Governing through Reason
Open Mic May 18
Disco Queen Donna Summer
We lost a couple more this week: Donna Summer and Mary Kennedy. In response to a Facebook executive’s decision to renounce his US citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes on today’s initial public offering, two Senators have introduced the Ex-PATRIOT Act. A ton of evidence was released in the case of George Zimmerman’s shooting of Trayvon Martin. Births of non-Caucasians exceeded that of Caucasians in the United States for the first time since the days of British colonization.
And it’s Friday, so it’s your day to choose subjects. Chat away!
Don’t see an article on a particular topic, but want to talk about it somewhere? This is Open Mic. Talk about whatever you want, but stay respectful.
We create a new Open Mic every week to give a clean slate, but feel free to add to this topic at any time.
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#2 written by shortchain 1 year ago
Since it’s likely there were about three times as many people of non-European descent living in the modern borders of the USA as there were of European descent in 1787, and the natives would outnumber the newcomers until sometime after 1800, there’s an inaccuracy in that last sentence in the first paragraph.
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#4 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“I think the Chinese have come up with a solution already that meets your criteria.“
I think you’re right.…though I’m hoping we can do something that hews to the inalieanable rights outlined in the DoI and Constitution and not emulate the Chinese model.
It’s a tough world out there, though, when so many people don’t back up their freedom with even an ounce of responsibility. -
Mule,
There are ways of addressing the these situations, ways that protect freedom while also encouraging responsibility. Things like required child support payments, which help to keep fathers responsible for having fathered.
Another thing that would help is expanded access to birth control. In the particular situation you linked, there’s not enough information to tell if all those children were wanted and planned. I’d guess not, but I could be wrong. In any case, I think it certainly makes sense to put the decision about whether to have children into the hands of the potential mother.
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#7 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“Things like required child support payments, which help to keep fathers responsible for having fathered.“
Agreed. Though in this case, there are so many and he makes so little that the share of his (what I believe) minimum wage income per child is practically meaningless. They’re essentially wards of the state.
“Another thing that would help is expanded access to birth control.…“
This I can latch onto and is an area I start to break with many social conservatives. -
#8 written by mclever 1 year ago
It doesn’t seem to me to make sense to establish national policy (or anything close to that) based on such unusual situations.
But we must stop all of the Cadillac-driving Welfare Queens!
You’re right. Basing national social policy on extremely rare exceptions makes for poor policy. We might craft some law to stop the 0.001% who abuse or manipulate the system, but we mustn’t neglect the other 99.999% just in order to get one cheater. No program will be perfect, but if we can hold the “cheaters” to around 2–3%, then we’re probably doing OK.
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#10 written by mclever 1 year ago
@Mule
“Another thing that would help is expanded access to birth control.…“
This I can latch onto and is an area I start to break with many social conservatives.
Yeah, I never quite understood the anti-contraception view among extreme social conservatives, because it seems to me that the best way to reduce abortions is to reduce unwanted pregnancies in the first place. And, it solves a whole bunch of other problems by helping women remain productive in the workforce and controlling their own career paths. It gives women the opportunity to be more responsible with their own lives.
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#11 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“Anyway, situations like that are not typical. I’m sure we’d be hard-pressed to find another example of a 33-year-old man with 30 kids. It doesn’t seem to me to make sense to establish national policy (or anything close to that) based on such unusual situations.
We might craft some law to stop the 0.001% who abuse or manipulate the system, but we mustn’t neglect the other 99.999% just in order to get one cheater.“
I understand you guys’ points, but situations like this, while extremely rare to find one man capable of doing this much carnage with his semen, have a HUUUUUUGE multiplier effect. This man has fathered 30 children he seemingly can’t take care of.…let that sink in, 30!!! And while 30 is way off the normal distribution, stories are rampant of guys irresponsibly fathering 5–6 children they are unable to care for. Each with a huge multiplier effect. It would be one thing — and seems so much more manageable — to handle the parents who bring 1–2 children into the world they can’t handle, but it’s tough to get your arms around something like this. So while a guy this stupid and irresponsbie may represent only 0.001% of the people, you wind up shaving off a lot of zeroes when it comes to the actual number of kids that enter the system the rest of us have to care for, especially when you consider how the cycle is likely to be repeated in the next generation with these 30 children. Even if they average just 3 apiece, that’s 90 more in 15–30 years that will likely begin life in a very handicapped position.
Anyway, hope my rebuttal didn’t seem harsh, but I think it’s a tad naïve to dismiss it as “extremely rare.”
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I understand your concern, Mule, and it’s a valid one. Perhaps one way to address it is to make sure those 30 kids have good healthcare and education so as to improve the odds that they grow up to be healthy, responsible, productive citizens. This would reduce the likelihood of the cycle repeating. And who knows, it may turn out, 40 years from now, that one of those kids finds a cure for cancer, or becomes President.
You’re also right about the problems of trying to squeeze child support money out of this turnip. It’s an argument perhaps in favor of better-paying jobs and expanded worker protections — more union rights — so he at least has a little more money to go to his kids.
However, even with the “multiplier effect,” the number of children in these extreme cases isn’t going to be very large. The more pressing concern is the cases of one or two kids without child support, particularly if they weren’t planned in the first place. There’s far more of those, dwarfing even the numbers from the “multiplier effect” of the extreme cases.
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#14 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“Yeah, both of them.“
Make a trip to SW Tennessee and NW Mississippi sometime and I’m pretty sure I can show you more than two.…or two hundred for that matter. Belly up to the blackjack table in Tunica the first weekend of the month and listen to the stories of lament of burning through “my (government) check.” -
Mule,
It’s a tough world out there, though, when so many people don’t back up their freedom with even an ounce of responsibility.
The solution to that problem is more complex. Much of the pressure behind people taking responsibility for their actions comes from social, not legal, forces. Human beings are highly social creatures, and evolved those constructs at a time when, within a society, everybody knew everyone else. Within those societies, people who deviated from the social rules were shunned, leaving them unable to survive on their own.
In modern society, particularly in highly mobile countries like the United States, those social bonds have faded, and most people we see every day are strangers. That situation makes it much easier to dehumanize most of the humans we encounter. And that leads to more selfish behavior, which reduces personal responsibility.
I don’t have a clue how to insert a village mentality into a society of strangers.
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mclever,
I never quite understood the anti-contraception view among extreme social conservatives
I suspect it has an element of religious Darwinism to it. Religions like the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing (a.k.a. “Shakers”, who believed in absolute celibacy) had a hard time surviving, since they couldn’t produce more of them through procreation. When you consider that procreation is one of the most effective means of increasing the number of adherents to a particular theology, it makes a great deal of sense that the most successful religions over time are those who do everything possible to encourage procreation.
Consider how the Church of Latter-Day Saints, a religion a mere 190 years old, has over 14 million followers (nearly half in the US). A contributing factor to this rapid expansion is their teachings of the importance of having large numbers of children.
Clearly, supporting contraception would push a religion more in the direction of the Shakers than the Mormons.
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#17 written by WA7th 1 year ago
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#18 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
We’ve had more than our fair share of debates about “sensible regulation” versus wasteful, useless government intervention, and I think the arguments often boil down to semantics whereas the examples each side uses to justify their case are often extreme and what that person believes to be “no-brainers” in explaining why regulation, or the lack thereof, can be either good or bad.
I think this can be filed as a slam dunk of an example of a case where government interference/intervention run amok and a case where it’s definitely been “bad.“
http://www.mnn.com/food/healthy-eating/blogs/utah-school-fined-15000-for-selling-soda-during-lunch -
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Mule,
I’m not so sure it’s a “slam dunk.” If we can refuse to sell cigarettes and alcohol to minors, I don’t know how much of a stretch this is. I’d like to hear the reasoning behind the laws.
The school said it was obeying the law. This is Utah. I’d be curious to see how the law was written.
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I’ve done some research on this, and while I have found multiple news stories that say turning off vending machines is Federal law, I can’t find such a law anywhere.
Here’s the law as passed by Congress:
So it looks like the law allows the US Dept of Agriculture to set rules regarding vending machines. Such rules will, of course, acquire the force of law. I can’t find the rule that says vending machines must be turned off during lunch, but I assume it’s in the Federal Register somewhere.
It sounds to me like an overzealous USDA employee went a little nuts with the rulemaking.
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Speaking of bubbles, the Facebook IPO sucked big rocks.
The stock opened at $38 and closed at $38.23, only because the underwriting bank kept propping up the share price with buy orders set at exactly the $38.00 price.
It will be interesting to see what next week brings.
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#25 written by mclever 1 year ago
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Maybe the non-success of the Facebook IPO had something to do with Eduardo Saverin? Some Rightists wanted to make him into a Patriotic Hero for renouncing his citizenship in order to avoid paying taxes. Personally, I think that makes him a traitor, but that’s just me. (Saverin himself insists that renouncing citizenship has nothing to do with taxes. Rush Limbaugh, the official spokesperson for the Republican Party, wants to give him a medal for tax evasion. Who are we to believe?)
Maybe investors agree with me. I’m going with that.
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All this Facebook stock movement suggests is that, for a change, the IPO was priced pretty accurately. I’ve always found it to be pretty bad for a company to IPO and have the stock double on day one. It merely means that someone other than the company is getting the cash. Kind of like scalpers for concerts.
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#29 written by mclever 1 year ago
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#33 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“And there are still people who deny that global warming is occurring.“
And there are still people who deny that the earth is round - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society - so what’s your point? The global warming-deniers, while maybe not quite as rare as a true “flat-earther,” are just about as insignificant in how much influence they exert over society.
But the term “global warming-denier” is a straw man for you to be able to ridicule the position of the group of people that is far, far more numerous, that being those that acknowledge global warming exists — in the strictest sense that average global temperatures are rising — but are skeptical of humanity’s contribution to global climate change or ability to counteract it, both of which the science is either very young or very weak. -
#34 written by shortchain 1 year ago
Mule,
One wonders where you get your information. “weak”? Virtually all published climate scientists agree that global warming is occurring, and 97 percent of published climate scientists believe that it is due to humanity.
How much higher a percentage do you need in order to conclude that support for the theory is strong?
As for “young” — yeah, the theory only dates back to Arrhenius in 1896. The fact that it has not been universally accepted as an explanation for the observed behavior of the Earth’s climate is largely due to a robust and well-financed anti-science campaign run by various organizations (such as the excrable “Heartland Institute”, AEI, Heritage, and Cato) and paid for by oil and coal interests. -
group of people that is far, far more numerous
There are indeed a lot of people who are either uninformed or victims of a campaign of intentional misinformation. That does not, however, provide evidence in dispute of the science of climatology. The likelihood of a scientific theory accurately describing real phenomena has nothing to do with popularity polls.
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#36 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“Virtually all published climate scientists agree that global warming is occurring, and 97 percent of published climate scientists believe that it is due to humanity.“
Then pardon me for being extremely skeptical of a branch of “science” that attributes changes in global climate phenomena to human activity when very similar and even more extraordinary global climate phenomena were known to have happened numerous times hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago without any possible help from human activity.
But humans are around now, many of whom you and people like you despise and detest , so they make a convenient and expedient scapegoat to advance a political agenda. It’s really not that hard to see right through your “science” to what your true motives are. -
#37 written by mclever 1 year ago
Mule is right about one thing:
Many of today’s climate-science deniers will now admit that global temperatures are rising (it’s difficult to continue disputing the straight numbers), they just deny the scientific conclusions as to why. Unlike twenty or thirty years ago, they don’t deny global warming, they just deny the anthropogenic part of AGW. To avoid getting side-tracked in a semantic debate, it’s worth being careful on this point. -
#38 written by shortchain 1 year ago
Mule,
Pardon me, but I’m going to have to point out that the idea that anything comparable to our current spike in temperature has ever occurred is based on ignorance. The rapidity of the onset, the lack of any concurrent volcanic or other activity to explain it — these are unique.
When I, or people like me, advance a “political agenda”, you can accuse us of that. Until then, your accusation comes across as paranoia. You have no possible way to discern my “true motives”, as you do not know me.
You can put “science” in quotes when you display any actual knowledge of science. Until then, you are should stick to commenting about something you supposedly know something about, like “economics”. -
#39 written by shortchain 1 year ago
Mac,
Actually, it’s only been in the last year or so that many of the deniers have admitted, grudgingly, that global temperatures are, in fact, rising. It was only last year that BDP was still claiming that the rise in temperature is actually an artifact of the changes in siting of measurement sites, how the sites are constructed, etc, etc.
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#40 written by Max 1 year ago
So what if global warming is directly related to human activity or is due to natural phenomena!
In EITHER case, there seems to exist the fact that human activity may be used in a positive manner to mediate it.
We should do so.
We will NOT be “saving the planet”. I can assure you, beyond a shadow of doubt, that this old world will keep on turning and turning for billions of years into the future. Species will come and go as they have for hundreds of millions of years.
No. If we have the potential to reduce global warming, it will be to save HUMAN civilization as we know it. To avoid famines. To avoid population shifts. To avoid possible wars. To avoid trillions of dollars of costs directly related to that warming in mitigation alone.
Save the “whodunit” argument for after the fact. -
Mule,
Can a given effect have only one cause? Is it possible for “X” to occur once time because of “A”, and another time because of “B”?
For example, if I break my leg by jumping off the roof, does that mean hitting my leg with a baseball bat can’t possibly break it?
If the Earth has warmed before for reasons other than human activity, is that evidence that current human activity is not the cause of the current warming?– especially when we know that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, and other chemicals (such as methane), will, without question, cause the temperatures to rise?
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#42 written by shortchain 1 year ago
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#43 written by Max 1 year ago
sc,
Maybe so, but few are arguing that the train is NOT coming. So, IMHO, arguing over whether Charlie Jones or Casey Jones is the engineer driving the train, when we have the ability to pull the handle on the switcher in a bit silly.
Because, just like the fair damsel tied to the track, WE AIN’T LEAVING the planet anytime soon! -
This sentence from The Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/21554570) made me laugh. It’s an article about the growing (heh) popularity of quinoa:
In March residents of two indigenous towns fought with sticks and grenades over the right to grow quinoa in a disputed arid area on their border, leaving 34 people injured.
I’m not exactly sure why, but it may be because of the rhyme at 2:24 of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2UFc1pr2yUU
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#45 written by dawolf 1 year ago
Re: Global Warming,
I see it as a plank taken away. Remember all the aggro over “hockey sticks”, “climategate” etc? Millions and millions of wasted words over whether the temperature is actually rising, mass scientist bashing and conspiracy theories.
Now, the denialists pretend they accepted it was warming all along, and that they have only ever disputed whether its humanity that is causing it. It’s pretty sad actually that they (and I admit I am tarring them all with the same brush) can’t just hold their hands up and say: “I was wrong to say the world wasn’t warming”.
But anyway, progress of a sort. One plank gone, and now the millions and millions of wasted words will only be on whether its anthropogenic or not (newsflash: it is). -
#46 written by Mule Rider 1 year ago
“Until then, your accusation comes across as paranoia.…
.… Until then, you are should stick to commenting about something you supposedly know something about, like “economics”.
Glad you brought up “paranoia” and “economics” because you’ve displayed more than your fair share on that topic.….that said, I’ll pare back my “paranoia” about “climate science” as soon as you pare back yours about economics. -
#48 written by rgbact 1 year ago
Had some decent local coverage here in Chicago of clashes between cops and protestors over NATO meetings. Not sure if OWS was engaged or their bomb plotting affiliates. Protestors looked pretty outgunned, so fairly calm so far. We’ll see how things develop. Maybe as you get more stoned you get more courage to harass cops with batons. Doesn’t look like fun though. -
Not knowing the why’s and wherefore’s, why should Facebook not suffer the same fate as Myspace? As again, Twitter will soon be obsolete or replaced also. On a similar note, I once owned an 8-Track player.
Interesting all the different aspects involved in Facebook had/have been around for years so Zuckerberg just stole er took all the different media technology which was already available and repackaged them for a larger audience. America, what a country!
Americans have a habit of quickly putting away old toys for new toys …
btw, ICQ messaging/file transfer was invented in 1996. Time … marches on or backwards depending on one’s perspective. Windows ’95 was just Apple ’89 repackaged.
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A few words re: mama grizzly ~ very few. She did robocalls for a TX teabagger senate candidate and the calls went out beyond TX to Kansas lol.
And Linda McMahon received the GOP endorsement at the CT state party convention. Sorry rgbact, etc. In the age of conservative extremism, Shays was DOA, even in moderate to liberal CT.
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I see it as a plank taken away. Remember all the aggro over “hockey sticks”, “climategate” etc? Millions and millions of wasted words over whether the temperature is actually rising, mass scientist bashing and conspiracy theories.
Now, the denialists pretend they accepted it was warming all along, and that they have only ever disputed whether its humanity that is causing it. It’s pretty sad actually that they (and I admit I am tarring them all with the same brush) can’t just hold their hands up and say: “I was wrong to say the world wasn’t warming”.I think you’re right. In a few years the line will be, “I never said the warming isn’t caused by humans. I said we can’t (or shouldn’t) do anything about it.”
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#51 written by mclever 1 year ago
@Monotreme
Facebook’s fall-off is what I expected would happen once the underwriters (especially JPM/Morgan Stanley) stopped propping the price up. As much as 15% of the volume on Friday looked to be JPM/MS. They were originally going to price it at $31-$32, but they jacked it up to $38 to get the backers to sell more upfront. I bet it settles at about $30 (where it should have been priced). Depending on market psychology, it could go either up or down from there. -
#53 written by mclever 1 year ago
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Semi rant:
Mark McKinnon was just on Tamron Hall’s MSNBC slot and said Ginrich’s Bain Capitol attack ads weren’t effective against mittens because neither train wreck’s newt or Santo could defeat mittens in the Rep primary. And Hall, nor dweebs Smerconish, etc. mentioned the obvious ie mittens won because of his extreme $$$ advantage and, in fact, his opposition were frickin’ train wrecks.
On a good day, most political pundits can’t even grasp the obvious lol.
carry on
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#57 written by mclever 1 year ago
@Michael
I basically agree with you that the expectation of extreme underpricing of IPOs seems strange. I would think that the best thing to happen would be a slight rise in price due to interest in the company that demonstrates enduring price support, but the meteoric rises are stupid. Whenever I see an IPO shoot up by 50% or more, I figure the company basically got robbed by the crappy underwriter(s). Think of it this way, if I sell you a house for $100K and you turn around and sell it the next day for $150K, I feel like a moron for poorly negotiating with you in the first place. That’s essentially what happens when an IPO jumps up like that. An IPO that holds steady or rises a little is OK.
However, because the expectations for high-profile IPOs are that the price goes up (at least a little), and because a lot of “popular” trading is based on emotion rather than fundamentals, then a price that drops creates a psychological drag on the stock in the long run, which makes it harder for the company to keep raising money by selling additional shares. When a stock like Facebook drops because it was over-priced, it looks more like a moneygrab for the company’s owners. -
Speaking of train wrecks …
Cory Booker not ready for prime time presidential politics notwithstanding, one wonders what occupation, other than politics, he’ll pick after his current term of Newark mayor is over.
He makes a video w/Christie … he trashes Obama on MTP … if he kisses Christie’s behind he’ll have a hat trick! ok, ok, he already qualifies for the hat trick.
Apologies to truly clueless “partisan” surrogates.
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Republican Party launches ‘I stand with Cory’ petition.
Are they ***endorsing President Obama too***?
Oops!
“Oh, p.s.: Thank you RNC for helping keep the Bain story alive.”
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Cory Booker Bain Remarks Complicate Things For Romney, Axelrod
Bottom line, “we’ll” be talkin’ ’bout Bain Capital for the next (5+) mos. A good thing for Obama!
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#60 written by rgbact 1 year ago
the obvious ie mittens won because of his extreme $$$ advantage and, in fact, his opposition were frickin’ train wrecks.
Or maybe bashing business doesn’t play too well in a GOP primary, especially when you don’t have many specifics besides general “he was Gordon Gekko” rhetoric?
I mean you didn’t see Obama/Hillary bashing John Edwards for being a rich slimy ambulance chasing business extortionist. Why?. Cuz Democrats love slimy ambulance chasing business extortionists.
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rgbact,
Democrats love slimy ambulance chasing business extortionists.
In the case of Edwards, here’s what it seems they liked about him:
– He is charismatic.
– He is from a southern state (that still mattered as recently as 2004).
– He was a very mainstream Democrat in the Senate (DW-NOMINATE of –0.33, slightly to the right of the –0.38 of the mean Senate Democrat during his tenure there).
– He gave the convincing impression of having a model family.That pretty much sums up his appeal.
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#62 written by rgbact 1 year ago
That pretty much sums up his appeal.
My point is, do you think Democrats would make a big deal about someone’s professional experience as a lawyer.…given how lawyers are a core of liberal professionals? So, ripping on Romney for his business experience in a GOP primary was a strategy fraught with risk, especially when you don’t have much besides random sob stories about a Bain company that went bankrupt. I don’t even remember much flack from Democrats on John Kerry’s wealth in 2004 primaries -
rgbact,
My point is, do you think Democrats would make a big deal about someone’s professional experience as a lawyer
Well, not if he were a Democrat, of course. If he were a Republican, and he, say, spent is career protecting companies from lawsuits filed due to those companies’ complete disregard for the harm they were causing their consumers? You bet they’d make a big deal about it.
ripping on Romney for his business experience in a GOP primary was a strategy fraught with risk
The issue is not that he has business experience. It’s that his business experience seemed to be focused on putting Americans out of work. When unemployment is high, that sort of history doesn’t play well to those who are affected by the high unemployment.
I don’t even remember much flack from Democrats on John Kerry’s wealth in 2004 primaries
I remember a great deal of flack from Republicans on that very topic.
Incidentally, Mitt Romney’s net worth is $230 million. Obama’s is $10.5M, W’s is $30M, Clinton’s is $80M, George H W Bush’s is $30M. Put all five of them together, and you get $150.5M…$80M less than Romney’s alone. Just for what it’s (net) worth.
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#64 written by shortchain 1 year ago
rgbact,
It wasn’t that the company “went bankrupt”. It was pillaged by Bain, who walked away with millions of dollars in profits from its investment while the company ended up dead.
Sure. Nobody likes lawyers, but if you are an apparently charming, good-looking lawyer with excellent hair (and a pretty progressive agenda, which was left out of the things Michael mentioned), plus a lot of money, you’ll get at least somewhere in the Democratic primaries.
Do you really think Democratic voters vote based on social class, race, or other features? You don’t have to take my word for it, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Or perhaps you want to pretend that a fair number of Republican voters don’t vote based on single social issues, such as abortion, race, NRA scare tactics and the like?
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My point is, do you think Democrats would make a big deal about someone’s professional experience as a lawyer.…given how lawyers are a core of liberal professionals?
Since government is about the law, it kinda makes sense to elect lawyers. Government isn’t about business (unless you live in a fascist state) so electing businesspeople isn’t as important. Business experience doesn’t necessarily provide experience that will be valuable in government, while experience with the law does.
So, ripping on Romney for his business experience
No one is “ripping on Romney for his business experience”. As I said above, “business experience” isn’t particularly relevant to elected office, but by itself, isn’t not a Bad Thing either. What matters is that Romney’s particular business expertise was is throwing people out of work for the profit of him and his croneys. That doesn’t seem to be valuable in a President.
I don’t even remember much flack from Democrats on John Kerry’s wealth in 2004 primaries
No one cares in particular if someone’s rich. How one gets rich, and what one does with the money, that does matter.
Nelson Rockefeller was a very rich Republican whom no Democrat (that I knew of) ever criticized for being rich. He was a good man, and engaged in a lot of philanthropy.
Romney is a vampire, and he has the ethics and conscience and honesty of a conman. Nor does he have any sense of what it’s like to live on, oh, less than a few million a year, and he gives no indication of giving a crap about anyone who isn’t in his tax bracket. That’s what he’s being criticized for.
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#67 written by rgbact 1 year ago
It was pillaged by Bain, who walked away with millions of dollars in profits from its investment while the company ended up dead.
Romney is a vampire, and he has the ethics and conscience and honesty of a conman.
Thats what I mean. You guys need to “put some meat on those bones”, else if you just intend to mindlessly repeat “Gordon Gekko” storylines and rhetoric about Romney I can assure you, your side will come off as little more that a bunch of anti-capitalist OWS crazies.
You can already tell this strategy is a loser by all the sane Democrats (Booker, Ford Jr. Warner, Rendell, etc) that are refusing to go along with it. -
#68 written by shortchain 1 year ago
rgbact,
The business about Booker, et al, is more about how Booker is likely to need a lot of money (from Wall Street) for his next run for office than any real issue. And Booker has already played the “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded” game (not that you’ll hear that, of course — the usual media outlets trumpeted the first quote, but the back-tracking is going to be on page 15 under the fold).
Both parties have quislings, you know. And both parties are actually in the pocket of the people with money, because to have a political career now is a hugely capital intensive venture, worse than going into farming. (But the ROI of even a moderate success is phenomenal, as Newt Gingrich has shown.)
The people you name are not very influential among the rank and file of the Democratic voting populace, so it really doesn’t matter what they say, other than to provide sound bites for the GOP.
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rgbact, bottom line, mittens buried Perry/Newt/Santo w/a humongous Super PAC $$$ advantage running 95% negative ads. Plus the (3) stooges were train wrecks. Worked well in the Rep primary, we’ll see how well it works in the general.
One of Obama’s major campaign/debate talkin’ pts. will be in the Rep primary debates mittens et al did/could not stand up to the audience which booed a gay soldier, contraception lol and cheered the death penalty.
Romney kowtows to whoever/whatever in order to attain his goal ie his gay campaign staffer resigning ’cause of outside conservative pressure and mittens meekly staying out of the fray!
ie how is mittens gonna stand up to world leaders when evangelicals work him like a puppet-on-a-string.
ok, at least Romney is consistent re: one major political aspect … backing down.
Apologies to puppets …
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btw, John Sununu said it’s ok for Obama to attack mittens re: Bain Capital er fair game ~ oops!
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Could somebody please come up with a solution to both prevent this kind of thing from happening in the future and for smartly taking care of the poor, innocent children in this case.
http://rollingout.com/culture/man-with-30-kids-by-11-women/
I feel neither the über-liberal position (of just throwing money at the problem) and the über-conservative position (of just ignoring it and letting them fend for themselves) are right and/or proper.