Month: November 2016
Clinton’s Popular Vote Lead Continues to Rise
1.72 million
Hillary Clinton’s popular vote lead as of Sunday night, with millions of votes still to count, reports the New York Times. “At 1.3 percentage points, she has built a lead not seen in a losing campaign since Rutherford B. Hayes’ bitterly disputed election of 1876.”
Trump’s Popularity has Risen Since Election
46%
Of voters now have a very favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of the president-elect. Twelve percent have a somewhat unfavorable opinion and 34% have a very unfavorable opinion of him, according to a new Politico/Morning Consult poll of registered voters. “Trump’s favorability has grown 9 points, 37% to 46%, compared to a Morning Consult poll right before the election — while his unfavorability has dropped 15 points, from 61% to 46%.”
Warren: No More Whimpering!
The time for whimpering, the time for whining, the time for crying is over. It is time to fight back. Are we clear on that?
— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), quoted by the Wall Street Journal.
The Independent Party of Trump Won the Election
What has stood in the way of people running as an independent is that winning the presidency in a system that so clearly favors the two major parties is something of a hopeless cause. … Trump took the elements of an independent candidacy — the lack of clear ideology, the name recognition of a national celebrity and the personal fortune needed to fund a presidential campaign — and then did what no one seemed to have thought of before. He staged a hostile takeover of an existing major party. He had the best of both worlds, an outsider candidacy with crosscutting ideological appeal and the platform of a major party to wage the general election. By the time he had finished, he had taken down two political dynasties: the Bush dynasty in the primaries and the Clinton dynasty in the general election.
— Dan Balz
McCain Takes Firm Stand on Waterboarding
I don’t give a damn what the president of the United States wants to do. We will not waterboard. We will not torture people… It doesn’t work.
— Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), issuing a fiery warning to President-elect Donald Trump on the subject of torture, Politico reports. Anyone who tries to resume torture, McCain said would find themselves in court “in a New York minute.”
Bannon Is a Fan of Darth Vader, Satan
Darkness is good. Dick Cheney. Darth Vader. Satan. That’s power. It only helps us when they get it wrong. When they’re blind to who we are and what we’re doing.”
— Trump strategist Stephen Bannon, in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Four Princeton Students Solved Facebook’s Fake-News Problem in a Weekend
The editors of Pensito Review take for granted that our sophisticated readers know the difference between real and fake news, fact and fiction, honest commentary and nativist propaganda. But maybe you know a less-sophisticated soul who has fallen prey to the fake news in their Facebook feed.
Tell him about fIB: Let’s Stop Living a Lie. It’s a Google Chrome extension that scrapes fake news from your Facebook feed that was created by four Princeton students engaged in a weekend hackathon. The extension works in two ways:
Content-consumption: Our chrome-extension goes through your facebook feed in real time as you browse it and verifies the authenticity of posts. These posts can be status updates, images or links. Our backend AI checks the facts within these posts and verifies them using image recognition, keyword extraction, and source verification and a twitter search to verify if a screenshot of a twitter update posted is authentic. The posts then are visually tagged on the top right corner in accordance with their trust score. If a post is found to be false, the AI tries to find the truth and shows it to you.
