Understanding the stability of the polls

One may think that the sensational events of the past week, such as the release of the Donald Trump recording and his ferocious performance in the last debate, would cause major swings in public opinion in support between the two candidates. But in the past, polls seem to shift by only small amounts even with major news breaking and it is not clear that those movements were due to any actual events like debates or are due to random drifts. The latest polls do seem to show more significant shifts with a large drop in support for Trump but if the past is any indication, we may see a regression to the mean and the gap with Hillary Clinton closing again.
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Some random thoughts on the current political situation

The locker rooms of America strike back

The repeated defense by Donald Trump and his surrogates that the recording of his disgusting comments about women was simply ‘locker room talk’ has caused offense to athletes who spend a lot of time in actual locker rooms, and they have reacted angrily to what they see as a blanket slur on all of them, as can be seen here and here. Maybe Trump has his own locker room where he only hangs out with Rudy Giuliani, Roger Ailes, and Newt Gingrich. I can well believe that those four talk like that in private because they all seem to be what we used to call ‘dirty old men’ and ‘lechers’, people who become completely unhinged in the presence of women.
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Reflections on the second presidential debate: Trump swings and misses

Donald Trump behaved in the second debate just like I expected him to, as someone who knows that he is losing and needs to do something drastic to halt the slide. He indulged in his usual hyperbole because he is a man who speaks only in superlatives and the subtlety of a comparative seems to be lost on him. He said that the government is totally incompetent in every conceivable way and that they make terrible deals and don’t know how to wage wars. He attacked Obamacare and said the Iran deal was the worst in the history of deal making. The list of US failures went on and on. You wondered if anyone in the government was even able to tie their shoelaces.
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How did the Trump recording surface?

I have been curious as to the origins of the recording of Donald Trump that has caused such a sensation, how something made in 2005 lay dormant until Friday. Here is some background to how the recording was made. It arose in the context that Trump had been working for NBC on his own show The Apprentice from 2004 until he decided to run for president last year, and in 2005 had been invited to appear as a guest on another of their programs Access Hollywood.
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Read this and weep

The New York Times today has a long article on the torturing of prisoners by the US at Guantanamo, CIA black sites, and at other facilities around the world where the US government has control. The descriptions and the long-lasting physical and psychological effects on the victims, many of them subsequently released because they were innocent, makes for truly depressing reading as you wonder how people could treat other human beings this way.
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What will Trump do tonight?

The debate tonight presents Donald Trump with a difficult problem, made much harder by the recent revelations of the way he treats women. Usually the second presidential debate is a less anticipated event with fewer viewers than the first because people have a sense that they no know the candidates. But the Trump revelations have fueled great anticipation about how he will react and we may see a huge audience, even larger than the record breaking first.
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Hillary Clinton’s speeches to Wall Street

While the news about Donald Trump’s assaults of women were bad enough, what makes it worse (for Trump) is that the release by WikiLeaks of what are allegedly excerpts of speeches by Hillary Clinton to big Wall Street firms also emerged yesterday, but that news was buried by his own scandal, preventing his campaign from taking advantage of them. The excerpts, if true, confirm the view that she was paid huge fees not because she gave them valuable advice but for demonstrating her eagerness for them to see her as their friend, to praise the wealthy banking industry, suggesting that they may be the best at regulating themselves (!), holding some views on trade and immigration that are contrary to those she has adopted during her campaign, and even supporting people who have advocated for cutting Social Security. She also said that she has ‘private’ and public’ positions on issues, the kind of duplicity of politicians that should come as no surprise to anyone.
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Film review: Dark Horse (2016)

This documentary is delightful even if you, like me, are not a horse enthusiast or know anything about horse racing. It tells the story of a group of people in a small Welsh coal mining town. The mines, like so many others, had closed and the town struggled economically. A woman who had a job cleaning a department store and also worked as a part-time barmaid had the bizarre idea of starting a small syndicate to buy a race horse and she managed to find 30 people willing to contribute £10 per week. With part of the money that was raised they bought a mare that turned out to be a rotten competitor. They bred that mare with a thoroughbred and named the foal Dream Alliance.
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Just when you thought Trump couldn’t sink any lower …

The recording of Donald Trump’s comments about women has created a firestorm. First, let’s listen to the recording itself that was caught on a ‘hot mic’, when the people being recorded did not know that their microphones were on, because it has to be heard to be believed. This 2005 recording was obtained by Washington Post reporter David Fahrenthold.
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