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Cenk Crushes Cruz

This is from a couple weeks back, so I apologize in advance if it has been posted previously.

Obama forced again to rethink troop numbers in Afghanistan

Source: Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fifteen years into the war that few Americans talk about any more, conditions in Afghanistan are getting worse, preventing the clean ending that President Barack Obama hoped to impose before leaving office.

Violence is on the rise, the Taliban are staging new offensives, the Islamic State group is angling for a foothold and peace prospects are dim.

Afghanistan remains a danger zone. It's hobbled by a weak economy that's sapping public confidence in the new government. Afghan police and soldiers are struggling to hold together the country 13 months after the U.S.-led military coalition culled its numbers by 90 percent.

The bottom line: For a second time, Obama is rethinking his plan to drop U.S. troop levels from 9,800 to 5,500 before he leaves office in January 2017.

Read more: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/d429e3433da740b39a87c801a15b8ee9/obama-forced-again-rethink-troop-numbers-afghanistan

What Happens If Bernie Sanders Wins Iowa

By Nate Silver

If you’re dreaming of Bernie Sanders beating Hillary Clinton, you know how the movie begins (he wins Iowa on Monday1), how it ends (he accepts the nomination to a Simon & Garfunkel tune), and one of the major plot lines (black, Hispanic and moderate Democrats, who for now prefer Clinton to Sanders, begin to #feelthebern). You also know who the hapless villain is: Democratic party elites (aka “the establishment”), who will be fighting Sanders every step of the way.

Otherwise, the details are fuzzy. We’re not quite sure how Sanders pulls off this Wes Anderson caper.

Sanders is highly competitive in the first two states, Iowa (where he’s only narrowly behind Clinton) and New Hampshire (where he leads her). However, those states are favorable for Sanders demographically, with Democratic turnout dominated by Sanders’s base of white liberal voters. The question is whether Sanders can expand his coalition into more diverse states that will vote later on and where African-Americans, Hispanics and white moderates make up a larger share of the electorate. He won’t need to win every voter in these groups, but he’ll need enough of them to go from the roughly one-third of Democratic voters he captures in national polls now to the 50-percent-plus he’ll need eventually.

The first challenge for Sanders is that he appears to be trailing in Iowa. Our “polls-only” forecast gives Clinton a 68 percent chance of winning the state, compared with 32 percent for Sanders, on the basis of her being about 4 percentage points ahead in our weighted polling average. Our “polls-plus” forecast, which assigns some additional credit to Clinton because of her massive lead in endorsements, has Clinton as a 76 percent favorite.

To be clear, those forecasts aren’t predicting that Clinton will win Iowa by 30 percentage points. They’re projecting a close finish and saying that Clinton is somewhat more likely — a little better than a 2-to-1 favorite — to come out on top. But Iowa polls are not all that accurate, and even some polls that show Clinton ahead envision Sanders winning if his voters come out. A Sanders win wouldn’t be all that much of an upset, in other words, at least relative to where the polls stand now.

At the same time, it’s not clear that Sanders has momentum in the Hawkeye State. He made major gains when the first few polls came out in January relative to where they’d been in December, making the race much closer. But he’s never quite surpassed Clinton. In fact, Clinton’s had roughly the same 4-point lead in our polling average for a couple of weeks now. We’ll know more after the Des Moines Register, which previously had Clinton 2 points ahead, releases its excellent poll Saturday.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-happens-if-bernie-sanders-wins-iowa/