Nifty

Okay, so what part of this pretense from NYT’s The Upshot―

History suggests that each party’s eventual nominee will emerge from 2015 in one of the top two or three positions, as measured by endorsements, fund-raising and polling.

―isn’t seemingly self-evident?

Nonetheless, it is an interesting toy, tracking various data sources according to reasonable pretenses, but pretty much from the outset it seems as if the New York Times is overplaying its hand.

If we might suggest to keep an eye on it, and see how well they do, we might also suspect it is designed to pitch itself as somehow successful, since its job is to follow trends toward a conclusive resolution.

Still, there are plenty of people you know who need color graphics in order to figure out what’s going on. Who knows, maybe this will help.

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“Who’s Winning the Presidential Campaign?” The Upshot. 22 Septemer 2015.

More Fun with Bill

“Bill O’Reilly was caught in a lie. No, not that one. Or that one. Or the whole sexual harassment loofah thing. This is not really news. Brian Williams being a fabulist was a little more surprising, but not really. Network and cable news are pretty much infotainment anchored by narcissists.”

―Brain McFadden

It is unfortunate, as Brain McFadden notes, that “there’s been no comeuppance for the liars that got us into the Iraq War”, an aspect of these weird chapters of the American press that seems strangely lost on all the right people. Wrong people. Right people. Whatever. What more and more seems like the inevitable fall of Brian Williams has its tragic aspects. That there really isn’t much for comeuppance in Bill O’Reilly’s case is hardly unexpected. But it makes for great comedy vérité.

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McFadden, Brian. “America at War: with Bill O’Reilly”. Daily Kos. 6 March 2015.