The Democrat Thread

[StrangeSox]

Prof. Groseclose, author of the book Left Turn: How Liberal Media Bias Distorts the American Mind that purports to show that the media is slanted to the left "without a doubt," has been guest-blogging over at the libertarian lawyer blog Volokh Conspiracy.

 

The basic assumptions underlying his research are being torn apart pretty heavily, both in the comments and by another regular blogger there. A few more articles by each, a "case study" of an LA Times article and another post by the Prof., but his work isn't being treated very kindly there.

 

The strongest criticisms seem to be what think tanks get included (Groseclose relies on some random internet list of the "Top 200" which doesn't include groups like API or the USCC but includes the 'geonomy society'), how those think tanks get rated (ACLU gets a slight right-ward lean because it was cited a bunch of times by conservatives Congressmen during McCain-Feingold and not much else) and whether the methodology even makes sense in the first place (why should journalist citations match the 'average politician' citations?).

[StrangeSox]

I don't even know what to say to this...

 

Alston's cable notes that autopsies conducted on the 10 civilians killed during the raid determined that they had been handcuffed and shot in the head. Of the 10 people killed, four were women and five were children younger than the age of five. Alston also disputed the idea that the house was destroyed in the firefight, maintaining that it was still standing until the U.S. called in an airtstrike.

 

"Troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them," Alston wrote. "After the initial MNF [Multi-National Force] intervention, a U.S. air raid ensued that destroyed the house."

 

Alston's account matches that of the Joint Coordination Center in Tikrit, a regional security center set up with American military assistance and staffed by U.S.-trained Iraqi police officers. McClatchy noted that the cable also backed up what neighbors and the doctor who performed the autopsies told Knight-Ridder -- which is now owned by McClatchy -- immediately after the incident.

 

"The American forces gathered the family members in one room and executed 11 persons, including five children, four women and two men. Then they bombed the house, burned three vehicles and killed their animals," the Joint Coordination Center's report said.

 

[BigSqwert]

I don't even know what to say to this...

 

Despicable if true.

 

[StrangeSox]

The Republican War on (Certain Kinds of) Voting

 

After the recount debacle in Florida in 2000, allowing voters to cast their ballots early emerged as a popular bipartisan reform. Early voting not only meant shorter lines on Election Day, it has helped boost turnout in a number of states — the true measure of a successful democracy. "I think it's great," Jeb Bush said in 2004....But Republican support for early voting vanished after Obama utilized it as a key part of his strategy in 2008.

 

....That may explain why both Florida and Ohio — which now have conservative Republican governors — have dramatically curtailed early voting for 2012. Next year, early voting will be cut from 14 to eight days in Florida and from 35 to 11 days in Ohio, with limited hours on weekends. In addition, both states banned voting on the Sunday before the election — a day when black churches historically mobilize their constituents.

[NorthSideSox72]

The Republican War on (Certain Kinds of) Voting

To me, national elections and making sure everyone gets reasonably easy access to voting is a clearly and inherently national/federal issue. So I'd be in favor of national standards for how elections are held, more so than are currently present.

 

That all said, I am not sure that curtailing the number of days and hours of early voting - a practice that nary existed not that long ago - is some huge problem.

 

[StrangeSox]

To me, national elections and making sure everyone gets reasonably easy access to voting is a clearly and inherently national/federal issue. So I'd be in favor of national standards for how elections are held, more so than are currently present.

 

That all said, I am not sure that curtailing the number of days and hours of early voting - a practice that nary existed not that long ago - is some huge problem.

 

Republicans doing it in a manner that disparately affects black voters who primarily vote Democrat is a huge problem--why only block it on Sundays which just happens to be when black churches have organized voting drives in the past?. Why the sudden push-back against early voting which just happens to have been a large part of Obama's success in 2008?

[NorthSideSox72]

Republicans doing it in a manner that disparately affects black voters who primarily vote Democrat is a huge problem--why only block it on Sundays which just happens to be when black churches have organized voting drives in the past?. Why the sudden push-back against early voting which just happens to have been a large part of Obama's success in 2008?

You misunderstand my statement. Nowhere did I say this wasn't clearly a political game - it is. That's why I feel there should be federal standards. But I also think it is true that reducing early voting days/hours isn't any type of true disenfranchisement, since there are still PLENTY of opportunities to vote, for everyone.

 

Now what does happen, that I would call material disenfranchisement, if things like what happened in Ohio in 2004 when there were clearly far more machines per registered voter in rich districts than poor districts, resulting in people waiting hours in lines or not being able to vote at all. That was material, and awful.

 

[southsider2k5]

Republicans doing it in a manner that disparately affects black voters who primarily vote Democrat is a huge problem--why only block it on Sundays which just happens to be when black churches have organized voting drives in the past?. Why the sudden push-back against early voting which just happens to have been a large part of Obama's success in 2008?

 

That also just happens to be the most common day for government entities to be closed. Locally we have been a one party democratic town since the 70's and we have never had Sunday early voting, even right before an election.

[Balta1701]

The amazing thing is...the fact that its the most common day for government offices and businesses to be closed means it would be the best day to have voting open if you actually wanted people to vote.

[StrangeSox]

That also just happens to be the most common day for government entities to be closed. Locally we have been a one party democratic town since the 70's and we have never had Sunday early voting, even right before an election.

 

I think that's two separate cases. You didn't decide to close early voting on Sundays only after seeing who turns out heavily on Sundays to vote early. Obviously, we can't know the motivation behind why poll closures, voting machine distributions, DMV availability in states with Voter ID laws etc. all seem to favor making it harder for typically Democrat voters to vote. It could simply be a coincidence, or maybe this one particular state really is while many of the other actions are not. But the evidence keeps mounting up on one side.

[StrangeSox]

Good timing with a pretty terrible article in ultra-conservative blog American Thinker:

 

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote? Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery. Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country -- which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote

 

If that's not bad enough, here's some of the comments:

 

From when the Constitution was written until about 1850, only white male property owners could vote. After 1870, former slaves could vote. Then in 1920 we had woman suffrage. In the 1960s, it became illegal to require voters to be literate. The motor voter law was passed in 1995. In 2008 it became de facto legal for Black Panthers to intimidate voters at the polls. Is anyone noticing a trend here? When the country started, voting was restricted to citizens who had a financial stake in small government. Now anyone with a pulse can vote. Eventually, you might have to fight your way into the polling place through a gauntlet of government dependents who will decide if you look like someone who will support big government candidates.

 

I have commented on the problem of universal suffrage before. It is a romantic notion of liberty, equality, and fraternity (and how did the original political movement with those ideals turn out?) It is no different than empowering all citizens to go to the local bank once a week and withdraw $100, whether they have any money in their account or not, or even whether they have an account. The future of the local bank under those circumstances would not be bright. Added together, we have enough people in the country who (1) actively wish the USA ill, (2) people who just don't care, (3) people who are actively voting their own short-term self-interest to get government handouts/money, and (4) useful idiots who have bought into the guilt trip, that it is questionable in many people's minds if an election to turn this country around can even be won, (i.e., does (1) + (2) + (3) + (4) = 50% of voters. (With restricted suffrage, this equation would most likely have a different answer and outcome for the country.) The fact is that to reverse, rather than simply slow, our nation's slide into irrelevance and oblivion would require some significant amending of the Constitution to reverse 5-6 decades of liberal judicial interpretations; that requires 2/3 of each house of Congress and a vote of 3/4 of states, and that, dear readers, just ain't gonna [sic] happen. There are simply not enough citizens left who aren't in one of the four groups named above to accomplish the changes required. In 2012 we'll see if there are even a simple majority left. I think the slide into chaos may be slowed, but I think that it is beyond the point that it can be stopped. What I don't know is what will happen when chaos arrives (martial law? suspension of civil rights and imposition of dictatorship? confiscation of weapons and/or wealth? sundering of the nation into blue and red states? use of military force to reunify the country as done once before? response of the military to such orders? blue-helmeted "peacekeepers" used against seceding red states if the U.S. military refuses to turn its weapons on departing states and citizens? or does the nation we know go out with a whimper rather than a bang as all citizens settle into a semi-comfortable equal sharing of the misery?)

 

Excellent article, but I don't think it goes far enough. We should not only purge welfare slackers and other un-Americans from the voter rolls -- including anyone who is unemployed and therefore not a producer, but voting should be proportional depending on net worth or taxes paid. No one could argue that someone making, say, $50,000 per year contributes to the well-being of the country as much as someone making millions and creating jobs. It's not even close. To argue that there is any sort of equality between workers and a job creators is pure socialism. Why not have votes apportioned based on income, wealth, or taxes paid, to make it more proportional to one's actual contribution to the country? For example, if you don't pay any taxes, you have no vote, as everyone here heartily endorses. If you pay $10,000 in taxes, you get one vote. If you pay $1,000,000 in taxes you get 100 votes. It's only fair. (I admit these numbers are arbitrary at this point, but it could be worked out.)

 

I don't know how long you can keep claiming Republican voting law changes just happen to disproportionately affect the poor and minorities when there's vocal strands of conservatism that actively promote disenfranchising the poor or basing voting rights on income levels.

[NorthSideSox72]

Good timing with a pretty terrible article in ultra-conservative blog American Thinker:

 

 

 

If that's not bad enough, here's some of the comments:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I don't know how long you can keep claiming Republican voting law changes just happen to disproportionately affect the poor and minorities when there's vocal strands of conservatism that actively promote disenfranchising the poor or basing voting rights on income levels.

Who is claiming that? And furthermore, do you really think these wing nut whack jobs represent the entire GOP?

 

[StrangeSox]

Who is claiming that?

 

Republicans, every time they pass new laws or rules changes that just happen to make it more difficult for minorities and the poor to vote in order to fight the specter of voter fraud. It's actually refreshing to see that facade pulled away and their real issue with ACORN and voter registration drives: these legitimate voters will vote, and they mostly vote Democrat, and that's a bad thing.

 

And furthermore, do you really think these wing nut whack jobs represent the entire GOP?

 

No, I said there's strands of conservatism that think that way. I don't know the size of it, but it isn't some radical fringe minority of conservatives. One of the founders of one of the bigger tea party organizations supports going back to only landed citizens being able to vote, and the "everyone needs some skin the game" (ie poor people should pay taxes if they want to vote) arguments are fairly common

Edited September 2, 2011 by StrangeSox

[StrangeSox]

 

 

The most unsettling drawing shows a Navy SEAL shooting at bin Laden, who seems to be hiding behind a niqab-wearing woman. The text on this page reads, "Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE."

 

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/01/911-co.../#ixzz1WpfZPKeT

[kapkomet]

People like you repeating this crap is part of the problem.

[StrangeSox]

lol

[mr_genius]

 

 

haha, that is a GREAT picture. i love it.

[Balta1701]

I forget what the appropriate satirical line is. Is it that we don't have enough doctors so the uninsured shouldn't be treated, or that it's too expensive to treat them, or that everyone has healthcare because they can just go to an ER?

The 24-year-old nephew of musician Bootsy Collins has died at the University Hospital in Cincinnati after a tooth infection spread to his brain.

 

Kyle Willis, an unemployed single father of a 6-year-old girl, first went to a hospital complaining of a painful toothache two weeks ago. Willis had no health insurance and couldn't afford the $27 antibiotic he was prescribed.

 

Left untreated, the infection in his tooth apparently spread to his brain. Willis was violent and delirious when an ambulance brought him to the hospital where he died Tuesday.

 

Bootsy Collins, a member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, is best known for his work with soul superstar James Brown and the '70s funk-soul-rock fusion band Parliament-Funkadelic.

[BigSqwert]

People like you repeating this crap is part of the problem.

Someone creating these f***ed up coloring books for kids ISN'T the problem? The appalled reaction from people IS the problem? SMH

[kapkomet]

Someone creating these f***ed up coloring books for kids ISN'T the problem? The appalled reaction from people IS the problem? SMH

 

 

Sure it's a problem. Why keep repeating it?

 

I forgot, Bush did this somehow and Obama followed or something.

[Balta1701]

The author of this piece is a recently retired Republican staff member who spent 28 years on the Hill working for budget and defense committee members. So, lifelong Republican.

But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.

 

To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.

 

It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.

 

The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.

 

...

 

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

 

A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).

It'd fill up 6 pages if I tried to excerpt everything. It appears to be a legitimate, cathartic rant about the people who are taking over the party he worked for.

 

[Cknolls]

I forget what the appropriate satirical line is. Is it that we don't have enough doctors so the uninsured shouldn't be treated, or that it's too expensive to treat them, or that everyone has healthcare because they can just go to an ER?

 

He was prescribed both an antibiotic and a painkiller and chose to get the painkiller and not the antibiotic, hence the ultimate price was paid. Ibuprofen or Tylenol would take of the pain.

[farmteam]

I quite liked this article:

 

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/20...tm_campaign=rss

 

It echoed/implied a lot of my thoughts on how scary it is many in this country (and yes, many seem to vote Republican, but that is probably a correlation, not a causation) seem to be turned off by intelligence, and that's a factor in their voting.

[lostfan]

The author of this piece is a recently retired Republican staff member who spent 28 years on the Hill working for budget and defense committee members. So, lifelong Republican.

It'd fill up 6 pages if I tried to excerpt everything. It appears to be a legitimate, cathartic rant about the people who are taking over the party he worked for.

Yes.

 

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)

Edited September 5, 2011 by lostfan

[BigSqwert]

Apparently Governor Perry's rain dance prayer hasn't been too effective with all of the wildfire spreading. I'm sure he won't be asking for federal assistance either knowing his views on Washington and handouts.

 

Hopefully the people down there are safe.