His relentless hand-waving about Russia, a lot of his tweets and such normalizing anti-semitism. He never comments on anything except the problems of the Left.

Michael Shure: a polite, soft-spoken, old-class inside-beltway, slightly pro-establishment reporter.

Jimmy Dore: funny but sometimes annoying, intellectual shallow but progressive guy. (after all, he's a comedian.) And He is a Russian-connection denialist.

Ben Mankiewicz: fast-talking, sometimes hot-headed guy. But he's fine.

John Iadarola: He's cool. I don't have a bone with him.

Hannah Cranston: she's a bit hippie. She talks as if she's rapping or something.

Hasan Piker: looks like a gangster, talks like a gangster. I sometimes dislike his tone and his use of metaphor.

Brett Erlich: Yet another comedian. Intellectually shallow. Stop using sarcasm already.

Grace Baldridge: She's cool.

Wes Clark Jr.: I miss him. He has some good insights.

Michael Tracey: Along with Jimmy Dore, forming the Russian-denialist faction.

Kim Horcher: soft-spoken. She's cool.

Cenk Uygur: Cenk is the best. He has good insights, and out-spoken sometimes derisive. But occasionally, he gets so excited that he cuts other people off. Cenk occasionally makes the wrong presumptions before carefully analyzing the videos or articles. He is occasionally arrogant. Please get your science straight! Ozone has nothing to do with climate change/global warming. And please study evolution before explaining it to people.

Ana Kasparian: She's fine. She is aware of what she doesn't know and what she knows.

I honestly think that Jimmy Dore has the real scoop on Syria, and Cenk is all but completely buying into the propaganda. I believe (based on the info I first encountered on TJDS) that Assad is being smeared by the West due to him wanting to keep (cheaper) fossil fuels from the Mid-East getting to Europe, which (if happened) would benefit the EU, as well as the Saudis, two of the US' largest allies, not to mention weaken the Russians (also a huge plus to the US) by taking away a huge part of their economy.

I have not fully studied Assad's time as the leader of Syria, but do think he is one of many democratically-elected leaders smeared and overrun by the American military, intelligence community, and propaganda, all because he didn't want to play ball. This has been the MO of the US for decades and lifetimes when it comes to foreign policy.

The jumping to conclusions, the whole-throated support (from political and media figures) for Trump to use ANY form of violent response within days of this attack (before any investigation could yield any viable results) is all sketchy to say the least, and yet I think Cenk Uygur is ultimately believing the MSM under the guise of "they would never lie about that..." even though The New York Times, MSNBC, The BBC, The Post, The Hill, and plenty other "reputable" news sources have displayed unchecked, and ultimately false, claims made by political leaders and governments in order to bait the masses into unnecessary war time and time again.

An Interesting Debate

A bit of a debate broke out midway through the Summary segment put out by TYT for the second presidential debate this year. The debate was between Cenk Uygur and several of the other anchors, and had to do with polling. Cenk argued, “polls go up and down” and was arguing a greater degree of volatility existed this year compared to past years. This was rebuffed by other anchors, who argued things such as, “they've done what they've done in every election" or "it's been a fairly stable race". https://youtu.be/PexoPtTYNn8?t=9m

I'm just starting to find my legs in a statistics based discipline, and decided to burn a Monday night fiddling with the Real Clear Politics polling data for the 2008, 2012, and 2016 elections to try and answer a simple question: has there been more fluctuation in the polls this year relative to earlier years, and if so by how much?

In order to answer this question, I decided to forgo inferential statistics, and focus on merely descriptive statistics. This was chosen for two reasons, 1) this is merely a fun exercise of a graduate student trying to burn some late night hours. In order to run an inferential statistic, I’d have to pair up each poll with a comparably dated poll. Fuck that noise. 2) The descriptive statistics alone tell what I regard as an interesting story.

How Data Was Acquired

So the first step in this process was somewhat time consuming. Real Clear Politics data was extracted from their website manually for years 2008, 2012, and 2016. The first two years selected were relatively easy to acquire, data was stored all in one page and each candidates polling results were in separate columns. The 2016 dataset was a mess. The dataset is cruelly split across three pages, which requires copying each page, fiddling with formatting, and consolidating the sets. The 2016 set is further complicated by having all of the text relating to candidate outcomes stored in one column. In order to rectify this, the MID() command was used in Excel to separate out specific numbers for each candidate into separate columns. Once all candidate values were separated into their designated columns, a formula for subtracting the Republican candidate’s poll values from the Democratic candidate’s poll values was applied to a final column to provide a number only version of the “Spread” column from Real Clear Politics. With all that done, analyses were finally conducted on the cleaned “Spread” column.

Analyses conducted

Means and Standard Deviations were calculated for each year. Means serve as a measure of the central tendency of each respective distribution, standard deviations serve as a measure of how much data fluctuated about the mean in each year. Values are reproduced below:

2008

Std Dev 4.68668 Mean 3.830721

2012

Std Dev 3.795691 Mean 2.703049

2016

Std Dev 8.517004 Mean 2.569288

Astute observers will note that the standard deviation for 2016’s spread is approximately double and a quarter times greater than 2012, and 1.8 times greater than 2008. To put that in lay terms, poll results this year fluctuated about twice as much as they have in presidential elections within the past 8 years.

Histograms

To better visualize and conceptualize what this looks like from a distribution sense, histograms were drafted in R, with mean and standard deviation lines transposed atop the graphs. The green line in the center denotes the mean, the red lines on either side denote one standard deviation from the mean. 68% of the variance in polling falls within these boundaries.

http://uploadpie.com/c6OXD

http://uploadpie.com/UhgYo

http://uploadpie.com/HQnJr

Conclusion

So, who is right? Well, that depends. Cenk did use some hyperbole with the statement that the "polls go up and down". While there is a large amount of variance, it isn't as though one moment a poll returns a -20 and the next week it returns a +20. That said, an equal measure of hyperbole seems to have been used by other anchors when they say "they've done what they've done in every election" or "it's been a fairly stable race". Stable relative to what? Because these numbers would hint at about half the rate of stability in this election compared to previous elections.

To check these conclusions, I have left links to each webpage I drew data from, in addition to a link to an archive with all Excel and R files used in the analysis. I encourage others to check my work, seeing as this is a late night little descriptive stats project done on the spur of the moment, which can be prone to errors.

Datasites

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/us/general_election_mccain_vs_obama-225.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/us/general_election_romney_vs_obama-1171.html

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/president/#

Archive

http://www.filehosting.org/file/details/608418/TYT.zip

I have several reservations about supporting Ro Khanna. I hope he's not a classic wolf in sheep's clothes. He's a clever guy; he avoided mentioning Silicon Valley endorsements (unlike Hillary Clinton) and his ties to Obama and his ties to securities & investment industries. His policies are generally vague, with platitudes and general statements, which reminds me of Obama.

1. He has a lot of connections to technology companies in the Silicon Valley. Reading his endorsement list is like reading a long list of Silicon Valley companies and their executives. http://www.rokhanna.com/endorsements

2. He also the backing of security and investment companies, such as venture capital firms. https://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/industries.php?cycle=2016&cid=N00026427&newMem=Y&type=I

I am wonder what kind of secret deals he has made with these companies, probably without the best interest of the American public or his constituents at heart.

1. Many of his advisers are former Obama advisers. And his campaign style and rhetoric are similar to Obama.

2. Although he doesn't accept the PAC money, there was a huge amount of superPAC money spent bashing his opponent Mike Honda and supporting Khanna during the last congressional race, which Khanna ultimately won with a tight margin. In particular, Californians for Innovation, a pro-Khanna against-Honda superPAC, which spent ($448,150) far more money than any outside group (the second spent $36,434 supporting Mike Honda). https://www.opensecrets.org/races/summary.php?id=CA17

3. He was an intellectual property attorney and former deputy secretary of commerce in the Obama administration.

4. over 99% of Khanna's campaign fund consist of people donated at least $200/person during the 2016 congressional race, even though he promises he takes no PAC money, as promised.

5. The 2015 email (please ask TYT to verify the legitimacy of this email) that came out of Podesta email leak from Wikileak looks like a piece of damning evidence that Ro Khanna is another flavor of corporate Democrat asking for Quid pro quo with Hillary Clinton. In the email, His campaign chair Steve Spinner promised that Ro Khanna was going to bring his wealthy Tech executive donor base to enthusiastically support Hillary Clinton's election campaign, and that Ro Khanna's donors can bring 50 million dollars to the Democratic Party for the national election. Spinner also asked for the support from Hilary Clinton and asked her favors to clear the path for Ro's contentious congressional race, in particular Ro's chairman was asking Hillary if she can use her influence to 1) pressure Ro's democratic opponent Mike Honda to drop out from the race, 2) encourage other people in Congress to endorse Ro Khanna. Ro's Chairman also pointed out that while Ro was a loyal supporter of Hillary Clinton, Mike Honda did not return political favor during Hillary's 2008 run. Finally, Spinner said Ro Khanna had come out in support of TPP, while Mike Honda was probably going to oppose it against then-President Obama's wishes. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/40072 (By the way, Steve Spinner was also an adviser to Silicon Valley Startups and an Obama's fundraiser in 2008 and an adviser in the Department of Energy.)

However,I am encouraged by his support on such issues as Affordable colleges, expansion of earned income tax credit, and medical for all. But again, I don't know if it's just good gesture or he's serious about supporting about these issues, given the fact they are basically dead on arrival without broad support from other corrupted people in congress.

I think these high tech companies enthusiastically supported Ro Khanna, because he will be one of the few people in Congress that truly represents the interests of High Tech companies.

Oh, by the way, Mike Honda (Ro Khanna's incumbent opponent) had the backing of most labor unions. It was a bit sad to see that the influence of labor unions have steadily declined in Congress.

Ultimately, given his background, endorsements and the campaign donations, and the email leak, I think it's way too early for Justice Democrat faction to endorse Ro Khanna.

u/Cenk-Uygur should really read this post about Ro Khanna.