Month: August 2015
Kasich Approval Hits All-Time High in Ohio
61% to 28%
John Kasich’s standing rises to an all-time high among voters as he campaigns for the Republican presidential nomination, a new Quinnipiac poll in Ohio finds. Voter approval of Kasich’s job performance is even stronger numbers among Republicans at 84% to 10%.
The Trump Effect Could Wreck the GOP
Trump’s candidacy has blasted open the GOP’s longstanding fault lines at a time when the party hoped for unity. His gleeful, attention-hogging boorishness—and the large crowds that have cheered it—cements a popular image of the party as standing for reactionary anger rather than constructive policies. As Democrats jeer that Trump has merely laid bare the true soul of the GOP, some Republicans wonder, with considerable anguish, whether they’re right.
— Molly Ball, in the Atlantic.
Priebus Spins the Trump Effect as a Positive for the GOP
I think it is a positive for our party. When you have 30 million people watching, not to mention the fact that we have 16 other incredible candidates out there I think we are showing America that we are the young, diverse party, offering a whole slew of options for people and that’s a good thing.
— RNC Chairman Reince Priebus, in an interview on WISN, on whether Donald Trump is a positive force for Republicans.
The GOP Frontrunner Is a Notorious Adulterer Whose Current Wife Posed in Her Altogether – Is This the End of GOP ‘Family Values?’
Update May 2016: Google informed us that it considers this photo of the wife of Donald Trump, the Republican Party’s nominee for president, to be obscene and ordered us to remove the photo because this page features Google advertising. You can see the full, uncensored photo here.
Original story:
Now that we have a Republican frontrunner who is an infamous serial adulterer and whose current wife once posed nude for a magazine in his private jet, can we say that the GOP’s 35-year masquerade as the party of “family values” is officially over?
Imagine for a moment that photos had emerged of a wife of a past Republican frontrunner — Ann Romney or Cindy McCain, for example — supine on a fur rug in the altogether. Their husbands’ campaigns would have been over faster than Rick Perry could say “Oops.” But this is Teflon Don, so even evangelicals are apparently okay with what they’d otherwise consider a sinful display.
And then there is the candidate himself. Just 14 years after impeaching Pres. Clinton over a sex lie in civil lawsuit, the Republicans are now giving majority support to a notorious philanderer who openly carried on an affair with wife number two while still married to wife number one, and may have started seeing number three (the one who posed nude) while still married to number two.
Tarantino Lauds Obama’s Presidency
I think he’s fantastic. He’s my favorite president, hands down, of my lifetime. He’s been awesome this past year. Especially the rapid, one-after-another-after-another-after-another aspect of it. It’s almost like take no prisoners. His he-doesn’t-give-a-shit attitude has just been so cool. Everyone always talks about these lame-duck presidents. I’ve never seen anybody end with this kind of ending. All the people who supported him along the way that questioned this or that and the other? All of their questions are being answered now.
— Movie director Quentin Tarantino, praising Barack Obama’s presidency in an interview with New York magazine.
Google Search Is Gaming the 2016 Election
And you thought it was the Koch brothers and super PACs that were calling the 2016 election. A new study reveals that Google’s search algorithms have the potential to sway undecided voters merely on the power of results rankings in Google search.
Google Search is having a detrimental affect on democracy by swaying undecided voters through its rankings, according to new research. A study by the American Institute for Behavioural Research and Technology found that Google has the power to shift voting preferences in the upcoming 2016 US elections by 20% or more through the results brought up by its secretive search algorithms, with Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton the most likely to benefit.
Through five experiments carried out in two countries, the study found that the search engine manipulation effect (SEME) could even be used to determine an election outcome if the proportion of undecided voters is calculated first. SEME is described as a “virtually invisible” form of social influence that is currently not subject to any specific regulations anywhere in the world.
“What the research shows is that when a candidate is ranked higher on Google, that shifts the votes of undecided voters towards that candidate because we’ve all learned they have such incredible trust in those rankings,” Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behaviour Research and Technology and co-author of the study, told WhoWhatWhy. “Some 50% of all of our clicks go to the top two [search results] and [more than] 90% of all clicks go on the first page.
“Because moderate Republicans are so vulnerable to SEME, this makes Hillary Clinton virtually a shoo-in if the next election is close. If she has Google’s support, no one is going to be able to mess with her and it means Google will be able to shift all kinds of people in her direction – even a big chunk, possibly, of moderate Republicans.”
Anchor Babies Aweigh!
In the campaign they haven’t acted much like mateys,
But they both disdain foreign-national pregnant ladies.
Despite the Constitution,
Which labels them “American,”
Both Jeb and The Donald prefer the term “anchor babies.”
