George Rebane

Hillary’s motto has been ‘CYA all the way’ for decades, ever since she served as a junior lawyer on the Watergate investigation.  Her email cover-ups are just the latest.  The House has subpoenaed “all relevant” emails to the Banghazi debacle.  But since she ran her private email server out of her house, Congress and we will never know the ‘all’ part before anyone can sort through them to find the ‘relevant’ emails.  Since ‘all’ is the superset of ‘relevant’, her faithful sysops manager can get rid of the ‘all’ part that contains the embarrassing ‘relevant’ items.  Yet another reason to oppose her candidacy.

Before her email revelations, she had been making noises about declaring her candidacy in April.  Now, with the pushback some Dems are giving her on this, that declaration may not come about.  Perhaps Rep Trey Gowdy’s committee investigating Benghazi may yet turn up something that will save the country from another opaque progressive.  I set the likelihood ratio that this email imbroglio will scotch her candidacy at 0.8, which says in other words that the prob that such evidence gives rise to a non-candidacy is 25% higher than the prob that such evidence still induces her to run.  This pulls Hillary down from 0.791 to 0.752.

On the other hand, this does raise the prob that some other Dem will emerge from the weeds to decide that Hillary is damaged goods and this will give them a chance at the golden ring.  So given the email fiasco, I judge that the likelihood ratio equals two that someone else from the ‘Other’ category will run.  That ol’ Joe is keeping quiet during all of this does not provide any additional info on what his 2016 hopes might be; same for Lizzy Warren.  Other then gets bumped up from 0.667 to 0.800.

Dr Ben Carson has formed an exploratory committee for his potential candidacy.  Given his reception across that country and recently at CPAC, this signals a high likelihood ratio of about 10 that he will run.  This takes Carson from 0.500 to 0.909.  At the same time, the likelihood that some other Repub will emerge from the ‘Other’ category is about 0.5 upon hearing of Ben’s new committee and JebB’s growing strength.  This reduces Other from 0.333 to 0.200.

Rand Paul’s good showing at CPAC gives that evidence a likelihood ratio of three that he’ll run.   This raises Paul from 0.500 to 0.750.  And I think that Huckabee has got to be rethinking his chances within his post-CPAC quietude.  I give him a likelihood of 0.7 that he’ll now go on to declare his candidacy.