Today there is a wealth of statistics being released including the ones that I have compiled here.  The official unemployment rate increased from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020.  The unofficial rate (which some call the true unemployment rate) rose from 8.7% in March to 22.8% in April.  The official rate counts […]

Mitt Romney becoming the first Senator in the President’s party to vote to convict on one of the charges in Trump’s impeachment trial did raise some eyebrows.  It may not be as surprising given that he and Trump have butted heads.  However other Republicans who have butted heads, with Trump in the past, such as […]

  It was scintillating watching C-SPAN’s coverage of the Iowa Caucus in West Des Moines on Monday night.  You can see a rebroadcast of it here.  In this one caucus room, Bernie Sanders had the most votes in the second round with 99 followed by Elizabeth Warren with 76, Pete Buttigieg with 73, and Amy […]

In a follow up to my posts on social media and the upcoming elections I came across this interview on Democracy Now! with Roger McNamee.  He is an early mentor and investor of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.  He now says the company is a threat to US Democracy.  In the clip below he talks about […]

I have been tied up with other writing assignments to post on this blog lately.  I saw this video on Facebook from Real Time with Bill Maher where he criticizes comic book fans and thought I should comment. I posted it on my Facebook and got one negative comment and one positive one.  The negative […]

I have been reading Nate Silver’s book The Signal and the Noise, about how hard it is to make predictions even when we have complete data. I tend to be a slow reader so I’ve been reading it for a while.   Finally I got to the chapter on his years as a professional poker player.  […]

    The Cambridge Analytica (CA) story may have fallen on the back burner because of the March for Our Lives (rightly) and Stormy Daniels (wrongly).  Mother Jones magazine published a detailed chronology of how it became involved in the 2016 election.  First they were partnered with Ted Cruz’s campaign.  They claimed credit for his […]

The Southern Poverty Law Center has come out with it’s annual census of hate groups which shows .  Last week I wrote extensively on the national hate group numbers at The Hill Talk.  This week I will l look at a new way of measuring the reach of these groups. The hate map for Pennssylvania […]

  Last Sunday Meet The Press (the worlds longest running television series, not The Simpsons) announced the results of a poll they conducted in the pivotal states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin of President Trump’s current approval ratings in those states.  His approval ratings in these states are 36%, 35%, and 34% respectively with a […]

Last week I met with two filmmakers who were doing a documentary film on faith and the economy in the Johnstown area.  I was telling them about my blog and my regression model that predicted 78.5% of the variability in Trump’s vote in the 50 states plus the District of Columbia with the predictor variables […]