the way, Barack Obama backs up this claim that either one of them will create 12 million jobs in four years. That is three million jobs a year or 250,000 jobs a month. We got 114.
At 1.3 percent economic growth there's not an economist in this country who thinks it will be higher than three percent in 2013 and probably similar in 2014 and 2015. That's a lie, too, right? Why don't you call Mitt Romney out on that?
WELCH: Well, because Mitt Romney is thinking about a plan which would lower regulations, which would change the tax, which would drive an energy policy that's very aggressive. I don't know if he's going to get 12. I'm not a Romney surrogate. I'm not in the campaign. I have never talked to the campaign. I have nothing to do with Romney. I just believe this number should not determine the outcome of the presidential election. Did you see today --
VELSHI: I agree with you. Jack, you're a hero to business people in this country. You're a hero to all sorts of people. Just do it now. Let's do it. I can go back to loving you and you can go back to loving me. Just do it now and say it's not right what you said. Nobody cooked the books. You don't truly believe that, do you?
WELCH: I said I should have put a question mark at the back of it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chris Matthews Interview with Jack Welch on MSNBC's Hardball

Welch: Chris these numbers are a series of assumptions. Tons of assumptions. And it just seems somewhat coincidental that the month before the election the numbers go one-tenth of a number below where it was when the President started. Although I don't see anything in the economy that says these surges are true. The 873,000 jobs in the household survey is the strongest economy since 1983. I don't think you can find an economist - there were 25 of them this morning that predicted 8.1 to 8.2 but they did predict 114,000 jobs. We got 114,000 jobs. And somehow the assumptions ended up at 7.8%.

Matthews: Let me just go back to your tweet this morning. It must be embarrassing for you to do a tweet now with the power you used to have. I mean "tweeting" doesn't seem like something I'd see from Jack Welch and I mean it. But here - you put out the word here - "Unbelievable jobs numbers" - fair enough - "these Chicago guys will do anything..can't debate so change numbers." What evidence do you have that they got to the BLS, that Chicago guys got to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and jimmyed these numbers by .3% as you put it?

Welch: I have no evidence to prove that. I just raised the question.

Matthews: No, you didn't just raise the question. (reads tweet again) So you're just asserting here in your tweet that you put out at 8:35 a.m. this morning, five minutes after the report came out. Did you talk to any economists or anyone in the National Income Accounting world that understood how these numbers were put together before you accused the "Chicago Guys" of changing the numbers?

Welch: Chris, I know that these numbers are gathered by a series of wild assumptions. Maybe they weren't right at 8.5 - maybe they weren't right at 8.4 - but it seems coincidental that one month before the election they would end up at 7.8%.

The President today is on the stump. The President - all he's talked about is 7.8. He didn't mention 600,000 jobs added in the government sector . . .

Chris: See, you're . . . It’s not your attitude about Obama people care about, it's your analysis. And you came out this morning and asserted, not a question mark, or concern about a coincidence, but you say "These Chicago guys will do anything so they change the numbers." Do you want to take that back?

Welch: No. I don't want to take anything back.

Matthews: This is an assertion that there was jimmying with the numbers, that there was corruption here, that there was infiltration getting to--

Welch: Laughs

Matthews: It’s not funny, Jack. You’re talking about the President of the United States playing with the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers. This is Nixon stuff. This is what Nixon did back in the old days, accused of this.

Welch: Chris, don’t lose it now.

Matthews: I'm not losing it. (smiles) Look at my face, I'm not losing it.

Welch: I can't see your face.

Matthews: Do you want to take back the charge that there was corruption here?

Welch: No, I don't want to take back one word in that tweet.

Matthews: So you assert right now as of 5 o'clock this afternoon that (reads tweet again).

Welch: I didn't say what they did, I said they'll do anything.

Matthews: And what did they do here?

Welch: They've been calling Mitt Romney a liar, a falsehood, for the last 48 hours after the debate.

Matthews: But you don't have any independent evidence. You didn't - from the time the numbers came out this morning at 8:30 and 8:35 when you tweeted. You didn't use that 5 minutes to gather any actual information or evidence?

Welch: No but Chris, I tweeted last night that I predicted they'd be at 7.9%.



Matthews: Okay. And? Why did you make that prediction?

Welch: 'Cause I guessed that's what would happen a month before the election.

Matthews: So you guessed that the "Chicago Guys" would do this.

Welch: Well . . . I don't want to put words in the mouth of what I said last night. But that's what I did.

Matthews: Let's go back to the tweet. What started this whole band today, with people with a lot less IQ than you, and certainly a lot less business sense, like Alan West, and some of the real screwballs out there are following the band you're leading, and the band you put together today was that there's corruption here from the Chicago people, meaning the guys around President Obama, got to the BLS and manipulated the numbers.

Welch: Chris, stop it, now! I reviewed 15 businesses this week, from restaurants to rental cars to widgets. I have seen everybody with a third quarter equal-to or weaker-than a first quarter. In order to get 873,000 new jobs you would have to have a GDP going at 4-5%. The second quarter was downgraded from 1.7 to 1.3. The third quarter is not going to be very strong. It just defies the imagination to have a surge larger than any surge since 1983 a month before the election. I leave it to you to do all the analysis.

Matthews: (Reads Quote from Keith Hall, previous Head of Bureau of Labor Statistics that "numbers are good") So why do you know more than him? Do you really think - it gets back to the question of integrity. Do you believe the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, lacks integrity? That a President of the United States . . . Nixon said he could never get to them. He used to say there was an ethnic factor, that they were all Jewish people over there and he didn't trust them. He thought they were all out to get him. Now you say the President controls the BLS? Previous Presidents said they couldn't get their hands in that place because it was so independent.

Welch: You don't think it's coincidental that we've got the biggest surge since 1983 in the job surge? Come on, Chris.

Matthews: It's .3 of one percent shift this month. It went from 8.1 down to 7.8.

Welch: It was .2 - 8.3 last month, 8.1 to 7.8 this month. It's a 6% improvement in employment in two months. Chris! 6% improvement? It would require a GDP - the numbers -

Matthews: Jack, all I want to know is when we write this down three weeks from now or four weeks when the election's over, I want to know what you meant. Do you mean it's a coincidence, or do you mean you have evidence that there was corruption here in these numbers.

Welch: No evidence of corruption. None whatsoever.

Matthews: Okay. So these "Chicago guys" had nothing to do with the numbers that came out today.

Welch: Oh, I don't know that.

Matthews: Then why'd you say it? (reads tweet again). You just said it in your tweet! I'm always careful when I tweet, Jack. I usually have someone like my producer and say 'read my tweet.'

Welch: I'm careful too.

Matthews: Do you stand behind your tweet?

Welch: I wanna raise the question of these numbers.

Matthews: You just raised the question.

Welch: Chris, these numbers defy logic. They defy logic. We do not have a 4-5% booming economy with 873,000 people added. I mean - stop it, Chris! On the face of it, we don't have this GDP. I love you, but you can't get there.

Matthews: I think you're a great brilliant businessman who's in some ways - I wish you were in charge of my stock options these days because you made a lot of money for us here. But let me ask you this one more time so that all the people out there of lesser intellect will stop marching in your band - Jack Welch thinks this is a coincidence. Jack Welch does not think the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the boys in Chicago changed the numbers.

Welch: No, no - Jack Welch is raising the question for some good analyst to go look at.

Matthews: Okay, good - you're raising the question. You certainly did that. Jack Welch, thank you very much for joining us at the very top of Hardball tonight.


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Friday, September 28, 2012

Rush, Dick and Rove Skewed into Frenzy by Polls - Updated

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Rush Limbaugh, September 26, 2012
RUSH: Folks, there are a couple of polls out there today that are just outrageous. One is the CBS/New York Times poll. The other is the Washington Post poll. I'm telling you: They are irresponsible. They are designed to do exactly what I have warned you to be vigilant about, and that is to depress you and suppress your vote. These two polls today are designed to convince everybody this election is over.
. . . there could be a lot of reasons for this. Voter suppression, voter depression, set up the possibility of allegations of voter fraud.
They have all these polls with Obama running away with this, and then say Romney wins. Guess what happens? People blow a gasket on the left. There's also early voting going on, and they know this stuff is not reported to reflect opinion. They're trying to shape opinion with these polls.

Dick Morris on Sean Hannity, Fox News
Dick Morris: [Romney] at the moment is in a very strong position. I believe if the election were held today, Romney would win with four or five points. I believe he would carry Florida, Ohio, Virginia. I believe he would carry Nevada. I believe he would carry Pennsylvania.
Sean Hannity: Aw, come on!
Dick Morris: And I believe he would be competitive in Michigan. I just saw a poll in Pennsylvania by a group that I've hired in the past and I trust their polling. Two points behind. And Rasmussen has it five points behind.
People need to understand that the polling this year is the worst it's ever been.
Because this is the first election where if I tell you who is going to vote, I can tell you how they're going to vote. You tell me that you're black or Latino or a college kid or a single mother, I'll tell you how you're going to vote.
And if you tell me you're over 65, you're a man or a married white woman, I'll tell you how you're going to vote. And I'll be right 2 out of 3 times.
Therefore the issue is who's going to vote. Polling is very good at saying how you're gonna vote, it's very bad at saying who is going to vote. And the models these folks are using are crazy. They assume a Democratic edge of six or seven points. I'm assuming a 3 point Democratic edge, and even that is very likely an overstatement.



Karl Rove on Bill O'Reilly, transcript via Fox News:
O'REILLY: . . . Are these polls dishonest?
ROVE: No. Look, we endow them with a false scientific precision they simply don't have. If you've got nine points more Democrats than Republicans and you're nine points more --
(CROSSTALK)

O'REILLY: You you're going to have a poll that reflects that.
ROVE: -- yes, nine points more Obama. Think about this. Romney and Obama get each roughly the same percentage of Republicans and Democrats as -- as their opponent. That is to say they carry their -- their base overwhelmingly. Romney, among Independents is winning by three points.
So -- so if Romney is winning the Independents and winning the Republicans do you think in a battle ground state like Florida, he's nine points down and the answer is no....

Rove-OReilly

ROVE: . . . So look, we've got to be careful about, you know, we have a proliferation of these polls. There have been 87 national polls in the last 30 days. That's more polls than were run in the last six months of the 1980 presidential race.

O'REILLY: All right.
ROVE: Last week -- last week alone, we had 51 state level polls; and the week before that, 41.

O'REILLY: I understand that but -- but here -- here -- look, from my point of view as a news analyst and I believe that the folks know I'm honest in that regard, when news agencies like the CBS News on the radio report the polling and it shows that Barack Obama has leapt out to a big lead in Florida and Ohio, that gets inside people's minds. They remember that. And that can only help the President. That helps the President.
ROVE: Sure.
O'REILLY: Because the perception is he is going to be the winner.

. . . . . . O'REILLY: All right, real quick, real quick, your board, the Karl Rove board where is the race in Ohio and Florida in your opinion?

ROVE: Well, toss-up in both states.

O'REILLY: Toss-up? It could go either way at this point in history.

ROVE: Sure.

O'REILLY: All right, Mr. Rove. We appreciate that.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Fox's laughable case for Romney
. . . Rove's role is nuttily professorial. He has adopted one of those erasable white slates popularized by the late Tim Russert. On it he scribbles integers with plus or minus signs. These, he alleges, are the amounts being added to President Barack Obama and/or subtracted from Romney by such daredevil organizations as The New York Times, The Washington Post, CBS, NBC, CNN, Gallup and the co-opted poll-averagers at the website RealClearPolitics. Bottom line: This vast conspiracy is downgrading Romney three to nine points by using screens that overstate the votes of blacks, Latinos, Asians, women and the young.
Morris, who is beginning to bear a waxen resemblance to Orson Welles, explained, I think, that pollsters cheat by using false baseline figures from previous elections. Morris didn't have time to explicate fully how every news organization except Fox has signed up to help Obama by disseminating these cooked figures. Even so, O'Reilly thanked Morris for explaining polling mysteries he said he had not previously understood.
. . . I think there's a secret behind O'Reilly's trademark smirk. Were it in his interest to say what's on his mind about the candidates' performance to date, he'd almost certainly admit that Obama has come on like a superstar candidate of the Reagan ilk, and so far Romney is one of the biggest duds in post-World War II presidential elections.
~ Howell Raines on CNN


Conservative blogger Dean Chambers ... analyzed these polls favoring President Obama, and then reached the scientific conclusion that they "just didn't look right." So Chambers set up his own polling site, "UnskewedPolls.com," where he unskewed all the national polls by skewing them in favor of Romney - and surprisingly found that Mitt had nearly an 8 point lead! And that doesn't even count the margin of error.
And given how many errors Romney's made, I think he should get all of it.
No surprise, folks, this "feels accurate" polling has caught the attention of some GOP intellectuals, like Texas Governor Rick Perry, who tweeted: "Always nice to get unfiltered, or in this case unskewed, information." Amen! If we had only had more accurate polling during the primaries, Perry could have dropped out way sooner.
~ Stephen Colbert

GOP partisans shouldn’t worry about a conspiracy. They should worry that this is a snapshot of how Americans feel about the two major parties.
It’s not the polls, it’s the policies. Now that’s a reason for Republicans to be depressed.
~ Eugene Robinson on The Moderate Voice

After four years of relentlessly condemning Obama as an historic failure and all around bad person, conservatives are desperately trying to explain the disconnect between their dire Obama denunciations and the on-the-ground political reality about Obama's polling surge. They need a scapegoat, and pollsters have been cast in the role.
. . . An Obama victory will confirm that bloggers and talk shows hosts were right all along because the skewed polls worked (as the conspiracy intended) and drained Republican enthusiasm. And that's why Obama won re-election: Not enough Republicans voted!
~ Eric Boehlert on Media Matters

The funniest prank that Fox News plays on viewers occurs every other night, when freelance strategist Dick Morris -- a former Clintonite who now despises Democrats -- lurches in front of a camera and explains that Republicans will win everything.
. . . According to Morris, literally 100 percent of "undecided" voters will eventually vote against Barack Obama. Leaving aside how the theory ignores spillover to write-ins and third-party candidates, this is one of the stupidest things I've ever heard. Nate Silver, bless him, has already explained why the "incumbent rule" doesn't actually exist.
. . . There's literally no evidence that undecided voters will break the way he says they're breaking. But he's telling an audience of voters -- and more importantly for him, potential consumers -- that the media is covering up how Mitt Romney's winning the election. It's silly, and at the same time it lays the ground for endless paranoia if Romney doesn't win.
~ David Weigel on Slate

It's all about the enemy. Of course it starts with the media, starts with the liberal media. The liberal media wants Mitt Romney to lose, its in Barack Obama's back pocket, so on, and so forth. Now it extends to the pollsters. Pollsters are supposedly riggin' these things.
Nobody's rigging anything. Nobody. In fact what the polls are showing is that fewer and fewer people who are being called by pollsters want to call themselves Republicans.
~ Michael Tomasky of Daily Beast on Hardball

Why would anybody ever ever ever, I don't care who pays them, ever listen to what Dick Morris has to say about anything? Especially when he says 'all the polls' including Fox's own polls are not to be trusted because he doesn't like the numbers. He doesn't like what they're saying this week.
~ ~ Chris Matthews on Hardball

You imagine that back in the Republican Green Room there's this giant crack pipe that they are all hitting on constantly - hittin' it hard! . . . Dick Morris bought the pipe!
. . . The rank and file literally believe some of this nonsense. They believe that evolution didn't happen, global warming's a hoax, Obama's a Kenyan, But people like Dick Morris, and Sean Hannity for that matter, who've spread alot of this propaganda, they know better than this! And there's a method to their madness here. They're not delusional, their dishonest. They're not crazy, they're craven.
What they're trying to do and accomplish is to say in advance that if President Obama wins this election, it's because the pollsters suppress the Republican vote. It's therefore an illegimate election, he's not really President. They're settin' the table for that.
~ Ron Reagan on Hardball

. . . reputable national polls out there, show that Obama is ahead in most of these key battleground states. That's obviously disconcerting to a lot of Republicans. Some of them, like Karl Rove, for example, have repeatedly gone out there and suggested that these polls are biased against the Republicans because they're oversampling Democrats, for example, as opposed to Republicans. And as a result, don't trust these polls, they're not reliable. So it's sort of convenient for a lot of these Republicans, like Karl Rove, to go after the NBC poll or the ABC poll or CNN polls.
But what they don't say is that the FOX News polls are showing almost exactly the same thing. FOX has some good polls. . . . You don't hear them complaining about the FOX News polls. They're complaining about the others, so there is an imbalance there.
~ Wolf Blitzer on CNN



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