posted
It's not as simple as that-and what, now we DID do it for money, for telecomm corporate money?-but even if it was, beholden doesn't mean completely owned, but if it did unless our government was *only* beholden to telecomm corporations, in such an outlook they would also be beholden elsewhere and as you said the scope there was small, the benefits minimal. Surely Corporate America (ohhhhh scary!) could have made more efficient use of American political and military power than in that part of the world.
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: And man, does he love Ron Paul! Heh. Usually I'd have to go to the Internet for this sort of weird craziness in my politics, but it's different when you hear it with your own ears.
Even more so than getting to see it in person, it's that Paul is a really strange case in that he inspires so much zealous delusion from a cadre of followers. Never has such a complete non-starter received so much persistent talk about himself as though he were not a non-starter. And the habits of those who seriously believe he could win in the national election are, well, fun.
If a person legitimately says something like "Ron Paul is going to win the presidency because Democrats will desert Obama in droves to vote for him." you are listening to a person to whom reality does not factor in terms of predicting races.
If you find one who is willing to bet money on Paul's success, you have found an easy source of money.
(Like the guy here who is quite literally named "Mark," and I don't think he would think it's funny why I think that's funny)
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
I would hope for Ron Paul if only to get interesting debates.
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Happy caucus day! Iowa is the first state to vote on candidates today. I was actually going to be in Iowa today but I wasn't sure if the caucus would snarl traffic near cities and decided to avoid it.
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posted
Happy caucus day! Iowa is the first state to vote on candidates today. I was actually going to be in Iowa today but I wasn't sure if the caucus would snarl traffic near cities and decided to avoid it.
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posted
Last night I set my radio to non static to wake me up in the morning. It turned out to be whatever station plays Rush Limbaugh at 10 am. Gosh I hate that guy. I am especially offended by his "Talent on loan from G-d" tagline. How about "Talent G-d had no particular use for and left lying around in an easily reachable place"? Then he spent 5 minutes complaining about Operation Chaos. I guess he was mad people weren't crediting him for inventing it. Anyway.
I used to enjoy pollster.com, but now it's part of Huffpost? Not happy.
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quote: Then he spent 5 minutes complaining about Operation Chaos. I guess he was mad people weren't crediting him for inventing it.
"You asked me once," said O'Brien, "what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is Limbaugh's recording studio."
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posted
In case folks were wondering, with 95.5% of precincts reporting Santorum is leading Romney by 80 votes, and they both have the same percentage of the votes.
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posted
97%, and within 44 votes of each other. I think it being basically a tie, is good for Romney. Santorum has virtually no presence in New Hampshire and he only has another week to stump there.
Not that I want Romney to win the election, but I sure as heck don't understand why Santorum is suddenly in contention. It only cements my bias that Iowans are as fickle as any other group of voters.
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posted
Blackblade, I think Santorum's surge has everything to do with timing. There's been a general sense of 'anyone but Romney' coming from Republicans this whole campaign season. Every candidate had their turn in the spotlight. They all messed up in one way or another, and it just happened to be Santorum's turn coming into the primary.
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Strider: I've heard that theory as well, and that had the primary come a week later it would have been all Romney, but I just don't see how people so easily throw their votes around. I mean I understand "not Romney" but is there really anybody who says, "Anybody but Romney?" Also, this slew of candidates who have risen to prominence and then fallen to oblivion happens so fast I really feel like Iowans can't be predicted, you just do your best and expect nonsense to reign.
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posted
One thing I did notice is that Romney carried virtually all the counties with large caucuses, and focused his efforts in the North East and South West. Santorum basically won way more smaller caucuses.
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posted
I'm not sure how many people really say "anybody but Romney", but I have gotten the sense that many republicans would rather not have Romney, and so keep flirting with whatever candidate happens to be surging at any given moment. It's difficult to make sense of Santorum's showing tonight otherwise. It's not like he's been polling well there the whole time right?
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posted
If you look at the actual number of votes these people are getting, the whole thing comes across as rather silly.
Paul is running like 3,000 votes behind Santorum and Romney. Third place is still pretty decent for a caucus, but come on, how is that an important enough number for them all to really be basically tired. You can't really take those numbers, or Iowa, and upscale it to pull statistical significance in anyway as to electability or what not.
It only proves how misguided the media is in hyping Iowa, and how silly it is that Iowa goes first.
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: I mean I understand "not Romney" but is there really anybody who says, "Anybody but Romney?"
There are plenty who state plainly they intend to vote for whichever candidate in the GOP primary stands to prevent Romney from being the candidate, and that all the other candidates are acceptable in this regard.
The reasons vary but you end up with the Anyone But Romney vote cycling with help from this.
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quote:Ron Paul may have officially come in third in tonight's Iowa caucuses, but if his organizational strategy went off as planned, it is possible that the Texas Congressman is actually the real winner of the state's Republican nominating contest.
Senior advisors for Paul's coalitions team told Business Insider this week that the campaign's organizational strategy was focused not only on getting as many votes as they can, but in making sure that their volunteers stuck around after the voting to make sure that they were nominated as delegates to the county's Republican convention — the first step towards being appointed as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
That's because Iowa's Republican caucuses are actually non-binding — it's technically just a straw poll. The only thing that will get Paul's — or any other candidate's — Iowa supporters to Tampa next year is if they stuck around and volunteered, or were elected, as delegates.
Or not! Or maybe!
MORE POPCORN FOR THE BROKEN U.S. PRIMARY SYSTEM
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
quote:Originally posted by pooka: Chief O'Brien?
A reference to 1984 by George Orwell.
From what I hear the big thing about Iowa is that it'll thin the herd, anyone who doesn't do well out of Iowa who wasn't already doing decent will fold em in.
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quote:Ron Paul may have officially come in third in tonight's Iowa caucuses, but if his organizational strategy went off as planned, it is possible that the Texas Congressman is actually the real winner of the state's Republican nominating contest.
Senior advisors for Paul's coalitions team told Business Insider this week that the campaign's organizational strategy was focused not only on getting as many votes as they can, but in making sure that their volunteers stuck around after the voting to make sure that they were nominated as delegates to the county's Republican convention — the first step towards being appointed as a delegate to the Republican National Convention.
That's because Iowa's Republican caucuses are actually non-binding — it's technically just a straw poll. The only thing that will get Paul's — or any other candidate's — Iowa supporters to Tampa next year is if they stuck around and volunteered, or were elected, as delegates.
posted
Bachman is set to drop out any moment now, and Perry has gone back to Texas to determine if he will continue his campaign.
Anyone see Newt's speech last night? I thought he was going to combust. He looked so mad during the speech.
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It's also worth noting that gingrich was the prime target of SuperPAC's flexing their muscles:
quote:Born out of a Supreme Court decision in 2010 that lifted the lid on campaign contributions in a case known as Citizens United, the shadowy but entirely legal groups spent $12.9 million through Dec. 31, according to the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity.
Much of that was directed toward the 122,000 Iowa Republicans who cast ballots Tuesday. The largest spender was a super PAC supporting Romney called Restore Our Future.
It is run by Carl Forti, the political director of Romney's failed 2008 campaign. Restore Our Future's top fundraiser was a fundraiser for Romney's current presidential campaign until he joined the super PAC last summer.
Hard-hitting TV ads funded by the group sank the campaign of onetime Iowa front-runner Newt Gingrich with a $4.1 million onslaught of TV ads in the final weeks before the caucuses. The former House speaker finished a distant fourth Tuesday, with half as many votes as Romney.
Unlike traditional political action committees, super PACs cannot legally communicate with the campaign they are supporting. So Romney could - and did - claim that he wasn't coordinating with Restore Our Future.
"It's the Tony Soprano strategy," said Dennis Goldford, a professor of political science at Drake University in Des Moines who has studied the caucuses up close for nearly three decades. "Your hands are clean, but you let somebody else do the dirty work for you."
posted
Santorum is such a dope. Those students actually come off as dirt stupid, though. God, I'm getting flashbacks to all the students I've had who can't defend their views but just assert them over and over.
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posted
Interesting note: Romney got almost exactly the same number of votes in 2012 as he did in 2008 in Iowa. It was off by less than a dozen, I believe.
Despite what the mainstream media says, I continue to believe that if the others drop out fast enough (and losing Bachmann and Perry (if Perry is really out) this fast was a big help) then Romney is toast. 75% of the vote is looking for someone else, and even if that vote is split 50-50, both those candidates make Romney the number three guy in every race. With those two out, perhaps Huntsman is out after New Hampshire, it's really down to Santorum, Paul, Gingrich and Romney. There will be a big shake-up, and votes will start to realign. These are still some pretty small states in the long run. If we lose one or two of these other guys, like Gingrich, who may know he's going to lose but might stand aside if it means Romney loses as well (since he HATES Romney), then Santorum becomes the winner of this game of hot potato.
It could still happen, but it relies on politicians giving up on the presidency rather fast. Romney was so praiseful of Santorum in his "victory" speech because he wants as many also-rans in the race as possible to dilute the anyone-but-Romney vote. Every drop out that comes makes his victory less than sure.
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It is nice, but its far from original. The first time I heard this argument/analogy was back in the 70s in regard to the Panama Canal zone.
The video reminds of what I see as the big Ron Paul problem. Ron Paul is the only candidate talking about what I see as some of the major problems facing America but the solutions he is proposing for these problems are ludicrous.
Unfortunately, a lot of people who agree with him about the problems are embracing his solutions with out criticism because no one else is even addressing the problems. And on the flip side, criticisms of his solutions end up persuading people to discount his analysis of the problems.
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posted
I'm becoming more and more convinced that the politicians with strong political ideals are the bane of good government. Before I go any further, let me explain what I mean by strong political ideals -- I mean fierce loyalty and near religious devotion to a political ideology that include not only a vision for how society should function but also moral commitment to a set of methods for achieving that goal. In America today, tea partiers devoted intransigently to reducing taxes and the size of government are examples of excessive political idealism. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the OWS people religiously devoted to the consensus decision making model, no matter the cost.
Governments exist in order to make it possible for people with conflicting interests to live together harmoniously. If there were no conflicts, there would be no need for laws or courts or police or armies, in short no need for politicians or governments. When peoples interests are in conflict, its impossible for everyone to get everything they want. That makes finding acceptable compromises the central function of government. A good comprise is one that optimizes the total happiness of those involved and distributes the pain and reward fairly among opposing parties. In a good compromise, every side gives and takes. Good compromises happen when all parties respect their opponents as deserving human beings. Good compromises happen when people are able see that they share good values with their opponents, even though they may weigh those values differently. Good compromises happen when people are humble and willing to consider the possibility that better alternatives exist and that they could be wrong.
Good governments seek balance so that everyone wins a little and looses a little. The best governments are those that are able to think outside the box to find novel solutions where everyone looses less and wins more of what's most important to them.
Bad governments (like bad marriages and friendships) are those whose compromises are always imbalanced. Where the rewards consistently favor one party and the other party consistently bares more of the pain. Strong ideals actually lead to bad governing because they embody pride and consider compromise inherently evil.
The political idealist believes they know the perfect way. If you disagree, you are an enemy of perfection. Political idealists can only see opponents as enemies to be defeated and conflicts as battles to be won. Because the idealist knows the perfect way, any deviation from that is a concession to evil. As Ayn Rand put it
quote:In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromiser is the transmitting rubber tube."
To an idealist, conflict is always about good vs. evil so compromise is always a concession to evil. Compromise is always bad. The idealist feels a moral obligation to fight compromise at any price. The opponents of their ideal, are fighting against what's morally right. They are not respected persons whose views and needs deserve consideration, they are enemies and agents of evil, who deserve to loose in every fight.
And that attitude is the exact opposite of what leads to good government. It doesn't matter what the ideal is, that kind of intransigent devotion to any political ideal leads to bad government, period. Any politician with that attitude is not fit to govern because they oppose the very essence of governing which is seeking compromise.
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posted
Eric Cantor recently said in an interview something to the effect that his side would never compromise. The interviewer asked if he was ready to compromise with Obama and he hedged by saying he was ready to cooperate, but not compromise. When asked about the difference, he got a little wishy-washy and said something about the evils of compromising your principles, but what actually comprises "cooperate" was left rather vague. Looks like they're still being ensnared in the web of their own rhetoric from the past couple years, where compromise is still a bad word on their side.
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posted
It's just so strange, from a party that purports to respect and even revere the Founding Fathers. I mean for pity's sake, 50m in a junior high school class when they go over the Constitution will tell you that, like it or not, they were all about compromise, bitterly disputed compromise but compromise nonetheless.
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Did the 500 billion$ budget cuts to the US military go through?
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The cuts aren't schedule to take effect for another year, so Congress still has plenty of time to fiddle with them.
But from Obama's speech the other day, it certainly sounds as if they're planning for them to stick.
Sadly, $500 billion is just a drop in the bucket. It won't decrease overall military spending, it'll just slow its growth.
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posted
Meanwhile our military will have all the usual stagnation since we can't afford this anymore, and then when some seriously large country becomes belligerent we'll spend twice as much rebuilding what we used to have.
Then we will of course castigate the president in charge because he doesn't have a crystal ball. I was just thinking. What is the longest stretch of time the US has ever gone without being in a state of armed conflict with somebody? I'm not sticking to war being declared, that's a girlfriend we're just too ashamed of admitting we still visit.
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quote:Magna Carta Controversy of the Day: State lawmakers in New Hampshire are considering a bill that would require all proposed legislation to have a basis in one of the most important declarations of rights in history.
No, not the U.S. Constitution. The Magna Carta.
Under House Bill 1580, set to be introduced by House Republicans Bob Kingsbury, Tim Twombly and Lucien Vita, all new legislation would have to quote the 800-year old document that outlines feudal barons’ demands of King John of England.
The lawmakers say their intention is to honor the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, but they also believe it’s “a document that still functions.”
“This is a little bit older than the Constitution, but the same thought is there,” said Vita.
The “functioning” document includes such totally-not-racist laws as “If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age.”
The state Democratic Party also supports the bill. Sort of.
“I appreciate all the hard work the Republican legislators are putting into the effort to make them look like extremists,” said Ray Buckley, spokesman for the Democrats. “Saves us the trouble.”
Fortunately, House Bill 1580 doesn’t include any actual penalties for failing to cite the Magna Carta, so even if it passes, New Hampshire’s legal system won’t necessarily be sent back to the 13th century.
quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: Meanwhile our military will have all the usual stagnation since we can't afford this anymore, and then when some seriously large country becomes belligerent we'll spend twice as much rebuilding what we used to have.
Then we will of course castigate the president in charge because he doesn't have a crystal ball. I was just thinking. What is the longest stretch of time the US has ever gone without being in a state of armed conflict with somebody? I'm not sticking to war being declared, that's a girlfriend we're just too ashamed of admitting we still visit.
Decreasing manpower in exchange for keeping some vital systems is a smart play, as is axing weapons systems we really don't need. We have to think realistically about what the next threat is going to be. Air power and the Navy are good enough to keep everyone at bay, and we aren't seriously lacking for tracked vehicles considering it's been 60 years since there has been a major tank on tank battle fought between the United States and another major power. So what are we really worried about? Better to draw down to a realistic level of force and save the money now. If we need it in a decade, we can ramp up training fast enough if it's soldiers we need, and we can dig tanks out of storage, but why spend more money than we spent to fight the Cold War without an obvious enemy to fight? It makes zero sense.
You also have to ask yourself, how many of the fights we've been involved in in the last half century were necessary and how many were manufactured? If we stop getting ourselves into unproductive and unnecessary conflicts, we won't need nearly as much strength has administrations have carped about in the last decade.
You asked when what was the biggest stretch of time we weren't actively engaged in a war, and that's a big question. Korea, and then Vietnam, but what do you consider the beginning date for Vietnam? And do you count the Cold War as a whole? We were never in a shooting war with the USSR, but we kept ourselves in such a state of readiness that we might as well have been for all the money it cost us. End of Vietnam to Gulf War I is probably your answer though.
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posted
Ok, must vent frustration, I STRONGLY DISLIKE RICK SANTORUM! I think he may have replaced Newt as my least favorite candidate.
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: Ok, must vent frustration, I STRONGLY DISLIKE RICK SANTORUM! I think he may have replaced Newt as my least favorite candidate.
oh oh oh oh oh oh
that's my cue
quote:Santorum also had a tense moment when a student asked him about health care and the Christian responsibility of caring for the poor.
The student said he didn’t “think God appreciates the fact that we have 50 to 100,000 uninsured Americans dying due to a lack of healthcare every year,” citing a 2009 study out of Harvard University.
“Dying?” Santorum answered before going back and forth about the validity of the study.
“The answer is not what can we do to prevent deaths because of a lack of health insurance. There’s — I reject that number completely, that people die in America because of lack of health insurance,” Santorum said to a crowd of 100.
“People die in America because people die in America. And people make poor decisions with respect to their health and their healthcare. And they don’t go to the emergency room or they don’t go to the doctor when they need to,” he said. “And it’s not the fault of the government for not providing some sort of universal benefit.
posted
I just got network TV back, so this was the first debate I was actually able to watch. I don't know how you guys have been able to do it. After about 30 minutes I had to change the channel, and it's a good thing I had not yet eaten dinner or I may well have vomited.
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quote:Originally posted by DDDaysh: I just got network TV back, so this was the first debate I was actually able to watch. I don't know how you guys have been able to do it. After about 30 minutes I had to change the channel, and it's a good thing I had not yet eaten dinner or I may well have vomited.
You assume people watched these things all the way through. I saw highlights and breakdowns. I would never subject myself to the full spectacle.
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quote:such totally-not-racist laws as “If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains under age.”
Technically, that may not have been all that racist. At the time, Christians were forbidden from lending with interest, so the only lenders who did lend with interest were Jews. (Of course, the main reason they went into money-lending was because they were forbidden from owning real property. That part is the racist bit, really.)
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quote:Following Rick Santorum’s sudden and unanticipated rise to prominence during the Iowa caucuses, there has been a rush to review the earlier and more obscure phase of his presidential campaign to see what newsworthy tidbits might have been overlooked when the spotlights were all shining on Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.
One of Santorum’s gems in the rough was initially uncovered back in November by the ThinkProgress blogger Eli Clifton and Philip Weiss, and returned to this week by a blogger at The Jewish Week . Santorum said, among other things, “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians.”
It was a reminder that two weeks before Newt Gingrich claimed that Palestinians are an invented people, Santorum had also denied their existence.
But whereas Gingrich’s vilification of the Palestinians was merely a nasty example of crude cynicism, Santorum’s seemed both more sincere and more intimately tied up with his ignorance not only of the question of Palestine but—more alarmingly perhaps—of American history as well.
In an informal discussion with a young man, which was aired on CNN, Santorum also said that Israel was the victim of an “aggressive attack on the part of Jordan and other countries,” that it had gained the West Bank in war—which is to say, fair and square. He said it is no more realistic to expect Israel to give back the West Bank than it is to expect the US to give “Texas and Mexico back,” since they too were gained through war.
That’s not a typo, not a verbal slip. Santorum refers to Mexico as part of the United States three separate times in the two-minute interview.
In fact, Santorum’s mangling of Palestinian history is the least interesting thing about his statement. It was so baldly false that it raised eyebrows even at the New York Times and the Washington Post. But it is still worth quoting in full in order to reveal what this vertiginous implosion of history, logic, syntax and grammar—a kind of Santorumian sublime—might tell us about what goes on inside the head of this man who would be president ...
quote:Originally posted by Blayne Bradley: To be fair maybe he meant New Mexico?
I think this has to be what he meant. Or the parts of Mexico we ceded from them in the Mexican-American war.
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posted
So Texas, all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a few other places? The Mexican Cession was HUGE. It actually would have been dramatically bigger, but several senators negotiated at the last minute to shrink the size of our acquisition because of the free soil issue. Same thing with the Gadsden Purchase.
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quote:Originally posted by Lyrhawn: So Texas, all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and a few other places? The Mexican Cession was HUGE. It actually would have been dramatically bigger, but several senators negotiated at the last minute to shrink the size of our acquisition because of the free soil issue. Same thing with the Gadsden Purchase.
Texas wasn't part of the Mexican Cession, we stole it in the "Texas Annexation" in 1845, along with Oklahoma, most of Colorado and New Mexico and a tad of Wyoming. The Mexican Cession included California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, another corner of Wyoming and the remainder of Colorado and New Mexico.
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