By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 8, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Rush Limbaugh tried hard on Wednesday morning to rationalize the Republican defeat in Virginia as something unrelated to President Donald Trump — but, after an hour, his enthusiasm for the project waned.

“I don’t do phony optimism and I don’t try to cheer people up when it isn’t warranted…I’m the mayor of Realville,” said Limbaugh.

For those of you not sure, Realville is not an actual place — which was symbolic of Rush’s plea to his faithful listeners. His rationalization of the Virginia elections was going nowhere.

[Fact Checker’s Note: There is, in fact, a Réalville. But it is in southern France and we verified that Rush Limbaugh is not their mayor.]

There is no positive spin Republicans can assign to the Democrats’ victories in Virginia (and elsewhere). The GOP didn’t just lose in Virginia, they weren’t even competitive. More distressing to them should be the turnover of Virginia’s lower house to the Democrats.

The Democratic Party’s victory on Tuesday was deep in northern Virginia, and may foretell the ‘Thus Always to Tyrants‘ state finally becoming reliably blue for Democrats.

Hillary Clinton won Virginia in 2016 by a 50 percent to 44 percent margin, with 6 percent of the vote going to third party candidates. Ralph Northam beat Ed Gillespie by a 54 percent to 45 percent margin, with only one percent going to Cliff Hyra, the Libertarian candidate.

Without an intensive look at individual-level vote data (such as The Washington Post’s exit poll data), it is difficult to make strong conclusions about the 2017 Virginia elections; however, Tuesday’s election results are consistent with Berniecrats’ claims that a large majority of the third party presidential vote in 2016 would have gone to the Democratic candidate had the nominee been anyone other than Hillary Clinton.

Yet, the shift of 2016 third party voters to Northam in the Virginia gubernatorial race is not the takeaway from Tuesday’s elections. The story was the vulnerability of incumbent Virginia legislature Republicans in what had been strong Republican districts.

Democrats won Virginia districts in places they had no business being competitive.

A 73-year-old Republican incumbent, Bob Marshall, an aggressively anti-LGBTQ state house legislator, lost to Danica Roem, the first openly transgender candidate in U.S. history. Their northern Virginia district is an historically conservative district along Highway 28 with a resident population that is prosperous with strong ties to the Washington, D.C. and federal government economy.

That Virginia state house race saw Roem pursue a clear, but understated, millennial-centered social justice agenda versus a Republican incumbent clinging desperately to a worldview that fit well in 1957, not 2017.

The Republicans should hope that race does not reflect nationwide trends. However, it probably does.

However, let’s step back from the this week’s GOP shellacking and think more strategically about the lessons both parties should have learned from the Virginia results. The early conclusions from mainstream pundits, unsurprisingly, are punctuated with hyperbole and unsupported speculation.

This was a referendum election, not an ideological one. Virginia independents, representing about 28 percent of the voter population, went slightly for Gillespie over Northan (50% to 47%, respectively), according to the Washington Post’s exit poll analysis. Gillespie did slightly better than Trump among independents.

Still, beyond the importance of partisanship and turnout, there are other significant lessons both parties can take away from Tuesdays results.

First, the Republicans:

Lesson 1:

The American political system is venting Republicans like Bob Marshall. Their worldview is not relevant or sustainable in our country’s globalized, intercultural social landscape.

A good share of these Republicans will survive in a smattering of Southern and Midwest states, but the Bob Marshalls are done. Being a bigot isn’t just a bad way to go through life, in politics it produces socially radioactive fallout whose blowback is hard to predict and control. The Republicans don’t need that uncertainty right now. And they definitely don’t need it

The Republicans of the future are going to be more like United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley or U.S. House Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Washington’s 5th congressional district). If the 2017 Virginia results teach the Republicans anything, it is that the GOP old guard needs to retire — which they are…in droves.

To paraphrase Gothmog, lieutenant of Morgul in The Lord of the Rings, “The age of old white men is over, the time of multi-ethnic women has come.”

Nikki Haley, Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, Tammy Duckworth, Jaime Herrera Beutler…..

To be fair, not all white men need to retire.

Bernie Sanders thrives because he speaks with credibility and passion on the issues and concerns of millennials and young, working-class Americans. The Bob Marshalls (and Chuck Schumers) do not.

Just as many of us prepare for winter by sorting through our firewood supply and throwing out the wet and rotted logs — usually the older logs on the bottom of the pile — that is what the Republicans are doing in preparation for 2018 and 2020.

In this way, the 2017 Virginia state house results did the GOP a favor.

Lesson 2:

The Virginia 2017 election results were a referendum on Donald Trump, not on conservatism.

As far as we can tell from the aggregate voting data on Tuesday, the results were not rooted in an ideological re-alignment of voters, but rather resulted from a partisan turnout differential caused by an unpopular president. In northern Virginia, populated by a high percentage of federal government workers and contractors, the voter turnout was decisively in favor of the Democrats.

The Washington Post’s election analysis describes well the dynamic in Virginia. The vote was highly partisan — very little voting across party lines. In addition, Democrats were far more energized than the Republicans. That is the definition of a ‘referendum’ vote. Democrats are angry and frustrated and they took it out on Virginia Republicans.

There is no indication, as yet, that weak Republican partisans or Republican-leaning independents made a wholesale shift towards the Democrats. If that did happen, then the Republicans would really be in trouble going into 2018 and 2020.

For now, they have a much more tractable enthusiasm problem.

Lesson 3:

Donald Trump doesn’t really care about Republicans or conservatism, or anything requiring significant amounts of intellectual investment. It took him about 10 minutes to throw his own party under the bus after learning about the Virginia results.

That was a predictable prick move on the part of President Trump. We’ve come to expect this from him. [Is anyone in a near-orbit to Trump telling him that the strong economy is not translating into support for his presidency?]

Electoral success at all levels of government requires a coherent and coordinated team effort and it hurts a party on the down-ballot races when their own president shows no propensity for teamwork. [Obama and the Clintons weren’t much better in this regard — ‘cult of personality’ candidacies never end well for the respective party]

He still inspires a significant percentage of disgruntled Americans — perhaps as high as 40 percent and as low as 30 percent of Americans. He does not, however, appear capable of inspiring another 10 to 15 percent of Americans required to form a durable electoral majority at all levels of government.

That is a problem Republicans need to address ASAP.

Now, for the Democrats:

Lesson 1:

There is no evidence Tuesday’s results were ideological. It was a referendum on Donald Trump. This is hardly news, but its strategic ramifications are still too often over-looked.

The vote outcomes in Virginia, New Jersey, Georgia and Washington state were turnout-driven partisan body counts. Democrats (and Democrat-leaning independents) came out to vote and they voted for the Democrats. In contrast, the now infamous Trump working-class Democrats did not show up in high numbers. Republican incumbents, never previously considered vulnerable, went down all over Virginia and Georgia.

The ‘not Donald Trump’ message will probably work just as well in 2018 (though one year is a long time in politics). The past failures of the Democrats’ mobilization-centric strategy — where money and time is spent on getting partisans to the polls and little spent on voter persuasion — will most likely work well in 2018.

But, the Democrats cannot pretend that the 2017 results are more than this simple fact: a large majority of Americans in shock about the behavior of their current president and are going to take it out on the party that enables him.

The Virginia vote does not portend a larger movement in support of the national Democratic platform. Danica Roem talked more about road building and infrastructure than social justice issues.

Had we seen traditional Republican voters turning out to vote for Democrats, then an ideological shift could be conjectured. As far as we know now, that did not happen.

Lesson 2:

Democrats can be competitive in districts presently viewed as ‘safe Republican’ districts. If the conditions behind the 2017 results hold, the Republicans will lose the U.S. House and it won’t even be close. It could be on a scale similar to the meltdown the Democrats experienced in the 2010 midterms.

A good example of this new competitiveness is found in Virginia’s 10th House of Delegates district, which covers much of the U.S. Highway 50 corridor west of metropolitan Washington, D.C. The Republican incumbent Randall Minchew received more votes in the 2017 election (14,014) than in any previous election, and still lost to Wendy Gooditis by over 1,000 votes.

That is what a partisan edge in voter turnout will do for the Democrats. But the important lesson to Democrats is that they should never be slaves to data analytics and simply ignore districts the “models” deem unwinnable. The models have been wrong in many important races, and they will be wrong again.

Lesson 3:

The Democrats need to hedge their bets and move to the political center.

The enthusiasm may not always be on the side of the Democrats. To assume so, and thereby continue their mobilization-focused strategy in 2018 and beyond, risks the momentum the Democrats currently possess.

It is not a crime against the political gods to hedge one’s bets going into the 2018 midterms. As underwater as Donald Trump’s approval numbers are right now, nobody knows where his approval numbers will be in November 2018.

One substantial international confrontation could overnight put him over 50 percent. And it won’t require a 35-point approval jump George W. Bush saw after 9-11. President Kennedy saw his highest popularity ratings just AFTER the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. President Ford’s approval ratings jumped sharply after the May, 1975, rescue of the Mayaguez ship crew — where 41 U.S. troops were killed! It is hard to predict how Americans will react to the next international crisis, but don’t assume Democrats and independents, especially those with family members in the military, won’t rally around the Trump presidency during a crisis.

More likely, the American economy will remain strong and at some point that will pay real dividends to the Trump presidency. It hasn’t happened yet, but many Americans still attribute the current economic strength to the Obama administration. That will change as time passes.

In that event, the Democrats need to reacquaint themselves with the political center.

But didn’t I read recently that there is no political center in the U.S. anymore? We are a ‘Center-Left’ country after all.

Many political analysts are saying the growing partisan divide in this country has left the political center empty. Go here and here for recent examples. And many Democratic-leaning pundits have argued the U.S. is a fundamentally Center-Left country (here and here).

All of these conclusions have serious analytic problems.

They are over-reliant on survey-based data, confuse statistical artifacts as findings, misinterpret existing research, and are just blind to the countervailing evidence. Even using the same data and research the ‘go left’ advocates cite, not only is the political center obvious, it is large and still determines close elections in the U.S.

Pew Research’s portrayal of the ideological structure of the American voting public shows a significant political center.

Yes, America is more politically polarized than ever. That does not, in itself, negate the political value of moving to the center. As you can see in the above chart, half of American voters are still between the mean ideological positions of the two parties, but that doesn’t alone justify moving to the center. For example, research is consistently finding that even moderate voters prefer candidates that take distinct policy positions. In corporate marketing, they call it brand differentiation. But taking a distinct policy position is not the same as taking a strong ideological position.

It is possible to be a distinct politician without being a highly ideological.

Here are the three realities that should drive Democrats (and Republicans too) to consider the need for a move to the center:

• When looking at Americans’ opinions on a wide range of topics, particularly outside of a political context, they are predominately non-ideological.
• Americans have a very unfavorable view of both parties (and it is not because they want the parties to become more extreme!)
• Objective policy results still matter in American politics — believe it or not.

Americans are politically ‘Center-Right,’ even if they may be socially ‘Center-Left’

Democratic pundits suggesting we are a ‘Center-Left’ nation put too much weight on survey data alone. Yes, public opinion surveys provide insight into voters’ minds. But these measurement instruments are mirrors, not crystal balls. Change the survey context or the questions themselves and you can get dramatically different results.

Furthermore, the term ‘Center-Left’ is relative. ‘Center-Left’ to what? And is it possible that Americans could be socially liberal, but not politically liberal (Author’s note: That has been my position on this topic in the past).

There are many analytic comparisons a researcher can employ to make this judgment:

• Compare Americans within one election or period of time (cross-sectional)
• Compare Americans over time (longitudinal)
• Compare Americans to other countries (cross-national)
• Compare actual policy outcomes to ideological divisions (Outcome approach)
• Compare Americans using a relativist measure of ideology (Relativist approach)
• Compare Americans to an objective measure of ideology (Objectivist approach)

I won’t go through all these approaches, but would like to highlight the last one.

The Voter Study Group’s lead analyst, Dr. Lee Drutman, takes the objectivist approach in which the center position in a survey question represents the dividing line between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives.’ The researcher determines objectively what defines a ‘liberal’ from a ‘conservative’ and looks to see how the American public matches up to the researcher’s definitions.

There is a significant danger of bias in such an approach. It is prone — scratch that — it invites the results to conform to the researcher’s view of the political world. It fulfills what conservative pundit Ben Shapiro describes as the left’s pathological need to believe most Americans agree with them. This approach imposes a cognitive structure on respondents that doesn’t necessarily mirror how respondents actually think.

Furthermore, the objectivist approach ignores the ability of political parties to strategically redefine ideology within the dynamics of electoral politics.

The objectivist approach becomes obsolete as soon as one party redefines what it means to be ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal.’

Oh, when has that ever happened?!

Most recently, the dramatic ideological shift on trade policy is one example of when assumptions on what is the ‘left’ versus ‘right’ position has proven to be fluid relative to time and space.

But the most dramatic example is the Republican Party in the mid-1970s.

The Republican Party in the mid-1970s was a smoldering wreckage following Watergate and the Vietnam War. The dominant question within the Republican Party in 1975 was “what do we stand for?”

“Moderate” Republicans such as President Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller were not popular with the Republican base.

Enter Ronald Reagan who redefined ‘American conservatism’ in a way that persists to this day.

And, subsequently, in reaction to the Reagan revolution, Bill Clinton redefined liberalism, not just to re-center the Democrats on economic policy (which he did), but to define a new form of ‘liberal’ that embraced free markets and the progressive Democratic social agendas (minus LGBTQ issues that would need to wait until the Obama administration to see significant positive action).

Ideological plasticity is where strategic-thinking parties and politicians excel  in order to win elections.

So, Democrats, there will always be a ‘conservative’ America out there, regardless of how you define ‘conservative.’ And, over time, they will win half of all elections.

Using the opinion survey method to map ideology includes other qualifiers. If you ask the right set of questions framed in a specific context, Americans can look as leftist (or rightist) as you want them to look. That doesn’t mean the objectivist approach is fruitless, but it does mean a skeptical person should look for additional information before concluding we are a ‘Center-Left’ nation.

So here is a brief look at another ideological data source…

University of North Carolina political scientist James Stimson has been tracking the political mood of Americans for most of his academic career. Unlike Pew Research or the Voter Study Group, Stimson’s measure of public mood (which is analogous to ideology) looks out over 60 years of survey data using multiple survey vendors and questions (an in depth methodology description of Stimson’s public mood measure can be found here). Pew Research and The Polling Company (the survey vendor for The Voter Study Group) do good survey research. But I prefer a survey-based opinion measure that aggregates multiple survey vendors and questions over time and looks at more than just voters, but the entire U.S. adult population.

Stimson’s most recent update on public mood shows America (as of 2016) is still centrist, compared to other times in American history since 1952.

The mean value in public mood is 63, almost exactly where American public mood stood in 2016. As I’ve said, it is very likely this country has become significantly more liberal since the 2016 elections. That is the common ideological reaction to a new president. Notice that prior to 1980, America’s mood was the most conservative it had ever been since 1952. Hence, Ronald Reagan wins in landslide over Jimmy Carter. Immediately after the 1980 election, we witness the American mood becoming more liberal.

[Author’s note: Many of us still remember how the American mainstream media outlets ‘freaked out’ at Reagan’s victory in 1980, in much the same way they are reacting to President Trump today.]

In 2016, heading into the November elections, Americans were about as liberal as they were in 1984, right before Ronald Reagan won the biggest presidential landslide since FDR in 1936.

However, the real power of Stimson’s public mood measure is its visualization of the significant year-to-year elasticity in public mood. Real changes in public mood materialize in relatively short periods of time. This is why we shouldn’t be too surprised when opinion data in 2017 is more ‘liberal’ than it was prior to the 2016 elections. It also means analysts, researchers, and pundits should confess more humility before making declarations about how this country is ‘Center-Left’ or ‘Center-Right.’ [Author’s note: I would benefit from some of that humility too.]

To declare that Americans are more liberal today than on November 7, 2016, that’s fine. It doesn’t change the fact that we were a centrist country going into that election and any ideological moves since then can be quickly reversed or accelerated.

Maybe the real conclusion should be that declaring the the U.S. as “Center-Left” or “Center-Right” is analytically unproductive. Any such judgment is as permanent as a child’s sand castle. Perhaps the real effort from analysts and party strategists should instead be focused on the forces that build (and destroy) those ideological castles.

Yes, there is a political center and it deserves our attention

There need not be a large number of voters at the political center for the strategy of moving to the center to be effective. Voter behavior is not as spatially-driven or as simplistic as often assumed by the “go left” Democrat crowd. Gabriel Lenz’ research shows that many voters move their attitudes towards their preferred party and candidates’ positions, not the other way around. So parties or politicians aiming for the thick part of the ideological distribution are not necessarily the most successful. Thus, the ideological distribution of Americans today is not, ipso facto, an argument for where the party should go in the future.

Here is the actual secret sauce to durable and sustainable electoral success in the U.S. political system….

…enact good public policies (which, sometimes, means ‘do nothing’) and voters will reward the party and politicians in power. Good policies attract voters.

Is that why incumbents win over 90 percent of the time?

No, not entirely. But it would be inaccurate to suggest this country has made a lot of bad public policy decisions. This country is as strong economically as it as ever been. For the  most part, our political leaders make good policy and are thus rewarded for this.

Are you out of your f**king mind?! Have you heard of G. W. Bush’s Iraq War? The Defense of Marriage Act? The Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act of 1988?

Yes, there are really bad U.S. public policy decisions in the history books. In most cases, the incumbent party was punished for them.

We can’t allow an aggregate statistic such as incumbent re-election rates to blind us to the real political changes that occur during bad economic times or counter-productive military adventures.

Americans reward good policy and punish bad policy.

And knowing that should shape how the Democrats move forward.

If Democratic leaders believe raising the minimum wage to $15-an-hour, or providing free tuition to public universities for qualified students, or raising taxes on high-income households, or imposing a carbon tax on energy users and producers, or creating a single-payer health care system, or creating government-funded child care are good public policies, then, absolutely, the Democrats need to move left.

If you are skeptical that these policies can be implemented in a cost-effective manner (or would even work if implemented) and that there is a limit to the long-term debt our economy can carry, then, as a Democrat, you must pump the party’s brakes on these leftist economic policy ideas.

That leaves the social justice issues as the only other area where the Democrats can move left. But here is the problem with that move….the Democrats are already on the extreme left on many of these issues. There is no place farther left position than your last presidential nominee’s position of ‘unrestricted access to abortion.’  Allowing people to choose their bathroom based on their self-determined gender identity, independent of their birth sex assignment, is ex vi termini the ‘extreme left’ position. Where is there left, pardon the pun, for the Democrats to go?

The ‘go left’ Democrats are still fighting the war against Hillary Clinton — a unapologetic centrist that put corporate interests ahead of all other considerations. But, Hillary’s problem wasn’t her squishy centrist positions. The problem was her. She was too unlikable to overcome her bland ideas. As we saw in Virginia when the Democratic base in energized, the Democrats win. In 2016, the Democratic base was’t energized, but it wasn’t because of Hillary’s tendency for centrism.

Had Hillary Clinton been even a little more honest, a little more transparent, a little more charismatic, and not deny attention to working-class America, I wouldn’t have been forced to wake up to this picture today:

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, November 1, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

How many people died in Puerto Rico as a result of Hurricane Maria? It is an important question that needs a serious, non-partisan answer.

An answer we will not get from CNN or any of the major news outlets covering the aftermath of Hurricane Maria.

Why? Because they are not really in the news business. They are in the Trump-bashing business. News stories are not pursued on their merit, they are selected based upon how well they serve the current popular narrative — and that narrative since November 2016 is: “Trump-is-a-liar-and-an-incompetent-Russia-colluding-stooge.”

Why focus on the narrative over objective facts? Because strong narratives build audiences, much like presidential candidates with the strongest narrative attract the most voters. Humans prefer narratives over hard, cold facts. The research supporting this conclusion is long, varied, and convincing.

The major news outlets’ coverage of the Hurricane Maria aftermath in Puerto Rico is an exemplar of this ‘feed-the-narrative’ journalism and its hurting their credibility and the people of Puerto Rico.

Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico, but by all objective accounts, the immediate death toll was relatively small

The official death toll in Puerto Rico from Hurricane Maria stands today at 54. These are deaths directly related to the storm — mostly caused by drowning, blunt force objects, and stress-caused physical traumas, such as strokes and heart attacks. This official number includes deaths in the more remote sections of Puerto Rico, according to the Puerto Rican governor’s office.

It is not a perfect number and probably an under-count, given the realities of Puerto Rico’s terrain and socio-economic conditions.

But the news media have decided to manipulate the suffering of Puerto Ricans for a political purpose. They have discovered local and state Puerto Rican officials willing to suggest over 900 people in Puerto Rico died due to Hurricane Maria.

Here is just a sampling of recent headlines suggesting this death toll:

ABC News: 900-plus cremations since Maria, but hurricane death toll still 51

Newsweek: Puerto Rico says more than 900 people were cremated after Hurricane Maria

The Hill: Puerto Rico says over 900 people died of ‘natural causes’ after hurricane: report

Is The Hill‘s convenient use of quotations around ‘natural causes‘ meant to suggest someone is doctoring the death toll? Perhaps Donald Trump is doing it himself between 3 a.m. tweets? As if Donald Trump or anyone in his administration would be connected or knowledgeable enough to manipulate a death toll count generated by Puerto Rico’s state bureaucracy. [See, even I am willing to hitch a brief ride on the ‘Trump-is-incompetent’ narrative]

How did the news media get to this 900+ number? Its a bit murky and unsystematic, but, generally, it is coming from body and cremation counts from local morgues and funeral homes across Puerto Rico.

On a superficial level, that approach may make sense to a journalist or the general public; but, in practice, it yields an inaccurate and biased number.

CNN reporter John Sutter’s approach to covering the death toll has been particularly creepy and dishonest. It is revealed in the first personal story he offers in his Oct. 27th article on CNN.com titled: Puerto Rico’s uncounted hurricane deaths — CNN visits every funeral home in one town to test the government’s count.

He writes: “Isabel Rivera González was 80. She loved to dance, and was known in this hilly enclave of Puerto Rico for her Saturday-night merengue moves…On October 15, three weeks after the storm, Rivera died awaiting a procedure at a hospital that had lost power in the hurricane and whose backup generator failed, according to several of her family members.”

Rivera was 80 and in poor health (prior to the hurricane). This is a sad death and possibly an indirect (not direct) result of Hurricane Maria. The direct versus indirect distinction may seem hardhearted, but it is an important distinction to those who study natural disasters and help prepare local, state and national governments for the next natural disaster.

Indeed, Sutter could have saved himself a lot of effort trolling Puerto Rico’s funeral homes had he first talked to an epidemiologist or public policy expert specializing in natural disasters. His methodology, which he painfully details in his Oct. 27th article, is not appropriate for measuring direct or indirect fatalities related to Hurricane Maria.

Here is why: people die in Puerto Rico every day. They were dying long before Hurricane Maria and they will die in Puerto Rico long after the visible effects of Maria have vanished. In fact, prior to Maria, around 80 Puerto Ricans were dying every day, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

This is why epidemiologists and policy experts establish mortality rates prior to an event (e.g., hurricane) and re-measure that rate during a post-event period of time when assessing the impact of natural disasters.

Establishing a baseline mortality rate is a normative benchmark that can be compared to the post-Maria mortality rate. This methodology in its simplest form is called a Pre-Post measurement design.

The following research study on the measurement of indirect deaths related to the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan is an excellent example of a high-quality scientific study measuring natural disaster-related mortality rates. A more basic analytic approach was employed here to measure the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the mortality rate in the Greater New Orleans area in Louisiana.

Yet, even a quick, back-of-the-envelope attempt at understanding the deaths related to Maria reveals the inherent flaw in the news media’s unscientific assertion that 900 people died in its aftermath.

Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico on September 20th. The 900+ death toll estimate being promoted by the media emerged around October 26th. Lets assume those estimates were derived in the week prior to the news stories, that puts us around October 20th. Rounding, that is 30 days between landfall and the 900+ death count.

Based on U.S. Census Bureau data, in just a normal 30-day period Puerto Rico would have seen around 2,400 deaths. That is the number of deaths without a hurricane at the start of the period. This makes the 900+ fatalities number a little suspect, I would say. At a minimum, it demands more information before we can take it seriously.

In fact, I wonder if Puerto Ricans didn’t become even more attentive to their sick and elderly in the hurricane’s direct aftermath, thereby decreasing (if only temporarily) the mortality rate in Puerto Rico.

No, I’m not going to go that far. That would make me no better than CNN. And it may be true that the post-Maria mortality rate is higher in Puerto Rico. Counting cremations and dead bodies in morgues however is not a reliable way of getting to that true number.

This is why the news media’s ‘feed-the-narrative’ motivation is so important to understanding what it reports as news. The primary concern of CNN or The New York Times or MSNBC or The Washington Post is not understanding the impact of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rico. Their primary motivation is finding ways to make Donald Trump look bad.

‘So what if the news media is reporting a sketchy death count, does it really matter?’

Unbiased mortality, morbidity, and financial loss estimates due to natural disasters are critical to understanding trends and long-term disaster planning. When these numbers are manipulated for political and economic reasons, public policy suffers.

“This poses a problem for any attempt to characterize trends in disaster impact and – maybe more importantly – to use those trends to identify optimal policy choices,” according to Dr. Llan Noy, from the Victoria Business School (Canada). “Trends in disaster losses are crucial because the distribution of losses across regions – and across countries at various levels of wealth and development – informs the discussion of climate change mitigation policies.”

Inflating the Puerto Rican death count may cultivate the news media’s anti-Trump narrative, but it harms those trying to prepare the world for the possible impact of climate change and natural disasters in general.

There is not going to be a quick answer to the “How many people died in Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria?” question. In the meantime, exploiting this period of scientific uncertainty to bash Donald Trump should be beneath the ideals of the news media. Unfortunately, it is not.

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

A post-essay addendum:

I used these two imaginary scenarios to explain to my son how someone might measure the impact of Hurricane Maria:

In the first scenario, a hurricane hits an island and, sadly, a boat with 200 people from the island capsizes and everyone dies. However, on the island, nobody dies and power and normalcy return quickly. Using the Pre-Post design, the researchers would see a spike of 200 people (above the normal mortality rate) but the rate would promptly return to its historical norm. Deaths directly attributable to the hurricane would stand at 200 and indirect deaths would be around zero (assuming the 200 people that died on the boat weren’t all doctors and first-responders from the island).

In the second scenario, a hurricane hits the same island but nobody dies on the day of the hurricane. Instead, the island’s power and transportation infrastructure is destroyed and is not repaired for weeks, even months. In this case, the researchers would see no spike on the day of the hurricane but may see a steady — maybe even abrupt — increase in the island’s post-hurricane mortality rate. This mortality rate change is the estimate of the hurricane’s impact.

Of course, reality is more complicated than offered in these simple scenarios. For example, life-expectancies can change due to natural disasters and would not be easily discernible a simple Pre-Post measurement design. For this reason, researchers employ much more sophisticated (but analogous) statistical techniques to assess the impact of natural disasters.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 27, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

It was one of the busier slides in a grievously long student presentation on nuclear proliferation at the National Defense Intelligence College (NDIC) in 2009.

Buried in a slide explaining the nation’s sources of strategic minerals, such as uranium, was an indented bullet point about the pending acquisition of the controlling stake in a Canadian-based mining company (Uranium One) by a Russian entity (Rosatom).

The significance of the bullet point missed most of us in the class until the professor noted that this acquisition, if approved by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the U.S. (CFIUS), would give the Russians mining rights to a significant percentage of U.S. uranium deposits.

It was a WTF!? moment for me. Can the Russians really do that?

“Yes, they can,” the professor said. “It’s called an open economy.”

The professor then told us, under federal law, the CFIUS reviews any foreign investments in the U.S. with possible national security concerns. Uranium would quality in that regard.

The professor, a retired intelligence officer, was memorable in how he would lean back in his chair and start caressing his temples anytime he had a problem with some aspect of U.S. national security policy — which was most of the time. The International Traffic in Arms Regulations (known as ITAR) were a particular sore spot with him.

As to the pending Uranium One sale, he told us: “The committee (CFIUS) can approve acquisitions, but only the President can disapprove of them.”

“Will they approve of this sale?” someone asked the professor.

“I don’t know why they wouldn’t,” he responded, without any temple rubbing. In his view, access to uranium ore is not a substantive barrier to nefarious entities wanting to build nuclear weapons.

The student moved on in her presentation and I wouldn’t think about Canadian mining companies or uranium mining rights for another seven years.

Until the 2016 presidential election. And, even then, the controversy of whether former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had greased the skids to get the Uranium One deal approved, in exchange for past generosity to the Clinton Foundation, was buried under the coverage of her “email problem.”

However, the recent story by The Hill that the FBI was investigating Russian spy activities and possible bribery surrounding the Uranium One deal returned my thoughts to that NDIC class on nuclear proliferation eight years ago.

Many of the details from that class have faded from my memory, but some of the general ideas remain, such as:

• Conceptually, it is not hard to build a simple, fission bomb. On a practical level, however, it still requires nation-state-level resources and commitments.
• There are intelligence officers in the U.S. intelligence community (USIC) that ALL they think about is nuclear proliferation: What countries have fully developed nuclear weapons? What countries quickly could, if the need arose? What countries control any of the constituent parts and knowledge bases required to make nuclear weapons?
• This country puts forth a considerable effort to track the intermediary and constituent parts needed to build nuclear weapons, including: raw uranium ore, weapons-grade fissile material, timing devices and detonators, centrifuges, advanced milling machines and metalworking, etc.
• No detail is too small for intelligence officers to track if it relates to the proliferation of nuclear materials and technologies across the globe. They care about who controls the world’s uranium ore. And there is a zero chance they would stay silent if the Secretary of State (or President) fast tracks the sale of a uranium mining company to the Russians if, collectively, they believed the sale was a threat to national security. A zero chance.

As the most recent headlines emerged concerning the Uranium One deal, I couldn’t help but think about that class. How the professor seemed nonplussed by the idea of the Russians controlling up to 20 percent of U.S. uranium mining still resonates with me.

Fox News’ narrative is seductive — that something inappropriate, at odds with this nation’s security, was involved in the Uranium One deal. That somehow Hillary Clinton was repaying a debt when she made no effort to stop the acquisition of Uranium One by the Russians.

Yet, I have no evidence to suggest the intelligence community, or anyone with a non-partisan perspective, viewed the acquisition of Uranium One by the Russians as a threat to national security.

So when the Hillary Clinton says on CSPAN that the “pay for play” accusation with respect to the Uranium One deal has been debunked, I have no reason to doubt her…

…but I still have a problem with Hillary’s connection to the Uranium One deal.

Why? Because I believe the type of structural corruption the Clinton’s have exploited since they left the White House is exemplified by the Uranium One deal. This deal was right in their soft corruption wheelhouse.

My graduate school mentor always asked his students to start any social inquiry at the most general level. “Don’t get buried in the details,” he would say.  “Nuance and details are likely to deceive rather than inform.”

What is the 30,000-foot view of Bill and Hillary Clinton?

Since leaving the White House, the Clinton’s have amassed one-quarter billion dollars in net worth. How? By selling their access to power.

It’s not complicated and, worse yet, its not illegal.

Generally, it is legal to offer a service where your access to power elites can benefit others who want access and favorable decisions from those power elites. That is called special interest lobbying. You have to register with the U.S. government to do that on an international level, which is why Paul Manafort will be spending a lot of time in front of a judge over the next year.

The Clintons, of course, have no need for the special interest lobbying model. Too plebeian. Its beneath their status. Instead, they have created a hybrid approach through their intermingling of genuine humanitarian efforts with private, corporate interests. For this effort, the Clintons profit both directly (speaking fees and campaign donations) and indirectly (the Clinton Foundation).

Access to power is what the Clinton’s peddle and that is why they may retire as near billionaires once all is said and done.

However, the fact that this is legal doesn’t make it ethical. And even though Bill Clinton has made positive contributions to the world since his presidency, it doesn’t justify the methods he has used to enrich himself (and his family) since leaving office.

This truth gets lost in MSNBC host Joy Reid’s self-serving setup of a conservative journalist who didn’t understand the real meaning of the Uranium One deal. The Clinton’s are not in the quid pro quo business. Amateurs are in the quid pro quo business. The Clinton’s are in the access selling business, at a level only ex-presidents, some U.S. cabinet members, and a few former U.S. Senators can realistically claim.

You will never find an audio recording or an email where Bill or Hillary Clinton communicate, “If you give to our Foundation X number of dollars, we will  make sure Y happens.”

That is quid pro quo for dumbkopfs. That is what Paul Manafort might have engaged in, but that is not what the Clinton’s do. They aren’t so pedestrian.

Rather, this is the deal the Clinton’s have sold the world’s elites since 2000: I am Bill Clinton, a former U.S president married to a U.S. Senator and future U.S. president. Give to our family foundation and we will learn about your interests and give you access to any world leader you require to fulfill those interests.

That is the Bill and Hillary Clinton business model. It is an awesome and lucrative model. It is the model Barack Obama is poised to employ and modify over the remainder of his post-presidency. Obama will die a billionaire if our nation’s laws don’t try to address this form of soft corruption.

If you are OK with that, than the Uranium One deal really is a nothin’ burger. If, on the other hand, you have a problem with a former U.S. President and U.S. Secretary of State engaging in that type of influence peddling, then the Clinton’s are the exemplar.

For all intents and purposes, Uranium One deal is business-as-usual for the Clintons

There is a reason politicians rarely go to jail. Lawyers understand how difficult it is to prove criminal intent (mens rea). It is their ‘get out of jail free’ card and they are not embarrassed to use it.

Former FBI Director James Comey’s decision not to indict Hillary Clinton for the mishandling of classified information was largely rooted in the knowledge that proving Clinton’s general intent — the lowest level of criminal intent — would be difficult. Nay, impossible.

The most direct evidence of general intent is a defendant’s confession, which prosecutors cannot force from a defendant given their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Or sometimes general intent is discerned through a wiretapped conversation.

Without concrete evidence of general intent, much less specific criminal intent, the Uranium One deal is a dead-end for Clintons’ critics. And the smart critics know it.

Besides, that is not how modern influence peddling works…not the way it is practiced by the Clintons.

The Uranium One deal was not about U.S. mining rights

James Conca, a geologist writing for Forbes magazine, offers a lucid summary and explanation of why the Uranium One deal is not going to yield any serious criminal investigation.

“Those U.S. facilities obtained by Russia produce almost nothing, ” writes Conca. “The uranium deposits are of relatively poor grade and are too costly to compete on the uranium market, but the facilities do have good milling capacity to process ore, if anyone gives it to them, which hasn’t happened in about 10 years.”

Conca lays bare any suggestion that national security was at stake with the Russians purchasing control of Uranium One. “The real reason Russia wanted this deal was to give Rosatom’s subsidiary Uranium One’s very profitable uranium mines in Kazakhstan ― the single largest producer of commercial uranium in the world,” writes Conca. [Rosatom is Russia’s state atomic energy corporation and is the world’s largest uranium enrichment leader.]

National security aside, the suggestion that Canadian businessman Frank Giustra’s $140 million in donations to the Clinton Foundation was related to CFIUS’s approval of the Uranium One deal is equally specious. As emphasized in MSNBC host Joy Reid’s take down of Washington Examiner reporter Jen Kerns, Guistra had divested himself from Uranium One three years prior to the sale to Rosatom. Though, Reid fails to mention Ian Telfer, another Uranium One investor, who donated $1.3 million to $5.6 million to the Clinton Foundation during and after the CFIUS review.

Five million dollars is not as eye-popping as $140 million, but nonetheless invites suggestions that more was going on between the Clintons and Uranium One than just a lot of good intentions.

Also feeding the conservative media’s feeding frenzy on the Uranium One deal is Bill Clinton’s $500,000 speaking honorarium in 2010 from a Russian bank connected to the Uranium One deal. However, given there will never be an email or recorded phone conversation where Bill Clinton says, “You pay me $500,000 and I will make sure you get CFIUS to approve your Uranium One acquisition,” any suggestion of wrongdoing on Bill’s part is purely speculative and nowhere close to an indictable offense.

Those types of emails or phone calls will never be uncovered, not just because the Clinton’s understand the legal concept of criminal intent, but because that is not how their influence peddling operation works.

It is far more sophisticated and, yet, still simple.

The Clintons’ activities are filled with interpersonal relationships that feed conspiracy theories the guileless conservative media inevitably promote as the next ‘greatest scandal in American history,’ only for the Clinton-friendly mainstream media to, on cue, easily knock it down like the green pigs in an Angry Birds game app.

No, the Clinton influence peddling model is far more subtle.

The Clintons are a symbiotic dream team. One is a former U.S. president and the other is (was) a future U.S. president. They have a charitable foundation that does good work throughout the world. This foundation offers to its major donors this obvious benefit: high-ideal, visible philanthropy. In Frank Giustra’s own words: “I admire what he (Bill Clinton) does and I want to be a part of it.”

But, this is where it gets murky, and deliberately so. The Washington Post reported that a Canadian charity, founded by Giustra in 2007, kept its donors secret, despite an agreement between the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton that the Clinton Foundation would reveal its donors.

Hillary Clinton never intended to honor her agreement with the Obama administration, whose malignant indifference to Hillary’s side businesses would define their reaction to Hillary’s “reckless” mishandling of classified information and destruction of government records as Secretary of State.

The Clinton Foundation’s connection to Giustra’s Canadian foundation allowed anonymous donors, “including foreign executives with business pending before the Hillary Clinton-led State Department,” to funnel money to the Clinton Foundation.

And, boy, did they.

Over 1,000 donors to Giustra’s charitable foundation are tied to the Clinton Foundation and remain unknown to the public, according to The Washington Post.

Anyone concerned about the integrity of charitable foundations should be outraged at the lack of transparency provided by the Clinton Foundation.

Is it at a criminal level? Unknown. Is it unethical? Absolutely.

According to The Washington Post, “Bill Clinton has used Giustra’s MD-87 luxury plane 26 times for foundation business since 2005, including 13 trips in which the two men traveled together.” The Clinton Foundation does not reveal Bill Clinton’s travel behavior, including modes of transportation or travel companions.

More importantly, Giustra’s private business activities benefited directly from his connections to Bill Clinton.

To business titans like Giustra, international philanthropy enhances both his reputation and bottom line. By coincidence or intent, Giustra entered into some of his biggest deals of his business career in the same countries where he traveled with Bill Clinton for philanthropic purposes.

That is the Clinton business model exemplified.

For example, at the same time he was dining with Bill Clinton in Kazakhstan, Giustra concluded a massive purchase of uranium mines in the same country. Coincidence? That is what Bill Clinton, Frank Giustra and Joy Reid want you to believe.

Kazakhstan president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, became Kazakhstan’s first elected president in 1991 with 99 percent of the vote. By any sensible definition, Nazarbayev is a dictator and has been accused of significant human rights abuses by various human rights organizations and the United Nations.

Is there evidence Bill Clinton personally intervened in Giustra’s negotiations with Nazarbayev? None, but again, that is the hallmark of the Clinton business model. It doesn’t require Bill’s personal negotiation skills. It only requires his personal connections. Whether Giustra has the skill to negotiate with Nazarbayev is Giustra’s problem.

When Giustra formed a Colombian oil company it received important drilling rights from Colombia’s state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol. When did this happen? After Giustra met the Colombian president through his affiliation to the Clinton Foundation.

Again, coincidence? Giustra insists the approval of the Colombian government was not required for his company’s Colombian drilling rights. We have to take his word for it, but forgive those that have doubts.

But, once more, this timeline regurgitation confuses the real power the Clinton’s offer global elites. Bill Clinton (and his wife) aren’t about the negotiation details. They are about facilitation and the mutual understanding that comes with being part of the world’s economic and political elite.

If you give to the Clinton Foundation, Bill and Hillary will know everything they need to know about your private business interests. You don’t need to ask them for help. If you give them (or rather, their foundation) enough money, they will learn what they need to know about your private business interests and how they can help.

It is a nice business model if you are an ex-U.S. president (or married to one). And it is all legal.

K.R.K

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 24, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

“We cannot turn back the clock. We cannot undo the impact of technology. Nor would we want to,” said Robert Mueller, former FBI Director and current special prosecutor investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, in his keynote speech at the March 2012 RSA Cyber Security Conference.

Mueller said the businesses and institutions embracing the newest technologies will prosper over those in denial or trying just to “keep up.”

Though he didn’t say so, the U.S. electoral system is definitely in the latter category.

Given the known Russian activities in the 2016 U.S. election, from the troll factories to the fake-news-spreading Twitterbot accounts, trying to control or eliminate foreign actors (rogue or otherwise) from participating in this country’s electoral process is a merry chase: American elections are an international affair whether we like it or not, particularly at, but not limited to, the presidential level.

Federal election regulations may be able to impede foreign money coming into our electoral system (though even that enterprise is dubious), but controlling information originating from foreign actors is a different matter. That may be an impossible task.

Do our first amendment rights give us the right to be influenced by campaign speech initiated by foreign agents?

At the individual-level, the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment implicitly protects the right of any U.S. citizen to re-tweet Tweets or post Facebook content generated by foreign sources of unknown veracity and integrity.

If someone believes a news story on the Russian government-funded news website, RT.com, is worthy of being passed around to their Twitter followers or Facebook friends, it is their constitutional right to do so. Any attempt by the U.S. government to abrogate that right will be met with the appropriate outrage.

While nobody can knowingly proliferate social media content that threatens physical or permanent harm towards others, we have no legal obligation to vet the content we download and share on the internet.

Morally, however, we have a civic obligation to eschew known falsehoods and to prefer truths, as uncertain as those may be sometimes. But, Twitter, Facebook and Google are under no current legal requirement to distinguish truth from falsehood. They are merely high-tech, digital conveyor belts designed to move and share information generated by their users.

Freedom of speech is messy and social media just makes it messier.

“The main issue to remember when dealing with the internet is that people still have their basic rights intact,” says Kelly O’Connell, a senior editor for Internet Business Law services.

The internet, unfortunately, also offers individuals the means to publish and propagate malicious or erroneous information that can spread to thousands, even millions, of individuals within a short period of time. Furthermore, this false information can reside near permanently on the internet, even after it has been discredited.

According to O’Connell, internet users are subject to the same defamation laws that newspapers and television broadcasters must also follow — and if rogue actors believe they can spread false and defamatory information on the internet with anonymity, they may be disappointed. “The internet is not as completely anonymous as the typical person may presume,” says O’Connell.

Even the Russians couldn’t hide their interference in the 2016 election (assuming they were trying to hide to so).

Yet, it is unlikely our defamation laws are an impediment to Russian influence operations. A libeled or slandered politician may be able to sue individual bloggers or vloggers located in the U.S. for damages, but it is doubtful a Russian internet troll would be similarly vulnerable.

Is the internet too big and decentralized to regulate campaign communications?

The size and scope of the internet should humble any U.S. congressional attempt to regulate and manage its content. But the internet is finite.

Most of the internet’s traffic enters and leaves the United States through over 40 network nodes via submarine cables connected to Europe, South America, Asia, Australia and Africa. (see map below).

Despite its ubiquitous and circuitous nature, it is not impossible for the U.S. government to control the internet content available to Americans. The Chinese government does it to their citizens, facing a task only marginally easier than what the U.S. government faces. And though significant content gets past Chinese internet censors, what the government does control is still substantial.

Regardless of whether the U.S. government should, it is naive to think the U.S. government is incapable of imposing significant controls on what Americans can see on the internet.

We already know our government monitors, categorizes and selectively warehouses much of this content as it passes through these 40 entry/exit nodes. This government activity is not a secret.

However, the philosophical and practical difference between monitoring internet content, as opposed to controlling, is substantial.

Social media botnets played a visible role in the past U.S. presidential election. These accounts are generally defined as a group of social media accounts (on services such as Facebook or Twitter) connected in a coordinated fashion for malicious purposes. They are, in effect, a force multiplier for rogue actors trying to magnify their presence in the social media information stream.

Studies found that around 20% of 2016 U.S. election-related Twitter activity came from suspect botnet accounts. These botnet accounts will need to be addressed by social media internet companies and the U.S. Congress, hopefully, before the 2018 midterm elections.

However, whatever rage many Americans feel about this past election, this should not cloud our nation’s judgment on how best to protect our electoral system from malicious external actors. Any congressional legislation this country passes in response to Russian electoral interference cannot be done without strict bipartisan oversight and accountability.

Just as many feel the 9-11 terrorist attacks led to, in the name of heightened security, unnecessary infringements on Americans’ civil liberties, we must be equally vigilant against any federal government power grab under the pretense of keeping foreign influences out of our campaign communications.

What can the government do to keep the Russians out of our elections?

How Congress will monitor and regulate content on Facebook, Twitter or Google is still a work-in-progress. Congressional Democrats have been restrained so far, as evidence continues to be gathered by congressional committees and the Mueller investigation on what actually happened in 2016; but, the initial legislative ideas coming out of Washington, D.C. have been narrow and are unlikely to deter the Russians or other rogue actors determined to interfere in American elections.

One example is the Honest Ads Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in October by Democratic senators Mark Warner and Amy Klobuchar and cosponsored by Republican senator John McCain, is the first legislative attempt to address Russian interference.

The bill would require political advertisers on social media and other online platforms to disclose who is paying for their ads. In effect, the bill requires internet political advertisers to comply with the same disclosure standards already required of broadcast, radio, and print advertisers. But the democratic nature of digital platforms — which, unlike radio and television, allow virtually anyone to create content — means rules aimed only at advertisements will have a limited effect.

Even the bill’s proponents agree that it will do little to hinder the Russians.

“It’s a good piece of legislation to address the modern realities of campaign financing and the need for disclosure,” Adam Sharp, former head of news, government, and elections at Twitter, told Wired magazine. “But I’m skeptical of how it will tamp down on behavior by bad actors like we saw in the 2016 election.”

Congress will need to address social media-based botnet accounts, perhaps the most effective tool utilized by the Russians in 2016, and there are a number of ways to identify and eliminate botnet accounts, some more intrusive and sophisticated than others.

Botnets distort the democratic pretenses of social network sites such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Their existence is inconsistent with the notion that these social networks are the modern day version of the ‘public square.’

One solution to botnets is rather mundane and easy to implement. Scholars at the University of Indiana suggest that Twitter use “captcha” tests for certain users to prove they’re human before they can post content. As a Twitter user, it would be annoying, but a small price to pay for limiting the power of botnets.

Another option would be for the social networks to allow users to directly flag suspected bot accounts — a sort of wisdom of the crowd method. This idea however could prove to be more an indication of the partisan bias of Twitter or Facebook users than a good detector of botnets.

Another option would be for the social networks to further develop sophisticated algorithms to detect botnets. While this anti-botnet solution may offer the least disruption to social network users, it places an extremely high burden on the social networks to maintain the relevancy of these artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. Where there is a will to evade such algorithms, rogue actors will find a way.

Given their potential for making decisions that could impact large swaths of social media content, using AI algorithms to identify botnets cannot be carelessly implemented simply to placate an angry Congress. AI systems are still relatively new and are limited in their operationalization.

“Real-world planning and decision-making is still beyond the capabilities of modern computers, the exception being very well-defined, constrained problems such as mission planning for satellites,” says Max Welling, who teaches artificial intelligence courses at the University of California-Irvine.

Finally, at a nation-state diplomatic level, we could implement meaningful sanctions against any country harboring agents disruptive to American elections. We know what the Russians did in 2016. Are we willing to back up our evidence with action?

I’m guessing, no. Our Congress will more likely inconvenience American citizens and social media companies with whatever legislation they finally pass to protect American elections.

Whatever Congress decides, the social media companies will likely be adversaries to their effort

Any attempt to control foreign-sourced election communications must recognize the user-count business models of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

Emilio Ferrara, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California and bot specialist, says, “Twitter’s business is selling advertising but bots don’t buy products and they don’t click on ads.”

The Twitterbot problem may, in fact, expose Twitter as being less than it says it is to advertisers and investors. Twitter is claimed to have 328 million monthly active users, as of the second quarter of 2017,  though to what extent that number includes Twitterbots is uncertain.

Twitters recent announcement to no longer accept advertising from the Russian government-supported news services, RT.com and Sputnik.com, will have no impact on future Russian influence operations.

What is clear is that the Twitter stock price is largely driven by its user base numbers. When Twitter reported earlier this year that its monthly active users were up 6 percent year over year and 3 percent sequentially, investors sent Twitter stock shares up almost 11 percent.

Twitter has a strong incentive to stonewall attempts to determine the number of Twitter botnets in its user population or attempts to delete botnets from the Twitterverse.

Nonetheless, that is exactly where the Congress will need to go if it wants to defend the legitimacy of American elections in the age of social networks. Furthermore, when rogue actors illegally hack into email systems for political purposes, that is crime and should be pursued as such.

Does that mean we ignore the information, no matter how accurate or pertinent to the campaign, once it is made public by some entity like Wikileaks? Unlike a jury, it is hard to ask the American voting public to disregard information already available on the internet.

What is possible is exposing the likely source of this illegally-obtained information and letting voters decide if it warrants their consideration when making a vote decision. This is exactly what happened in 2016 and, in that sense, it was our greatest defense against Russian interference.

The Internationalization of U.S. Elections is Here to Stay

Here is a prediction: Future U.S. elections will include information (some of it ‘fake news’) created by foreign sources aiming to disrupt the election. Email servers will be attacked. Botnets will become more sophisticated. Online trolls will continue to target American voters on the various social media platforms. Even at the risk of retaliatory sanctions, the incentive for the Russians (and other nations) to influence American campaigns will not go away. This is the price of a free society.

This prediction does not mean, however, we should ignore these international miscreants. Our political parties and campaigns need to be more sophisticated in how they protect their private information. Our state governments need more secure methods for maintaining their voter registration records and more consistent technical standards for their voting machines. No entity should ever be able to hack into a U.S. voting machine from a remote location (Note: There is, as yet, no evidence this happened in the 2016 election; nonetheless, the theoretical possibility that it could happen should make us concerned).

At the same time, Americans cannot let its defense of our elections become another power grab by the federal government. Congressional Democrats, in particular, assume a government-imposed solution, often accompanied by increased federal powers, will solve the problem. It won’t.

One inference from Mueller’s speech at the 2012 RSA Cyber Security Conference was that the ‘bad guys’ will never go away and will adapt as fast as we build defenses to stop their attacks. That doesn’t mean we stop improving our cyber security efforts. It does mean we need to be realistic about what we can and can’t do. Their are no fail-safe solutions, but what we can do is keep Americans informed on what foreign actors are doing during our elections and how voters, on an individual-basis, can self-identify rogue actors and ‘fake news’ populating our social media platforms.

Americans must always have access to foreign sources of campaign information. This does open the door for other countries’ intelligence services to manipulate such information, but that risk is small compared to the risks associated with our federal government becoming a gatekeeper to what we can read, see and hear on the internet. The risk of foreign interference in our elections is attendant with our constitutionally-protected freedoms. Let us not harm the latter thinking we are stopping the former.

K. R. K.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 23, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

As NuQum.com reported earlier this year, the Green Bay Packers and Head Coach Mike McCarthy mutually agreed, short of a Super Bowl appearance in one of the next two seasons, the team will not renew his contract after the 2018 season.

Has the Aaron Rodgers likely season-ending injury changed that informal agreement?

One Packer management source close to the McCarthy’s negotiations says, “Yes.” This year is even more critical, not less, to McCarthy’s future with the Packers.

Nothing shows the value of a coach more than how a team responds to the loss of its best player. The Packers 26-17 loss to the New Orleans Saints is not, by itself, an indicator of McCarthy’s coaching ability, but our source close to Packer senior management says this season has become more important to McCarthy’s future following Rodgers’ injury.

“Behlichick won a Super Bowl (2016) with Brady out for six games,” notes our source. “Brady missed almost the entire 2008 season and the Patriots still finished 11-5. That’s the standard we expect for the Packers as well.”

Since the Packers’ 2011 Super Bowl victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers, the Packers have not returned to the Super Bowl. Considering many NFL analysts view Rodgers as the best quarterback in the game today, the Packers’ absence from the Super Bowl leaves many wondering who is to blame: Packer management or the coach? Or both?

Packer management, of course, looks at McCarthy as a key factor to success and recent results have not proved favorable to his cause.

Despite a dramatic victory over the Dallas Cowboys in last season’s playoffs, the Packers’ subsequent 41-22 destruction at the hands of the Atlanta Falcons in the NFC Championship game left many in Packer management feeling McCarthy’s time with the organization is nearing its end.

That conclusion seems harsh to many that still regard the Packers’ 2011 Super Bowl victory as a testament to McCarthy’s coaching acumen. Rather, some analysts pin the blame for the Packers’ post-2011 misfortunes on Packer management itself. Namely, management’s in ability to build a championship caliber defense around their future Hall of Fame quarterback.

The Packer defense, in terms of yards allowed per game, has only once finished a season in the league’s Top 10 since the 2011 season (when it was ranked 1st in the league).

2012: 22nd

2013: 8th

2014: 18th

2015: 18th

2016: 11th

2017 (in first 7 games): 22nd

“The problem with the Packers’ defense is that it is predicated so much on Rodgers getting hot early and allowing the unit to play with a significant lead,” wrote Sporting News’ Vinnie Iyer after the Packers 2017 NFC Championship game loss. “Green Bay, perhaps spoiled by Rodgers, has taken that approach too far, to the point of no return to the Super Bowl.”

Radio sports talk host and long-time Packer observer, Steve Czaban, thinks blaming the Packers’ post-season misfortunes on specific management decisions is off-the-mark; instead, he believes the Packer’s unique municipal ownership structure must share some of the blame.

“I know that Ted Thompson and Mike McCarthy have tried. And no, I don’t have any specific critiques of missteps on personnel,” says Czaban. “But the one, and only time it hurts the Packers to not have an actual owner is right now. It’s when those men responsible for wasting a generational talent like Rodgers’ career would otherwise feel the heat and urgency of a single billionaire calling them into his office to ask simply: “what the f**k? What… the F**K!”

Injuries have hobbled the Packers every year since their Super Bowl season, but one of the features of their last Super Bowl victory was that the team overcame a number of critical injuries that championship season.

Jermichael Finley, the Packer Pro Bowl tight end, was a big loss for the offense in 2011, but even bigger loses occurred on the defensive side of the ball. Defensive back Al Harris missed the first half of the 2010-11 season due to injury. All-Pro linebacker Nick Barnett was out the last two-thirds of the season, including the playoffs. Likewise, for starting defensive back Morgan Burnett and linebacker Brady Poppinga.

The 2010-11 Super Bowl winning season guaranteed McCarthy’s job would be safe for more than a few years. But this is 2017 and the Packers, in all likelihood, are not going to make it to the Super Bowl this year.

To what extent does the Packer management hold McCarthy accountable for the fact that the Packers haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since 2011? Packers president and chief executive office, Mark Murphy, will ultimately answer that question.

The fact that their Hall of Fame certain quarterback is no longer available for the 2017-18 season does not work in McCarthy’s favor. Should the Packers not contend for their division title this year, our sources say McCarthy will be all but done with the Packers.

Short of Super Bowl appearance next season, McCarthy will be out of a job on December 31, 2018.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 17, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Our Unitarian-Universalist (UU) minister was midway through a touching and powerful Sunday sermon celebrating National Coming Out Day.

She had shared a story about the pending arrival of her and her spouse’s second child and how, when telling a stranger about the new arrival, the person assumed her spouse was a man, when, in fact, she is not.

It was a funny, well-told story about a same-sex couple having a baby in America today.

Then she told a second story about a married, middle-aged man who decided, after a lifetime of hiding his true identity, to tell his dying mother that he was bisexual. In the minister’s telling of the story, the man felt a personal burden had been lifted — he no longer needed to hide who he was to his mother.

As the congregation members around me nodded their heads in approval, and some even shedding tears, the minister’s sermon moved on to other poignant ‘coming out’ stories.

But I couldn’t let go of the middle-aged man’s story. I stewed on it as the minister and congregation had moved on. Something just rubbed me wrong about a man telling his mother, in the last days of her life, about his sexual preferences.

“What a self-indulgent sack of shit he is,” I thought.

Perhaps my wife had the same visceral reaction as I had to his story? In private, later, I asked for her reaction. But, no, she thought the story was just fine. “We shouldn’t have to go through life hiding from our family about who we love,” she said.

Yeah, but…I just couldn’t articulate at that time why the story felt so off key to me. So, I kept repeating the story in my head in the drive home…

His mother is on her deathbed and THAT is the time this man decides to inform his poor mother about HIS sexual preferences.

Mother Mary and Joseph! Really? The guy couldn’t let that one resentment towards his mother go unsettled? He HAD to get it off his chest. For whose benefit? Definitely not hers.

The UU minister’s story implied the man’s mother was not so open-minded about LGBTQ issues. For this reason, the man, married with adult children, never felt comfortable sharing his sexual identity with his mother — a not uncommon and often sad story repeated all over this world.

I empathize with his struggle and the need to tell his mother; but, presented as it was by the UU minister, the story did not come across to me like an act of liberation or love. It came across as self-serving and even vengeful.

The story glorified a selfish act. That’s the conclusion I draw from it.

The minister didn’t share the mother’s reaction to her son’s news because that was irrelevant to the story’s purpose. The mother was a stage prop in a man’s vainglorious ‘coming out’ drama.

Cue the congregational choir and their spirited rendition of “Standing on the Side of Love.”

Judge Not, Lest You Be Judged

Why is my judgment so harsh towards this tormented man in my minister’s story?

Insomuch as we are all self-centered, this man’s act felt unusually selfish and senseless; and when presented by the minister as heroic, it became a serious case of rhetorical overreach.

But more upsetting to me was that I could not find anyone else in the congregation, including my wife, that shared my ambivalence with the story. Can someone empathize with this man’s lifelong identity struggle and still question the way in which he brought his dying mother into the ‘coming out’ process? Based on reactions from my wife and other UU congregants, apparently not.

“When is it a good time to come out?” was one representative response.

Maybe if the minister had brought the mother into the story more I would have reacted better? I would like to think the mother gave her son a hug and told him, “Son, I always knew and I love you no matter what.” I need closure, even if it has to be Disney-fied.

But, apparently, other Unitarians don’t.

From listening to the post-church service chatter, I realized that most in the congregation thought the ‘coming out’ story was a potent representation of the sermon’s central narrative: We should not need to hide who we really are.

What could I have possibly misinterpreted in the story to think it was a tale of self-absorption, cruelty and heartlessness? I do not rule out that the problem is with me, and not the story.

Yet, I don’t think so in this case. Something bigger is going on. Something I’ve seen developing within liberal religious communities over thirty years. Something that widens my disconnect from what I hear more frequently from the pews at my UU church.

Identity issues are an unhealthy obsession with liberals. I’m saying nothing new in that statement. We hear it all the time now, post the 2016 elections. But I’ve never felt, until now, that how my religious community was doing harm to themselves in using identity — be it race, ethnicity, sexual preferences or gender — to turn otherwise empathetic people into self-absorbed…bigots.

Ouch! That hurts just to type the word. I’ve grown up in the Unitarian tradition. I refrain from calling anyone a bigot or a racist or sexist or whatever –ist you use. Because I am a Unitarian, I look to context and root causes when trying to understand other people’s behavior and attitudes. I would like to think I am empathetic, in part, because of my liberal religious upbringing.

Sadly, times have changed…and not for the better.

Partisan Religions are a Bad Idea

Two forces are drawing Unitarians away from their better angels. One is their growing acceptance of using identity issues to label entire groups as sharing one homogeneous, subconscious mindset. This is called stereotyping. It used to be a bad thing for anyone to do. Now it is acceptable for liberals and Unitarians to do it.

People are now assumed guilty of thought crimes based on the color of their skin or their sex organs, or whatever the out-of-favor personal characteristic at the moment. That is what Unitarians used to call bigotry.

Social critic, Reni Eddo-Lodge, gives voice to this new, socially acceptable form of bigotry in her article: “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People about Race.”

It’s not just their race that disqualifies some people from being welcomed participants in the social dialogue. It could also be their ethnic category, or their sex category, or their gender category, or their sexual preferences…or some identity category we haven’t politicized yet.

The identity-centered parables delivered from the UU pulpits today no longer just strive to present the liberal religious ideals of exploration, inquiry and inclusion — they now also serve to exclude and shutdown certain groups and ideas as well.

Today’s UUs now like to identify their enemies.

The UU Church may reject the Christian concept of original sin, but have replaced it with their own original sins called racism, sexism and bigotry. Self-aware or not, we are all sinners in this regard, or so we are told from the UU pulpits.

All this dovetails into the second negative force infecting today’s liberal religious thinking: the partisan politicization of identity issues.

Much of what you hear from the UU pulpits today are also dominating conversations at the Democratic Party’s state conventions and monthly county committee meetings.

This new assumption of original sin is now part of the Democratic Party’s core orthodoxy, even if it is dishonest and ultimately harmful to the Party’s attempt to regain majority status in the state and national legislatures.

It is important to acknowledge the importance of politics in fighting for, and extending rights to, disenfranchised and disadvantaged groups in America. Without politics, slavery doesn’t end, women don’t get the right to vote, Social Security doesn’t exist, and same-sex couples don’t have the right to marry.

Politics is central to addressing social grievances.

But it is the level (and assumption) of partisanship driving social and civil rights projects today that is different. Martin Luther King met frequently with a wide range of Democratic and Republican leaders, and often non-sympathizers to the civil rights cause.

U2 frontman, Bono, tells a great story about how he persuaded North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms, a conservative Republican, to advocate increasing U.S. aid to Africa to combat AIDS.

“The great old cold warrior himself, after going through this with him and explaining that there was 2,103 verses of Scriptures pertaining to poverty, and that second to redemption, this is the second most important theme, and that sexual behavior, even misbehavior, doesn’t seem to be there that much — it’s mentioned a couple of times in the Old Testament — he was amazing,” Bono said during a PBS “Frontline” interview in 2015. “Not only was (he) moved by this; he was moved to do something. And he had a press conference where he publicly repented for the way he thought about the AIDS virus.”

Those kind of stories are not happening anymore. Not consistently. Not in a way that is changing U.S. political outcomes.

Today, once you’ve politicized an issue, you’ve guaranteed it won’t be solved anytime soon.

Increasingly, Unitarian sermons and Democratic candidates merely lecture us on how our ascribed characteristics (e.g., sex and race), gender identities and sexual preferences define us. Today’s liberal Democrats frenzy feed on the notion that our identities go a long way in explaining all aspects of our lives, including how we vote. The new business school religion called Big Data is built on this deeply flawed, error-prone supposition.

To Unitarians and Democrats, we are captives to our identities (though we have the latitude to change our gender self-identification) and, therefore, not solely responsible for our personal outcomes. Social norms and institutions — built by others in positions of privilege — are the problem.

Unitarians and Democrats take the lead in the drumbeat against privileged groups within mainstream society. In their worldview, ‘mainstream’ equates to ‘oppressor.’ To think of the social dynamic any other way is to condone and reinforce its inherent biases, excesses, and dysfunctions.

Misery Loves Company

The irony, of course, is that most Unitarians, and increasingly Democrats, are from the most privileged segments in our society. If you are looking for wealthy and/or highly-educated white people, I’d start with any local UU church congregation. Looking for African-Americans, Hispanics, working-class Americans or Muslims? They are as rare in a UU congregation as ‘shit is from a rocking horse,’ as my grandmother might say.

No, it is hard to find undocumented Dreamers or victims of police violence in a UU congregation. But you will nonetheless find lots of suffering, miserable people.

Many religious theologies are founded on guilt and suffering — the Unitarians are not exceptional in that regard. But having spent a few years attending Catholic services (during my first marriage), there is something qualitatively different about how Unitarian theology treats suffering. For Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists, it is an intermutual phenomenon. For Unitarians, it is personal. Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists accept it (mash’ Allah, says the Koran). Unitarians soak in it.

In market research we would say, Unitarians over-index in their miserableness quotient.

We UUs do not adhere to fixed dogmas — so we renamed them principles and covenants.

Fixed dogmas. This is where the UU Church and religious liberals, in general, go off course. Their foundational assertion that they are in a constant search for truth, and that their principles and covenants are evolving ‘works-in-progress,’ is merely a pretense.

The first of the UU Church’s Seven Principles emphasizes “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Yet, as so often happens with core religious principles, a simple dictum like this becomes neutered over time.

My UU religious community, while embracing the rights and dignity of all individuals from the pulpit, in fact, acts to enforce the exact opposite approach on a societal level. To UUs, your individuality is subsumed under, not above, your identity. What you think, how you interact with others, and even how you vote is largely determined by your identity.

If this sounds like the national Democratic Party’s approach to election campaigns, it is not a coincidence. The religious Left is the conscience of the political Left. They go to the same universities, vacation in the same locations, read the same books, and invest their 401ks in the same socially responsible mutual funds.

You may think you are enlightened or open-minded or broadly accepting of others, but to religious liberals, you are a category and, in that inviolable assignment, gain the institutional advantages (or disadvantages) inherent to all people in your category. You may have the approved attitudes, but that doesn’t change who you are.

“Oh, you’re a typical white male,” my wife chides. “Sounds like a Sean Hannity-level analysis to me.” She knows how to hit with words.

I did basically steal this rant from Tucker Carlson, but still, I ask her, “What would happen if I stood up one Sunday at our local UU Church and declared that my interpretation of the UU’s First Principle — the inherent worth and dignity of every person — must include the unborn.”

Most UU congregations do not have Tiki torches readily available, but there are usually enough unclaimed potluck dinner bowls and pans in the church kitchen to cause some real damage if thrown in the general direction of someone uttering a heretical statement like that.

The religious Left has zero tolerance for opinion diversity. Zero tolerance.

Ask former Omaha, Nebraska mayoral candidate, Heath Mello, a Catholic Democrat who is marginally pro-life, about the national Democratic Party’s tolerance for opinion diversity.

The Republican candidate ended up winning the race (53 vs. 47 percent) after Democratic National Committee chairman, Tom Perez, withdrew his unqualified support for the Mello candidacy due to the abortion issue. Barack Obama won the 2008 presidential vote in Douglas County (which includes Omaha) by 52 percent to 47 percent, and lost it by a similar margin in 2012. Omaha is a winnable constituency for Democrats.

Mello’s loss is natural product of a fixed dogma.

As Ohio congressman, Tim Ryan (Democrat), puts it: “Requiring everybody to fit some purity test is a recipe for disaster.”

And its not just abortion.

Do you oppose raising the minimum wage to $15-an-hour on the basis that the empirical evidence shows such policies generally have a negative impact on employment levels for unskilled labor? If this is your opinion, do not utter it on UU Church grounds or within earshot of your county Democratic Party headquarters.

What happened to their search for truth? Some might call this hypocrisy.

Yes, but the religious and political Right are no less rigid, you may retort. Maybe. But is that the benchmark the UUs want for their church or the Democrats want for their party?

And, for those that prefer empirical data, the evidentiary case actually suggests the political Right’s voters have more opinion diversity than voters on the Left. I recommend Lee Drutman’s analysis of the 2016 election which makes this observation — though he draws from it some terribly misguided strategic recommendations for the Democrats, such as: The Democrats do not need working-class whites anymore, so let them go.

A really bad idea, Democrats.

Cradle Unitarians of the World, Unite!

I need to be clear on this point. There is no other church for me outside the UU Church. It is my spiritual home port.

I was born into a UU family, which makes me a cradle Unitarian. My parents joined the UU Church in the late 1950s in direct reaction to the McCarthy-era and the rise of an odious form of religion-sourced bigotry that settled into places like Iowa (my birth state).

Religious bigotry was not invented in the 1950s, nor was its politicization. What was different was the prosperity spreading across the U.S. at this time. My parents were both college-educated; with the exception of my maternal grandmother, their parents didn’t even complete high school.

My parents openly questioned the religious dogmas of their Midwestern upbringing and soon realized many others in their age and social group felt similarly disconnected to their traditional religious roots.

My religious journey to the UU Church was second-hand, but I still share my parents’ reasons for choosing this religious community.

Once I moved away from Iowa for work and school, I didn’t attend UU services very often, but I reconnected when needed, particularly after the end of my first marriage and the death of my father. The UU religious community never failed to be there for me at those moments.

I met my second wife at the Unitarian Church of Montclair (New Jersey) and we have raised our 11-year-old son in the Unitarian Church. There is no other church for us.

So why do I now find Unitarians so frustrating? So intolerant? So close-minded?

I fear it reflects our times. We are all more polarized and less open to new ideas. Like dark matter accelerates the expansion of distant galaxies from our own, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter seem to serve that same function here on earth. We are all moving away from each other faster than ever. Sadly, my own church is part of the problem, not yet the solution.

Unitarians are ‘canaries in the mine’ for American liberals. If liberals are on the verge of collective over-reach, this will first manifest itself, often in extreme form, among Unitarians.

In the mid-70s, when I was entering my teen years, a small but significant number of Unitarians in our congregation embraced (or, literally, flirted with) the idea of open marriages. My parents thankfully resisted the concept. Yet, even as bystanders, their marriage suffered damage.

Open marriage was an awful idea in 1970s and the broken families and psychological carnage this minor movement left in its wake quickly ended its limited popularity. The Unitarians, always willing to question social norms, paid a disproportionate price.

But Unitarians have always loved being the vanguard for any movement that rams a stick up conservative America’s ass.

Fast forward to the present, a similar dynamic exists among Unitarians with respect to identity politics, particularly transgender issues. Empathy for the bias transgender individuals experience on a daily basis is one of the admirable features of the UU Church. There is no religious tradition more supportive to those who outside mainstream norms.

However, for most Americans, the transgender issue is relatively new and it draws out many complex attitudes and deeply-held prejudices. It does not surprise me that a Public Religion Research Institute poll in February 2017 found that 53 percent of Americans oppose bathroom laws that disallow transgender individuals from using the bathroom of their choice.

It also doesn’t surprise me that 72 percent of Americans, according to a Rasmussen Poll in February 2017, don’t believe this is an issue for the federal government to address.

Unitarians have the luxury, even an expectation, to stand against mainstream opinion when it stands on the wrong side of an issue. The Democratic Party, however, does not have that freedom.

UUs would rather shame others for not supporting the bathroom rights of transgender Americans (who are about 0.6 percent of the U.S. population), than understand why 47 percent Americans have a problem with transgender individuals with male genitals going into women’s bathrooms.

Unitarians and Democrats share one unfortunate trait: their intellectual arrogance and intolerance for opinion diversity. They speak of empathy for some, but for those holding opinions outside their “green zone,” it is aggressively withheld.

There is someone else many think lacks empathy, to go along with his probable narcissistic personality disorder. Yes, that’s an provocative comparison to make, but I regret that it fits.

Donald Trump’s personal flaws are well-documented. He is ill-informed. He is dangerously inarticulate. He also appears incapable of understanding and soothing other’s pain — but isn’t identity politics just a group level manifestation of this same pathology? If you are outside an approved group, you are shunned. There is no attempt at finding common ground. That would require listening, constructive dialogue, and…well, empathy.

Dialogue? Empathy? Why bother? Its much easier just to get your people to turn out and vote.

Donald Trump is a symptom of a sickness within society-at-large, not a cause. And it infects all political persuasions. The illness doesn’t discriminate.

There are other Unitarians and Democrats that lament the current emphasis on identity theology and politics. We see its divisiveness and know that it may cause as much harm as it relieves.

We also know from experience that the tight correlations between group identities and attitudes are not permanent and can shift rapidly.

Those of us that doubt the efficacy of identity theology and politics are not all white or uneducated. Some of us may be rich, but most of us are not.

We lurk in the shadows like a secret society and exchange approving winks and nods every now and then. We exist, but we are quiet. We regret the increasingly narrow path we see our religious community going down and fear our preferred political party is not far behind.

But we are not leaving our progressive faith community and still lean towards staying in the Democratic Party, even as both make it increasingly clear that people that think like us are not welcome.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 12, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Steve Bannon is a very smart man — always three moves ahead of his opponents.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, October 7, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Keith Olbermann was only half right when he tweeted, “@realDonaldTrump, the @GOP and @benshapiro have sold their souls to the NRA and the death cult.”

Not just pro-Second Amendment conservatives belong to this cult, we all belong to the American death cult.

The latest mass shooting in Las Vegas merely reinforces our cultural dependency on violence. And this dynamic is not just coming from the Republicans or the political right. We all participate.

When a Planned Parenthood medical director attending a professional conference openly describes abortion as “violence” and “killing,” it shouldn’t require an undercover conservative journalist to spark the outrage, we should all be saddened this barbaric procedure (regardless of its legal status) is considered an expression of freedom and civil justice by many. We had a presidential nominee hesitate in a debate to even rule out abortions up to the very moment of birth…and was cheered for her brave stance. The theater of the macabre, American presidential campaign style.

While the liberals turn a blind eye to the unborn, the conservatives aren’t occupying the moral high ground either. Their support for the unborn is not matched by a similar respect for the living. From their callous refusal to join the civilized world in ensuring affordable, basic health care for all of its citizens to their tepid condemnations of neo-Nazi marches, conservative America has little empathy for the weak and most vulnerable in our society. Live and Let Die could be their anthem. Its Calvinist theology as public policy.

Why do Americans tolerate such high levels of violence?

Few advanced countries tolerate violence and death like Americans do. Our media and entertainment sources soak us in it. Our politicians nurture it. Our companies package it. Our economic elites profit from it. We all grind on it.

“We have the best military in the world,” crows President Trump, stating the obvious. He even told The Washington Post there should be more military parades with F-16s over Brooklyn and Marines “marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.” And, on cue, the Democrats cry “Fascist!” at Trump’s suggestion.

Democrats, have you been to a football game or NASCAR race in this country? We already do this. Every day. What Trump is saying is not new.

With every mass shooting in the U.S., we confirm our own American exceptionalism. We are different than France, or Germany or Canada by choice. We are not just bad asses to our external enemies, we will put our own people in the rifle scope’s cross hairs.

That is who we are and neither the Democrats or Republicans have any real incentive to change this foundational aspect of American society.

But most Americans want better, more effective gun control — so why hasn’t it happened?

Americans, like most people, want to feel safe. But personal safety has a yin yang quality that gun control advocates don’t seem to understand. Yes, the statistics strongly suggest that bringing a gun into a household increases the chance a household member will die from gun violence (including suicides). But, for many, guns make them feel safe. The overwhelming majority of gun owners have good intentions. Whether motivated by security or sport, their gun ownership poses no proximal threat to society-at-large.

Still, a June 2017 national survey by Pew Research Center shows 84 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, support an expansion of background checks to include private firearm sales and purchases at gun shows.

Gun control advocates rightfully suggest the public understands these types of gun control laws are just good common sense.

Unfortunately, public opinion doesn’t matter in the case of gun control. Why? Because few Democratic politicians are voted out of office for supporting gun rights. In fact, Democrats use their support for gun rights as evidence of their independence from rigid liberal orthodoxy.

Furthermore, politicians raise millions amidst America’s self-inflicted carnage, particularly on the political right.

According to Geoff West of OpenSecrets.org, an campaign finance watchdog group, “Gun rights interests have given about $41.9 million to candidates, parties and outside spending groups since 1989, with 89 percent of the funds contributed to candidates and parties going to Republicans. And in the 2012 and 2014 election cycles, they let loose another $48 million (at least) in outside spending.”

In contrast, gun control interests have given only a fraction of the amount in the same time period. “They’ve given $4.2 million since 1989 (and) 96 percent of their contributions to parties and candidates have gone to Democrats,” says West. “In the 2016 cycle, gun control groups accounted for $3 million in outside spending versus $54.9 million from gun rights organizations, including $54.3 million from the NRA.”

Money is not always a direct measure of political influence. It is, however, a good proxy for influence in this case.

There simply is no stomach for gun control in America. If this country was not compelled to change gun laws after the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings of 20 children, there is no event that will bring about meaningful gun control.

The same media outlets that saturate their mawkish news coverage of each mass shooting with cloying appeals to our worst fears, inevitably remind us that we, as a country, can show our unique strength by going on with life as normal.

“Don’t let the S.O.B. change us,” former Las Vegas mayor Oscar Goodman told CNN’s Michael Smerconish, after 58 people were senselessly murdered at a concert in his city.

So, there you go gun control advocates. Change our gun laws? Apparently, doing so means the homicidal maniacs win.

In the privacy of our thoughts, many of us know, short of confiscating all guns from the civilian population (which will never happen), no law, new regulation, or enhanced background check will really reduce the gun violence in America. Mass shootings are a by-product of our tolerance for violence. And that is a cultural problem, not a legal one.

The American death cult needs the violence. It nourishes the American exceptionalism narrative that justifies the U.S. spending more on defense than the next eight countries combined. It rationalizes why we, as a society, spend as much money on guns and ammunition as we do on educational tutoring for our children.

We indulge in violence at all levels of our social lives. Our most popular music is violent. Our favorite national sport is violent. Our movies are violent. Even the everyday language we use to talk to each other is laced with profanity and violence, and usually unnecessary given the context of most conversations. Like a nervous tick, we use profanity as the conversational equivalent of Hamburger Helper.

With each mass shooting we remind ourselves that we can care, we can feel compassion, feelings that for many is increasingly hard to find in their daily lives.

We even feel pride and envy when the heroes are inevitably marched out by the media as symbols of our resolve and resilience against inexplicable treachery. It prompts hero fantasies that we play out in our heads.

We are a warrior culture that values the acquisition, use and taming of violence. A modern-day Sparta minus the awesome head gear. Guns are just one element of this social disorder. Mass shootings are just one symptom.

We know, collectively, without the guns and violence, we are just a more populated version of Canada (minus universal health care, of course).

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, September 25, 2017)

{Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

At this point, an NFL starting quarterback job would be a demotion for former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

Willingly or not, he is now  one of this nation’s most prominent symbols of protest against police brutality towards people of color. And for good reason. He took a visible position while a player in this country’s favorite professional sport — and did so knowing it could (and did) jeopardize his career.

#IMWITHKAP is becoming a mainstay on Twitter’s trending list in part because the core issue being highlighted by Kaepernick — equal treatment under the law by our nation’s police and judicial system — continues to divide this country.

My 11-year-old son, a rabid Washington Redskins football fan, can’t spell Q-U-A-R-T-E-R-B-A-C-K, but he can spell K-A-E-P-E-R-N-I-C-K. His friends are still talking about Kaepernick, over a year removed from last playing a significant down in an NFL game.

On one level, this could be evidence of Kaepernick’s success. Sadly, however, Kaepernick’s original protest seems to be lost in what are now the daily distractions our president and the servile media have chosen to be our next 24-hour obsession.

WHY KAEPERNICK KNELT FOR THE NATIONAL ANTHEM

Kaepernick initially sat down and eventually took a knee instead during the national anthem at NFL games as a protest for the unequal and deadly application of police force in this country towards African-Americans.

We should welcome discussion on this topic whatever the viewpoint. I do not apologize for using both the #BlackLivesMatter and #BlueLivesMatter hashtag when tweeting on this issue.

The police are put in harms way every day and they don’t always have the luxury to make the best decisions under stressful circumstances. And, yes, young men are increasing their chances of being killed by law enforcement when they do not immediately and unequivocally comply with police commands.

All true but do not abrogate our responsibility as a civil society to find ways to minimize these too frequent deadly force confrontations between law enforcement and citizens.

From a statistical perspective, the evidence is murky on whether African-American men are disproportionately killed by law enforcement. The Washington Post’s 2015 investigation into the issue found that, out of the 995 people killed by police in 2015, less than 4 percent (38 people) involved an unarmed black man and a white police officer. In 2016, only 17 unarmed black men were killed by the police, according to The Post. That is 17 too many.

The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund reported that 64 police officers were killed in firearm-related incidents in 2016 compared to 41 killed in 2015.

These numbers may seem small relative to the amount of news coverage dedicated to police shootings and racial justice, but what the statistics don’t capture are the intense emotions generated within the African-American and law enforcement communities every time a police shooting video is released to the public.

Regardless of your view on whether it is appropriate to kneel during the national anthem, we can all agree that our law enforcement officers work within the most weaponized civilian population in the world. According to the Congressional Research Service, there are 113 guns per 100 residents in the U.S. The next most armed country is Serbia with 76 guns per 100 residents.

Americans arm themselves like Peshmerga rebel fighters and then ask their law enforcement officers to go into dangerous situations where suspects can sometimes have more firepower at their disposal than the police on the scene. Solely judging police officers for making bad decisions in those situations is short-sighted and unproductive. However, how we train our law enforcement officers, particularly with respect to rules of engagement and deescalation training, must be addressed.

Something has to change and that, in my view, is what Kaepernick’s simple and visible protest was always about.

That Kaepernick responded to his fellow 49er teammate and former U.S. Army Green Beret Nate Boyer‘s belief that sitting during the anthem was disrespectful to our military members’ sacrifices, and that kneeling would be more appropriate, confirms the former 49ers quarterback’s intentions. Kaepernick was not trying to disrespect the military, the flag, or the country — his purpose was to keep the issue of the unequal application of justice on the nation’s agenda. That’s all.

But that was when Barack Obama was president. This is a new day and a new president.

The issue of racial injustice now requires the Trump name to be repeated 125 times per hour while discussing any hot topic issue. And while we can admire what many NFL owners and players did this past weekend, we should not forget how the league has manipulated the national anthem for its own purposes, particularly in the last 10 years.

The NFL not only cloaks itself in the American flag, but emphasizes its military symbolism to the neglect of other important aspects the flag embodies (like say, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, equality before the law, justice, and all that other legally do-gooder stuff that can’t be easily represented by things as cool as a B2 Stealth Bomber doing a low stadium flyover). Many will rightfully note the NFL’s extraordinary cynicism given that it once required the U.S. Department of Defense to pay for halftime tributes to our nation’s military members.

After Trump’s incendiary Alabama speech, Roger Goodell said some good things about the players kneeling at NFL games. He’s still a shit head toady for the owners, though.

As for the news media and the political Left, they need to stop posing Trump’s remarks against these NFL player protests as potentially infringing on their right of free speech. Trump’s comments were not a threat to the First Amendment.

The NFL is a private organization run by the team owners. They run an entertainment enterprise and have the legal right to set rules on how their employees behave when they represent the NFL. This is not a First Amendment issue, despite what Megyn “I was a lawyer once” Kelly tells us.

NO ROLE IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THAT OF SETTING THE AGENDA

You don’t need to exaggerate Kaepernick’s influence to appreciate how his simple act of protest became something much bigger.

Statistics do not always tell the whole story. The issue of race is one of those cases where the official data we collect fail to reflect the real experience of being a person of color in this country. Numbers are sterile and emotionless. Videos, on the other hand, are visceral.

The latest disturbing video comes Huntington Beach, California where a High School junior was shot dead outside a 7-11 after wrestling with a police officer and grabbing something from the officer’s belt (it appears to have been his walkie-talkie, but it is not clear in the video). This is not suggesting young men should wrestle with police officers with impunity. It is suggesting that some law enforcement officers are not prepared for situations like the one in Huntington Beach.

Police should not be issuing summary death sentences in these circumstances. I don’t understand why the law enforcement community would want its officers making these decisions when legitimate non-lethal forms of defense are available and already in the hands of police officers.

While President Trump spits out needless and impertinent remarks meant only to garner crowd applause, Kaepernick has stayed out of the spotlight. Only his mother’s tweet in response to Trump’s Alabama remarks gives a reminder that her son is still a figure in this protest movement.

Kaepernick’s absence however does not protect him from personal attacks, even among commentators otherwise sympathetic to his cause.

ITS ALWAYS A BULL MARKET ON THE CABLE NEWS NETWORKS FOR EXPERTS TO GIVE STUPID OPINIONS

Perhaps the saddest comments I’ve heard since Trump’s original comments in Alabama came from the elder statesmen of sports broadcasters — NBC’s Bob Costas.

While appearing on one of CNN’s morning shows, Bob Costas gave an awkward and intellectually sloppy dismissal of Kaepernick’s importance in this current controversy. According to Costas, who apparently has the education he considers necessary to judge who should and should not lead racial justice protests, suggested that Kaepernick’s public statements regarding the futility of voting makes him “an imperfect messenger” for this protest movement.

Fair enough, that is Costas’ opinion. And to be truthful, Kaepernick has made some decisions I would not have recommended (i.e., socks showing pigs wearing police uniforms).

But Costas’ citing Kaepernick’s voting cynicism ignores the litany of writers, academics and prominent social activists that have come to similar conclusions.

Costas instead cites Mohammed Ali, Jackie Robinson, Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Jim Brown as better representatives of what a protest leader should sound and look like. Again, I admire each of those four men for varying reasons, but how Costas determines their qualifications for leadership to be superior to Kaepernick’s is baffling. No, its just stupid.

Here is a quote that is not stupid. It was how Kaepernick explained his reason for kneeling during the national anthem in the first place: “This country stands for freedom, liberty, and justice for all. And it’s not happening for all right now.”

Costas’ gripe about Kaepernick’s credentials mirrors similar dismissals made by politicians and media opinion elites about ABC talk show host Jimmy Kimmel’s criticisms of the Graham-Cassidy health care bill. Conservative writer Stephen Moore called Kimmel “uneducated” on the subject. Others mocked his over-simplification of the bill’s effect on Americans. God knows, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News have never put “experts” on their air that over-simplified an issue like health care. I’m so exhausted right now, I’m reduced to offering low-grade sarcasm. Its late in the day and I have little else left in the tank.

Hypocrisy, elitism and occasional idiocy is embedded in our genetic code and I fully expect someday Colin Kaepernick will say something wrong or ill-timed that will require a day of national outrage against him and everything for which he stands.

Until then, he gets my respect for standing against what he perceives to be an injustice. We don’t have to agree with him.

We are a great but imperfect nation and we should all, when we see imperfections, share our concerns with our fellow citizens. That’s not disloyalty or lack of patriotism. It’s our civic duty. And that is why I respect Colin Kaepernick today.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, September 21, 2017)

{ Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

One reason science remains human advancement’s greatest engine is its subjection to empirical evidence for confirmation of its assumptions, models and theories.

Regrettably, since science is conducted and reported by humans — at least for now — it is subject to many analytic biases including measurement error, selection bias, peer pressure, reputation protection, partisan politics, and peer pressure. Scientists are vulnerable. Journalists are vulnerable. Even the Pope and Al Gore aren’t immune.

Moreover, the politicization of science fosters a dysfunctional social dynamic between experts, politicians and stakeholders, each bringing different, sometimes contradictory, motives and interests to the public discourse. Journalists want attention-grabbing headlines, activists need to raise money, scientists are competing for government research grants, and politicians must cater to their constituents.

The resulting stew can bury real science under layers of misinformation, bias, partisanship and deceit.

With the latest minor controversy in the climate science community, we see many of those analytic solecisms and social dynamics in action.

The latest scientific rumpus started with the release of a new climate study, Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C,  by Richard J. Millar, et al., and published in the September 2017 issue of Nature Geoscience.

And what did they find?

In their words: “We show that limiting cumulative post-2015 CO₂ emissions to about 200 gigatonnes of carbon (GtC) would limit post-2015 warming to less than 0.6 °C in 66% of Earth system model members of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) ensemble with no mitigation of other climate drivers, increasing to 240 GtC with ambitious non-CO₂ mitigation.”

Using more layman terms, they write, “assuming CO₂ emissions peak and decline to below current levels by 2030, and continue thereafter on a much steeper decline, [global temperatures will peak at] 1.2–2.0 °C above the mid-nineteenth century [pre-industrial] levels.

No single study is the last word on global warming, and the Millar,et al. study did not find anything contradicting previous warming forecasts, including those reported in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report in 2013. However, the study did report, after 2020, the CMIP5 ensemble-mean human-induced warming is over 0.3  °C warmer than the central estimate for human-induced warming to 2015.

Let the conservative media’s misinterpretations begin. When the study’s results were reported in the UK’s Daily Mail, the headline read:

Now that’s an inconvenient truth: Report shows the world isn’t as warm as the green doom-mongers warned. So will energy bills come down?

The Daily Mail gets a A+ for headline creativity and a D- for headline accuracy. Once the mainstream news outlets took hold of the Millar et al. study, all interpretational control of was lost.

The problem is the Millar et al. results are influenced by the climate model outputs and observational temperature measurements selected in their analyses. Furthermore, the authors did not intend for their paper to be an estimate of current model/observation temperature differences, but was instead focused on global carbon cycle accuracy.

As for the news media, they serve a different master than climate scientists and the rash conclusion (no matter how wrong) that the climate models are exaggerating the extent of global warming was just too “newsworthy” to ignore, at least for the conservative-leaning media. News on the Millar et al. study was nowhere to be found in the liberal-leaning news outlets.

But the ‘models are wrong’ interpretation of Millar et al. is not accurate, even if understandable given the somewhat confusing way Millar et al. summarized their findings.

The website CarbonBrief.org offers an excellent critique of Millar et al. and offers the following, presumably more accurate, conclusion:

The results of model/observation comparisons differ greatly based on the dataset used, the model outputs analysed – model air temperatures or blended model air/ocean temperatures – and the time period examined. While the Millar et al study points out some sizable differences between the HadCRUT record and the model air temperature field, this should not be generalised to conclude that warming projections are unreliable or that warming has been ‘exaggerated by faulty models’. The paper’s real focus is on carbon budgets and carbon cycle accuracy, rather than model/observation comparisons of the warming associated with increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, and their results have little bearing on our understanding of climate sensitivity.

As a statistician (and not a climate scientist), I will defer to Carbon Brief’s expertise on the methodological issues regarding the measurement of global temperatures over time. Climate science has a long history of measurement issues and controversies. But the plotting and interpretation of time-series data is an area where I do have some experience, and in this regard, I am puzzled at to why climate scientists repeatedly shutdown public discussions over the uncertainty inherent to global warming models and forecasts.

WE KNOW HOW FAST THE PLANET IS WARMING, BUT THE QUESTION REMAINS: DO WE KNOW HOW SENSITIVE THIS WARMING IS TO THE POLICY OPTIONS AVAILABLE TO US?

The graph below comes from CarbonBrief’s website and shows the time-series plotting of five selected climate observation methods and the average of the forecast models (black line) between 1970-2020 for global temperatures. The gray shaded area indicates the models’ forecast ranges.

Since 1970, global temperatures are rising about 0.18 °C per decade, while model forecasts average about a 0.2 °C increase per decade.

When the aggregated forecast models have a yearly error range of ±0.4 °C from the mean prediction and a signal-to-noise ratio of around 2.5, the ability to explain short-term temperature anomaly fluctuations is constrained. In other words, it takes multiple years, even decades, to assess trends in global temperatures. To react to a one or two year spike (or decline) in global temperatures is like trying to drive your car but only being able to see one or two feet in front of your car.

Remember the ‘pause’ in global warming often cited by conservatives and global warming skeptics? A simple eyeball scan of the above time-series plot reveals the time period where the ‘pause’ occurred. Global temperatures did not increase between 1998, the year of a major El Niño warming event, and 2014, the year prior to the last strong El Niño event in 2015.

It may look like a pause, but the forecast models’ levels of uncertainty make it difficult to distinguish a genuine warming pause from natural variation. We know this because it is easy to draw a straight line for long time periods within the model forecast ranges (the gray shaded region). Like a lucky streak at a Vegas blackjack table, the so-called ‘pause’ may be random chance.

However, the climate scientists have a similar problem in that even sharp year-to-year increases in average global temperatures also could be a function of natural variation and not an indication of accelerating global warming.

THERE ARE CONSEQUENCES WHEN SCIENCE IS ONLY ALLOWED TO GO IN ONE DIRECTION

Millar et al. may not have proven any systematic bias in global warming models, but the swift reaction by CarbonBrief.org (and other climate scientists) to their paper demonstrates the community’s hyper-sensitivity to any science even slightly optimistic about the rate of global warming or the time we have globally to reduce carbon emissions to zero.

Even more distressing is how climate scientists’ use public forums to police their own over minor professional controversies. In the present example, the lead author of the Millar et al. paper, Dr. Richard Millar, and his co-authors felt so much professional pressure they quickly issued a public statement concerning the misinterpretations of their research paper.

The climate science community’s apparent need to shield the public from even small bouts of climate optimism carries with it significant analytic risks. Yes, Millar et al. paper could have been more precise in their conclusions, but their very public rebuke by their own colleagues sends a chilling message to other climate scientists: Do not challenge the consensus view on global warming and the urgency of our planet’s collective need to reduce carbon emissions to zero within the next 40 years.

I doubt the climate change community would have reacted at all to a similarly flawed research study if its final conclusion were that the earth is warming faster than the current models predict or that the time frame to reduce carbon emissions to zero is shorter than previously asserted.

Its a similar type of peer pressure and shaming the major world religions have been using for centuries.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, September 19, 2017)

{ Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Just when we think we can finally move past Hillary Clinton, she finds a way to pull us back in.

Cue Michael Corleone:

The View is a banal and usually harmless syndicated morning talk show that recently had Hillary Clinton on promoting her book, What Happened.

It was painful to watch. But feel free to give it a try:

I resist calling Hillary Clinton a liar anymore as Donald Trump’s post-truth era has rendered the term punchless. Besides, what she does so well, and that she put it on display in front of The View’s fawning hosts and audience, is crafting plausible fables that serve some larger, typically self-serving, political purpose. She is a fabulist, and while she is a joyless politician, she does enjoy (it shows in her eyes) tearing down her enemies…and she has a bushel and a peck of enemies.

IF THIS WERE RUSSIA, BERNIE SANDERS WOULD BE DEAD ALREADY

Her recent book release and subsequent promotional appearances have a clear mission: Destroy Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ credibility and with it the influence of the  progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

She believes (with little empirical merit) that progressive Democrats, led by Sanders, caused her to lose the 2016 election. Sure, Comey and Russians share some blame in her mind, but Bernie came before both of those proximal causes. Bernie is the distal, and most culpable, cause of her defeat and she is not about to forgive and forget…and she is enlisting every mainstream Democrat (i.e., any Democrat who cares about raising money — which is all of them) to join in her dark quest to crush Bernie Sanders and the progressives.

The apparent lurch leftward by congressional Democrats is a chimera meant to sedate the party’s progressives, not embrace them.

Enter Bernie Sanders’ plan for universal health care in the U.S.

It is extraordinary to see how many mainstream Democratic Senators (Al Franken, Kamala Harris, Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and others) suddenly falling all over themselves praising and endorsing Bernie Sanders’ policy ideas, particularly universal health care.

Democratic leaders can’t say the word “progressive” often enough.

Even Hillary Clinton’s new website — hillaryclinton.com — says “her 2016 campaign for president…laid out a comprehensive progressive vision for America’s future,” and goes on to say she supports “universal, quality, affordable health care for everyone in America.”

She was the true progressive in the 2016 Democratic nomination race, according to her website’s storytelling. Her website even claims: “She worked across the aisle to help pass the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP). Today, it covers 8 million kids. She has never given up on the fight for universal coverage.”

Hillary is now responsible for working across the aisle to get CHIP passed in 1997?

This is the Art of the Fable Clinton has mastered over a long public career. For the young 20-something and 30-something Hillary supporters today, they have no reason to question her CHIP claim. For those of us working in Washington, D.C. at the time and who followed the CHIP legislative saga, the story is far more complicated and not a wholly positive one for Hillary.

The story must begin with the  titanic failure of the Health Care Reform Task Force led by the First Lady in 1993. It was her first national executive role and it didn’t go well.

Hillary blamed the insurance companies and physician lobbies for the failure to pass a national “managed care” system in 1993 (yes, she’s always loved blaming others), but many policy experts also said her disproportionate penchant for secrecy in the policy process contributed to the insurance companies and physicians taking their grievances public.

The 1993 Health Care Reform Task Force turned into a hot mess, and its impossible not to hold the First Lady partially accountable for her lack of executive skills to manage the process.

“The scheme was fatally over-complicated.,” wrote historian James Fallows a few years after the 1993 health care reform debacle. “The proposed legislation, 1,342 pages long, was hard for congressmen to read and impossible for anyone except the plan’s creators, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira C. Magaziner, to understand.”

Enter Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy.

The Massachusetts Senator devoted his career to pushing for a more rational, national health care system, particularly with respect to poor children. Towards the end of his life he would tell people his greatest mistake was not accepting Richard Nixon’s offer to create a universal health insurance system (similar to Obamacare in its focus on mandating and subsidizing the purchase of health insurance, but on a much more comprehensive scale).

However, due to the deep political divide in the country at the time (sound familiar?), Kennedy rejected the Nixon overture. It was not until Bill Clinton’s presidency that the issue was again taken up seriously by Congress.

A fair assessment of Hillary’s role in CHIP must acknowledge that she pushed her husband to keep the CHIP program alive during budget negotiations in the mid-1990s; and though CHIP was dropped out of the 1996 budget during the administration’s negotiations with Trent Lott and the Republicans, it was revived and ultimately passed for the 1997 budget.

Kennedy’s senior health policy adviser, Nick LIttlefield, sums up Hillary’s contribution as such: “She wasn’t a legislator, she didn’t write the law, and she wasn’t the president, so she didn’t make the decisions — but we relied on her, worked with her and she was pivotal in encouraging the White House to do it.”

Basically, she lobbied her own husband.

Credit-grabbing is not uncommon in Washington, D.C. Hillary certainly wasn’t the first politician to take more credit than warranted for a policy success, but she angered the “Lion of the Senate” who felt her arrogance had not been earned.

There is a reason Ted Kennedy did not endorse Hillary’s candidacy in 2008.

As for those Senate Democrats endorsing Bernie’s “Medicare-for-All” plan, can we assume it is genuine? Yes. I believe these Democrats have some affinity with the idea a universal health care system. The Sanders bill proposes an incremental approach to rolling out universal health care, building upon CHIP’s existing administrative structures to cover all U.S. children, and expanding over time to eventually cover all Americans.

Though still lacking explicit funding mechanisms, the Sanders bill has brought genuine optimism to those Democrats that believe a single-payer, universal health care system is the most logical and efficient approach to health care delivery. The Nation details Sanders’ newly-found skill in building support for his bill within the Senate. [For some reason, the media is ignoring Michigan Representative John Conyers who has periodically offered a universal health care plan for over ten years now.]

But don’t believe for minute that this country is on the cusp of supporting and implementing “Medicare-for-All.” The polling data shows growing support, but these survey questions are prone to framing biases. For example, if the potential costs in terms — such as higher taxes or more government control over health care — are included in the question, support for universal health care falls.

[Henry Aaron’s 2010 book, The Problem that Won’t Go Away: Reforming U.S. Health Care Financing, offers some insights this attitude volatility with regards to health care.]

Democratic progressives need to keep their expectations low regarding Sanders’ plan. It will not go anywhere, which is one reason those Senators co-sponsoring it are not putting much at risk (for now). It was very telling that California Senator Kamala Harris’ endorsement of the Sanders plan included the rationale that it “makes sense from a fiscal perspective.” She is smart –which is why she will be the next president — because she has left herself a nice little escape hatch once the funding mechanisms for Sanders’ plan are revealed. When the Republicans start crying about Sanders’ plan not making fiscal sense and putting too much power in the incompetent hands of the government, expect a lot of these Senate co-sponsors to jump ship.

Hillary understands this issue better than anyone in the Democratic Party. That is not hyperbole, nor is it praise. It is her deep knowledge in this policy area that causes her to consider any attempt at a universal health care system in the U.S. to be a fools errand.

Frustrating to congressional Democrats is that, at the moment in history when the Republicans are drowning in political ineptness as they try to repeal Obamacare, and when public support for a more comprehensive health care system is near all-time highs, Hillary is betraying her own party.

Hillary is not a team player. She never was and never will be.

Under the harsh klieg lights of daytime television, Hillary’s book tour is a public shit storm descending on the disloyal progressives in her own party (not to be confused with the loyal progressives in the party –that is, anyone in senior management at Goldman Sachs, Oscar de la Renta, Barbara Streisand, Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards, CNN’s Jake Tapper, etc.). Hillary is dedicating the end of her public life to calling her opponents “misogynists,” one of the most contemptible acts in politics. Its what politicians do when they have nothing left to offer.

Apparently, it is not acceptable to dislike Hillary Clinton on her merits.

As Hillary undoubtedly knows — she is after all married to the greatest political savant of our generation — the time to kill the unholy progressive wing is now, when they are distracted by that shiny object called Donald Trump. In an ironic way, Clinton’s 2016 defeat may well mark the beginning of the end for the neo-progressive movement in the Democratic Party.

Does Hillary care if a real attempt to pass a national health care system is one of the victims of her new TV thriller, Kill Bernie (Vol 2.). Probably not. Like me, she’s too cynical to think it would pass anyway.

My father once said Bill Clinton was the best Republican president of his lifetime. Working-class Americans are still seeing the negative consequences of Bill Clinton-era policies labor and trade policies.

In terms of economics and foreign policy, Hillary is even farther to the right of Bill and one of the byproducts of her campaign to discredit Bernie will be to keep the corporatist Democrats like her firmly in control.

Progressive America, keep wearing the pussy hats while your party betrays you again courtesy of the Clintons, Wall Street’s investment banks, the insurance industry, the defense/foreign policy establishment and the neoconservatives at the Center for a New American Security — who are already drawing up plans for the next regime change war in the Middle East — probably Syria, but don’t rule out Yemen.

REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED ON THE TALK SHOW CIRCUIT

Hillary is known to like lists. She undoubtedly has a list of people she wants to see suffer for her 2016 loss. You see the blood lust in her eyes when she talks about them: Jim Comey, Trey Gowdy, Matt Lauer, Tulsi Gabbard and, of course, Bernie Sanders. It is starting to border on bat shit crazy.

If her sycophants still believe Hillary could run for the presidency in 2020, they need to let go of that dream. She is making herself toxic to half of the Democratic Party. Deliberately so. And she clearly doesn’t care anymore. The Clinton family has scores to settle..and the family’s business is going to get settled.

Cue Michael Corleone again:

[I am not suggesting Hillary is going to have people killed. Such baseless accusations are what we have Ann Coulter and Joy Reid for.]

IS HILLARY GOING TO PULL A RICHARD NIXON MOVE ON US?

In the September issue of The New Yorker, David Remnick reports Hillary’s closest confidants view her mental state as “angry, confused, bitter and sad.”

The same psychological assessment could have been made about Richard Nixon in 1962 after his defeat in the California gubernatorial race — but Nixon was far from done and he did come back to win the presidency six years later. Nixon was also just 49-years-old in 1962 when he famously said that the press wouldn’t “have Nixon to kick around any more.”

Luckily for the press, Nixon was lying.

If The View is available in hell — and why wouldn’t it be? — Nixon must recognize the many characteristics he shares with Hillary.

Well, let us think about that first. An informal checklist comparison might help:

1. Intelligent? Yes, both are intelligent.
2. Trained lawyers? Yep and yep.
3. Charismatic? Uh….put that down as two ‘No’ answers.
4. Secretive boardering on unethical? Absolutely, both get an enthusiastic thumbs up.
5. Criminally corrupt? Nixon gets an A- since, at best, he was only going to get nailed on an obstruction of justice charge; Hillary receives an ‘incomplete.’
6. Paranoid? Sweet Jesus, do you even have to think about this one? Two more yeses.
7. Endured a humiliating marriage to a documented sexual predator, and then served as the sword’s point in character assassination campaigns against the spouse’s accusers, while knowing the accusations were mostly true? Hillary wins on this in Crimson Tide versus Troy State fashion.

Hillary is very different from Richard Nixon. Despite all of his other deep personality flaws, Nixon faithfully loved his wife, Pat, to the very end.

HILLARY WILL NOT RUN AGAIN, BUT WHO IS SHE TAKING DOWN WITH HER? THE DARK LORD HIMSELF, BERNIE SANDERS.

Hillary will not be back in 2020 to give it one more go-around. She will, however, play footsie with the nomination process, at one point acting like she might jump in — given the weak candidate choices offered, in her opinion— and then, once the field has been narrowed to two or three candidates, encourage the media to hold watch over who she may or may not endorse for the nomination.

The media attention will make her feel good.  Not good enough to put down the Chardonnay, but good enough to suppress her now autonomic reflex to grab the nearest heavy, sharp object and throw it at Bill’s head when he walks into a room.

Yes, Hillary tells us in her book, What Happened, when it was clear she would lose to Trump, she laid down next to Bill on a bed where they just ‘breathed together” in silence.

Its a heartwarming story. I may even believe it. I wasn’t there. And, to be fair, Bill is the only person Hillary has not blamed for losing the 2016 election. Never mind that Bill’s boneheaded, politically tone deaf tarmac meeting with U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch ignited a genuine media firestorm about possible collusion between the U.S. Justice Department and the Clinton campaign over a criminal investigation into Hillary’s alleged use of a private email server for transmitting classified information.

Don’t worry, I’m not going down that road. If the FBI says there is nothing to look at here, then there’s nothing to look at it. Move along.

What I can’t ignore are the pernicious myths Hillary promotes today to rationalize her failure to win the 2016 election.

There are so many, but I will concentrate on the biggest myth she offered to the uncritical women hosting The View, because it features Hillary’s base, most self-destructive pathology. She is a professional victim, boarding on clinical paranoia. The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders identifies the major symptoms of this personality disorder as…

• A pervasive, long-standing suspiciousness and generalized mistrust of others,
• Hypersensitive and unable to handle criticism,
• Vigilant scanning of the environment to validate the paranoia,
• An eager observer of other’s actions and motives, and
• Prone to spontaneous violence.

That may describe 50 percent of the people we know (including ourselves), but we see those symptoms on vivid display in Hillary’s appearance on The View. No, she didn’t hit anybody with a lamp, but she has a maniacal need to find more causes than are necessary to explain her 2016 defeat.

The Russians, the Comey letter and Robbie Mook’s awful tactical resource allocation decisions are the biggest non-Hillary factors in her defeat.

(Yes, I understand. If Hillary hadn’t recklessly set up a private, home-based server to handle classified documents there wouldn’t have been a Comey letter. So, assign 50 percent of the Comey letter blame on Hillary, 30 percent on Loretta Lynch for not allowing a genuine investigation, and the rest blame on Comey for losing control of a bad situation.)

A consensus is forming among serious political analysts that the Russian information operation against the 2016 election made it difficult for the Clinton campaign to form a coherent, stable message. It is doubtful definitive evidence will ever exist to quantify the impact of Russian interference, but our gut instincts are probably correct: The Russians interfered and it impacted the race.

As for the Comey letter, its timing was terrible. And while the news on the Obamacare premium hikes may have started Clinton’s late campaign slide, the Comey letter’s appearance in late October exacerbated the decline.

HILLARY IS RIGHT. WE NEED TO KNOW EXACTLY WHAT THE RUSSIANS DID IN 2016. BUT IS GOING ON “THE VIEW ” TO STAB SANDERS IN THE BACK THE WAY TO DO THAT?

Clinton’s friendly-fire approach to party building isn’t going to bring long-term electoral success to the Democrats. She is lashing out at everyone she perceives as either being an enemy or an insufficiently loyal votary. As we are finding out, its a  long list and likely to get longer.

(How did Bill Clinton not make that list? Give it time my friend, give it time.)

This type of over-identification of causal factors is to historical analysis what Dairy Queen’s Blizzard Cake® is to childhood nutrition.

But Hillary Clinton can speak for herself. So here is what she said on The View about Bernie Sanders that launched me out of my shoes:  “I know what it is like to lose because I lost in 2008 to President Obama. As soon as I lost I turned around and I endorsed him, I worked hard for him.”

What the hell was she talking about?

I will be kind and assume she just mis-remembered what happened in 2008. Let me refresh our collective memories on that race.

Hillary’s official suspension of her 2008 campaign occurred on June 7, 2008. The last Democratic primaries were on June 3rd in Montana and South Dakota. Furthermore, any outside chance Hillary had at winning the nomination ended on May 6th with her defeat to Obama in the North Carolina primary.

Why didn’t she concede then? Why did she continue to pressure Democratic super-delegates to rescind their pledges to Obama using the racially charged argument that Obama would not win in the general election?

Hillary targeted white voters with so many dog-whistle attacks on Obama that even former Klansman-turned-U.S.-Senator Robert Byrd (WV) had to step in and tell Hillary to cool her jets.

Hillary doesn’t stop with just attacking Bernie Sanders, who she likes to remind us is “not even a Democrat.” [Which does beg the response, “Forty-three percent of Democratic primary voters preferred a ‘non-Democrat’ to you.” That is not a ringing endorsement of your candidacy. A can of tuna might have garnered 10 percent of 2016 Democratic primary voters.]

But, no, Hillary doesn’t just attack Bernie, she attacks Bernie’s supporters, who she claims disproportionately supported Trump over her in the general election.

The truth? About 1-in-10 Bernie Sanders supporters voted for Trump and another 10 percent voted for Jill Stein or Gary Johnson. Enough in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania to swing the election back to Clinton.

By historical standards, the 2016 Democratic defections to the GOP dark side (or to third parties) were not unusual.

In 2000, 11 percent of Democrats voted for George W. Bush in the general election. A similar percentage of Democrats went to George W. Bush in the 2004 general election.

In fact, the historical outlier case might be Hillary Clinton’s primary supporters in 2008. One study determined that around 25 percent of Clinton primary voters ended up voting for Sen. John McCain in the general election.

Of course, all of this gets muddled due to states with open primaries where ‘independents’ and Republicans can vote in Democratic primaries. Those Democratic primary voters, of course, are much more likely to vote Republican in the general election.

But that is the problem with Hillary’s complaint towards Sanders supporters. That is the game played every four years. As Sanders said in reply to Hillary’s attack, ‘That is what happens in politics.”

Hillary Clinton knows this. If there is one political couple that obsesses about poll numbers and voting patterns, it is the Clintons. At some point, she must have been told a large percentage of her supporters in 2008 bailed on Obama.

It is just numbing how easy it is for Hillary Clinton to tell nuanced fabrications and sometimes, dare I say it, flat out lies. Journalist William Safire famously labeled Hillary a ‘congenital liar.’ He was being kind.

For Clinton to now launch the disloyalty indictment against Sanders and his supporters leaves many us exhausted.

WHEN WILL CLINTON AND THE DEMOCRATS STOP ACTING LIKE THE DONNER PARTY?

Does Hillary want to see the Democrats divided going into 2018 and 2020? If she does, then she needs to keep doing what she is doing.

Even as I agree that intramural disagreements within the Democratic Party should never be shut down out of  party “loyalty” — that would be particularly hypocritical on the part of a Bernie supporter — there is a difference between an intra-party dispute and what Clinton is doing.

Clinton continues to eat her own young. She is slashing through the Democratic Party like Anakin Skywalker did with the Jedi younglings in Revenge of the Sith.

Sorry, gotta take one more movie break (Enjoy!):

“Master Clinton, there are too many Republicans in Congress. What are we going to do?”

Hillary is not engaging in a constructive critique of the current Democratic Party (though she does occasionally offer some valid insights on the fiscal realities constraining Bernie’s Cheesecake Factory menu of policy ideas). Instead, she is telling Bernie’s supporters that they are an invasive species that need to be eradicated from the Democratic body.

And, frankly, many of Bernie’s supporters would reverse the argument and say the neo-liberal corporatists like Clinton are the invasive species.

This argument is unwinnable. Neither side holds the high ground. The progressive far left is trying to convince us that the Democrats are unified in their opinions and attitudes and its only the “process” (such as Democratic National Committee election rigging) that divides the party.

That is weaponized bullshit straight from the same East and West Coast elites that happily looked away when Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns became too beholden to banking, insurance, and high tech corporatist interests.

Today’s Democratic Party is deeply divided (though not as divided as the Republicans!), but now is not the time for a party purge. This isn’t Stalin’s Russia.

The Democrats’ current configuration file is improperly set up to ensure consistent electoral success going forward. That problem list is almost as long as Hillary’s personal hit list. The problems include:

• Not attracting enough working-class Americans (of any ethnic/racial background)
• Identity and rights issues used as tools for exclusion, not inclusion
• The Democratic brand of government-centered solutions and civil rights activism is not built for success in the 21st-century
• Democratic messaging and themes are confrontational, not aspirational
• Support base too geographically clustered
• Current party leaders need to step aside and allow in some new blood
• Fail to embrace opinion diversity
• Stop obsessing about Trump and the Russians and focus on Americans

I could go on….

But I need to get back to the Hillary Clinton’s 2017 Slaughterhouse Tour. Its just too much fun to watch. Its like Game of Thrones without the boring dialogue scenes. She’s Darth Vader in the hallway scene at the end of Rogue One.

I hope this Hillary Clinton never goes away…

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.

By Kent R. Kroeger (Source:  NuQum.com, September 13, 2017)

{ Feel free to send any comments about this essay to: kkroeger@nuqum.com or kentkroeger3@gmail.com}

Last I checked my inbox and cell phone voice mail, California Senator Kamala Harris is not asking for my advice on how she can best become the next President of the United States.

I’m sure she’s busy right now lining up donors and manning the anti-Trump barricades in the U.S. Senate. On that assumption, I unilaterally offer some advice should she run for president in 2020.

[Note: This advice is relevant to any Democratic presidential nominee in 2020 as well.]

Presently, we are being treated to a nationwide Hillary Clinton pity party as she softens up the public for the release of her book, “What Happened.”

Predictably, Twitter and Facebook are ablaze with mean-spirited memes and vicious character attacks over Hillary’s book and her take on the 2016 presidential election.

We should all understand by now, she blames former FBI Director Jim Comey for her defeat. I would too if I were her — but I’m not, and in past essays I’ve even made the counter-argument that the Obamacare premium hikes started her electoral decline and the Comey letter simply reinforced her rapidly softening support heading into the final weeks of the 2016 campaign.

Regardless, I am willing concede Hillary has a strong argument on the Comey letter’s impact.

So my first point of advice to Senator Harris is this…

DON’T GO INTO THE DEFENSE OF HILLARY CLINTON BUSINESS

Let Hillary fight her own battle with history. As Senator Harris works to become the Democrats’ 2020 nominee, there is nothing to gain from overly effusive and public statements of confederation with the former Secretary of State.

Polite acknowledgement of Hillary’s significance to the Democratic Party is fine, but much more than that will distract attention from Harris’ own substantive accomplishments. Her demonstration of fealty to feminist ideals does not require excessive obeisance to Hillary, who has a checkered history with respect to defending women victimized by sexual assault. Senator Harris does not have that baggage and there is no reason to take on Hillary’s.

Which leads to my second point of advice…

DO NOT RELY TOO HEAVILY ON HILLARY’S & OBAMA’S BIG MONEY DONOR LIST

To the point of almost being a physical law, there has long been an assumption among political pundits and consultants that the candidate that raises the most money (and endorsements), especially early in a nomination race, is most likely to win. The evidence for the power money is strong but more complex than portrayed in the mainstream media. A few recent research efforts on this question can be found: here, here and here.

Money does matter, though in 2016 we saw strong evidence that “free media” (the media promotes the term “earned media” because it makes them feel more empowered) can help overcome monetary disadvantages. Hillary outspent Trump two-to-one, even when considering Russia’s Facebook advertisement expenditures in support of the Trump candidacy. Trump’s greatest advantage in 2016 was his ability to get free coverage on MSNBC and CNN every time he had a big rally. He was a novelty that was good for ratings.

Hillary out-raised Bernie Sanders by $570 million in the 2016 nomination race ($807 million versus $238 million, respectively), but Sanders still won 43 percent of the popular vote in the primaries. I am not advocating for Senator Harris to raise less money than her fellow nominee candidates, she just doesn’t need the crushing fundraising advantage that Clinton (and Obama) acquired in their successful nomination races.

A Democratic presidential nominee can win the nomination without excessive reliance on money from banking, health care, insurance, pharmaceutical, and Hollywood executives. They will be there for the nominee in the general election.

In the nomination phase the task is to demonstrate a candidate’s deep and substantive connection to average voters (as well as party activists, of course). Hillary was never credible in that effort to connect with average people because she….I don’t think she likes average people. Seriously, it was a vibe I heard from more than a few Iowa Democrats. Hillary never connected with Iowans, who are insecure, quick to judge others and easily insulted.

Having attended a few Hillary rallies while living in Iowa, Hillary was noticeably inaccessible to the crowds. At the last Clinton rally I attended, she shook hands only with the very front row of a small group of rally attendees — mostly Iowa Democratic Party leaders).

She had an anti-charisma charisma, perhaps— but even there she was outflanked by Sanders.

And where has Hillary been since the 2016 campaign? Unless you own your own worldwide fashion label or are willing to stand in line for her latest book, the chances that you will ever meet Hillary Clinton are slim to none.

Kamala Harris is already being labelled the Democrat’s establishment’s candidate (Holding fundraisers in the Hamptons will do that). That is an image fraught with problems and destined to further divide an already divided party.

A transcendent Democratic candidate, like Barack Obama, did not embrace the neo-liberal, establishment label (though it fit him) and Kamala Harris, likewise, cannot afford to do so.

Spending too much visible time with big donors is something she can control and must in order to start shedding the establishment label. Besides, spending significant face time with George Clooney or Barbara Streisand has no proven value to a political candidate outside of the money they raise — certainly not at the presidential level. In my opinion, Kamala should play it safe and avoid the Hollywood crowd altogether.

The third piece of advice is this…

PROMOTE AREAS WHERE YOU HAVE SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES FROM THE LIBERAL WING OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

I could fill up a hundred feet of blog space with articles and essays arguing that the Democratic Party needs to move to the left. It is a careless and even dishonest argument predicated almost entirely on survey-based opinion data that are more appropriate for descriptive and retrospective analyses than for prediction.

The data point Harris needs to internalize is the value and status of the Democratic brand within the U.S. electorate. According to a recent YouGov.com poll, 48 percent of registered voters have an unfavorable view of congressional Democrats compared to 36 percent with a favorable view. That is good news only in relationship to congressional Republicans who get a favorable review from only 22 percent of registered voters. No surprise: The ongoing health care debacle is  weighing negatively on the Republicans. If the Republicans fail on tax reform as well, that pretty much hard codes the outcome for the 2018 midterm elections in the Democrats’ favor.

As for 2020, one voter group Harris needs are the 16 percent of registered voters that are “unsure” about the Democrats. And drilling down even farther, I would target the 30 percent of self-described “moderates” who are “unsure” about the Democrats. While they are not a large percentage of the electorate in the aggregate — only around 10 percent in the YouGov.com poll — they are still large enough to change an election outcome in key battleground states. Lets put it this way — if I’m the Russians in 2020, my money is best spent targeting those folks’ Facebook pages with fake news stories.

The idea of standing against your own party’s ideological wing is hardly new. Bill Clinton mastered the art in 1992, highlighted by a still remarkably relevant argument he had with American writer Sister Souljah concerning violence within the African-American community.

Not to open a old wound, but the following exchange in 1992 between Sister Souljah and a Washington Post reporter regarding the 1992 Los Angeles riots sparked the controversy.

WaPo Reporter: “Even the people themselves who were perpetrating that violence, did they think that was wise? Was that a wise reasoned action?”

Souljah: “Yeah, it was wise. I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?”

Yeah, that’s gonna get a rise out of a few opportunistic politicians. Enter Bill Clinton.

More seriously, Kamala Harris (or any Democratic nominee) will need to demonstrate independence from the party’s ideologues. It is true for the Republicans as well, but I don’t think it is as important for them.

For Democrats, however, the near constant din from political pundit about how out-of-touch Democrats are with the American voter (whether true or not) can overwhelm an otherwise strong Democratic presidential candidate

I recommend the book, “What it Takes: The Way to the White House,” by Richard Ben Cramer, about the 1988 presidential campaign between Michael Dukakis and George H. W. Bush. The book digs deep into the the success of Bush’s chief campaign strategist, Lee Atwater, in soaking Dukakis with the image of being “too liberal” and “out-of-touch.”

In the 1992 presidential election, employing many of the same Atwater techniques, Bill Clinton returned the favor on the Republicans. [I am a fierce critic of both Clintons, but if God told me I can manage one candidate from American political history to run for president, I pick Bill Clinton. No hesitation. Over Obama. Over JFK. Over FDR. Over Reagan.]

So, in my view, Harris needs to give voters the opportunity to say, “Kamala Harris is no liberal — she believes [insert non-liberal viewpoint on some key issue].”

Of course any pivot to the center has to be genuine (voters are good at smelling fakes) and even then it won’t necessarily change many votes. And it probably won’t bring many new people to the polls. But the effort helps set the table for bigger, more electorally critical arguments…and that represents my fourth piece of advice…

HAVE AT LEAST ONE BIG IDEA TO OFFER THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

Hillary Clinton had no big ideas in 2016.  She still doesn’t. Clinton’s website redux — hillaryclinton.com — says it provides a “comprehensive progressive vision” for America’s challenges, but its endless laundry list of policy proposals is straight off of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign website.

That many figures from the Democrat’s establishment (Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Cory Booker, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand) have embraced key elements of Sanders’ progressive agenda — most notably, universal health care — should send chills down every progressive Democrats’ spine.  What the establishment couldn’t kill overtly from from the outside, they may be trying to kill covertly from within.

A tendency towards unnecessary equivocation has already become one of the narratives describing Harris’ political career. While I believe her tenure as California’s AG more than overcomes that argument, as it is impossible to be an active California AG — as Harris was — without taking substantive policy positions. Still, Harris’ critics will rightfully challenge her for not going far enough in holding mortgage banks accountable for the housing crisis, just as an example.

Is Harris cautious? Most good politicians are. But is she Hillary Clinton-level cautious? That is the question Harris needs to answer for the American people and one way to start is by offering big ideas early in her presidential campaign.

Should it be universal health care?

Hillary Clinton’s experience on the issue serves as Harris’ Cassandra. Recall that Clinton’s first significant executive role in national political life was to lead the 1993 Task Force on National Health Care Reform. I will skip to the conclusion: The Task Force effort blew up in her face. Was she to blame? Probably some. Excessive secrecy didn’t help. But this country didn’t hate Hillary Clinton in 1993. We were all hopeful that this holy grail issue for progressive post-FDR Democrats, a national universal health care system, was finally going to happen.

For me, the Task Force’s failure represents the biggest legislative disappointment in my lifetime. That’s not hyperbole. There is a reason Obama pushed so hard on his own administration’s Affordable Care Act. It was always going to be the keystone achievement of his administration (along with getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan).

As Bernie Sanders is offering his universal health care bill to the U.S. Senate for a universal health care plan. As mentioned, along with Harris, Senators Franken, Gillibrand, Booker, and Elizabeth Warren are co-sponsoring the bill. I expect all five (plus Bernie Sanders) to contend for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2020 and their credibility with the party’s progressive (liberal) wing rides largely on their position with respect to universal health care.

Needless to say, Bernie already has the street cred on this issue.

My own research using 2016 American National Election Study data shows that health care is one three broad issues, along with climate change and the activist role of government in addressing economic inequalities, where the Left currently holds a strategic advantage over the Right (see chart below).

[How to read chart below: The more shading — blue for the Left and red for the Right — indicates higher degrees of disagreement between ideological activists and the average American voter. For example, on immigration, the activist Left is outside mainstream opinion while the activist Right is closer to that norm. Both ideological groups are relatively close to mainstream policy stances related to terrorism and internal (domestic) security.]

When Democrats talk about health care, economic inequality and investment, and climate change, most Americans side with the political Left. That doesn’t mean most Americans are Leftists or that they will agree with the Left on these issues in the future. But, as of today, those issues are strategic opportunities for the Democrats.

Health care is one big issue to consider, but it may not be the issue right for Kamala Harris. Perhaps climate change? Or tax middle-class tax cuts coupled with tax increases on the wealthy? That is a decision for the Kamala Harris campaign to hash out internally.

My advice is to Kamala Harris is to avoid Hillary Clinton’s most glaring mistake in 2016. She didn’t have ANY big ideas and voters were forced to decide whether they distrusted Donald Trump more than they distrusted Clinton. It was an ugly election that the Democrats should not try to repeat.

My final suggestion for Senator Harris is perhaps most difficult to follow…

EMBRACE COMPETITION WITHIN YOUR OWN PARTY FOR THE 2020 NOMINATION

This advice rubs against every  living cell in a politician’s body. There is nothing a politician loves more than going unchallenged in an election. Typically, only the most entrenched incumbents get that privilege.

Democrats need to allow this prediction to start settling in now: The 2020 Democratic nomination race will be an intramural shit storm filled with baseless accusations, misrepresentations, borderline slander, all mixed in with a few tactical dog whistle attacks to activate and divide the party’s many identity group warriors.

As Hyman Roth might say, “That’s the business we’ve chosen.”

Senator Harris needs to do what few politicians do well — including Bill Clinton. Seek and encourage competition. The stronger Harris’ competitors in the 2020 nomination race, the more likely she wins in the general election.

Barack Obama would not have won as decisively in 2008 if Hillary Clinton hadn’t run for the nomination. Joe Biden is tough, but he’s not Hillary Clinton tough. John Edwards brought his deep ties to organized labor to the discussion. Bill Richardson had foreign policy credentials. Together, they all made Barack Obama, a genuinely inexperienced politician, a far better candidate in the fall campaign.

Crushing your primary opponents may seem like the best approach to winning a party’s nomination, but it is potentially the midwife to the harmful narrative of the party nominee being the predetermined handiwork of party elites.

Consider the last three Democrats to win the presidency: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. All were arguably “outsider” candidates, even if they had a few establishment benefactors along their path.

Harris will need to have a credible answer to this question if she is the nominee: Is she the establishment candidate who won only because the party elders rigged the nomination in her favor (if even just subtlety)?

Harris cannot afford to be viewed as simply Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama 2.0. If she wins in 2020 (against, I still assume, Donald Trump), it will be historic on a level perhaps surpassing even Barack Obama’s 2008 win.

To get to that moment, Harris needs to win the nomination in a big, crowded and substantively contentious family brawl that ends with a party nominee ready to take on the dirtiest fighter in American political history.

That’s my advice to Senator Harris.  Good luck.

About the author:  Kent Kroeger is a writer and statistical consultant with over 30 -years experience measuring and analyzing public opinion for public and private sector clients. He also spent ten years working for the U.S. Department of Defense’s Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness and the Defense Intelligence Agency. He holds a B.S. degree in Journalism/Political Science from The University of Iowa, and an M.A. in Quantitative Methods from Columbia University (New York, NY).  He lives in Ewing, New Jersey with his wife and son.