Trump causes 3000 job losses in Atlantic City this week

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Tuesday October 04, 2016 · 4:19 AM PDT

2016/10/04 · 04:19

Signage stands outside the Trump Taj Mahal casino and hotel, owned by Trump Entertainment Resorts Inc., in Atlantic City, New Jersey, U.S., on Sunday, May 8, 2016. Trump, after becoming the presumptive Republican nominee at least a month earlier than even he expected, hes being hammered by Democrats and denied the welcome mat from his own party. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images

This week, shock waves from the bursting of Trump’s Atlantic City bubble hit the Taj Mahal, affecting 3000 workers.

The closure timeline starts on October 9th:

All registered hotel guest must check out no later than noon on Oct. 9

and

Comp dollars can be redeemed at Trump Taj Mahal until 11:59 p.m. on Oct. 9. All balances after this time will have no further value.

Arielle Brousse, daughter of a pianist and waitress who were caught up in the bubble, has a beautifully written piece at Vox.com:

Trump has said time and again that the present-day failures in Atlantic City have nothing to do with him, merely because he’s gone now. But it was his gamble that blew up the region to this degree in the first place. It was his promises that attracted thousands of workers and their families to my hometown, building developments, shopping malls, and schools to accommodate the new community that was to serve Trump’s personal seaside empire. We’re still by the boardwalk, but we’re now treading water.

Thousands of people have lost their jobs due to the ripple effects of his early mismanagement. Another 2,848 will join their ranks next week when the Taj finally closes, and the city’s unemployment rate — already among the highest in the nation — will skyrocket.

What does the presidential hopeful have to say about the people who helped build his name, the people he so spectacularly failed? What words of inspiration does our would-be leader offer the broken city he left behind?

He tells us: H e’s smart to have gotten out when he did.

It completely destroys the entire basis of his candidacy. Every voter in America should read it.

Obama's words on Dallas

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Friday July 08, 2016 · 2:49 AM PDT

2016/07/08 · 02:49

From the Guardian’ live coverage, just now, a transcript of Obama’s words spoken from Poland, regarding events in Dallas:

I spoke this morning with Mayor Rawlings of Dallas to convey the deepest condolences of the American people. I told him that the federal government will provide whatever assistance Dallas may need as it deals with this tremendous tragedy.

We still don’t know all the facts. What we do know is there has been a vicious, calculated and despicable attack on law enforcement. Police in Dallas were on duty doing their jobs, keeping people safe, during peaceful protests. These law enforcement officers were targeted and nearly a dozen officers were shot. Five were killed. Other officers and at least one civilian were wounded, some are in serious condition and we are praying for their recovery.

We are horrified over these events and we stand united with the people and the police department in Dallas.

According to police there are multiple suspects. We will learn more about their twisted motivations, but let’s be clear there is no possible justification for these kinds of attacks or any violence against law enforcement.

Anyone involved in these senseless murders will be held fully accountable. Justice will be done.

Yesterday I spoke about our need to be concerned as all Americans, about racial disparities in our criminal justice system. I also said yesterday our police have an extraordinarily difficult job and the vast majority of them do their job in outstanding fashion.

Today is a wrenching reminder of the sacrifices that they make for us.

We also know that when people are armed with powerful weapons unfortunately it makes attacks like these more deadly and more tragic. And in the days ahead we are going to have to consider those realities as well. In the meantime our focus is on the victims and their families.

Police across America, it’s a tight knit family, feels this loss to their core, and we are grieving with them. As a nation let’s remember to express our profound gratitude to our men and women in blue, not just today, but everyday.

You have a truly great president. It strikes me more forcefully than ever that what we need are leaders who can articulate complexity clearly, simply, and fairly. And they are SO rare.

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Sunday June 19, 2016 · 7:13 AM PDT

2016/06/19 · 07:13

Nicknames and bumper stickers are the blunt instruments of campaigns, and there’s a lot to be said for more sophisticated tools. There’s also a lot to be said for trying to win on your own turf, not your opponent’s, and Trump is a champ at insulting nicknames.

But Crooked Hillary, the one he seems to have settled on, isn’t one of his best. It can be, well, trumped.

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Monday October 29, 2012 · 3:56 AM PDT

2012/10/29 · 03:56

The Telegraph, one of the UK's better, if editorially right-of-centre, newspapers, has an interesting article about Nate Silver this morning:

Nate Silver, the geeky statistician who is singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum

It's by Dan Hodges, a "Blairite cuckoo in the Miliband nest":

Where most political commentators output is the product of briefings, gossip and personal perception, Silver deals in cold, hard facts. And at the moment, Silver’s facts are being fired like bullets into the heart of the Romney campaign.
Over the past week Romney has had a clear strategy; give the impression of momentum. Demonstrate the post-debate surge is continuing. Get people talking about how the race is his to lose.

Nate Silver is Mitt Romney’s nemesis. Not intentionally; although he admits to being an Obama supporter, his whole career is predicated on getting his predictions right. Like he did in 2008, when "Poblano" accurately predicted the result of 49 of the 50 states, and all 35 senate races.
And it is that reputation for accuracy that is so damaging to the Romney campaign’s attempt to sustain their precious “momentum” narrative. People listen to Silver. And over the past 48 hours, the narrative is starting to shift. “Mitt-mentum? Not so fast” – US News & World report. “Romney’s Momentum Seems To Have Stopped. “The momentum myth” – Washington Post.

Cheered me up this morning, anyway! More cheering than the Guardian, which I normally read, and seems editorially too worried to let itself be too cheerful.

Why the RAND poll is really good news

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Saturday October 27, 2012 · 4:43 AM PDT

2012/10/27 · 04:43

The RAND presidential poll is an interesting one because it polls the same group of people week after week. Each participant is polled once a week, and the total is averaged over the week. There are two important limitations to this methodology that need to be borne in mind:

The original sample has sampling error, like all polls, but that error is propagated throughout the poll, whereas if fresh samples are drawn, it will cancel out over time. For this reason it is misleading to consider the absolute margin as a good indicator of the state of the race - the same non-representativeness of the original sample will be present in every total. However, what this means is that its usefulness lies in the direction of the trends, which will tend to be far less noisy than when a new sample is drawn each day, whilst the opposite is true of conventional polls (sampling error cancels out over time, but makes the trends noisy).
Polling people regularly will itself tend to focus their minds to the race - as a result, by now, this is probably a group of people that have shown an atypical degree of interest in the race. However, it occurs to me that in that sense it may mimic the opinions of those in swing states who have been much more heavily targetted with news, conventional polls, and ads. So perhaps RAND may be regarded as a kind of proxy measure of attitudes in swing states.

So what I did was to plot the RAND margin, relative to its own baseline, i.e. with the margin artificially set to zero (in fact the Pollster model has Obama 1.4 points ahead on that date, which is what the RAND poll originally showed, so this is conservative), and simply tag a few key events.

And it seems to me (looking through my telescope from the UK) that a very clear pattern emerges (see below): Read More

Breaking: US embassy in Yemen stormed in film protest

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Thursday September 13, 2012 · 2:45 AM PDT

2012/09/13 · 02:45

BBC reporting:

Protesters angered by an anti-Islam film made in the US have stormed the grounds of the American embassy in the Yemeni capital, Sanaa.
Police opened fire in an attempt to hold back the crowds, but failed to prevent them gaining access to the compound and setting fire to vehicles.

A number of people were reported to have been injured.

I'll take this down if there's another thread, but there didn't seem to be.

Update 1: live updates on the Guardian here.

Update 2: Reuters:

Hundreds of Yemeni demonstrators stormed the U.S. embassy in Sanaa on Thursday in protest at a film they consider blasphemous to Islam, and security guards tried to hold them off by firing into the air.

Update 3: Telephone interview (Guardian) from Sana'a here

Update 4: from the Guardian live blog, statement from embassy:

Fortunately no casualties were reported from this chaotic incident. The government of Yemen will honour international obligations to ensure the safety of diplomats and will step up security presence around all foreign missions.

How to read exit polls: a primer

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Saturday November 04, 2006 · 11:48 AM PST

2006/11/04 · 11:48

(From the diaries - I was pleased to see how many posters here recognized an instant classic when they saw one - DemFromCT)

We will all be avidly watching the exit polls on Tuesday night. Some of us will simply be avid to know what they can tell us about who won. Others will be avid to parse them for evidence of skulduggery. This is an attempt to sort out fact from fiction, and help all of us understand what is going on.

First of all: there will be more than one exit poll exercise on Tuesday, and some of the smaller independent exit polls will be specifically designed to shed light on the integrity (or otherwise) of the vote-counting process. But the big one will be the Edison-Mitofsky poll for the NEP (National Election Pool], so this diary is about that. Read More

The Death and Life of a Great American City

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Wednesday September 07, 2005 · 5:40 AM PDT

2005/09/07 · 05:40

(with acknowledgements to Jane Jacobs).

I don't know New Orleans, hell, I don't know America, I'm a Brit. But being a European means that like most Europeans, I have a bit of a different perspective on the life and death of cities. And I'm worried about New Orleans.

Disasters don't generally kill cities. London was ravaged first by plague, then razed by fire, in 1666. The fire not only burned the thatched, timber-framed houses to the ground, it destroyed the ancient cathedral of St Paul's. And yet St. Paul's was rebuilt, mostly within Wren's lifetime, and its dome is iconic of the city. Florence was devastated by flood in 1966, as was Venice, a city built over water. Although loss of life was small, both cities lost priceless artworks, although many were painstakingly restored. Both cities are as alive as ever today.

Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki were all destroyed in the second world war. All are thriving cities today. And Holland survives as a nation below sea-level by virtue of a constantly maintained system of levees and pumps.

So why am I worried about New Orleans? Read More

Exit polls again: the mystery of the wandering WPE

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Tuesday April 19, 2005 · 5:10 AM PDT

2005/04/19 · 05:10

[catastrophic technical glitches in original diary led to rapid deletion - hoping this re-post functions properly]

This is an exit poll story, about trying to get to the bottom of why the early exit polls in the 2004 US presidental election over-estimated Kerry's share of the vote, an especially painful overestimate because unlike an error of comparable magnitude in 1992, where the exit polls also over-stated the Democratic vote, the difference in 2004 was the difference between defeat and victory. It's a geeky story, because it's about a tiny mathematical piece of the puzzle - but a piece that may be crucial to interpreting the data. And it's a blog story, because that tiny piece emerged from the collective networked wetware that is the blogosphere.

Read on....
Read More

Any one fancy a pint?

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Monday April 11, 2005 · 2:37 PM PDT

2005/04/11 · 14:37

Welshman's new snug bar is open for business!

Come and join us! We're discussing the UK election.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have already got a drink....

...but there are still a few seats left near the fire.

Here it is

and recommend it when you get there, so's we can get a good fug going.

The Tory manifesto came out today - they want less immigration, cleaner hospitals, and stricter schools. No sign of wanting to teach creationism as science, thank God. Howard looks like Dracula grinning from the inside cover (they don't want to risk putting him on the outside). Blair and Brown are pretending the Iraq war isn't happening, and that the country's blooming. Charlie Kennedy's wife's about to have a baby.

Whose round is it?

New: Snark-free Exit Poll analysis

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Wednesday April 06, 2005 · 5:00 AM PDT

2005/04/06 · 05:00

There is no doubt that Edison-Mitofsky's exit polls failed to predict successfully proportions of votes cast for the two presidential candidates in 2004. Because the candidates were so close, and because the exit poll deviated from the count in the loser's direction, this meant that a predicted Kerry win contrasted painfully with a Bush victory in the count.

The 64 million (or is it billion?) dollar questions is: which was wrong, the polls or the count?

"Fraudsters" claim it was the count. Edison-Mitofsky (and the "anti-fraudsters") claim it was the exit polls. In this diary I have a brand new analysis. Bear with me, even if you find math icky. There will be pictures, if not cookies.
Read More

BREAKING: email from Tony Blair - election 5th May

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Tuesday April 05, 2005 · 4:12 AM PDT

2005/04/05 · 04:12

The UK election has just been announced for May 5th.

I just received this message from Tony Blair:

If you have been keeping up with the news, you may already know that I went to the Palace a few minutes ago to ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament.

More below: Read More

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Trump causes 3000 job losses in Atlantic City this week

Obama's words on Dallas

Don the Con

Nate Silver singlehandedly dismantling the myth of Mitt-mentum

Why the RAND poll is really good news

Breaking: US embassy in Yemen stormed in film protest

How to read exit polls: a primer

The Death and Life of a Great American City

Exit polls again: the mystery of the wandering WPE

Any one fancy a pint?

New: Snark-free Exit Poll analysis

BREAKING: email from Tony Blair - election 5th May