Saturday, November 28, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
Clinton And Trump Still Hold Large Leads
All of these charts were composed from information in the new YouGov Poll -- done between November 19th and 23rd of a random national sample of about 2,000 registered voters. No margin of error was given.
It looks like Hillary Clinton is marching steadily toward the Democratic nomination for president. She has the support of a strong majority of Democrats (64%), and leads Bernie Sanders by 38 points. She also is the candidate that everyone thinks could win the general election. Democrats think so by 85%, the general public by 70%, Independents by 63%, and Republicans by 60%. Only Democrats think Sanders could win (54%), and no one thinks O'Malley could win.
I also thought it was interesting that the Democratic candidate Republicans would prefer to run against was Sanders 21%. It seems that they think he would be the candidate giving them the best chance to win.
The charts below show the Republican presidential preference. Donald Trump still has a good lead (37%). Marco Rubio (15%) and Ted Cruz (11%) finished second and third. It looks like Ben Carson is fading fast. He got only 10% Republican support -- less than half of what he was polling a couple of weeks ago. Have the Republicans finally figured out he just doesn't have the knowledge or experience to be president?
The poll also asked Democrats who they would prefer the GOP nominee to be. Trump finished in first, but only with 17%. I think Democrats don't see any of these candidates as a real problem for Clinton.
Feds Will Finally Start Keeping Stats On Police Shootings
I am convinced that the folks at "Black Lives Matter" are correct. There are too many police shootings involving minorities -- and too many of those shooting are not necessary. Unfortunately, too many of my fellow Whites are not convinced of that. Part of it is due to the fact they they don't want to believe it, but another part is that we don't have the hard statistics on police shooting (or deaths in police custody).
Why don't we have those statistics? Because most police departments don't want to do that. They are afraid to let the general public know just how bad the problem is. And the federal government, who should be keeping those statistics, just have not been willing to do the job.
The media has tried to compile statistics, but that is an enormous task and they simply don't have the people to stay in contact with every department in the country -- which results in incomplete or widely differing statistics. For instance, The Washington Post says 759 people have been fatally shot by police this year, while The Guardian puts the total at 891.
Hopefully, it looks like this rather serious problem (a lack of correct data) may soon be corrected. The FBI Director says his department will create a program to monitor police shootings. And the Department of Justice is going even further. They will not only monitor fatal shootings, but also non-fatal shootings and other deaths of people in police custody (from any cause).
I'm glad this is finally happening -- but it's something that should have happened many years ago.
Republican Candidates Have Accepted The "Big Oil" Lies
The chart above, from an AP survey, shows just how far from the truth the Republican candidates are when they talk about global climate change. They have either foolishly accepted the propaganda from the big will companies in their desire to please corporate America, or they have received (or hope to receive) a lot of money from the big oil companies -- primarily the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil.
It is the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil that have been most responsible for paying for and promoting the propaganda (lies) that deny global climate change. They have know for decades that the climate change is real (and is caused by overuse of fossil fuels), but they have funded a huge effort to fool the American people into believing that climate change is not happening. They don't care about the truth or the planet. They only care about their profits, and are perfectly willing to toss future generations under the bus to protect those profits.
And their propaganda effort has been pretty successful with Republican officials and the general public -- successful enough to create doubt in the minds of too many people, and keep the government from doing anything about the global climate change. Now there is a report showing just how successful the propaganda from the Koch brothers and ExxonMobil has been. Here is how that report is described by Natasha Geiling at Think Progress:
When it comes to climate deniers in the halls of Congress, some have suggested that their rejection of the scientific consensus on climate change stems from their financial ties to the fossil fuel industry.
But it turns out that it’s not just members of Congress whose climate doubt may be traced back to corporate influence — a study published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that over the last 20 years, private funding has had an important influence on the overall polarization of climate change as a topic in the United States.
“The main thesis that corporate funding influences climate change issues is definitely something people have been writing about for a long time, but just not with the type of data to fully support these conclusions,” Justin Farrell, author of the study and a sociologist at Yale University, told ThinkProgress. “It confirms what we thought using comprehensive data and computational analyses.”
To understand how corporate funding has contributed to the polarization of climate change in the United States, Farrell looked at 20 years’ worth of data, analyzing articles, texts, and policy papers produced by 164 organizations and more than 4,500 individuals who do not accept the science of climate change (that climate change is either not happening or not a product of human activity). The study also looked at funding from two key contrarian entities: the Koch Family Foundationsand ExxonMobil.
By analyzing both the networks of individuals and organizations that have participated in climate misinformation campaigns and the climate-related texts that those organizations produced between 1993 and 2013, Farrell found what he described to the Washington Post as an “ecosystem of influence” within groups that received corporate funding. Groups that received funding from Koch or Exxon were not only more likely to have written texts aimed at polarizing climate change, but were more likely to change the emphasis of their content over time. Beginning in 2008, groups that received funding were more likely than unfunded groups to produce texts stressing things like the idea that climate change is a long term cycle or that carbon dioxide is in fact good for the planet, key tenets of the climate misinformation campaign aimed at casting doubt on the scientific consensus. Groups that received funding consistently touted these themes, while groups with no funding didn’t show the same level of coordination.
“This funding has an impact on the nature and amount of what is going out in the climate misinformation effort,” Robert Brulle, a professor of sociology and environmental science at Drexel University who was not involved in the study, told ThinkProgress. “It’s stronger, and there’s more of it, and these organizations are at the core of the effort.”
The study comes out at a time when ExxonMobil is facing increasing public scrutiny for its role in misleading the public about climate change. Several prominent politicians have called for a Department of Justice investigation into whether or not Exxon purposefully mislead the public about climate change, based on information published in a recent Inside Climate News investigation which found that Exxon’s internal research confirmed in 1977 that climate change is caused by carbon emissions from fossil fuels. Earlier this month, New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman issued a subpoena to Exxon, demanding records relating to its climate research.
“[The study] gives credence and empirical strength to the argument that ExxonMobil made a concerted effort to promulgate climate misinformation, which they knew from their internal research was false,” Brulle said.
But beyond Exxon, Brulle praised the paper for proving with data something that climate activists have long suspected: When it comes to climate misinformation, corporate funding plays a crucial role.
“We sort of always suspected that this was the case, that the funders were building and creating this effort, but this really demonstrates it empirically,” he said. “This is a very, very robust and interesting paper.”
Thursday, November 26, 2015
HAPPY THANKSGIVING
I wish all of my readers a very happy Thanksgiving Day. May your day be filled with fun, food, and time spent with people you love -- whether they be family or friends.
A Thanksgiving Survey
In honor of the Thanksgiving holiday, Public Policy Polling gives us a fun survey. The survey was done on November 16th and 17th of a random national sample of 1,360 registered voters, with a margin of error of 2.7 points.
They asked those respondents who the presidential candidate would be that they would most or least like to have at Thanksgiving dinner. Hillary Clinton turned out to be the candidate most wanted for Thanksgiving dinner at 24%, while Donald Trump was the candidate least wanted at 46%.
Of course, you can't do a poll without asking some serious questions, and PPP did. They asked whether the side dish at Thanksgiving was appropriately called "stuffing" or "dressing". I've always called it dressing, but it seems I'm in the minority. About 51% say it's stuffing, and only 34% believe it's dressing -- and that holds true across all political lines.
They also asked what was the best pie to serve with Thanksgiving dinner. No surprise, pumpkin pie was the winner at 27%, with pecan and apple tied for second at 17%.
Now we know -- a Thanksgiving turkey should be served with stuffing and pumpkin pie.
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