The Democrat Thread

[HuskyCaucasian]

Man, that Obama guy sure sucks at catching terrorists.

[BigSqwert]

Sullivan:

 

Isn't it telling that as Cheney spent Sunday morning attacking the president for not being serious about the war on terror (by which he seems to mean solely Obama's refusal to commit war crimes), Biden must have already known about the capture of Mullah Baradar? The administration could have blown Cheney out of the water, but, of course, chose not to.

 

Why?

 

Because they are serious about national security and do not put domestic political games before it. Unlike Cheney, who never wasted an opportunity to use a war to score political points at home. In the end, I believe this president's calm and sincere and determined efforts to keep this country safe and to defuse the appeal of Islamist terror will be better understood and appreciated. And that he has done so by adhering to American values will go a long way to repair some small part of the damage Cheney inflicted.

[DukeNukeEm]

So then torture is justified?

Assuming we have a common definition of torture, no. But whether we like it or not it's probably going to happen and in very rare cases it probably has to happen, and those instances I would prefer to not even know about it.

 

Or then so we should bring back civics tests for voters?

I'm referring more on an international level, our domestic political history is pretty awful.

[Balta1701]

So, there was one other person who had been trying to get on the Indiana Senate Primary ballot against Bayh, Tamyra d'Ipppolito, a cafe owner from Bloomington. As of yesterday it seemed like she had about 23 twitter followers and had raised $60 on ActBlue. And she's a former Lehman Bros. employee.

 

Yesterday she was a few thousand signatures short of the needed number, but today it appears that, unless she's received some questionable assistance in getting those remaining signatures, she'll qualify for the primary ballot. That would mean the only way that she would not be the nominee is if the Indiana Democrats could mount a successful write-in campaign against her in the primary.

[southsider2k5]

So, there was one other person who had been trying to get on the Indiana Senate Primary ballot against Bayh, Tamyra d'Ipppolito, a cafe owner from Bloomington. As of yesterday it seemed like she had about 23 twitter followers and had raised $60 on ActBlue. And she's a former Lehman Bros. employee.

 

Yesterday she was a few thousand signatures short of the needed number, but today it appears that, unless she's received some questionable assistance in getting those remaining signatures, she'll qualify for the primary ballot. That would mean the only way that she would not be the nominee is if the Indiana Democrats could mount a successful write-in campaign against her in the primary.

 

This is the worst case scenario for the Dems. At least if she fell short, the party could pick someone.

[NorthSideSox72]

This is the worst case scenario for the Dems. At least if she fell short, the party could pick someone.

Yeah, I really didn't see why it was a huge deal for Bayh to leave like that at first, even if you were a Dem. But his choice of timing is pretty s***ty, to the party that supported him for a long time. Not real professional.

 

[Rex Kickass]

Yeah, I really didn't see why it was a huge deal for Bayh to leave like that at first, even if you were a Dem. But his choice of timing is pretty s***ty, to the party that supported him for a long time. Not real professional.

 

Could have been orchestrated to let the party bosses choose a candidate. Which is what looks like will happen.

 

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/...#more?ref=fpblg

 

Our Eric Kleefeld has spent the morning trying to make heads or tails of what's going down in Indiana. Thing are still a bit hazy, but it looks like Democrats have avoided ending up with a political unknown as their nominee to succeed Evan Bayh in the U.S. Senate.

 

Today is the deadline for prospective candidates for the Democratic primary to file with each county clerk the petitions required by law in order to appear on the ballot. Earlier this morning Tamyra d'Ippolito -- calling her a longshot is probably too generous -- told us she already had all the signatures she needed to qualify. But shortly thereafter she told Greg Sargent that she didn't really have them but she would have them by the noon deadline.

 

Around that time, the state Democratic Party chairman, Dan Parker -- a close Bayh ally, it should be noted -- told us d'Ippolito wasn't even close to having enough signatures to qualify. By his count, she had 22 signatures filed statewide, out of the 4,500 the law requires.

 

Just now, after the noon filing deadline passed, Eric checked in with the clerk in Marion County -- the largest county in the state, where Indianapolis is located, which contains an entire congressional district. Indiana's qualifying law, like many state's, is byzantine. One requirement is that you have to have at least 500 signatures from each congressional district. The clerk tells us that d'Ippolito has filed a total of two signatures from residents of the congressional district wholly within Marion County.

 

That would seem to end the d'Ippolito boomlet -- fueled partly by conservatives looking to cause trouble for Democrats -- before it even began, but we're still confirming the particulars.

[BigSqwert]

Apparently Palin's claim that making fun of "retards" is ok if it's satire just went out the window after she berated The Family Guy folks for making fun of her.

[Balta1701]

Apparently Palin's claim that making fun of "retards" is ok if it's satire just went out the window after she berated The Family Guy folks for making fun of her.

Family Guy isn't satire.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Fox News: Study proves college makes you liberal

 

That's it: Time to start a war on education. Clearly education is BAD for America.

 

"Is it better to not go to college at all then get this kind of education?"

"Well, that's an open question"

 

Really??? Seriously? College is now evil??

[NorthSideSox72]

Fox News: Study proves college makes you liberal

 

That's it: Time to start a war on education. Clearly education is BAD for America.

 

"Is it better to not go to college at all then get this kind of education?"

"Well, that's an open question"

 

Really??? Seriously? College is now evil??

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of the GOP, institutionally, in recent years. The idea that ignorance is somehow a good thing. Its absolutely mind-boggling.

 

[HuskyCaucasian]

This is one of the most frustrating aspects of the GOP, institutionally, in recent years. The idea that ignorance is somehow a good thing. Its absolutely mind-boggling.

Yea. They said, without ACTUALLY saying it, that new ideas are bad.

[BigSqwert]

When your defacto leaders laugh at science (Rush and Beck) and the 2012 Presidential front runner for the party is as ignorant as they come then what do you expect?

[lostfan]

I like America a lot, and I'm getting a little bit sick of cliched "I remember when I started to question things!" stuff as it pertains to our history. Have people lost sight of how justified we usually are in what were trying to accomplish? Defeat the brutal dictatorships of the 30's and 40's who sought to build empire through eugenics, beat the Soviet brand of communsim which proved to be a destructive force that set much of the world back 50 or so years, eradicate international terrorism that's claimed thousands of lives... these are good things for us to be doing. We've even cleaned up after some of our messes with things like the infusion of Iraqi infrastructure development and the Marshall Plan*.

 

You all get so caught up in the means that you forget the ends; America by and large has been an overwhelmingly positive influence on the world. We've had our f***ups (Native American genocide, Latin America) but they are tiny blips compared to our successes.

 

*our track record here is not perfect, but its a step up from previous empires who left everything they couldn't loot to die.

Yeah I'm not disputing any of this, at all. Hell, even with all of the f***ups (Iraq is a pretty big one) that still probably makes the United States the most benevolent hegemon in the history of civilization. That wasn't really the point of my mini-rant though. I'm talking about kool-aid drinkers who sincerely believe the United States is incapable of doing wrong simply because of who we are. That's not patriotism, that's just being a sheep and that kind of dumb pseudo-nationalism is actually toxic and dangerous.

[StrangeSox]

Yea. They said, without ACTUALLY saying it, that new ideas are bad.

 

Except when they actually say it by advocating eliminating the 12th grade.

[lostfan]

Except when they actually say it by advocating eliminating the 12th grade.

On Amazon, if you search by categories for "keeping america stupid" all the books seem to fall into a certain category.

[kapkomet]

On Amazon, if you search by categories for "keeping america stupid" all the books seem to fall into a certain category.

 

 

Which is why college is uneducating our kids, but whatever.

[lostfan]

Not sure where you're going with that. I'm talking about Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity's books and others like them

[bmags]

Was anyone else surprised at how unpolitical their college was? I was pretty relieved, I think I would've been annoyed as hell at Madison, Wisc in 2008. All my polisci courses were so process specific it never really got into political parties. It might just be that thousands of 18-24 year olds on their own without parental influence tend to be more liberal before they find jobs and move on.

 

 

[NorthSideSox72]

Was anyone else surprised at how unpolitical their college was? I was pretty relieved, I think I would've been annoyed as hell at Madison, Wisc in 2008. All my polisci courses were so process specific it never really got into political parties. It might just be that thousands of 18-24 year olds on their own without parental influence tend to be more liberal before they find jobs and move on.

Have to agree here, about college being surprisingly apolitical. I was a Poli Sci major for undergrad, and very few classes did I detect anything I'd call bias from the instructor or the selection of materials. Not none, but, very few. As you point out though, many of those classes are not about the partisan aspect of politics anyway.

 

One class that could easily have been filled with partisan bias, was the class I took on the Presidency. First day of class, the instructor said, if he did his job right, no one in the class would know at the end of the semester what his political beliefs were. And near the end of the class, we agreed, he had managed to pull that off. I was glad to see that level of professionalism.

 

[Balta1701]

Was anyone else surprised at how unpolitical their college was? I was pretty relieved, I think I would've been annoyed as hell at Madison, Wisc in 2008. All my polisci courses were so process specific it never really got into political parties. It might just be that thousands of 18-24 year olds on their own without parental influence tend to be more liberal before they find jobs and move on.

The sad thing is...I got the opposite impression, and I don't think it was deliberate...I think it was because I was in a science, and you can't take a class on evolution or on the fossil record or on climate and just pass over the kind of questions you got from the crowd without having the whole class undermined.

[NorthSideSox72]

The sad thing is...I got the opposite impression, and I don't think it was deliberate...I think it was because I was in a science, and you can't take a class on evolution or on the fossil record or on climate and just pass over the kind of questions you got from the crowd without having the whole class undermined.

That's interesting. The hard science guy found lots of politics in college, and the poli sci guys found surprisingly little of it.

 

[Balta1701]

That's interesting. The hard science guy found lots of politics in college, and the poli sci guys found surprisingly little of it.

If you're a professor teaching a class on the geologic history of the earth and you get the "How do you know the Earth isn't 6000 years old" question, how do you answer it and not be political?

[NorthSideSox72]

If you're a professor teaching a class on the geologic history of the earth and you get the "How do you know the Earth isn't 6000 years old" question, how do you answer it and not be political?

By answering with scientific evidence, and then allowing people to either take that evidence to heart, or continue to believe in something that can't be measured. Teaching at higher levels shouldn't be about absolute answers, it should be about facts and information, and allowing for analytical thought and conculsions from your students (whether scientific or not).

 

 

[Balta1701]

By answering with scientific evidence, and then allowing people to either take that evidence to heart, or continue to believe in something that can't be measured. Teaching at higher levels shouldn't be about absolute answers, it should be about facts and information, and allowing for analytical thought and conculsions from your students (whether scientific or not).

And you wouldn't judge that type of answer to be a politically loaded one? I would.