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When I began Schwartzreport my purpose was to produce an entirely fact-based daily publication in favor of the earth, the inter-connectedness and interdependence of all life, democracy, equality for all, liberty, and things that are life-affirming. Also, to warn my readers about actions, events, and trends that threaten those values. Our country now stands at a crossroads, indeed, the world stands at a crossroads where those values are very much at risk and it is up to each of us who care about wellbeing to do what we can to defend those principles. I want to thank all of you who have contributed to SR, particularly those of you who have scheduled an ongoing monthly contribution. It makes a big difference and is much appreciated. It is one thing to put in the hours each day and to do the work for free, but another to have to cover the rising out-of-pocket costs. For those of you who haven’t done so, but read SR regularly, I ask that you consider supporting it.
W. Joseph Campbell, Professor of Communication Studies, American University School of Communication - The Conversation
Stephan: It is perfectly obvious to everyone, I should think, that once again the pollster community got hosed by the American population. The big question, of course, is how did this happen? I think the answer is that most people do not tell the truth when polled. It's a spectrum from hedging to outright lying. The reason is that what is really driving people is a taboo subject. The United States is going to become a majority-minority nation, according to the Census Bureau, by 2045. Very few people define themselves as racists, although that is their real position.
You can not support a man like Trump unless something overrides any concerns you have regarding his criminality, the corruption, the recurring sexually aggressive incidents. What is that? I think it is three things that align to create this trend: White supremacy, male dominance, and christofascism, and although someone will tell you their religious beliefs, only a minority will tell you they are racists. On top of that, one must add that the Trump population live in a non-fact basis reality. One has to watch and read a lot of this parallel university to understand, how thoroughly different that world is. Fox is the on the edge of that world; it gets much weirder.
The technology of polling must be transformed until it gives accurate answers. It is clearly not reliable.
CNN posted national polls on the presidential race, taken between 10/16/20 and 11/1/20. Screenshot, CNN, CC BY
Election polling is facing yet another reckoning following its uneven-at-best performance in this year’s voting.
Although the outcome in the 2020 presidential race remained uncertain the next day, it was evident that polls collectively faltered, overall, in providing Americans with clear indications as to how the election would turn out.
And that misstep promises to resonate through the field of survey research, which was battered four years ago when Donald Trump carried states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, where polls indicated he had almost no chance of winning. Prominent, poll-based statistical forecasts also went off-target in 2016.
Those failings deepened the embarrassment for a field that has suffered through – but has survived – a variety of lapses and surprises since the mid-1930s. Many of those flubs and failings are described in my latest book, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”
Criticism was intense in some quarters Wednesday. Politico’s widely followed “Playbook” newsletter was notably scathing. “The polling industry is a wreck,” it declared, […]
Stephan: Here is another take on the psychophysiology of the Trumper world. We need to understand this. This is a group who by their voting pattern have shown they will not abandon their worldview. In my opinion, trying that is a waste of time. But understanding it is essential.
A Trump campaign rally
The orange spray-tan was barely wiped off Donald Trump’s inauguration Bible before the mainstream media went on Trump Voter Remorse Watch. Working off a common but incorrect understanding of human psychology — that, given evidence and time, people come to regret their worst decisions — journalists kept interviewing Trump voters over and over, in “heartland” diners and farm fields and gargantuan exurban malls, in search of evidence that doubts were starting to creep in.
I found the whole thing exhausting fairly quickly. In June 2017, I published an article in which I concluded, after interviewing psychological experts, that “the answer to the question of when Trump voters will come around is somewhere between ‘a long, long time from now’ and more likely ‘never.’”ON THE PODCAST: Election Day 2000… all over again?
Here we are, three and a half years later, and things have gone even more poorly than we could have imagined. Trump was impeached for trying to extort a foreign leader into smearing a political opponent, the economy is in the toilet and getting worse, and 231,000 […]
Stephan: We are so diminished. Everything Trump does makes us appear thoughtless, vulgar, and incompetent.
President Donald J. Trump joins G7 Leaders for dinner Saturday evening Aug. 24, 2019, at the Biarritz Lighthouse in Biarritz, France. (Official White House Photo. Credit: Shealah Craighead)
All over the world, President Donald Trump drew widespread criticism on Wednesday, November 4 for demanding the vote-count cease in the 2020 presidential election even though thousands of votes had yet to be counted in key battleground states. Some of the criticism of Trump’s behavior has come from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
For almost two decades, the 57-member organization has been monitoring U.S. elections at the invitation of the U.S. Department of State. But in 2020, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe has been troubled by what it observed in the United States.
The Week’s Catherine Garcia reports this year, participants accused Trump of making “deliberate attempts” to “weaken confidence in the election process.”
German politician Michael Georg Link, according to Garcia, complained, “Baseless allegations of systematic deficiencies, notably by the incumbent president — including on Election Night — harm public trust in democratic […]
Stephan: No matter who wins the presidency, Trump or Biden, one thing is clear and irrefutable. A large segment of the White American population is racist, increasingly pro-authoritarian, anti-democratic, and uninterested in having an ethical government of integrity. If that sounds harsh swallow it anyway because the facts of the vote are the reality. And what that is also telling us is that we are a society scarily close to degenerating into violence and collapse
Image by Kenji Aoki/ The New York Times
When I first spoke with Joseph Tainter in early May, he and I and nearly everyone else had reason to be worried. A few days earlier, the official tally of Covid-19 infections in the United States had climbed above one million, unemployment claims had topped 30 million and the United Nations had warned that the planet was facing “multiple famines of biblical proportions.” George Floyd was still alive, and the protests spurred by his killing had not yet swept the nation, but a different kind of protest, led by white men armed with heavy weaponry, had taken over the Michigan State Legislature building. The president of the United States had appeared to suggest treating the coronavirus with disinfectant injections. Utah, where Tainter lives — he teaches at Utah State — was reopening its gyms, restaurants and hair salons that very day.
The chaos was considerable, but Tainter seemed calm. He walked me through the arguments of the book that made his reputation, “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” which […]
Stephan: This is the view of America and the election from the most prestigious English language newspaper in Europe. What it makes clear is that those who used to be considered America's allies, today see us as a savagely diminished nation, a country more to be pitied than admired. What happened? Because, as I said in my comment about the previous report, the world sees that a large percentage of our White population are uninterested in climate change or democracy, and happy to support a grossly corrupt and dishonest man for president as long as he supports male dominance, christofascism, and White supremacy.
Demonstrators gather in front of the White House on election day in Washington DC. Credit: Olivier Douliery/AFP/Getty
Whoever wins this year’s election, America remains a country bitterly and evenly divided. It has been more than three decades since the last presidential landslide. Despite polls suggesting that Donald Trump was poised to suffer a sweeping rejection by the voters, there was no repudiation of the president. Rather, just a fraction of the popular vote separates Joe Biden and Mr Trump.
Our view was that Mr Trump deserved to lose and in a big way. His mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis, which cost hundreds of thousands of American lives, was cause enough. But there were numerous reasons for Mr Trump’s ejection from the White House, given he ran the worst administration in modern US history.
It is small comfort that Americans understood the threat that Mr Trump represented and turned out in record numbers to vote against him. Yet, as this election depressingly revealed, there was an almost equal and opposite reaction from Mr Trump’s base. The president’s appeal, it seems, has only widened and deepened since […]
Heather Gillers and Gunjan Banerji, - The Wall Street Journal
Stephan: This, I think, is a major alarm bell about the economy no matter who wins the presidency.
Connecticut acted fast. Social distancing, lockdowns and testing slashed Covid-19 cases in the spring.
But when Comptroller Kevin Lembo opened an email from his budget director on April 15, it was clear the state’s quick action to contain the pandemic hadn’t insulated its finances.
“We hit the brakes so quickly on the economy that we went through the windshield,” his deputy wrote.WHAT’S NEWSU.S. States Face Historic Cash Crisis00:001xSUBSCRIBE
Connecticut is projecting a total revenue decline of $8.4 billion through the 2024 budget year—more than twice the rainy day fund built up over the past three years.
“All you can do is grip the bar as tight as you can, make the smartest decisions you can in real time, plan for the worst and be surprised at something less than worst,” said Mr. Lembo.
Nationwide, the U.S. state budget shortfall from 2020 through 2022 could amount to about $434 billion, according to data from Moody’s Analytics, the economic analysis arm of Moody’s Corp. The estimates assume no additional fiscal […]
Stephan: This has been talked about for weeks now, so it can not be considered a surprise. I take the vote for Trump as a statement by a large percentage of Americans that they don't care about climate change, because they voted for the man who has done this. All the effects of this withdrawal, I think, will be negative at many levels. America is passing off the world stage as the international leader.
Call it the long goodbye from the Paris climate agreement.
Driving the news: President Trump’s 2017 announcement withdrawing America from the 2015 accord becomes official at midnight Wednesday after a prolonged process required by the United Nations. It’s a chaotic coincidence that it comes the day after Election Day.
Where it stands: The outcome of the presidential election was unclear as of midnight. If Joe Biden wins the White House, he has vowed to return to the deal.
Trump’s official exit from the deal would be fleeting, but America’s retreat on climate change over the last four years would linger and be laborious to reverse.
The intrigue: Wednesday’s news is anticlimactic from the administration’s perspective. In Trump’s mind, he exited the deal the day he announced his intention to do so in June 2017, according to Axios’ Jonathan Swan.
A White House spokesperson declined to comment and referred Axios to the State Department, which has authority over global deals. The department is also not expected to mark the exit in any official way.
Stephan: I don't think it can be disputed that America is an increasingly fascist racist nation. It makes me very sad to write that sentence but the voting results demand it be seen as the truth.
TrumpersCredit: MOAR
Financier and philanthropist George Soros must have seen Trump coming as early as 2011. He certainly saw where a disturbingly large proportion of American voters were going. “The United States has been a democracy and open society since its founding. The idea that it will cease to be one seems preposterous; yet it is a very likely prospect,” he wrote in the New York Review of Books in June of that year.
George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004 had convinced Soros “that the malaise in American society went deeper than incompetent leadership.” The public had proved “unwilling to face harsh reality and was positively asking to be deceived by demanding easy answers to difficult problems.”LISTEN: Mark Cuban Joins The New Raw Story Podcast!
Will the American public now reconfirm Soros’ observation? This year’s campaign has given us plenty or reasons to worry.
By the end of Bush’s second term in 2009, few Americans denied the harsh realities of the Iraq war fiasco and of failed federal responses to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation and […]
