POTUS WITH 79% CHANCE OF BEING A SECOND TERM PRESIDENT |
The last few days have just about caused the American Taliban a coronary. Why you ask?
The Albert Einstein of statistical analysis, also the owner of "five thirty eight blog" AKA Nate Silver, has all but called the election for President Obama. The statistician has Obama at a 79% chance of winning, and needless to say, the radical righties are livid. If facts elude this unlettered group, can we really expect them to grasp histograms, analysis of variance, better known as ANOVA? Something tells me no.
The battle has gotten so heated that Silver even tweeted to MSNBC tea bagger Joe Scarborough, that he'd bet him a thousand dollars that his data would prove correct on election day.
The wingnuts of the right keep saying that Silver is a incompetent ideologue, and why not, all this from a group who have a total collected IQ of less than 2.
Let's be realistic readers, Silver is a political polling genius. Fortunately, our most prominent numbers cruncher has been giving us the straight story, instead of capitalizing on this anxiety. Silver's accuracy last November 2008 - presidential election predictions—he correctly predicted the winner of 49 of the 50 states—which won Silver further attention and commendation. The only state he missed was Indiana, which went for Barack Obama by 1%. He also correctly predicted the winner of all 35 Senate races that same year.
Silver’s backstory reads like a quirky screenplay. While working as a transfer pricing consultant who helped companies minimize tax exposure from overseas investments, he spent his evenings and weekends perfecting an ingenious computer system for evaluating baseball players’ stats, which outperformed the analyses of many experts. A company running an Internet site for Rotisserie League fans bought his system. Silver used the money to stake himself as a full-time online poker player, quickly earning $400,000. Shortly thereafter, congressional grandstanding before the 2006 midterm elections stifled the online poker business with regulations, leading the best professional players, deprived of the overconfident amateurs they had been feasting on, to go after players like Silver. He lost $130,000. So he turned to politics, attempting to predict the partisan composition of the next Congress to help him decide whether to cut his losses and move on from poker. Thus was born the sideline that became fivethirtyeight.com.
This Prediction is bad news for the American Taliban, and we all know how much teapublicans like to delude themselves. You know, the flat earth mentality, the earth was created in 6 days, 6000 years ago, man has had no impact on the climate, and as everyone knows, tobacco is perfectly harmless.
I say step up Joe. You have considerably more wealth than Silver. How confident are you? Take the bet, put you money where your mouth is!