I wonder what everyone thinks about the release of Trump's tax returns by the New York Times.

I wonder if anyone has noticed, but on weekends, there are often fewer polls. This usually drives me crazy.

Well, if we want a break from making fun of and bashing Trump, we can make fun of and bash Gary Johnson! And there may be almost as much material!





I used to give him a good rating in my old cosmic rating system, but in my updated research, his rating went way down. Jill Stein's is high instead at 14-4. So I don't know if Gary is going to continue doing so well! He scores only 12-10. And he seems to be living up to a score that is lower than both Trump and Hillary and without the advantage of a major party nomination.

And being the Green Party nominee and never having held elective office is a long way for a candidate to come. But Bernie Sanders had a long way to come, and went somewhere with his 14-5 score. So Jill? Who knows!

But Johnson? He's not much of a choice, it seems, for those who like neither major candidate.

I just saw something about Henry Rollins (1961 cohort). It reminded me that in just a bit more than 90 days, the oldest Xers will hit 56.

I'm only a few steps behind that. Mid next year I will hit 54. The last year of the vaunted "35 - 54" age bracket. The following year, marketers will view me increasingly as a curmudgeonly tightwad who is adverse to accepting new music, new trends, etc. Of course, barring some unforeseen life changer, that will not actually happen to me when I hit 55 in 2018. Being in a state of permanent arrested development I am a living example of 30 being the new 18, and 50 being the new 30. These days, the Full Retirement Age here in the US is, I believe, 67 years old for anyone born after 1960. 67 is the new 45. Therefore, sorry, most will not be able to retire at FRA!

I want to address this point independent of any ongoing controversy surrounding Trump's business activities, simply because this perspective is so prevalent and so fallacious that it's bound to come up again in some future election further down the line.

The Presidents with the most private sector experience in the past century were Herbert Hoover (who owned a mining engineering firm), Jimmy Carter (whose peanut farm was actually a major operation, not the family farm he played it off as), and George W. Bush (Arbusto and the Texas Rangers). America's most popular Presidents - the Roosevelts, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan - had no experience in business.

Oh, yeah, Warren Harding owned a newspaper.

As a corollary to this, there's absolutely nothing wrong with being a "career politician", except that most "career politicians" are actually career lawyers. This is an especially annoying populist canard because it implies that businesspeople are 'outsiders' who can achieve 'real world results', when the practical results of putting businesspeople into office (at least at the executive level) have all been disastrous.

There are several very good historical examples of the tendency to try to 'capitalize' government failing miserably, on a bipartisan basis.

For example, Jimmy Carter's Civil Service Reform Act tried to emulate the efficiency of business by making civil servants directly subordinate to elected politicians, on the theory that business succeeds because it has greater accountability over its employees than government does.


The practical effect, however, was to politicize what had been a professional, nonpartisan core of workers, and make them dependent on the same kind of patronage that went out with Jackson's spoils system. Long-time professional civil servants were replaced with political adjuncts, not for any evil motives but on the purely egalitarian theory that efficiency and accountability would improve service. Just like in the business world.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=30438

Quote:I have also directed members of my Administration to develop, as part of Civil Service reform, a Labor-Management Relations legislative proposal by working with the appropriate Congressional Committees, Federal employees and their representatives. The goal of this legislation will be to make Executive Branch labor relations more comparable to those of private business, while recognizing the special requirements of the Federal government and the paramount public interest in the effective conduct of the public's business. This will facilitate Civil Service reform of the managerial and supervisory elements of the Executive Branch, free of union involvement, and, at the same time, improve the collective bargaining process as an integral part of the personnel system for Federal workers.

Quote:In 1946, rather than returning to academia, McNamara became part of an elite team from Statistical Control that joined Ford. They were nicknamed the Whiz Kids. The firm’s young president, Henry Ford II, charged them with overhauling the once-proud company, now in disarray and losing money. McNamara’s star rose as he brought the discipline of rational analysis to Ford’s sprawling bureaucracy, emphasizing facts and figures. Austere and formal, with rimless glasses and neatly slicked-back hair, McNamara projected a no-nonsense air. The financial turnaround at Ford was remarkable, yet he did not focus only on shareholder returns. He went about his work with an acute sense of social responsibility. Unlike most automobile executives, he was an early champion of passenger safety. He later recalled, “The prevailing idea in the auto industry was that if you talked about safety, you’d scare the public.” Under McNamara’s leadership, Ford’s 1956 models featured padded instrument panels and safer steering wheels, and were the first passenger cars with seat belts. Rivals scoffed: “McNamara sells safety, Chevrolet sells cars.” Yet he persisted, guided by his sense of responsibility to the public.

Quote:


...





At the Pentagon, McNamara applied his usual rigorous approach to the management of the vast military establishment. Until then, each branch of the service had had its own budget and pushed its preferred weapons systems. The result was massive inefficiency and questionable effectiveness. McNamara set out to optimize the nation’s arsenal, to provide the best military capability in the most efficient manner, subordinating the parochial interests of the individual services. He also overhauled U.S. military strategy, replacing the potentially catastrophic doctrine of massive retaliation with a doctrine of flexible response, which insisted on proportionality and sought to avert escalation. Congress was highly impressed. Republican Barry Goldwater called McNamara “one of the best secretaries ever, an IBM machine with legs.”



...



Focused to a Fault

Whether at Ford or in the military, in business or pursuing humanitarian objectives, McNamara’s guiding logic remained the same: What are the goals? What constraints do we face, whether in manpower or material resources? What’s the most efficient way to allocate resources to achieve our objectives? In filmmaker Errol Morris’s Academy Award–winning documentary The Fog of War,McNamara summarized his approach with two principles: “Maximize efficiency” and “Get the data.”



Yet McNamara’s great strength had a dark side, which was exposed when the American involvement in Vietnam escalated. The single-minded emphasis on rational analysis based on quantifiable data led to grave errors. The problem was, data that were hard to quantify tended to be overlooked, and there was no way to measure intangibles like motivation, hope, resentment, or courage. Much later, McNamara understood the error: “Uncertain how to evaluate results in a war without battle lines, the military tried to gauge its progress with quantitative measurements,” he wrote in his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect.“We failed then—as we have since—to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrines in confronting highly unconventional, highly motivated people’s movements.”


Equally serious was a failure to insist that data be impartial. Much of the data about Vietnam were flawed from the start. This was no factory floor of an automobile plant, where inventory was housed under a single roof and could be counted with precision. The Pentagon depended on sources whose information could not be verified and was in fact biased. Many officers in the South Vietnamese army reported what they thought the Americans wanted to hear, and the Americans in turn engaged in wishful thinking, providing analyses that were overly optimistic. At first, being likened to a computer was meant as a compliment; later, it became a criticism. In the wake of Vietnam, McNamara was derided for his coldness and scorned as one of the so-called best and brightest who had led the country into a quagmire through arrogance.

I don't know why, but a recent news report is making me laugh. Howard Dean has suggested that Trump is on cocaine. I would never have expected such a rumor.

A really cool audio visual creation.

Many juxtaposed vignettes mainly showing SoCal (lots of movie clips mixed in), some from that time frame, and some from much earlier, set to an hour plus of the "Future Rock" program on KROQ - 08-MAR-1981. If you were a late teen who was there at the time, it might just bring a tear to your eye:

I Found this article that should be interesting. Here is the URL: http://www.politicususa.com/2016/09/23/c...polls.html

Here is the article:

Quote:NBC’s Chuck Todd broke down the tightening state polls and offered a very simple explanation for why Democrats don’t need to be worried about what looks like an election that is getting closer.

Todd said, “You look at the state polls are showing one thing, which is a closing race. Trump getting closer. The national polls have all shown something else. Looks like Clinton is opening up. Take a look at that dates these were conducted. All of the national polls have been conducted basically since last Friday. The birther announcement by him. Many of the state polls, including Quinnipiac, a lot of it conducted before, of course, that week was a very bad week for her, some in the post weekend, but I would say I would like to see what the numbers look like in a week to see an indicator, but I think the state polls are the lagging indicator right now.”

Chuck Todd takes a ton of criticism, sometimes justified, but the man can break apart polling data like few others on cable news.

Todd’s exactly right. Democrats are freaking out over these state polls, in part because the media reports the horserace headline without providing the context. The state polls are running about a week behind the national polls. What the state polls are measuring is the tightening that occurred during Clinton’s health scare bad week.

Immediately after Clinton returned to the campaign trail, she bounced back into the lead nationally, and that is where she has stayed.
A poll measures a snapshot in time, and it is important to be aware of what is going on at the time the poll is taken.

It is possible that if Hillary Clinton has a good debate performance on Monday, the state polls will show her numbers improving. Much of this improvement will be credited to the debate by some in the press, but that improvement will actually be a snapshot of Trump’s fall over the birther mess and Clinton’s return to the campaign trail.

The interesting state polls will come a week after the debate. Those polls should show how much of an impact the debate had on voters. A good debate for Clinton could result in two weeks of good poll numbers.

Democrats should relax about the polls, and Democrats really need to cool it with the gloom and doom fundraising emails, because not all polls are measuring the same thing at the same time.

As Chuck Todd pointed out the state polls are lagging behind the national numbers, which are looking very good for Hillary Clinton.

This is for old-time posters, and John Xenakis.  I have a distinct recollection of a T4T poster coining the them Homelander for the New Silents shortly after 911.  For some reason I have Susan Brombacher associated with this term in my memory. I was curious about this and did some Google searches for the term.  It is attributed to S&H based on a survey they did in 2005.  Does anyone remember anything about this? If so, perhaps John might have it on his site where he was preserved a number of threads going way back in 2001.

Thanks

I am referring to Agustin de Iturbide, the Spanish general who was dispatched to Mexico to put down the Mexican Revolution, only to turn traitor and assume command of the revolutionary army, which then proceeded to win the war and make Mexico independent.

This theory is now being expounded by nervous Nellies on the right - including yesterday by a caller to Rush Limbaugh.

It wouldn't surprise me one bit.

Oh, he will try to do the Samuel Gompers stuff on immigration, and do some saber-rattling at the Muslims - but he won't lift a finger to repeal ObamaCare or toe the fundie line on abortion, and will probably lead the charge to get ENDA passed.