From Dorchester, I moved to Cambridge, then Somerville, then somewhere else in Somerville, then Lexington, then Cambridge, then Somerville then Somerville then …. and so on. The entire time I either worked for, was a student at, or taught at Harvard, which is in Cambridge.

Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Medford, Alltson, etc. are all mushed together as one big urban zone around and including Boston. And, historically, the smaller cities around Boston have been absorbed into the Beantown Borg over time. Charlestown, where the Battle of Bunker Hill happened (on nearby Breed’s Hill) used to be separate. South Boston was created out of neighboring communities in 1804. East Boston was annexed in 1855, Roxbury in 1867. Then Dorchester, West Roxbury, Brighton, Charleston, and Hyde Park by 1913. Over historical time, a lot of people grew up outside of Boston in a community that, by the time they died, was in Boston.

So it is tradition for people to say “I lived in Boston” or “I am flying to Boston next week” and really they hardly step foot in Boston proper, which is both a place and an attitude, because that is how we talk about Boston. Back when I lived there, I had the five-five rule to remember the demographics. About 500K people live in Boston, and 5 million live in the GBA (Greater Boston Area). Meanwhile, all those people crammed into the urban zone commonly use the term “Boston” to refer to where they live or once did.

I now live in Minnesota. When people ask about my background, I say, “I’m from New York, but I lived in Boston many years before coming to Minnesota, except when I was in the Congo or Milwaukee.” However, the truth is, I grew up in New York State, not New York City (a distinction lost on most Minnesotans), lived mostly in Somerville, and 9 of those 12 months in Milwaukee were actually in Shorewood, which is to Milwaukee what Somerville is to Cambridge/Boston. Crammed in there, where many people who live there actually live.

The reason I mention all this is to warm up the part of your brain that has to do with geographical identity, especially vis-a-vis Beantown.

(For completeness, I’ve lived in the Twin Cities ever since moving to Minnesota. But really, I’ve lived in Falcon Heights, the home of the Saint Paul Campus of UMN, New Brighton, Fridley, Minneapolis, Coon Rapids, and Plymouth.)

Anyway, I have something for those of you who understand and know something about Boston, sensu large. You will ROFLYAO, most likely. There is a moment in this presentation of Lawrence O’Donnell’s when you think, “oh, listen, he’s slipping into his old accent,” but really, he’s just having fun with the audience. If you don’t have any connections with Boston, this may not be worth watching, so I’ll give you the key meaningful point below. But if you have that Boston connection, watch and enjoy!

The key point: Fox News Lies!!!!!! (Secondary point: Tucker Carlson is an asshole.)

Also, shame on Wikipedia and others for referring to Stephens as a journalist. He is no more a journalist than Anne Coulter. He is a commenter. (He’s way better than Coulter, of course.)

Prior related posts:

Out of the gate, Bret Stephens punches the hippies, says dumb things

Honestly, New York Times? You are entitled to publish all the opinions, but not to endorse your own facts!

My letter to the New York Times

Dear New York Times: Climate Change Is Real

The New York Times Bites It With New Climate Denier Columnist

Apparently the widespread opposition to Stephens, which included a lot of tweeting, has driven him off Twitter.

And, MSNBC has added climate denier Hugh Hewitt as a host of a Saturday morning program. Read this expose from MMFA for the documentation on Hewitt’s climate denial.

Updated, 25 October AM

As I expected, and demonstrated much to the consternation of everyone, the ever widening double digit lead of Clinton over Trump in an increasing number of polls meme is a falsehood. Here is the latest graphic using the same approach as described below, but updated to reflect additional polls.

Rather than a widening, or even consistent, gap, or a gap that is double digit, we see Clinton continuing to lead, but pretty much in the same way that she has led since the conventions. In other words, the three presidential debates, the release of Trump’s tax records, the sexual assault tape, the confirmation of many actual groping cases, and the VEEP debate, may have had some short term effects on the polls, and if you look closely and squint, may have actually re-widened Clinton’s lead to post convention levels a bit, but for the most part, we are looking at a pretty steady relationship between the two candidates from the end of the convention period to the present.

When the general polls conform to expectations, they matter. When they don’t conform to expectations, say “yeah, but what really matters is the electoral college, and in the electoral college … bla bla bla.”

And yes, since we attempt to choose our president using the Electoral College (though that doesn’t always work) that is what matters, and it may be the case, though I can not independently confirm this at this exact moment in time (Tuesday AM), that Clinton is either taking or widening the lead in some of the swing states, and some red states are turing less red, as we speak. But, it turns out that we DO look at the general numbers for a number of reasons, including the fact that we expect general trends to conform to state wide trends, as a check on what we are seeing, and general trends may matter down ballot.

The original reason that I wrote this post is that I was concerned that a lot of commenters (and maybe voters) had come to the conclusion that Clinton’s lead was growing, nearing or in the double digit range, and that the Clinton campaign need not look back, and could start doing other things, but, my read on the polls was that the debate/scandal swing looked like earlier swings, and I had little faith that it was long lasting. I took a look at the data and saw preliminary information suggesting that this may be the case. And now, that is confirmed. I conclude for now that the three presidential debates, the release of Trump’s tax records, the sexual assault tape, the confirmation of many actual groping cases, and the VEEP debate, may have had some short term effects on the polls, and if you look closely and squint, may have actually re-widened Clinton’s lead to post convention levels a bit, but for the most part, we are looking at a pretty steady relationship between the two candidates from the end of the convention period to the present.

And yes, I said the part that the incredulous will ignore twice.

I may do another electoral projection to replace this one later today.

Original Post:
America. Democracy. Decency. Thoughtfulness. Everybody and every thing, it feels like.

Everyone is upset this morning about Trump’s comment that he will wait and see about the results before he accepts them. His comments are deplorable and astonishing, but I think they are also a distraction. If he ignores the results, it may be a bit messy but he will be ignored. A few militia groups will go and take over a Federal facility or two, but that will be managed. Unless the Congress gets on board with denying Clinton the presidency, nothing really bad will happen.

I’m more alarmed by all the comments he made in this debate, and perviously, about how he would handle wars, the military, the economy, the law, the Supreme Court, trade, ethnic/race relations, and his comments about women (which continued last night). Those are all problems that will ruin us as a country if he wins, and that have damaged us as a country already even if he walks away from this race right now. I’m not all that worried about him having a tantrum if he loses.

And, of course, it is maximally concerning that Trump wins the election, than it is that he loses and refuses to go quietly. This is because it is simply not the case that Hillary Clinton and the Democrats have this sewn up. Let me show you why.

This graph shows the daily averaged-out polls, all of them, as listed by RCP’s site, since July 1st (plotted on a y-axis of days before the election). There is a 3 day moving average imposed on this (a shorter moving average than usual, but this is an average of averages, and those averages are of polls taken over varying numbers of prior days, so we have plenty of helpful smoothosity on that curve).

Never mind the details for a moment. Notice first that over this time, which starts in the month of the conventions and goes up to the present, there is an overall pattern of oscillation. For much of the time all of the pols are within the margin of error, but Clinton’s polls are usually higher than Trumps, when averaged out. If you apply the FiveThirtyEight method, or use similar approaches, to combine the different polls into probability statements, one can be more definitive about Clinton’s overall and consistent lead since the conventions.

But, notice that about 50 days out, the two candidate’s polling became close before Clinton started to separate again, and also notice, that this cycle of Clinton pulling ahead and then drawing down again seems to be happening one more time. There was probably a lot of pressure separating Clinton and Trump, with Trump’s bizarre and generally poor performance in the debates, the revelation of the tape in which he seems to have no clue that sexual harassment is not OK, and the revelations seeming to confirm that he is a serial sexual molester, and the tax story from the NYT, and all of that. But the about 27 days out, that pressure relaxes, and all the numbers regress towards the mean again.

Let me put this another way, as a stark but supportable hypothesis. About 50% of the United States would vote for Trump, and about 50% would vote for Clinton. People talk about the 35% to 40% Trump base, and that’s real. And Clinton has a similar base. But the rest of the country, the 20% to 30% that are not part of those groups, are divided roughly in half, in terms of preference for either candidate, and their preference is soft.

If there are no more strong events pushing people away from Trump, the numbers will settle down to where they were between days 40 and 50. this will place trump within about one point of Clinton. And, one point is very very close.

The current widespread rhetoric that Clinton is going to win no matter what may be the exact cause of her losing. How many people will not bother to vote, when they otherwise might have, because they are confident that Clinton will win? If the two candidates are 1% apart, then only 1 in 200 voters have to do that to put Trump in the White House.

Let me note what may end up being the greatest situational irony of our times. MSNBC has lots of great commentators and reporters, like Rachel Maddow and Chris Hayes. They are providing the most thoughtful and coherent analyses of what is going on during this election cycle. But, they are also constantly repeating and supporting the rhetoric that Trump can’t win. And, their audience corresponds closely to that subset of people who are going to vote for Clinton.

Unless…

Unless MSNBC and other sources fail to shut up about how Clinton can’t possibly lose, and one in 200 otherwise-Clinton-voters stay home.

There are, of course, other possibilities. The apparent closing of the gap we see on the above chart could be an artifact of poling and disappear by itself over the next 48 hours, or it could be real, but reverses because of something Trump does. However, keep this in mind: Trump is being such a distraction from the race that a lot of information that could be used against Clinton (legitimately or not) is currently piling up and not coming into play. It is quite possible that forces that work to push Trump down on this graph could be weak, and forces that work to push Clinton down on this graph could be strong, and we might not be looking at a dangerously weak 1% lead by Clinton when the first week of November rolls around. We may be looking at a distinct Trump lead.

I should mention that today’s polls are not shown on this graph because they are mostly not available. Those that are available are in that subset that tends to favor Trump, but they are all showing a virtual dead heat.

Today, tomorrow, through Monday, we should be looking very closely at the polls. If they show narrowing, then my Hypothesis from Hell can’t be ruled out and the idea that the race is really about 50-50 between scandals needs to be taken seriously.

I know it is appropriate to have a range of opinions among the talking heads representing a news agency, and MSNBC certainly does have a range. Pat Buchanan, regular commentator on two or three MSNBC news shows, probably serves at the most conservative individual in the MSNBC panoply.

But he has to go now.

This letter comes as a reaction to Buchanan’s most recent column, which addresses Darwinian theory and evolution in an over the top intellectually dishonest, inaccurate, and offensive manner. I will not discuss the details of his absurd column; several of my colleagues on the blogosphere have (see “Old fossil” by PZ Myers, “Buchanan Blathers” by Ed Brayton and “We Don’t Take Pat Buchanan Seriously” by Mike Haubrich). Rather, I’d like to simply call for Buchanan’s retirement from his role as MSNBC commentator, with this letter being the written manifestation of Buchanan’s final steps into unacceptable offensiveness and intellectual irrelevancy.

It has always annoyed me that MSNBC would use the services of Pat Buchanan. I would have thought that by now we would have put aside all remaining vestiges of the Nixon Administration. In fact, I always thought that MSNBC’s choice to use Buchanan as a regular was moderately offensive to those of us who suffered through the Nixon years and were, at the time of Buchanan’s joining MSNBC, now suffering through the Bush years.

You see, the self-righteous politics at any cost, “if the president does it it is legal” attitude of the 1970s right wing has moved off the stage over recent decades, and most of the practitioners of that attitude (many in prison) moved with it. So what was Buchanan doing on your show?

Now, we are seeing a new shift in political framework. Over the last decade we’ve seen a relentless erosion of the role of quality science in the forum of public policy, and a steady induration of ideological humors into the scientific discourse. Press agencies, even including the relatively intellectual and progressive MSNBC, have not helped as much as they have hurt society, the economy, and as a matter of fact, the truth itself, by insisting that every issue has two valid sides in matters of science (it doesn’t, by the way). If someone says “global warming is real” there MUST be someone out there saying it is not. Find that person and put them on TV. The “balance” of viewpoints “pro” and “con” with respect to this and other important scientific issues has had a chilling, negative effect on science. At this point in time, more people die younger, suffer more, and live less happy lives than they otherwise might because science has been so badly treated by conservative politicians. That is indisputable fact. It will take years to undo the damage that right wing ideological anti-science has done.

Although there is still a great deal of work to do, it is a fact that as we speak the nature of science funding, evaluation, reporting, and implementation is rapidly changing in a post-Bush environment. Suddenly, science can breathe.

But many elements of the right wing hang tenaciously on to the ideological approach in which real science is denigrated and damaged wherever doing so will produce either profit or power. As a long time voice of this sort of conservatism (“Right from the beginning” is his motto, after all) Pat Buchanan now represents the damaging fringe, the corrosive edge, the untenable underbelly of political commentary at MSNBC. As the anti-science gambit of the right wing is moved, still struggling but doomed, off the stage, Pat Buchanan is left on your stage … the MSNBC stage … playing a tune on the atonal kazoo of ignorance to which fewer and fewer people dance.

That era of political whitewash of scientific truths and mean spirited hobbling of progress in medical, life science, and earth science studies is flanked by several events. The election of Ronald Reagan and the daparture of Bush II from office are volcanic layers dating the rise and fall of the eclipse of science. The publication of The Republican War on Science and Unscientific America are literary bookends. The first Earth Day, which some will remember as a radical act, and the IPCC report on climate change are the embryo and the wise sage representing different ends of a remarkable developmental period.

Perhaps the retirement of science-friendly Walter Cronkite in 1981 and the retirement from MSNBC of science-unfriendly Pat Buchanan … this year … would be appropriate era-markers for the dark ages of science’s role in the American political forum.

Sincerely,

Greg Laden
Denizen of the Liberal Blogosphere