Year: 2016

Trump’s Popularity has Risen Since Election

Buck Banks

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%.”

The Independent Party of Trump Won the Election

Buck Banks

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

Buck Banks

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.”

Four Princeton Students Solved Facebook’s Fake-News Problem in a Weekend

Buck Banks

galleryThe 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.

[…]

Donald Looking to Settle Trump University Suits

Buck Banks

$20 to $25 million

Likely amount it will cost President-elect Donald Trump to “settle litigation in New York and California involving allegations of fraud at the now-defunct Trump University, according to people familiar with the matter — an agreement that would resolve a major legal headache before he enters the White House,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

Donald’s Team of Rivals, er, Racists

Buck Banks

Donald Trump’s presidential campaign bludgeoned modern norms about the acceptability of racism. The candidate proposed a religious test for immigrants, and called a federal judge unfit on the grounds of his heritage. Trump could have decided to put the racial demagoguery of the campaign behind him, and it could have been remembered as a divisive ploy to win that did not define his administration, like George Bush’s manipulation of white racial panic to defeat Michael Dukakis in 1988. But Trump, perhaps predictably, is making a different choice. His early staffing choices are redefining the boundaries of acceptable racial discourse in Republican politics.

— Jonathan Chait

The Media Deserves Blame, too

Buck Banks

On so many levels, vari­ous parts of the me­dia es­tab­lish­ment should look back at the en­tirety of their cov­er­age with re­gret and in some cases shame, wheth­er it was cable net­works hand­ing over their air­waves to Trump early in the race, or au­gust news­pa­pers tramp­ling on journ­al­ist­ic stand­ards in the fi­nal weeks in a des­per­ate bid to stop him. It was not a pretty sight. Just as it’s hard to get tooth­paste back in the tube, it will be hard for the press to re­store the bright line between re­port­ing and opin­ion.

— Charlie Cook

Did Chatbots Influence the Election?

Buck Banks

An automated army of pro-Donald Trump chatbots overwhelmed similar programs supporting Hillary Clinton five to one in the days leading up to the presidential election, according to a report published Thursday by researchers at Oxford University. … The chatbots — basic software programs with a bit of artificial intelligence and rudimentary communication skills — would send messages on Twitter based on a topic… Their purpose: to rant, confuse people on facts, or simply muddy discussions.

— New York Times