Trumpthinkable, Hack-The-Vote-Ohio, Dirty Energy Koch Bros Spying, Palestinian Paranoia,

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Paul Krugman | Thinking About the Trumpthinkable

Paul Krugman, New York Times
Krugman writes: "You have a party whose domestic policy agenda consists of shouting 'death panels!', whose foreign policy agenda consists of shouting 'Benghazi!', and which now expects its base to realize that Trump isn't serious."
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lan Abramowitz reads the latest WaPo poll and emails:

Read these results and tell me how Trump doesn’t win the Republican nomination? I’ve been very skeptical about this all along, but I’m starting to change my mind. I think there’s at least a pretty decent chance that Trump will be the nominee.

Here’s why I think Trump could very well end up as the nominee:

1. He’s way ahead of every other candidate now and has been in the lead or tied for the lead for a long time.

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No, You're Not Paranoid: The Koch Brothers Really Are Spying on You
Katie Herzog, Grist
Herzog writes: "There's a secret intelligence network funded by evil billionaire brothers determined to choose the next American president. No, that's not the plot of the new James Bond movie - it's life in the U.S.A. circa 2015."
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2 Palestinian Americans Barred From Southwest Flight After Passenger Claims to Feel 'Unsafe'
Nicole Rojas, International Business Times
Rojas writes: "Two Palestinian Americans were barred from boarding their flight home from Chicago on November 18th after a fellow passenger claimed to feel afraid to fly with them."
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Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fritakis | Official Vote Tally on Ohio's Pot Issue Deemed "Statistically Impossible"
Harvey Wasserman and Bob Fritakis, Reader Supported News
Excerpt: "The 'stolen election' controversy over this month's officially defeated Ohio pot legalization referendum has gone to a new level."
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he "stolen election” controversy over this month’s officially defeated Ohio pot legalization referendum has gone to a new level.

“The results are not only impossible but unfathomable,” stated Ron Baiman, Assistant Professor of Graduate Business Administration at Benedictine University, where he teaches economics and statistics.

The Columbus Free Press asked Baiman to calculate the odds of the official vote count of Ohio’s Issue 3, to legalize marijuana, being correct – compared to the tracking polls charting voter preference leading up to this year’s November election. The Free Press supplied Baiman with poll results taken prior to the election by noted pollster Jon Zogby.

The polls leading into the November 3 vote showed the referendum passing. But the official results claim it lost by 2:1.

The standard assumption with such polling is that the undecided voters in the poll would have potentially gone 50-50. Thus half of them would be voting no and the other half would be voting yes on Issue 3. Baiman pointed out that with such an assumption being probable, the odds against the referendum losing 2:1 go through the roof. They are, he said, “one in a trillion.”

The analysis showed that even if the most illogical outcome is assumed – that every single undecided voter in the polls voted against Issue 3 – it is still statistically impossible to accept Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted’s official tally as being credible.

If the Zogby poll was accurate, says Baiman, one would expect the official outcome as reported by the state once in every 105,000 elections.

As general rule, undecided voters do not tend to split more than 60-40 percent in favor of one side or the other.

Pre-election tracking polls are performed using a random and representative sample. They accurately reflect how voters of various demographics are likely to vote. All such polls do contain a margin of error. The Zogby poll has a 4.9 percent margin of error, which leaves the official outcome of the Issue 3 vote still very far out of the realm of reasonable statistical probability.

Another Issue 3 poll done by the Kitchen Group showed a closer split between the yes and no vote. It was conducted one week before Election Day, with a random survey of more than over 1000 Ohioans. The odds that Husted’s official tally is correct based on the Kitchen poll are even heavier than with the Zogby poll…in this case yielding a result that would be expected only once in once in every 799,000,000 elections. [see attachments]

There can be only two explanations for this.

Ohioans can assume that the well-funded corporate multimillionaire growers backing Issue 3 who hired highly-regarded pollsters were given made-up drivel as the poll results. Or, Ohio’s notoriously corrupt, antiquated and highly-vulnerable voting system was hacked or manipulated by partisans like Ohio’s Secretary of State Husted.

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http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33656-official-vote-tally-on-ohios-pot-issue-deemed-qstatistically-impossibleq

Stranded Migrants Block Railway, Call Hunger Strike
Yannis Behrakis, Reuters
Behrakis writes: "Moroccans, Iranians and Pakistanis on Greece's northern border with Macedonia blocked rail traffic and demanded passage to western Europe on Monday. One Iranian man, declaring a hunger strike, stripped to the waist, sewed his lips together with nylon and sat down in front of lines of Macedonian riot police."
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Homicide on the Rise in Mexico: 47 People Killed Everyday
teleSUR
Excerpt: "According to official figures, the number of preliminary inquiries and investigations for homicide in Mexico went from 13,149 to 14,069 this year, which translates to a staggering 47 murders a day."
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Only 3 Northern White Rhinos Left on Earth After Death of Nola at San Diego Zoo
Maureen Nandini Mitra, Earth Island Journal
Mitra writes: "Nola, one of the last four Northern White Rhinos remaining in the world, died at San Diego Zoo Safari Park Sunday following a bacterial infection."
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