…continuing on yesterday’s post. More assorted “odds and sods”:

I thought Boston fans were supposed to have class, but judging from what happened during the Red Sox victory parade I guess that’s not the case. What fu**ing idiot would throw cans of beer at a parade? I’d I’m the Red Sox, Pats, Bruins, or Celtics any future victory celebrations get held at Fenway, Foxboro, or the Garden. It’s so sad to see our society can’t get together for large-scale celebrations without having it ruined by a bunch of a**holes. But that’s today’s culture for you.

Today, for me, used to be the worst day of the year when I lived back In Massachusetts (or Kentucky, for the matter). The first day after turning the clocks back. All of a sudden, you’re having to drive home from work in the dark. Talk about feeling that fall is over, bring on the winter, snow, and cold, and a world of light has gone dark. I never had the SAD, but I could sure understand why people got it.

OK, lesson from The Great White Shank: did I, or did I not provide a guide to “what to watch for” leading up to the mid-term elections? If you recall, I posted to watch for three main things: 1) where the national party money was going, 2) the national pollsters and mainstream media tempering enthusiasm about the so-called “blue wave” and Democrats upcoming performance, and 3) where the “big guns” are going to as far as ginning up enthusiasm was concerned.

…so lookee here: on the Democratic side, you have the so-called “celebrity know-it-all and pollster Nate Silver (he of “538” fame basically saying he hasn’t a clue as to what’s going to happen on Tuesday – he’s got his built-in excuse “the pollsters were wrong” all ready to go.
Same with Cornell Belcher. And, all of a sudden you have the mainstream media trying to play it both ways, but headlines aside, they’re saying the same thing: no one really knows what’s going to happen. I know this: seeing Barack Obama pulled out of his retirement to shill for votes in Florida and Georgia ought to tell you a lot.

…what bugs me so much about the Silver and FOX News is their reliance on polls for their talking points. And FOX News is the worst, with the insufferable Chris Stirewalt spewing highlight from FOX’s polls, which were amongst the worst in 2016. Let me ask y’all this: if you care about this kind of thing and research it (as I do), is there anything you see at all out there that has changed in pollsters methodologies since 2016, when they were basically all wrong? They still use past performance and outdated party identification ratios to develop “horse race” headlines. They don’t bother to project changes in current voting patterns based on what happened in 2016.

…for example, they based their polling in 2016 based on what happened in 2014 and were blown out of the water. Now they’re doing the same thing, basing their 2018 voting projections based on what happened in 2014. Here’s what they are missing:

…there are three main flaws in polling these days, and no one basically knows how to fix it: 1) the oversaturation of high-visibility races to the point where people stop responding, thereby missing emerging trends; 2) they put too much reliance on people who have land lines or who answer their phones during the day, thereby missing folks who work for a living or refuse to answer phones displaying numbers they don’t recognize; 3) they miss Trump supporters or voters (two different kinds of folks) who will simply refuse to respond because they despise pollsters and the media, or (this is important), lie to pollsters because they fear retribution of some scale if their support for the President were to ever get out.

…we Trump supporters know what it’s like to be harangued and badgered by those who don’t understand or respect our support for PDJT, and the climate out there is so hostile to us that you have friends, family, or acquaintances who simply can’t handle or fathom your support for the president. In the best of cases it’s just an unhealthy conversation that results in everyone deciding to stay away from talking politics, but we’ve all heard of people losing friends, being cut off from their families, losing their jobs, or even being threatened or suffering physical harm if they dare to express their Trump support in public or on social media.

…so what I’m basically saying is this: don’t be surprised if come Tuesday you feel as if you’re watching a 2016 election night rerun on the cable news networks. They simply cannot – or refuse to – understand that Donald J. Trump is a transformative force in American politics, the most transformative since at least FDR. I’ll have more to say on this in my next post, where yours truly will make his predictions for Tuesday, so let’s just leave it at that.

…Bottom line: if you are basing your life or emotional well-being on what will happen Tuesday based on what the pollsters are telling you this weekend, be warned you just may be in for a rude shock. Because they don’t know. And they know they don’t know.

Enough about politics, a word about my golf game. Have had a couple really good sessions working into my short game and downswing a suggestion given to me by my Goodboys friend Killer while hitting balls back in New Hampshire several weeks ago. I was having trouble with my short game, so he suggested I make sure that when my club makes contact with the ball my shaft is straight down, not leaning one way or the other. And it has been a godsend! Which then got me thinking later on: if that’s the case, shouldn’t it be likewise when hitting all my clubs? So that’s what I have been trying to do: making sure at impact that my arms and shaft are straight. Not only has it resulted in better results with my 5-iron, hybrids, 5-wood and driver, but overall it has helped me to stay on top of the ball, given me a wider swing arc, and slowed down my tempo. Can’t wait for my own golf season to start next weekend (more on that in a upcoming post).