Trump and Conflating of Reporting

From the New York Times:

Another was how Mr. Trump and Mr. Spicer conflated BuzzFeed’s reporting of the Russia story with CNN’s (which omitted the uncorroborated details). This let him conveniently lump two very different Russia-Trump reports into the same manila folder, mislabeled “fake news,” and deposit them in the circular file together.

While true, this misses an important aspect of the matter. While Trump and Spicer may have intentionally conflated Buzzfeed's and CNN's reporting as a way of dismissing both, it's a near certainty that many people were going to conflate the two when assessing Trump and the stories. We had just seen similar where many were conflating Russian meddling in the election, including releasing emails hacked from Podesta and the DNC, with Russia hacking the election-possibly down to the vote tallying itself.

Frankly, most journalists did not do a very good job of pushing back against that conflation.

Why I am skeptical

Let me get this straight. You think that your client, one of the wealthiest, most powerful men in the world, is secretly a vigilante who spends his nights beating criminals to a pulp with his bare hands; and your plan, is to *blackmail* this person?

We are supposed to believe that the Russians pulled out all the stops to get Trump compromised. And that a single spook had sources who gave him the goods on it. And that the story was percolating through the press corps for months; a veritable open secret, perhaps sans one or two details. And Putin, rather than protecting this leverage in his own particular fashion, let this spook run it to the one journalistic enterprise with the balls to run with it, Buzzfeed, taking away his ability to blackmail the most powerful man in the world? And you want me to believe that?

Good luck.

On Carrie Fisher.

@GerryDales @CJA1781 @amandacarpenter all of you are horrible assholes

— d.m. (@missumyhappybrd) December 28, 2016

This is how I started my morning.

I am sure she had the best of intentions in chiding me, but she really did miss the point. However, she did not miss the point nearly as badly as did a TV report on Carrie Fisher's death. I think it may have been E! Tonight or some similar show. They lauded her for her triumph over her mental illness of Bipolar Disorder.

No, she had no such triumph. It killed her.

That she was vocal about it, and that she fought it, and that she did a world of good with her efforts does not change the fact that it tormented her. When up, it made her ignore consequences and boundaries. When down, it made her want to bring the consequences on. It led her to self-medicate throughout her life. This self-medication likely led to her dying by age 60.

She had a serious illness, no more shameful than if she had cancer. To say she triumphed over it does a disservice to her efforts to make people understand what dealing with a mental illness is like. What dealing with this mental illness is like.

She was a treasure as a performer and, by all accounts, an all-time personality.

But Bipolar Disorder killed her. Was the damage to hear heart done in her 20s? 40s? Last year? Last week? It does not matter. It killed her. If we gloss over that, then her early passing was truly a waste.

The Daily Mail Story on Platte River Is Misleading. Why?

From The Daily Mail:

EXCLUSIVE: Hillary's email firm was run from a loft apartment with its servers in the BATHROOM, raising new questions over security of sensitive messages she held

Really? From a loft, with servers in the bathroom?

The Daily Mail article continues to quote a former employee, Tera Dadiotis, who described the company as a 'mom-and-pop' shop. Dadiotis said, "At the time I worked for them they wouldn't have been equipped to work for Hilary Clinton because I don't think they had the resources, they were based out of a loft, so [it was] not very high security, we didn't even have an alarm."

The article notes that the last time Dadiotis worked for them was 2010.

I like using the "Wayback Machine", aka The Internet Archive. Let's take a look at some things. I poked around on their website's archive circa 2013 (when the server was migrated to them), and found this description of services, originally posted in 2012 but still applicable through 2014 (or later). Notice what it says:

Offsite/Online/Data Center Backup

• Fully Automated Backups Held on Disk for Rapid File Restoration
• Secure Online Transfer of Fully Encrypted Data to an Offsite Data Center
• 24x7 Live Customer Support
• Immediate Access to Restore Data

Italics and underlining added by me for highlighting.

The company was run out of a loft, but the data center, where the [ETA: backup] information was stored, was elsewhere, not in the bathroom.

A press release from 2013 bragged that Platte River was named by Inc. Magazine as "one of the fastest growing companies in America for 2013." Further, the press release asserted them to be "a national leader in the managed services and cloud industry." That hardly sounds 'mom-and-pop' at that time to me.

All of this leaves me with a few questions. The Daily Mail tracked down "ex-employees" of Platte River, including the aforementioned Dadiotis (who was undoubtedly telling the truth about what the company was like back during her tenure). Why did they track down employees from years earlier, when the company was much smaller? Why weren't they talking to current employees who had been there merely two years ago?

Why are they publishing an article talking about what Platte River was like "At the time [Dadiotis] worked for them", 2010 and earlier, and making it sound like this was how it was when they started their involvement with the Clinton server? Why is this article pushing the false impression of the company, minimizing what they do and what their capabilities and offerings are and were in 2013?

Just sloppy reporting? Or is the false impression being deliberately pushed?

I can't help but remember back to earlier Clinton scandals, when false information would get pushed and then used as evidence of a vast right-wing conspiracy against them.

Probably just a coincidence.

Edited to add: The data center, which is where the servers were (and not just backups), was in New Jersey, as The Daily Caller reported last week.

Edited to add, again: Neil Stevens has convinced me that the Intuition brochure linked above suggests that only the backup services were in the offline data center. As such, I have struck-through the last part of the article. However, The points regarding Dadiotis being employed 3 years earlier, before the company grew to a $6M revenue company, remains as does my estimation that it was hardly 'mom-and-pop' by the time the Clinton server entered the picture.

That said, it is possible that there was a server located in a closet and I retract my confident assertion that it wasn't.

From Where is Trump Getting His Support?

Earlier today, Charles Franklin (Director of the Marquette Law School Poll, co-founder of Pollster.com, proprietor of PollsAndVotes.com, etc.) posted the following:

Pre-post Trump support in Fox CNN & Monmouth polls Change w/in pollster, then averaged h/t @EsotericCD @GerryDales pic.twitter.com/sAbgoBmyv4

— Charles Franklin (@PollsAndVotes) July 15, 2015

Clearly, since Trump entered the race, his numbers have greatly improved while Walker's and Rubio's have declined markedly. I found that counter-intuitive for a moment, until it dawned on me that nearly all of the candidates who showed little change were those who had little support to begin with. Obviously, if one is polling at 2%, it would be pretty difficult to lose more than 2 percentage points. If a candidate shows a sudden surge in the numbers, the most probable losers would be those with a decent amount of support available to lose.

Walker and Rubio fit that bill.

Another GOP candidate that had a pretty decent base of support before Trump joined the fray is Jeb Bush. Jeb announced mid-June and subsequently gained publicity for some eye-popping fundraising numbers. As such, it isn't all that shocking that he saw his support rise during and despite the Trump boomlet.

But is it all as simple as Trump is hurting the other GOP front-runners excepting Bush, who avoided the decline during a honeymoon phase? I am skeptical.

Since Charles was gracious enough to tell everyone which surveys he was using for his graph, I was able to go back to the surveys he used and look at some other numbers. The surveys he used were Monmouth, Fox Opinion Dynamics, and CNN/ORC International. I found the releases for the most recent iteration of each (linked below), each of which helpfully had earlier results included in them. The data from these made me even more skeptical.

In each of the following charts, the most recent iteration of a survey is to the left. For each survey, only the most recent was conducted after Trump announced. These are for the three candidates I would have called the frontrunners a month ago.

In each, the overall support for the triumvirate has been fairly steady. Within the Monmouth poll, the aggregate has varied by all of one percentage point. In the Fox poll, the spread is four percentage points with the most recent being three off of the maximum. In the CNN poll, one might get the impression that the group fell off in the most recent survey, but concurrent with their collective decline in the late June survey was growth in the combined "none of the above" / "no opinion" cohorts of eight percentage points in May. I believe that these three have been stealing share back and forth from each other for the past few months, and The Donald has not impacted them much, if at all.

The following charts compare Trump with all candidates other than Rubio, Walker, and Bush. Notice again how the aggregate totals remain fairly constant, especially when one keeps in mind the margin of error.

Trump is not hurting the presumed front runners. Instead, he's been sucking some of the air away from the candidates that Republican primary voters have been considering as alternatives to the main three; Christie, Carson, Huckabee, and Cruz hit the most. At least, that's the way it appears to me.

The .pdf files for the surveys are here: CNN/ORC, Fox Opinion Dynamics, Monmouth

Edited to add: If one goes by the Monmouth and Fox polls, you could also say that Paul isn't being impacted by Trump one iota. His numbers have been remarkably steady in each of their surveys. CNN, however, has shown him slipping a bit.

Clinton to propose police body cameras

Clinton is going to propose body cameras for every officer nationally at her speech today at Columbia.

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) April 29, 2015

Good idea.

I am wondering about a hypothetical, though. Let's say that something happens, and the video of a certain timevspan is subpoenaed. Further, that the officer had decided to use a personal camera, and when told to turn over all recordings, scrubbed much of them as being personal and unrelated.

How should we handle that?

Put a Stop to Using Police as Revenue Streams

Reform this now. https://t.co/Koo7hIdQ24

— Gerry Daly (@GerryDales) April 10, 2015

There are many reasons to oppose the use of police to generate revenue. It hits the poor the hardest. It leads to abuse. It leads to a disdain for law enforcement. It leads to abuse.

Hopefully, some Republican Presidential candidates will take this up as an issue. Rand Paul seems a natural, but I could see others joining in as well.

I would recommend a simple proposal, such as making states report to the federal government all revenues raised from traffic violations, and using that amount as an offset to the amount given to the state for highway maintenance and similar construction projects. Give the individual states an incentive for discouraging the practice within their own borders, perhaps by doing something similar to their municipalities.

Simple, clean. Have the incentives be towards ticketing the minimum amount required to ensure public safety, which is how things really should be.