Please Don’t Run, Hillary

[kool maudit]

It amazoes me that there are people – decent people, people I know – who consider voting for Hillary Clinton to be a reasonable act, something not at all absurd or sinister.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Trump And Hillary Agree: Screw Internet Freedom, ISIS Is Scary!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqF2H4vUVUE

[Nordic]

http://youtu.be/pr-TJTisSbc

[km artlu]

Thank you Nordic, for my daily moment of pure evil.

[82_28]

Wow, Nordic. How she is running as what she is running as is a travesty. I knew she was lame, but that small snippet tells it all. Absolute evil knowingly parroting the propaganda. Who was to know back then other than taking a 100% firm anti-war stance back then? It is clear she will lie and lay down for whatever she is told.

Try getting fellow liberals to agree with you though. The Iraq war is "over" now and get over it! That was a long time ago! We need to focus on ISIS!

One thing, however, I never got was why not plant the "WMDs" and declare the fact that they were right all along? It would have been fucking easy, no? But instead they rolled with the "we were mistaken" line. There has to be a reason for that -- the reason they didn't just plant them. Some sort of double bind or whatever you wanna call the bait and switch.

[Nordic]

Wow, Nordic. How she is running as what she is running as is a travesty. I knew she was lame, but that small snippet tells it all. Absolute evil knowingly parroting the propaganda. Who was to know back then other than taking a 100% firm anti-war stance back then? It is clear she will lie and lay down for whatever she is told.

Try getting fellow liberals to agree with you though. The Iraq war is "over" now and get over it! That was a long time ago! We need to focus on ISIS!

One thing, however, I never got was why not plant the "WMDs" and declare the fact that they were right all along? It would have been fucking easy, no? But instead they rolled with the "we were mistaken" line. There has to be a reason for that -- the reason they didn't just plant them. Some sort of double bind or whatever you wanna call the bait and switch.

"It is easier to apologize than to get permission".

If also remember reading back then there was some sort of covert mission to plant them that failed and was aborted. May or may not be true. Either way they got what they wanted and fuck everybody who said "I told you so".

[Elvis]

http://youtu.be/pr-TJTisSbc

Good find, Nordic. "It's time for the United States to start thinking of Iraq, ah, as a business opportunity."

[Wombaticus Rex]

2016 is going to be an outlier kinda year.

Trump and Sanders are both remarkable, but together, even more so: both US political parties thrown into chaos as they lose control of their respective bases at the same time, and find themselves saddled with an admin too corrupted and entitled to do anything but complain about their own uppity constituents.

Which, really, might be the last satisfying spectacle we get for awhile, here at Team America. Do enjoy it while you can.

So we've got two candidates upsetting conventional wisdom. What interests me now is a potentially much larger disruption, something that might well re-set conventional wisdom: Hillary Clinton losing in November.

Hillary is obviously going to win. Let's start there. It's so obvious, in fact, that stating it plainly makes Vegas and London bookies so nervous they reflexively hedge their bets, in fact:

The favorite tends to win in betting markets more often than indicated by the odds. So if the markets say she's a 47% chance to be president, history suggests that the true odds are a bit better than that.

But it's worth breaking this race down into the two steps of the process: There's the question of whether Clinton will win the nomination, and then upon having won the nomination, whether the Democrats will win the general election.

It's the race for the nomination where Clinton is the overwhelming favorite — online bookies rate her about a 75% chance … to be the Democratic nominee — and this favorite-longshot bias is most acute when you're a strong favorite. As such, history suggests that Clinton is substantially more likely to win the nomination than markets currently suggest. The bias may be as large as ten percentage points, suggesting that she's an 85 percent chance to win the nomination.

As to whether the Democratic or Republican nominee will win the race, bookies currently give the Democrats a slight edge — suggesting that they're around a 55 percent chance to win, versus 45 percent for the Republicans. That's a close enough race that while the Democrats are the favorite, the odds aren't much biased. My back-of-the-envelope correction suggests that maybe the true odds are 58 percent instead.

Put these numbers together, and there's about a 49 percent chance that Mrs. Clinton is our next President. ...

There's another way to get at this though, which is simply to ask whether the odds make sense. I think the idea that Clinton is only a 75 percent chance to win the nomination is nuts — she's essentially the only serious candidate running, and it's now clear that her campaign is not going to implode. With any candidate there are risks that secrets may come out, but with Mrs. Clinton, we've had several decades for them to surface. So my (personal!) judgment is that she is at least an 85 percent chance to win the nomination, and maybe 90 percent is a more realistic assessment.

Whether the Democrats will win the general election remains a much harder question. I don't think there's a strong reason to favor one party over the other, and the current odds which give the Democrats a slight lead seem reasonable, given the state of the economy.

So both my math, and my assessment of the race lead to the same conclusion: Mrs. Clinton is a near-certainty to win the Democratic nomination. And the Democrats are a bit better than a fifty percent chance to win the White House. Put these together, and it looks like Mrs. Clinton must be close to a fifty percent chance to be our next President.

That's prof Wolfers, talking to the WaPo. He's an interesting character as wonks go, studying probability markets and conventional wisdom, operating in a similar space to Prof. Tetlock's work in "Superforecasting" but inevitably less sexy.

So, re-stated, it is completely obvious that Hillary Clinton will win in 2016, based on past performance and current knowledge. Yet we've already got Donald Trump dominating the GOP field, so the question of how much "past performance and current knowledge" will matter going forward is ... well, more open than usual.

I'm certainly not betting any actual money against Clinton, but I have to wonder: would I have bet any actual money against the continued success of the housing market in 2007? I'm no Michael Burry. I'm a spectator with nicer seats than the average prole, is all.

Ultimately, my logic is that the institutional buffers and failsafes in the system will work. This time. The state caucus system and electoral college will protect against populist upstarts. For now.

[Nordic]

It's always 50% in politics in this country. When they divide and conquer, they do it right down the middle.

Again the election will be "close". It's always "close".

Exit polls are suddenly, now, inaccurate after generations of being accurate as hell.

Why are we even talking about this? I guess it's the stuff of soap operas. "Soap operas for people who otherwise wouldnt be caught dead watching soap operas".

[Wombaticus Rex]

Why are we even talking about this? I guess it's the stuff of soap operas. "Soap operas for people who otherwise wouldnt be caught dead watching soap operas".

Because we might fuck around and wind up with an actual human being in office this time, be it Bernie or Donald.

Also because I might be better at math than you.

[zangtang]

Stone killer murderous bitch i reckon. Can't prove it of course but
VINCE FOSTER!!!
something might turn up.

i'm too far away from across the pond to read the tea leaves, but her seeming pathological need to 'join the club'
is a tad....disconcerting.
I recall some believe her to have been CIA er.....affiliated from the get-go, so perhaps its already a done deal........(if we recall the relevent section from 'Compromised' that we looked at pretty closely 6-12 months ago).
If her campaign funds run low, she could fall back on her commodity futures trading.
I have no idea why she should have a relationship with the Chinese PLA, financial or otherwise, but dear old Sherman Skolnick thought she did. Never could find out just how hit & miss Skolnick was, so
if the unseemingly prescient highly lucrative porkbellies futures weren't a mechanism for the PLA to funnel money to her, egg on face and sincere apologies all
round (sugar or non-cattle, whatever) - did that missing piece of carpet ever turn up & can we get a picture of Webster Hubbell?

Scurrilous I tell you! - scurrilous!

[Iamwhomiam]

Such profound vehemence for our former First, sometimes second, Lady, oh my!

Far too narrow a focus. That's what's scurrilous.

[Nordic]

Why are we even talking about this? I guess it's the stuff of soap operas. "Soap operas for people who otherwise wouldnt be caught dead watching soap operas".

Because we might fuck around and wind up with an actual human being in office this time, be it Bernie or Donald.

Also because I might be better at math than you.

I have come to the conclusion that there hasn't been an honestly counted election in a very long time. Not at the national level. And certainly not yet this century. And I don't see that changing.

It seems like nothing more than a spectator sport.

But ok call me cynical. Or bad at math.

[Luther Blissett]

The funniest thing this time around is that there is barely a whisper about Hillary Clinton in my world — it's either the curiosities of the republican candidates, or Bernie. And that includes commentary for or against. No old hippie aunts, no political nerds, no dissenting angry uncles, no peers whatsoever. I think it's just a coincidence but she barely registers above Martin O'Malley or Chris Christie at this point.

Wombaticus I think you would have bet against the housing market in 2007. This forum in its infancy "knew" for the most part. Of course at my age then I only wanted to be a contrarian so I didn't know any better, but it was this place that convinced me of what was coming.

[Nordic]

The only person I know who seems to actually want Hillary is, inexplicably, Lena Dunham.

And I don't actually know her.

She did, however, pickup the endorsement of my parent union, the IATSE. Which has a lot of our members appalled.