Orange turd smacked down by FEC Chair

[Scooter]

[ex-khobar Andy]

I didn't know - or had forgotten - that Weintraub had asked for this evidence back when Trump first alleged it. I see from her Wikipedia entry

In February 2017, Weintraub called on President Donald Trump to reveal his evidence of voter fraud after the president claimed that it caused him and former Senator Kelly Ayotte to lose in New Hampshire in the 2016 U.S. election.[7] “The scheme the President of the United States alleges would constitute thousands of felony criminal offences under New Hampshire law,” Weintraub said in a statement printed on FEC letterhead.[8] As a result, an organization funded by the Koch brothers, Cause of Action, issued a statement calling for her to be investigated for ethics violations.[9][10] Weintraub subsequently defended her actions and maintained that the alleged fraud would constitute a violation of federal campaign finance laws, which is germane to her position as a FEC commissioner.[11]

that the Kochs (more accurately an organization funded by them) had called for her to be investigated for ethics violations. I think that that is exactly her job: if someone who is in a position to know and is not some random guy off the street alleges malfeasance, then s/he should either provide the evidence or shut up.

I'd go further: this president alleges all sort of things, this being one example. If indeed there was significant voted fraud in NH, then someone was not doing their job. Similarly if NYT and WaPo and CNN are circulating invented news then their editors and presenters and owners are guilty of massive breaches of integrity. (I was going to say fraud: and if they are selling 'news' which really isn't then I think that's fraud but I don't know if it fits the legal definition.) Integrity is their stock in trade and I would love to see them (NYT etc) suing him for a few bills worth of libel/slander damages. And if he is accusing the FEC Commissioner of not doing her job, she should sue the fucker.

ETA: PS I do like that last sentence in the letter. She probably shouldn't have done it, but I like it.

[Crackpot]

Scooter your second image is not showing up for me.

[ex-khobar Andy]

It's someone dropping a microphone, CP. I've never understood that particular meme, FWIW.

[Lord Jim]

I believe it's supposed to mean, "That's it, the last word, there's nothing more to say"...

Hence no more need for the microphone...

[eddieq]

It's pretty much that. The "mic drop" idea is mostly a "nothing you say could possibly be better than what I just said and I have no need to rebut anything you are about to say". Probably originated with "rap battles".

[Crackpot]

Correct it is the urban equivalent of ending an argument with Q.E.D.

[ex-khobar Andy]

As usual, Trump follows a lie by doubling it - or in this case multiplying by about five. According to HuffPost: (I don't know how to copy and paste a Twitt)

Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump

Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch
126K
11:52 AM - Aug 19, 2019

Apparently this was based on some 'researcher' who used a grand total of 21 undecided votes to conclude that Google had somehow wrongly influenced all these voters up to a total of 16 million.

Hillary Clinton pointed out that:

Hillary Clinton
‏Verified account @HillaryClinton

Hillary Clinton Retweeted Donald J. Trump

The debunked study you’re referring to was based on 21 undecided voters. For context that’s about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted.

[wesw]

yu are s funny.

Hillary is yur trusted surce.

what a mar00n.....

[Bicycle Bill]

If Hillary really did tweet that line about "that's about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted" line, then good for her!!  It's about time someone took off the kid gloves and got down and dirty with ol' lyin' Donny.

If this were two hundred years or so ago (back when America was great, at least to Trump's way of thinking), he'd have been challenged to more duels in the last two years than d'Artagnan and all three of Dumas' Musketeers combined.

Hey, maybe that's what we need to do.  Just wait until the Chief Embarrassment insults some leader or potentate in some little 'shithole country' (his words) where dueling is legal — and you know it's only a matter of time before he does, and let the other guy call out the Coward-in-Chief.

-"BB"-

[Scooter]

Shall we go to the "study" itself?

Ninety-five people from 24 U.S. states (mean age 39.9) were recruited, 21 of whom identified themselves as "undecided."

Gee, looks like Hillary got it exactly right. And the infinitesimal sample size isn't close to the biggest problem with this slanted joke of a "study".

[RayThom]

If Hillary really did tweet that line about "that's about half the number of people associated with your campaign who have been indicted" line, then good for her!!  It's about time someone took off the kid gloves and got down and dirty with ol' lyin' Donny.

A little clarity on that.

Hillary Clinton zings Trump over new voter conspiracy theory
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/19/clinton-trump-voter-conspiracy-1468885

[Lord Jim]

Weintraub will be on Morning Joe this morning...

That should be good television...

[ex-khobar Andy]

Thanks for the link, Scooter.

I read through the Epstein 'study.' Wow. (No, no - not that Epstein.) Talk about a sheep in wolf's clothing.

They don't supply the raw data of course: most scientific studies don't, although an increasing number make it available on line. I'd love to be able to look through it. I don't know if it's peer reviewed although that process, which is often cited as the means by which poor science is weeded out, has its problems. (See, for example, the famous 'water memory' paper published by Benveniste in Nature in 1988. Complete codswallop, never been reproduced, and published by the most influential journal in the world. I mention that because in those days I read Nature every week as part of my job; and I remember when that issue crossed my desk. I was outraged and wrote to John Maddox, the then editor - they didn't publish my letter but if memory serves they had upwards of 5000 letters from all over the world telling them to knock it off.)

I'm sure the statistics, which claim to measure bias in Google search results favoring either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, are correctly calculated. They are pretty impressive. I can't of course verify that because I don't have the raw data. Where you can drive a truck through the whole science-like process is the lack of any sort of definition of what constitutes bias or how it is determined. There is no indication of any kind of objective determination procedure. Top pages of Firefox/Google search results were scanned to give 98,044 'election related' web pages which were scanned for bias by 'people recruited from a crowdsourcing website'. There's a random slice of the population.

The results showed, based on Epstein's methodology, a clear 'bias' towards HRC and against the orange shitface. (Those of you of an analytical bent might notice a lack of objectivity in my assessment of the science here. Sorry, can't help it.) Google of course deny that their algorithms have any inbuilt bias, but of course they don't let us see how they are constructed, citing intellectual property.

I do see a possible mechanism for this effect. The study authors do not; or if they do, they don't mention it. I did a quick Google search (yes, yes, I know) for 'conspiracy theories right wing correlation' and got this Quora hit. Now I wouldn't normally cite Quora to defend any position I hold, but it's the best I have given the 10 seconds I allocated to the task. The Quora piece led me to this item in Scooter's hometown newspaper which correlates low intelligence with right wing views. (Note that a correlation is not causation; and even if it is, its by no means one to one. For the record, I believe that there are plenty of high intelligence people with right wing views. Just because you are smart in one area of your life doesn't mean you are right everywhere.) And this piece in The Big Think site links high education levels with a reluctance to believe in conspiracy theories. Merging these two sets of results, we have at least a suggestion that right wing beliefs make one more susceptible to belief in conspiracies. Anecdotal evidence isn't evidence of course, but thinking of certain people I have come across in my life, I'd say that's generally true.

Here's the mechanism. To see bias where none exists (the null hypothesis) you have to be receptive to conspiracy theories. The world is out to get you. That's regardless of whether the (visible only to you) bias is for HRC or the OS DJT. I posit that the less educated tend to be right wing (again: it's not one to one) and right-wingers tend to be more amenable to belief in conspiracy theories. So those looking for bias will tend to find more against their own beliefs - i.e., left wing bias - where none exists. If they wanted to, the authors of the original study could easily evaluate this effect and correct for it. They don't - and to fail to investigate obvious effects which might skew the data is scientific fraud.

I have not read the studies I cited because they are behind the usual scientific paywall, and not, as far as I can tell, available on SCRIBD like the first one. Based on the abstracts they are far wider (many more subjects by something like a factor of 100) and IMO more valid than the Epstein study.

[Scooter]

The part that told me everything I need to know about this guy was how he excluded all the data from people who communicated via gmail, which essentially showed little or no bias, and he justifies doing so by claiming that Google must have learned who those people were and adjusted their algorithm so that no bias would show. He also claims to be studying the period from May to November 2016, but then says that his analysis had to be limited to 22 of the last 25 days of the campaign, because of insufficient data prior to October 19, and the loss of all data for Oct 25-27. Those contributing data were essentially self-selecting, and there is no indication of what terms were being searched on to generate this "bias". The whole thing has methodological holes you could drive a truck through, and because it wasn't peer reviewed (the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology is Epstein's own shop) he was able to get away with drawing conclusions that he couldn't have gotten away with in any truly scholarly publication.

[ex-khobar Andy]

According to CNN, Epstein used Amazon Mechanical Turk to recruit his staff who assigned bias. This is a crowdsourcing site on which people take on defined assignments which require human labor. An example was the search for Steve Fossett: some of Fossett's friends divided satellite pictures into small pieces and assigned them to people who would scan them and report back. The idea was with enough scanners they would eventually find his plane. This was unsuccessful because the location of his crash was outside the presumed search area. The people who take on these tasks are typically paid $1 per hour or thereabouts - because they are independent contractors there are no minimum wage laws or payroll taxes etc. (All this from the Wikipedia article.)

The Wikipedia entry also states:

While a survey done by researchers at the University of Texas, showed that the surveyed Workers were motivated by enjoyment and self-fulfillment.[40], these results may have been prejudiced by MTurk's Worker selection algorithms. A 2016 Pew Research study found that a quarter of online "gig workers" like those who work on Mechanical Turk do so because there are limited employment opportunities where they live.[41]

(I love the bit I underlined. There's some serious irony for you. My bolding, too.)

That reference [41] is to this piece in The Atlantic. Wow. Not a long read - five or ten minutes - but it did leave me with a sickening 'what kind of world have we left for our kids?' feeling. Quite apart from the 'limited employment opportunities where they live' bit - and I have every sympathy for the jobless who are tied to a location - which might contribute to biasing the population and political tendencies from which they are drawn, I wonder at the quality control. If I were desperate for cash and looking for a needle in a haystack for $1 per hour, I might well be tempted to up my number of alleged scans in order to generate more income and hope that someone else had that needle.

This beggars belief. The truly sad thing is that it really does not.

[wesw]

g00gle these specific search terms and see the results.

and click 0n images t00

white c0uple with baby

and

black c0uple with baby

during the electi0n I c0mmented 0n the fact that negative clint0n clips were made very difficult t0 find, if y0u remember.

it was 0bvi0us t0 any keen 0bserver 0f men.

[wesw]

the FEC chair 0n m0rning j0e was mindbl0wing.

same as if she had been0n rush Limbaugh

un pr0fessinal and sh0wing herself t0 be unfit f0r the j0b.

[Scooter]

And in response to Weintraub's challenge to put up or shut up, we hear...





























(crickets)

[wesw]

well ..., dr Epstein put 0ut quite the tweet strm refuting Hillary s dish0nesty.

salty cracker, n y0utube has it , in full, if y0u like me d0n t frequent the twatter site