The idea that we're suddenly at the 'limit' for labeling is nonsense, anyway. There's absolutely no reason that we couldn't add another line to the required 'Nutritional Facts' section, right above 'Serving Size' or whatever.
A lot of people seem to think this would be required as some big label on the front. Perhaps there is some actual bill or something that I don't know of requiring that, but I think that unlikely...the only thing _required_ on the front of a food package is the amount of the food in the package. (I thought there were some extra rules about different things like soft drinks having their black 'calories' badge, but it turns out that's a private initiative of the American Beverage Institute that Coke and Pepsi and others are participating in.)
Indeed. This entire discussion (not just here, but everywhere) has shown an absurd level of hypocrisy from the 'small government' crowd, usually run around asserting 'Free market! The market will take care of it! Just let the market decide!'.
Until, uh, the market wants some information to make a decision on. At which point suddenly there's a 'free speech' issue.
Here's an interesting fact: When society has decided that there is a danger (Not whether or not there actually is one, when we decide there is one.) we've always required providers of that danger inform the nearby public. We require construction sites to post 'Hard Hat Area' signs, we require labels on tobacco, we require people to notify others they are a convicted sex offender, hell, we require all sorts of things on a food label that _aren't_ dangers, such as the amount of Vitamin C.
This is not actually a first amendment issue, as long as the information the government requires them to provide is _truthful_. And here, we're talking about a label that is not, in any way, a warning message. The GMO label is a simple statement of fact. And it's a _lot_ less work than the nutritional labeling we _already_ require on all foods!
It's been clear to me for years that a lot of 'free market/small government' people are simply 'parrot whatever corporations want' people. And every so often I run across a perfect example of this issue, where suddenly the Most Important Rule Ever that 'the market should decide' _instantly_ flips to worries that the market may make the 'wrong' decision and decide against GMO foods, so we can't tell people which those are.
Erm, what Maddow did is in no way comparable with the behavior of the Daily Caller here. Sparkman's death _was_ apparently murder. It was a suicide staged to look like a murder, as far as we can tell. It was perfectly reasonable to report on it _as if_ it was a murder before we knew that.
When people became suspicious that it was not murder, Rachael Maddow reported that there were such suspicions (Which, I must point out, you seemed to have missed in your blog, although the article you link to talks about it, if by using rather biased language.), and then _stopped reporting or talking about it as a murder_.
Then later, The Rachael Maddow Show ran an _actual correction_ in November when the police determined it _was_ suicide. (It was a guest host that night, so I guess saying that 'Rachael Maddow' never mentioned it again is technically true, if obviously deliberately misleading.)
Do you think that she should have, at that point, continued to cover a single suicide? What the hell would be the point of that? Or do you think it was wrong for her to start to cover something _very clearly looked like a lynching of a Federal official_, even though it was not? (That would be an _amazing_ standard to ask the news to take. 'Please never report on any sort of crime at all until after every single fact is in.')
Or do you think she have lead off her show each night for a week saying 'That thing we thought was murder last week was possibly just a deranged man committing suicide?' You think she didn't run _enough_ corrections?
What exactly is your complaint there?
Do you want to know what people's complaint is about the Daily Caller? It's that they ran a story with really really shitty 'confirmation', and then, after it became clear the story was false, doubled down on it.
And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond.
And banning gay marriage does this how, exactly? (As opposed to, for example, banning divorce?)
I'm really tired of people just _asserting_ this. There is not any logical way 'No gay marriage' leads to 'children staying with their biological parents'.(1)
There are three possible ways that children can end up being the child of someone in a gay marriage: 1) they are adopted, 2) they are the biological child of the parents created while that parent is in the homosexual relation, using a sperm or egg donor, 3) they are the biological child of one of the parents from a previous heterosexual relationship,
#1 obviously has nothing to do with anything. Children who are adopted at _already_ missing 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'. Gay people do not run around magically adopting children out from under the arms of their existing family. So this is not what they're actually talking about.
#2 is so obviously stupid it's hard to explain. Is the argument honestly that children are better off _not existing_ than not having 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'? This leads to some rather...interesting conclusions, and I doubt it is that the discussion that the people who are _also_ running around banning contraceptives and abortion really want to have. ('Sure, you should have to bear your rapist's baby, how dare you think otherwise! And how dare _you_ two lesbians decide to bring someone into this world into a gay family, he'd be better off not existing! And no adopting the rape victim's baby either!') So this is not what they're actually talking about either.
#3 is, of course, what they're actually talking about. They want gay people to _stay in straight relationships_. They see children as a reward for _pretending to be straight_. (Which historically has been completely true for gay people.)
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps someone can correct me. Seriously, those are the _three_ situations where children can be raised by gay people. #1 _already_ have had their biological family 'fail' them and #2 literally do not exist without the gay relationship existing, so cannot possibly be 'worse off' with the relationship existing.
It _must_ be #3 they're talking about, and for those children to have 'their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond' must mean they think _gay people should remain married to a straight partner_. Which they then describe as 'committed and exclusive' relationship...but you will note they don't use the word 'loving' or 'honest'.
That is the _only_ possibly way for their premise to make sense.
1) And there's an addition side issue that just _assumes_ that 'biological mom and biological dad' are the best people to raise a child, and moreover must be in a relationship with each other, which also has very little evidence. Actual evidence is that children do best when their family makes enough to support them and yet has enough family members left over to interact with them, and that the makeup of this family change as little as possible while they are children. It has nothing to do with the gender, biological relationship, or even familial relationship of the members, as plenty of children raised by elder siblings or aunts and uncles can attest to. Gay parents where one works and the other does not is produces _vastly_ better outcomes than straight parents where both work. (Which is why, currently, gay couples are better parents...not because they are better, but because they very rarely have children without being able to support them.) But for the purpose of this post, let's just accept the premise that 'biological mom and dad' are best, because the idea that banning gay marriage somehow _leads_ to that is stupid enough,
The unemployment paragraph was carefully written to avoid sweeping allegations of laziness.
Yes, we are aware of that. The problem is we are not complete idiots, and you can't make a statement about how poor people aren't working enough, and as a single aside talk about unemployment and expect us to put up with the rest of your bullshit.
Jesus Christ, you _just said_ that poor people only work an average of 14 hours a week. You _yourself_ brought this fact in. Because I'm _sure_ they were offered full time work, but said 'No, I only need to work 14 hours a week because I wish to remain poor.'.
You honestly think people are _choosing_ to work 14 hours a week. You have the actual belief in your actual brain that people are _choosing_ to work less than two full days a week and thus _choosing_ to remain poor.
I can't even conceive of how to answer such nonsense.
For the non-morons out there confused about that '14 hours', I will point out that a very large segment of the poor are actually elderly and disabled, and hence _can't_ work any time at all. And others are probably working 27 hours a week because that's the limit of what their boss can give them without them being considered 'full time'. (And a lot of those are working _two_ 27 hour a week jobs.)
AND THE REST ARE UNEMPLOYED. Which in Roger's world means 'Choosing not to work', ignoring the fact we have an _official_ rate of 7.7%. Which mean of that 20%, the 'bottom quintile', 38.5% are _officially_ looking for work and cannot find any. (And the official rate is completely wrong. Actual unemployment and underemployment in this country has always been underreported.)
I didn't reply to you. I replied to Roger and his idiotic comments about 'In general though, jobs are out there to be found for those really interested.' and 'Work 50 to 60 hours a week.'
Which, of course, ignore the fact that the poor often _do_ work 50-60 hours a week...when they can actually find jobs.
Step one is to get and hold full time work, preferably for two adults.
Step one for the poor: Magically find jobs that they currently can't find. Got it.
The key is to begin saving in an institutional situation which takes the savings in an automatic way and which slowly raises the amount saved each month.
Step two for the poor: Save small amounts of money constantly until they retire. Or save small amounts of money constantly for eight months and then use it plus a payday loan to replace the transmission in their car. Whichever comes first.
The stupid! It burns!
I said it earlier and I will repeat, and then I am done with morons: Poor people almost always have more _expenses_ than _income_. I want you to actually sit and think about that. In your words 'Do the math...' How do they survive? Loans, eating very shitty but cheap food, avoiding healthcare, and doing without stuff that is actually needed.
Trying to somehow argue that there's a savings plan out of poverty for people with _negative_ cash flow is completely fucking stupid. As is arguing there's some magical way for them to get well-paying full time work that they just haven't _bothered_ to get for some reason.
And not knowing that poor people almost always are _losing_ ground (Or, at least, doing without some necessity or another), and that poor people _would love to have better jobs but cannot find them_ rather disqualify you and Noah Smith from talking about them.
And is anyone else amazed that homeless shelters are perfectly balanced with the amount of homeless people. They're exactly full every night! And all the food is exactly consumed!
Most poor people's _needed_ expenses are larger than their income. By a large percentage. But because they don't have that money, they simply do without those things.
Of course the money they _actually spend_ is balanced. How the fuck could the poor spend more than they have? (Well, they can borrow, and do. But they can't _keep_ doing that.)
But by all means, let's go find people who would need 200% more income to buy health insurance, and 30% more income to buy better food, and 50% more income to make car payments so they could get to the bank and Costco and stuff...
...and let's stand there and comment how it's certainly suspicious that they use 5% of their income to buy cigarettes or see a movie, or whichever the hell the current 'Poor people are actually rich' nonsense is popular. That 5% could have, with careful savings, bought a week of health insurance every three years! Or something.
And, in a totally unrelated fact: The savings rate that poor people can get is _under_ 1%. Inflation is _over_ 1%. Why the fuck would they want to save? Why would anyone want them to save except for the banks? What would savings accomplish them?
The thing this rich assholes don't understand is that the poor are not poor because they don't have money. They are poor because they don't have _income_, and yet have expenses.
Jesus Christ, you could give every poor person $10,000 , and they'd either use it responsible or not, but in a year, even the _most_ responsible poor person _is still going to be poor_ because they're working a minimum wage job that barely pays the rent. A financial-savant poor person might have managed to parlay that $10,000 into saving them $11,000 that year, but they wouldn't have done it via 'investment', they would have done it via one-time purchases of a working refrigerator and paying off credit card bills.
Hell, does this moron even understand that the poor have _debts_, and hence 'investment' would be a fucking stupid idea anyway? If the poor manage to scrimp and save an extra $100 a month, they really need to be putting it towards that credit card bill they racked up when their car broke last month.
The problem is, that _is_ how it works in this asshole's world, where all his money magically appears out of fucking nowhere. Oh, I'm sorry, it magically appears out of the bank. So clearly it must that way with the poor. Let's ignore the interest rate poor people get is actually less than inflation, and that poor people don't actually have _any extra money at all_ to invest. If they have 'extra money', it will be to replace the rotting floor in the bathroom and catch up on car payments.
Telling a poor person they need better money management skills and that will solve the problem of poverty is like telling women they need to learn more self defense and that will solve the problem of rape. It's not a _bad_ idea for people to learn those things, and in fact I'm all for it. But that is not the fucking 'solution' that society needs to be talking about. Poor people are not poor because they have failed at being rich, they are poor because _they do not have the ability to make enough money_.
Wait a minute. 25% of recreational boating accident deaths _aren't_ from drowning? What the hell were they from, then?
I mean, boats do occasionally run into things, and presumably people die in such collisions. Although that would seem to either require either a much large ship smashing through a smaller one, because people normally are not hanging out at the very bow of the boat, at least not 25% of them!
And boats can also run into or over people, but we usually manage to separate swimming areas from boating areas, so that seems odd also.
Seriously, what did those 250 people die of? Caught up in rigging? Killed by a a swinging sail? Crushed between a boat and dock? What exactly is the threat here? Are they counting non-boat related deaths like heart attacks? (That does not seem to be a 'recreational boating accident'.)
Indeed. The real joke here isn't the symbolic vote. Symbolic votes on constitutional amendments are fairly silly anyway, so who cares when anyone did it?
Either a state ratifies it when it's not yet passed, or it passes and the state forgets about it until someone brings it up. (Now, failing to ratify this amendment when someone bring it up _would_ be something to notice would be relevant, but isn't what we're talking about here.)
No, the real joke is that they're so fucked up in Mississippi it takes them almost two decades to file a piece of paperwork. That paperwork is _almost old enough to vote_.
Man, and I thought the US Congress was dysfunctional.
Why would anyone have _paid_ to do that when it would have been simpler and cheaper to just _say_ they were doing that, but actually just killed them?
Not even as any sort of public policy. They'd simply be faced with which of two ships to hire...the one that actually did the shipping, or the one that cost 1/100th as much, and mysteriously reappeared back in port two days after taking on a former-slave shipment. (I am assuming it's the state governments doing this, because former slaves would have no money to book passage.)
Does anyone now think anyone then would care?
There's not really any way, in the pre-intercontinental communication days, that former slaves would have made it en mass back to Africa. That benefited _no one_ to do correctly. (No one who was actually a 'person', at least.) I mean, look how many black people on slave ships died, and those deaths _directly cut into profit_.
About the only plausible way that things could have ended well would have been to give them a territory out west, one that they could get to themselves, and eventually making a state out of it. In fact, that probably would have been for the best in our _actual_ history. Having an actual power base where wealthy-ish black people could originate from, and where marginalized black people could retreat to, might have made the civil right's struggle shorter.
OTOH, I doubt it would have actually worked, no one would have allowed black people to end up in charge of a state in 1880 or whenever this would be. And such a place sorta already existed in New Orleans anyway.
Oh, I don't disagree with you. A lot of states constitutions have that and other rules about their militia.
Of course, state constitutions are _much_ easier to amend than the US constitution. If _state_ constitutions were what was standing in the way, we'd be fine. (Especially with the whole 'interstate commerce' thing obviously allowing regulation of sales.)
I was just pointing out is that the 2nd amendment was intended to just apply to the Federal government (Which everyone knows, if half the people forget.), and it really seems to me that it was intended to stop the Federal government from disarming the state militias, and is just conceptualized very poorly.
Now, what I'm not entirely sure of is what the writers of the 2nd thought about the Federal government disarming citizens which were _not_ in a state militia. I suspect the founders also would not approve of that, but for slightly different reasons. I suspect their objection would be more along the lines of 'The federal government should not be telling citizens of Virginia what they can and cannot own, period.'
This, incidentally, is sorta the reason I think it was supposed to work like I said. No one in 1789 would have _conceived_ of the US restricting citizens of the various states from owning things. No, the 2nd amendment was not for that...it was to stop the US from restricting the state militias. And least we forget, the US explicitly can seize control of militia of under the constitution, and _is in charge of arming_ them. The 2nd makes it even if the Federal government does something insane like refuses to arm them, _militias can still have weapons_.
If the 2nd amendment had not been incorporated under the 14th amendment, we'd be fine. If the 2nd amendment had been incorporated but had been correctly written to say 'The militias may not be disarmed', we'd also be fine. (As states could simply define who is in their own militia, and disarm others if they wanted...and change their constitution to allow that if it did not.) Instead, both stupid things happened and here we are.
I have no actual solution here, I was just trying to explain 'How we got here'.
Moreover, arguing that because militias ceased to be the preferred military option of the Feds, the Feds can simply disregard the 2A and disarm the militia- by disarming the people who fill it- is just goofy. The entire point of the 2A is to restrain the Feds from disarming the militia. Arguing that the militia can be disarmed becasue the Feds don’t want to use it anymore renders the whole Amendment useless.
The real problem is now the _states_ can't disarm _their own_ militia, which is rather absurd.
Subjecting the 2nd amendment (Which, regardless of how it is phrased, is intended to give states a _right_ to operate a militia, even if the Federal government wishes to disarm it) to incorporation under the 14th amendment (Thus subjecting states to restrictions on their own militia!) was completely idiotic.
Although it's still being interpreted wrong even if that's true. Logically, even if states cannot now disarm their own militia (!?), they can still determine who is _in_ it. (This is one of those things so well known back then that no one bothered to put in writing, like what habeus corpus is.) So a state could ban all guns simply by saying it _has_ no militia, or that militia is solely the National Guard plus the police plus people who have passed specific gun training, and, thus, logically, it is only required to allow those people to be armed.
The problem is the courts have idiotically decided that the entire first part of amendment doesn't matter. That the right to bear arms doesn't exist in the context of _state power to have a militia_, like the amendment is clearly trying to say, it just exists in general.
The actual intent of the 2nd amendment is pretty damn clear to anyone who actually reads it and knows the history. Because the 2nd amendment was _never intended to apply to the states_.
That's a pretty indisputable fact, that even if the founder's intent was that the Federal government couldn't disarm _anyone_, obviously the states could, and did, have laws about gun ownership at that time. I think everyone agrees with that, although a good 90% of the people involved in discussions about the 2nd amendment seem to forget it.
'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'
So, realizing it didn't apply to states, it is pretty clear that the 2nd amendment is the _federal government_ being forbidden from disarming _state militias_. Which they would do by disarming individuals, because that is how militias worked. I don't actually understand how people can read that amendment in any other way. States have a right to a militia, and the federal government cannot disarm people in it. (And, as is pointed out, pretty much any able-bodied male is considered part of the militia, and the state can presumably put anyone it wants in it, so the Federal government is basically forbidden from disarming anyone if the state doesn't want it.)
The problem is then we applied this restriction as applying to _states_ and have now forbidden the states from disarming not only their own militia (Which is somewhat crazy, if a bit moot because states don't really have those anymore.), but _anyone at all_ (Which is completely insane in the context of the original.)
Yes, I know that is one _logical_ outcome of the interaction between the second amendment and the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth amendment, but it's very clearly a colossal accident. The right being spoken of wasn't _actually_ a right to keep and bear arms, it was a right for a _state_ to operate a militia, and just phrased in a fucked up way.
The idea that a state can be _forced_ to not disarm its own frickin militia is crazy. As is the idea that somehow everyone is in the militia _even if the state doesn't want them to be_ and hence is required to be armed. Those two concepts are complete and utter nonsense, even if the 'programming' of the 2nd and 14th amendment makes them true. Those might really be the rules, but they are completely batshit crazy rules.
The GOP has convinced it’s base it can have everything they like about government, and less taxes too. But they can’t. So they bitch and whine about taxes that are at historic lows, and act like rolling back the tax rates to the 90s is gonna kill America and turn us into Soviet Russia.
Luckily, that's going to happen anyway, at the end of this year. Well, partially.
Plain fact of the matter is, when you poll the public on what they want to cut from government? There ain’t much, really, that has broad support to slash.
Actually, there is stuff that has 'broad support' to slash by _completely misinformed_ people. For example, if you poll people, foreign aid has broad support to slash, and people think it should be slashed way down to 5% of the budget or so. The obvious problem there is that foreign aid actually totals 25 billion, or 0.8% of the budget.
And, of course, there was Romney's public television insanity. To fight the dreaded half a billion dollars we're spending on it. Oh noes! That's enough money to give everyone a tax reduction enough to buy a single item off the dollar meal at McDonalds! That's worth giving up PBS and NPR for!
Likewise, when you ask people how much different income groups should be taxed...there'd for 'lowering' the amount of tax the rich pay to almost Sweden levels! Seriously. They want to 'lower' the rich's taxes to much higher than they _currently are_.
The problem is, frankly, people seem to have no idea where money goes, or how much goes where, or where it comes from. Checking other countries, educating people about such things is supposed to be the job of a system called 'the media', and someday this country might actually get one.
But, yes, there's nothing with broad support for cutting that actually would _do_ anything, except for the military. Especially the wars. Which is, of course, treasonous to talk about cutting.
And there’s no reason to force politicans to make hard choices — to cut into things like the military (do we really need to spend as much as the entire world combined?), or agricultural subsidies, much less anything truly difficult. (Cutting the military or agriculture hurts lobbyists more than Americans. Cutting in Social Security or Medicare tends to get the masses involved).
That is the real problem with living on borrowed money. If the spending matched the revenue, and people could see 'Oh, I'm spending $100 dollars a year on this, is there a way to trim it?' and 'Well, that's $200 a year, but it seems like it's a big program, so I guess I understand that.'
(Not that the revenues should exactly match spending, of course. I'd suggest varying by up to an extra 20% spending in bad times, made up for by an extra 20% revenue in good.)
Oh, and I somehow forgot to mention the difference in _money_ spent between the two sides under 'Obama handicaps'.
Seriously, folks, in 2008 there was the excuse of a idiotic running mate, _and_ the anti-Bush sentiment, _and_ people voting for a historic candidate they perhaps otherwise would not have, _and_ perhaps Obama didn't have a mandate because no one knew how 'far left' (ha) he would govern.
Yeah, all those excuses are gone this time. All of them. The Republican ticket is, at least, competent. Bush has gone down the memory hole. We've already had a black president. We know exactly how Obama governs. And it's also a recession. And hundreds of millions of dollars in secret spending, a lot of which was used to promote flat-out lies.
And it's +127 EVs for the 'socialist'. +127 EVs for living under Obama.
I think we've forever proven that the right, and the beltway idiots, and half damn the internet, don't live in the America they _think_ they live in.
And, see, in a sane world, we could sit there and argue about what it actually makes sense for the government to do, secure in the fact that once we agree to that, we would _actually set taxes to allow us to do that_.
But we can't. Because the Republicans have picked as a 'policy goal' something that isn't even a political question to start with, namely, 'What amount of taxes do we need to take in?
The problem is what actually happened is for about two decades the right pretended to care about less spending, while actually only caring about lower taxes. Meanwhile, they brainwashed _everyone_ into caring about both of them (While everyone somehow failed a spot check on who was actually doing the spending. Apparently, it's only spending if Democrats do it.)
This was stupid enough...but then they got overthrown by their own brainwashed base who actually _tried_ to reduce spending down to the idiotic level that would match the idiotic level of taxes. (And everyone else said WTF?)
You know those countries that have just been introduced to democracy, and don't really understand it, and have to have a decade or so learning how it works?
Well, thanks to the Republican brainwashing, us Americans need a decade or so to (re)learn how taxes actually work and what the correct level of them is. Hint: It's roughly the amount we are spending, regardless of whether or not you politically agree with that amount of spending.
I tend to hate the implication that _taxes_ have anything to do with _freedom_. The GOP has managed to brainwash a large percentage of the electority, _including Democrats_, that such a thing is true. And, what's more, that it is the _most important_ freedom.
How much you pay on your goddamn taxes is actually pretty unimportant to _everyone_. Almost everything the government does is more important than paying 3% more income tax. If you actually _ask_ people this, they will willingly agree. Aka, would you rather have roads than the 2% of money that goes towards roads?
Incidentally, the few things that people _don't_ agree they'd rather have more of than a corresponding cut in their taxes are the military, which we can never ever cut. And the rest is entirely made up bullshit. (Yes, I _would_ like to spend $1 a year to fund public television, you assholes.)
It's like the entire nation is convinced that the most important thing about a movie is how many times people said 'the' in it, or the most important thing about a car is whether the radio antenna is perfectly straight. It's completely insane.
Taxes _are not a political issue_. Period. Taxes need to match spending on average, slightly higher in good times and slightly lower in bad. There is no actual 'politics' there, besides who should pay what percentage. If the right thinks the government should spend less, they need to MAKE THE GOVERNMENT SPEND LESS.
There's a quote going around about how a Democracy is doomed once people learn how to vote themselves free stuff. Well, that's wrong. A democracy is doomed when people realize they can just _vote themselves no taxes_ and keep getting the stuff that they had been purchasing, but are free now.
Which is, incidentally, counter-productive to reducing spending. If people are _paying_ for spending, and they are spending too much, and they are _paying_ for it, they might actually cut back on it. But if they aren't feeling it, why would they cut back?
The problem for Republicans is that, as I said, taxes _are not actually hurting people_, they were not too high, and wouldn't be in normal circumstances even if we taxed enough to cover spending. (Doing it now would be a bad idea, though.) People were basically happy with the level of government, so to reduce it, Republicans had to embark reducing taxes to start with, and hope, at some point, the government just falls over.
So, to recap: In 2000, Republicans win the presidency by _one_ electoral vote for a president we've never seen before and hence don't really know what he wants. He loses the popular vote. The Republicans also lose two seats in the House and lose four seats in the Senate.
And Bush proclaims _that_ is a mandate for Republican policies.
In 2012, Democrats win the presidency by 97 (+/-29) electoral votes for a president we've just seen four years of and presumably know what policies to expect from. He also wins the popular vote. The Democrats also win twenty-two seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.
And Obama wins during a _high unemployment_, where incumbents are supposed to be at a disadvantage. Oh, and he's black, and hence there's a small fraction of the population who will never vote for him.
And this blowout, of course, is _not_ a mandate for Democratic policies.
Speaking of blowout, I think the ultimate hypocrite on how to describe an election goes to Dick Morris. Apparently, his prediction of Romney winning by 325-213, aka, Romney winning by 60.4% is called 'a blowout ', but Obama winning, without Florida, by 303-206. That is, for reference, 59.5% of the (decided) EC. And Dick Morris calls it 'a squeaker'.
Who knew that 0.9% made such a difference! I guess 50.1%-59.9% is 'a squeaker' (Also known as 'a mandate' when it's a Republican), exactly 60.0% is 'a win', and 60.1%-100% is 'a blowout'.
Please note I'm not talking about his _prediction, which was even stupider than that, as Obama is actually going to win by 332 EV, aka, 61.7% of the total EC. I'm just talking about the word he used to describe Obama's victory when FL was still in doubt, when Obama had, tada, 59.5% of the EC. vs. the word he used to describe his prediction of a 60.4% win.
I'm rather hoping that classic liberals end up in one and the progressives end up in another, and we can run around debating _how_ to accomplish basically the same goals, and whether or not, for example, we should 'play favorites' to redress past wrong, or instead come up some other way to help people. And whether restricting people's ability to do drugs helps society, and even if it does, should we do it? Aka, a 'freedom' party vs a 'making society work' party, with both sides having to compromise to some exist, and both of them having basically the same goals. That would be an interesting and useful discussion.
Instead of this idiotic discussion we're apparently having about the delusional idea that cutting taxes increases revenue, and the delusional idea we should decrease spending during a recession, and the delusional idea that voter impersonation is an issue, and all the other delusional ideas that the Republicans keep coming up with.
Well, yes, the demographics problem is sorta on top of the crazy problem. And, yes, it's actually the demographics that will kill them.(Or, rather, _have_ killed them.) The crazy problem is just why they are unable to solve the demographics problem.
In fact, they almost _did_ solve part of the demographics problem, with Bush's rather reasonable immigration reform...and the first major success of the crazies was to destroy that.
The crazy problem happened _right_ as Republican party was ready to pivot on immigration, expanding their tent _just_ wide enough to keep a majority. So it is the reason they fell down...but it's sorta just random, that was the first thing they got caught up on.
If we look into an alternate universe where the internet was ten years later, we'd see a universe where the Republicans were still in charge, and the crazies were just now taking over in blogs...and in ten years the Republicans would lose because crazies held them steady on the LGBT issue while the rest of the country moved on.
And an internet (And fox news) ten years earlier than our universe, the 1992 blogs would be full of crazy about flag burning and how Clinton was secretly a Soviet spy or whatever. (The Soviet union's breakup obviously being some sort of liberal trick.)
So, basically, whatever issue destroys a party taken over by crazy is whatever issue comes up next that the crazies think crazy things about. Currently, that appears to be racial minorities. Admitted, the Republicans would have had a hard time pivoting on that _anyway_, but probably could have managed it.
What's also seriously helped is the Republicans continuing to demonstrate that both parties _aren't_ the same by having all sorts of crazy local people and laws.
Indeed. And the fact is, it's hard to see anything the right did wrong, except not predict the future.
The plan was obvious...keep stirring up the crazies with the newly invented cable news and talk radio, and keep gutting and criticize the mainstream media so the media doesn't report on this. Appear moderate to the public, appear far right to the base, and govern as basically moderate plus low taxes, ignoring the deficit, which was just something to yell around the Democrats about.
This actually seems like a perfect plan. It got them into power in 1994, and while it didn't get rid of Clinton in 1996, it did manage to get frickin George Bush in office in 2000.
And they managed to move the Overton window to the right, where suddenly we've all realized we need welfare reformed framed how the right says it. So the left moved away from their crazies (And plenty of sane leftish people), and into, functionally, a center-right party _barely_ to the left of the Republicans, which were also center-right.
But Al Gore had his revenge: The internet.
Suddenly, the crazy had a platform, and, worse, could _compare notes_. And realized that the Republicans were actually standing pretty close to the center, except for a few things like hurting unions (Which helped them politically) and lower taxes on the rich (Which also help them politically in donations). None of the Republican actually _cared_ about the lunatic issues that the far-right had been feed for two decades. Yes, that was somewhat obvious to everyone, but the far right had a lot of, to be blunt, fucking morons, and more importantly they were able to talk to each other and gin up the outrage.
Fox news then said 'Holy shit, right wing outrage, That's ratings gold!' (Insert video of a controlled detonation to take down a building.)
At this point, the right had two ways to jump. One option was to the left (On top of the Democrats) and disavowed their crazies, likes the Democrats did. Except the Democrats did that slowly, with the help of the media, the right had no time at all and the media had picked the other side. So they jumped rightward, a jump which half of them didn't manage to pull off and got replaced anyway.
That was _really_ the wrong choice. Well, perhaps the right choice for any individual's political career, as jumping to the left or even staying in the same place got people primaried out already. But it was _really_ the wrong choice for the party because of one simple fact:
Yes. Almost all hobbies look like wastes of time from the outside to other people. And a boatload of them are more dangerous than drugs.
Drugs sometimes cause a physical dependency, but so what? Skiing sometimes cause broken legs. A lot of hobbies, like computer games, TV watching, etc, sometimes cause people to not get enough exercise. Sports sometimes cause fights and riots. D&D sometimes causes players to think the game is real and go on murderous rampages for 'experience'...wait, that one is made up, nevermind.
It is legal for people to put specialized pieces of cloth in their backpack, hire an airplane, and then _jump out of that airplane_ and use the cloth to maybe land safely. This is entirely _legal_. People _sell_ other people this service, and the government is completely aware of this.
Compared to all that, someone who needs a specific amount of heroin each day to function is _nothing_.
And frankly, within a _functioning_ treatment system, it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to detox someone vs. fixing a broken leg or a heart attack caused by not enough exercise. (We do not have a functioning treatment system.)
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Why Not Demanding GMO Labeling is Udder Foolishness… (Get it? It’s a pun!) ”
The idea that we're suddenly at the 'limit' for labeling is nonsense, anyway. There's absolutely no reason that we couldn't add another line to the required 'Nutritional Facts' section, right above 'Serving Size' or whatever.
A lot of people seem to think this would be required as some big label on the front. Perhaps there is some actual bill or something that I don't know of requiring that, but I think that unlikely...the only thing _required_ on the front of a food package is the amount of the food in the package. (I thought there were some extra rules about different things like soft drinks having their black 'calories' badge, but it turns out that's a private initiative of the American Beverage Institute that Coke and Pepsi and others are participating in.)
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Indeed. This entire discussion (not just here, but everywhere) has shown an absurd level of hypocrisy from the 'small government' crowd, usually run around asserting 'Free market! The market will take care of it! Just let the market decide!'.
Until, uh, the market wants some information to make a decision on. At which point suddenly there's a 'free speech' issue.
Here's an interesting fact: When society has decided that there is a danger (Not whether or not there actually is one, when we decide there is one.) we've always required providers of that danger inform the nearby public. We require construction sites to post 'Hard Hat Area' signs, we require labels on tobacco, we require people to notify others they are a convicted sex offender, hell, we require all sorts of things on a food label that _aren't_ dangers, such as the amount of Vitamin C.
This is not actually a first amendment issue, as long as the information the government requires them to provide is _truthful_. And here, we're talking about a label that is not, in any way, a warning message. The GMO label is a simple statement of fact. And it's a _lot_ less work than the nutritional labeling we _already_ require on all foods!
It's been clear to me for years that a lot of 'free market/small government' people are simply 'parrot whatever corporations want' people. And every so often I run across a perfect example of this issue, where suddenly the Most Important Rule Ever that 'the market should decide' _instantly_ flips to worries that the market may make the 'wrong' decision and decide against GMO foods, so we can't tell people which those are.
On “In Which Tucker Carlson Hoists Himself By His Own Petard”
Erm, what Maddow did is in no way comparable with the behavior of the Daily Caller here. Sparkman's death _was_ apparently murder. It was a suicide staged to look like a murder, as far as we can tell. It was perfectly reasonable to report on it _as if_ it was a murder before we knew that.
When people became suspicious that it was not murder, Rachael Maddow reported that there were such suspicions (Which, I must point out, you seemed to have missed in your blog, although the article you link to talks about it, if by using rather biased language.), and then _stopped reporting or talking about it as a murder_.
Then later, The Rachael Maddow Show ran an _actual correction_ in November when the police determined it _was_ suicide. (It was a guest host that night, so I guess saying that 'Rachael Maddow' never mentioned it again is technically true, if obviously deliberately misleading.)
Do you think that she should have, at that point, continued to cover a single suicide? What the hell would be the point of that? Or do you think it was wrong for her to start to cover something _very clearly looked like a lynching of a Federal official_, even though it was not? (That would be an _amazing_ standard to ask the news to take. 'Please never report on any sort of crime at all until after every single fact is in.')
Or do you think she have lead off her show each night for a week saying 'That thing we thought was murder last week was possibly just a deranged man committing suicide?' You think she didn't run _enough_ corrections?
What exactly is your complaint there?
Do you want to know what people's complaint is about the Daily Caller? It's that they ran a story with really really shitty 'confirmation', and then, after it became clear the story was false, doubled down on it.
On “The Problem with Arguments Against Same-Sex Marriage”
And there is nothing arbitrary about maximizing the chances that children will know the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond.
And banning gay marriage does this how, exactly? (As opposed to, for example, banning divorce?)
I'm really tired of people just _asserting_ this. There is not any logical way 'No gay marriage' leads to 'children staying with their biological parents'.(1)
There are three possible ways that children can end up being the child of someone in a gay marriage: 1) they are adopted, 2) they are the biological child of the parents created while that parent is in the homosexual relation, using a sperm or egg donor, 3) they are the biological child of one of the parents from a previous heterosexual relationship,
#1 obviously has nothing to do with anything. Children who are adopted at _already_ missing 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'. Gay people do not run around magically adopting children out from under the arms of their existing family. So this is not what they're actually talking about.
#2 is so obviously stupid it's hard to explain. Is the argument honestly that children are better off _not existing_ than not having 'the love of their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond'? This leads to some rather...interesting conclusions, and I doubt it is that the discussion that the people who are _also_ running around banning contraceptives and abortion really want to have. ('Sure, you should have to bear your rapist's baby, how dare you think otherwise! And how dare _you_ two lesbians decide to bring someone into this world into a gay family, he'd be better off not existing! And no adopting the rape victim's baby either!') So this is not what they're actually talking about either.
#3 is, of course, what they're actually talking about. They want gay people to _stay in straight relationships_. They see children as a reward for _pretending to be straight_. (Which historically has been completely true for gay people.)
But maybe I'm wrong. Perhaps someone can correct me. Seriously, those are the _three_ situations where children can be raised by gay people. #1 _already_ have had their biological family 'fail' them and #2 literally do not exist without the gay relationship existing, so cannot possibly be 'worse off' with the relationship existing.
It _must_ be #3 they're talking about, and for those children to have 'their biological parents in a committed and exclusive bond' must mean they think _gay people should remain married to a straight partner_. Which they then describe as 'committed and exclusive' relationship...but you will note they don't use the word 'loving' or 'honest'.
That is the _only_ possibly way for their premise to make sense.
1) And there's an addition side issue that just _assumes_ that 'biological mom and biological dad' are the best people to raise a child, and moreover must be in a relationship with each other, which also has very little evidence. Actual evidence is that children do best when their family makes enough to support them and yet has enough family members left over to interact with them, and that the makeup of this family change as little as possible while they are children. It has nothing to do with the gender, biological relationship, or even familial relationship of the members, as plenty of children raised by elder siblings or aunts and uncles can attest to. Gay parents where one works and the other does not is produces _vastly_ better outcomes than straight parents where both work. (Which is why, currently, gay couples are better parents...not because they are better, but because they very rarely have children without being able to support them.) But for the purpose of this post, let's just accept the premise that 'biological mom and dad' are best, because the idea that banning gay marriage somehow _leads_ to that is stupid enough,
On “Noah Smith Trolls Working Class”
The unemployment paragraph was carefully written to avoid sweeping allegations of laziness.
Yes, we are aware of that. The problem is we are not complete idiots, and you can't make a statement about how poor people aren't working enough, and as a single aside talk about unemployment and expect us to put up with the rest of your bullshit.
Jesus Christ, you _just said_ that poor people only work an average of 14 hours a week. You _yourself_ brought this fact in. Because I'm _sure_ they were offered full time work, but said 'No, I only need to work 14 hours a week because I wish to remain poor.'.
You honestly think people are _choosing_ to work 14 hours a week. You have the actual belief in your actual brain that people are _choosing_ to work less than two full days a week and thus _choosing_ to remain poor.
I can't even conceive of how to answer such nonsense.
For the non-morons out there confused about that '14 hours', I will point out that a very large segment of the poor are actually elderly and disabled, and hence _can't_ work any time at all. And others are probably working 27 hours a week because that's the limit of what their boss can give them without them being considered 'full time'. (And a lot of those are working _two_ 27 hour a week jobs.)
AND THE REST ARE UNEMPLOYED. Which in Roger's world means 'Choosing not to work', ignoring the fact we have an _official_ rate of 7.7%. Which mean of that 20%, the 'bottom quintile', 38.5% are _officially_ looking for work and cannot find any. (And the official rate is completely wrong. Actual unemployment and underemployment in this country has always been underreported.)
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I didn't reply to you. I replied to Roger and his idiotic comments about 'In general though, jobs are out there to be found for those really interested.' and 'Work 50 to 60 hours a week.'
Which, of course, ignore the fact that the poor often _do_ work 50-60 hours a week...when they can actually find jobs.
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Step one is to get and hold full time work, preferably for two adults.
Step one for the poor: Magically find jobs that they currently can't find. Got it.
The key is to begin saving in an institutional situation which takes the savings in an automatic way and which slowly raises the amount saved each month.
Step two for the poor: Save small amounts of money constantly until they retire. Or save small amounts of money constantly for eight months and then use it plus a payday loan to replace the transmission in their car. Whichever comes first.
The stupid! It burns!
I said it earlier and I will repeat, and then I am done with morons: Poor people almost always have more _expenses_ than _income_. I want you to actually sit and think about that. In your words 'Do the math...' How do they survive? Loans, eating very shitty but cheap food, avoiding healthcare, and doing without stuff that is actually needed.
Trying to somehow argue that there's a savings plan out of poverty for people with _negative_ cash flow is completely fucking stupid. As is arguing there's some magical way for them to get well-paying full time work that they just haven't _bothered_ to get for some reason.
And not knowing that poor people almost always are _losing_ ground (Or, at least, doing without some necessity or another), and that poor people _would love to have better jobs but cannot find them_ rather disqualify you and Noah Smith from talking about them.
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Are you serious? Are you goddamn serious? Or is that some sort of absurd attempt at humor?
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And is anyone else amazed that homeless shelters are perfectly balanced with the amount of homeless people. They're exactly full every night! And all the food is exactly consumed!
Most poor people's _needed_ expenses are larger than their income. By a large percentage. But because they don't have that money, they simply do without those things.
Of course the money they _actually spend_ is balanced. How the fuck could the poor spend more than they have? (Well, they can borrow, and do. But they can't _keep_ doing that.)
But by all means, let's go find people who would need 200% more income to buy health insurance, and 30% more income to buy better food, and 50% more income to make car payments so they could get to the bank and Costco and stuff...
...and let's stand there and comment how it's certainly suspicious that they use 5% of their income to buy cigarettes or see a movie, or whichever the hell the current 'Poor people are actually rich' nonsense is popular. That 5% could have, with careful savings, bought a week of health insurance every three years! Or something.
And, in a totally unrelated fact: The savings rate that poor people can get is _under_ 1%. Inflation is _over_ 1%. Why the fuck would they want to save? Why would anyone want them to save except for the banks? What would savings accomplish them?
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The thing this rich assholes don't understand is that the poor are not poor because they don't have money. They are poor because they don't have _income_, and yet have expenses.
Jesus Christ, you could give every poor person $10,000 , and they'd either use it responsible or not, but in a year, even the _most_ responsible poor person _is still going to be poor_ because they're working a minimum wage job that barely pays the rent. A financial-savant poor person might have managed to parlay that $10,000 into saving them $11,000 that year, but they wouldn't have done it via 'investment', they would have done it via one-time purchases of a working refrigerator and paying off credit card bills.
Hell, does this moron even understand that the poor have _debts_, and hence 'investment' would be a fucking stupid idea anyway? If the poor manage to scrimp and save an extra $100 a month, they really need to be putting it towards that credit card bill they racked up when their car broke last month.
The problem is, that _is_ how it works in this asshole's world, where all his money magically appears out of fucking nowhere. Oh, I'm sorry, it magically appears out of the bank. So clearly it must that way with the poor. Let's ignore the interest rate poor people get is actually less than inflation, and that poor people don't actually have _any extra money at all_ to invest. If they have 'extra money', it will be to replace the rotting floor in the bathroom and catch up on car payments.
Telling a poor person they need better money management skills and that will solve the problem of poverty is like telling women they need to learn more self defense and that will solve the problem of rape. It's not a _bad_ idea for people to learn those things, and in fact I'm all for it. But that is not the fucking 'solution' that society needs to be talking about. Poor people are not poor because they have failed at being rich, they are poor because _they do not have the ability to make enough money_.
On “How Much Liberty Is Too Much?”
Wait a minute. 25% of recreational boating accident deaths _aren't_ from drowning? What the hell were they from, then?
I mean, boats do occasionally run into things, and presumably people die in such collisions. Although that would seem to either require either a much large ship smashing through a smaller one, because people normally are not hanging out at the very bow of the boat, at least not 25% of them!
And boats can also run into or over people, but we usually manage to separate swimming areas from boating areas, so that seems odd also.
Seriously, what did those 250 people die of? Caught up in rigging? Killed by a a swinging sail? Crushed between a boat and dock? What exactly is the threat here? Are they counting non-boat related deaths like heart attacks? (That does not seem to be a 'recreational boating accident'.)
On “I’m having a hard time deciding which I find harder to believe…”
Indeed. The real joke here isn't the symbolic vote. Symbolic votes on constitutional amendments are fairly silly anyway, so who cares when anyone did it?
Either a state ratifies it when it's not yet passed, or it passes and the state forgets about it until someone brings it up. (Now, failing to ratify this amendment when someone bring it up _would_ be something to notice would be relevant, but isn't what we're talking about here.)
No, the real joke is that they're so fucked up in Mississippi it takes them almost two decades to file a piece of paperwork. That paperwork is _almost old enough to vote_.
Man, and I thought the US Congress was dysfunctional.
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Why would anyone have _paid_ to do that when it would have been simpler and cheaper to just _say_ they were doing that, but actually just killed them?
Not even as any sort of public policy. They'd simply be faced with which of two ships to hire...the one that actually did the shipping, or the one that cost 1/100th as much, and mysteriously reappeared back in port two days after taking on a former-slave shipment. (I am assuming it's the state governments doing this, because former slaves would have no money to book passage.)
Does anyone now think anyone then would care?
There's not really any way, in the pre-intercontinental communication days, that former slaves would have made it en mass back to Africa. That benefited _no one_ to do correctly. (No one who was actually a 'person', at least.) I mean, look how many black people on slave ships died, and those deaths _directly cut into profit_.
About the only plausible way that things could have ended well would have been to give them a territory out west, one that they could get to themselves, and eventually making a state out of it. In fact, that probably would have been for the best in our _actual_ history. Having an actual power base where wealthy-ish black people could originate from, and where marginalized black people could retreat to, might have made the civil right's struggle shorter.
OTOH, I doubt it would have actually worked, no one would have allowed black people to end up in charge of a state in 1880 or whenever this would be. And such a place sorta already existed in New Orleans anyway.
On “A Well Regulated Militia”
Oh, I don't disagree with you. A lot of states constitutions have that and other rules about their militia.
Of course, state constitutions are _much_ easier to amend than the US constitution. If _state_ constitutions were what was standing in the way, we'd be fine. (Especially with the whole 'interstate commerce' thing obviously allowing regulation of sales.)
I was just pointing out is that the 2nd amendment was intended to just apply to the Federal government (Which everyone knows, if half the people forget.), and it really seems to me that it was intended to stop the Federal government from disarming the state militias, and is just conceptualized very poorly.
Now, what I'm not entirely sure of is what the writers of the 2nd thought about the Federal government disarming citizens which were _not_ in a state militia. I suspect the founders also would not approve of that, but for slightly different reasons. I suspect their objection would be more along the lines of 'The federal government should not be telling citizens of Virginia what they can and cannot own, period.'
This, incidentally, is sorta the reason I think it was supposed to work like I said. No one in 1789 would have _conceived_ of the US restricting citizens of the various states from owning things. No, the 2nd amendment was not for that...it was to stop the US from restricting the state militias. And least we forget, the US explicitly can seize control of militia of under the constitution, and _is in charge of arming_ them. The 2nd makes it even if the Federal government does something insane like refuses to arm them, _militias can still have weapons_.
If the 2nd amendment had not been incorporated under the 14th amendment, we'd be fine. If the 2nd amendment had been incorporated but had been correctly written to say 'The militias may not be disarmed', we'd also be fine. (As states could simply define who is in their own militia, and disarm others if they wanted...and change their constitution to allow that if it did not.) Instead, both stupid things happened and here we are.
I have no actual solution here, I was just trying to explain 'How we got here'.
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Moreover, arguing that because militias ceased to be the preferred military option of the Feds, the Feds can simply disregard the 2A and disarm the militia- by disarming the people who fill it- is just goofy. The entire point of the 2A is to restrain the Feds from disarming the militia. Arguing that the militia can be disarmed becasue the Feds don’t want to use it anymore renders the whole Amendment useless.
The real problem is now the _states_ can't disarm _their own_ militia, which is rather absurd.
Subjecting the 2nd amendment (Which, regardless of how it is phrased, is intended to give states a _right_ to operate a militia, even if the Federal government wishes to disarm it) to incorporation under the 14th amendment (Thus subjecting states to restrictions on their own militia!) was completely idiotic.
Although it's still being interpreted wrong even if that's true. Logically, even if states cannot now disarm their own militia (!?), they can still determine who is _in_ it. (This is one of those things so well known back then that no one bothered to put in writing, like what habeus corpus is.) So a state could ban all guns simply by saying it _has_ no militia, or that militia is solely the National Guard plus the police plus people who have passed specific gun training, and, thus, logically, it is only required to allow those people to be armed.
The problem is the courts have idiotically decided that the entire first part of amendment doesn't matter. That the right to bear arms doesn't exist in the context of _state power to have a militia_, like the amendment is clearly trying to say, it just exists in general.
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The actual intent of the 2nd amendment is pretty damn clear to anyone who actually reads it and knows the history. Because the 2nd amendment was _never intended to apply to the states_.
That's a pretty indisputable fact, that even if the founder's intent was that the Federal government couldn't disarm _anyone_, obviously the states could, and did, have laws about gun ownership at that time. I think everyone agrees with that, although a good 90% of the people involved in discussions about the 2nd amendment seem to forget it.
'A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.'
So, realizing it didn't apply to states, it is pretty clear that the 2nd amendment is the _federal government_ being forbidden from disarming _state militias_. Which they would do by disarming individuals, because that is how militias worked. I don't actually understand how people can read that amendment in any other way. States have a right to a militia, and the federal government cannot disarm people in it. (And, as is pointed out, pretty much any able-bodied male is considered part of the militia, and the state can presumably put anyone it wants in it, so the Federal government is basically forbidden from disarming anyone if the state doesn't want it.)
The problem is then we applied this restriction as applying to _states_ and have now forbidden the states from disarming not only their own militia (Which is somewhat crazy, if a bit moot because states don't really have those anymore.), but _anyone at all_ (Which is completely insane in the context of the original.)
Yes, I know that is one _logical_ outcome of the interaction between the second amendment and the Due Process Clause of the fourteenth amendment, but it's very clearly a colossal accident. The right being spoken of wasn't _actually_ a right to keep and bear arms, it was a right for a _state_ to operate a militia, and just phrased in a fucked up way.
The idea that a state can be _forced_ to not disarm its own frickin militia is crazy. As is the idea that somehow everyone is in the militia _even if the state doesn't want them to be_ and hence is required to be armed. Those two concepts are complete and utter nonsense, even if the 'programming' of the 2nd and 14th amendment makes them true. Those might really be the rules, but they are completely batshit crazy rules.
On “It’s the Party, Stupid, Ctd. : How we deal with the peccadillos is actually pretty important, too”
The GOP has convinced it’s base it can have everything they like about government, and less taxes too. But they can’t. So they bitch and whine about taxes that are at historic lows, and act like rolling back the tax rates to the 90s is gonna kill America and turn us into Soviet Russia.
Luckily, that's going to happen anyway, at the end of this year. Well, partially.
Plain fact of the matter is, when you poll the public on what they want to cut from government? There ain’t much, really, that has broad support to slash.
Actually, there is stuff that has 'broad support' to slash by _completely misinformed_ people. For example, if you poll people, foreign aid has broad support to slash, and people think it should be slashed way down to 5% of the budget or so. The obvious problem there is that foreign aid actually totals 25 billion, or 0.8% of the budget.
And, of course, there was Romney's public television insanity. To fight the dreaded half a billion dollars we're spending on it. Oh noes! That's enough money to give everyone a tax reduction enough to buy a single item off the dollar meal at McDonalds! That's worth giving up PBS and NPR for!
Likewise, when you ask people how much different income groups should be taxed...there'd for 'lowering' the amount of tax the rich pay to almost Sweden levels! Seriously. They want to 'lower' the rich's taxes to much higher than they _currently are_.
The problem is, frankly, people seem to have no idea where money goes, or how much goes where, or where it comes from. Checking other countries, educating people about such things is supposed to be the job of a system called 'the media', and someday this country might actually get one.
But, yes, there's nothing with broad support for cutting that actually would _do_ anything, except for the military. Especially the wars. Which is, of course, treasonous to talk about cutting.
And there’s no reason to force politicans to make hard choices — to cut into things like the military (do we really need to spend as much as the entire world combined?), or agricultural subsidies, much less anything truly difficult. (Cutting the military or agriculture hurts lobbyists more than Americans. Cutting in Social Security or Medicare tends to get the masses involved).
That is the real problem with living on borrowed money. If the spending matched the revenue, and people could see 'Oh, I'm spending $100 dollars a year on this, is there a way to trim it?' and 'Well, that's $200 a year, but it seems like it's a big program, so I guess I understand that.'
(Not that the revenues should exactly match spending, of course. I'd suggest varying by up to an extra 20% spending in bad times, made up for by an extra 20% revenue in good.)
On “Election 2012 Recap: Getting the Triumphalism Right”
Oh, and I somehow forgot to mention the difference in _money_ spent between the two sides under 'Obama handicaps'.
Seriously, folks, in 2008 there was the excuse of a idiotic running mate, _and_ the anti-Bush sentiment, _and_ people voting for a historic candidate they perhaps otherwise would not have, _and_ perhaps Obama didn't have a mandate because no one knew how 'far left' (ha) he would govern.
Yeah, all those excuses are gone this time. All of them. The Republican ticket is, at least, competent. Bush has gone down the memory hole. We've already had a black president. We know exactly how Obama governs. And it's also a recession. And hundreds of millions of dollars in secret spending, a lot of which was used to promote flat-out lies.
And it's +127 EVs for the 'socialist'. +127 EVs for living under Obama.
I think we've forever proven that the right, and the beltway idiots, and half damn the internet, don't live in the America they _think_ they live in.
On “It’s the Party, Stupid, Ctd. : How we deal with the peccadillos is actually pretty important, too”
And, see, in a sane world, we could sit there and argue about what it actually makes sense for the government to do, secure in the fact that once we agree to that, we would _actually set taxes to allow us to do that_.
But we can't. Because the Republicans have picked as a 'policy goal' something that isn't even a political question to start with, namely, 'What amount of taxes do we need to take in?
The problem is what actually happened is for about two decades the right pretended to care about less spending, while actually only caring about lower taxes. Meanwhile, they brainwashed _everyone_ into caring about both of them (While everyone somehow failed a spot check on who was actually doing the spending. Apparently, it's only spending if Democrats do it.)
This was stupid enough...but then they got overthrown by their own brainwashed base who actually _tried_ to reduce spending down to the idiotic level that would match the idiotic level of taxes. (And everyone else said WTF?)
You know those countries that have just been introduced to democracy, and don't really understand it, and have to have a decade or so learning how it works?
Well, thanks to the Republican brainwashing, us Americans need a decade or so to (re)learn how taxes actually work and what the correct level of them is. Hint: It's roughly the amount we are spending, regardless of whether or not you politically agree with that amount of spending.
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I tend to hate the implication that _taxes_ have anything to do with _freedom_. The GOP has managed to brainwash a large percentage of the electority, _including Democrats_, that such a thing is true. And, what's more, that it is the _most important_ freedom.
How much you pay on your goddamn taxes is actually pretty unimportant to _everyone_. Almost everything the government does is more important than paying 3% more income tax. If you actually _ask_ people this, they will willingly agree. Aka, would you rather have roads than the 2% of money that goes towards roads?
Incidentally, the few things that people _don't_ agree they'd rather have more of than a corresponding cut in their taxes are the military, which we can never ever cut. And the rest is entirely made up bullshit. (Yes, I _would_ like to spend $1 a year to fund public television, you assholes.)
It's like the entire nation is convinced that the most important thing about a movie is how many times people said 'the' in it, or the most important thing about a car is whether the radio antenna is perfectly straight. It's completely insane.
Taxes _are not a political issue_. Period. Taxes need to match spending on average, slightly higher in good times and slightly lower in bad. There is no actual 'politics' there, besides who should pay what percentage. If the right thinks the government should spend less, they need to MAKE THE GOVERNMENT SPEND LESS.
There's a quote going around about how a Democracy is doomed once people learn how to vote themselves free stuff. Well, that's wrong. A democracy is doomed when people realize they can just _vote themselves no taxes_ and keep getting the stuff that they had been purchasing, but are free now.
Which is, incidentally, counter-productive to reducing spending. If people are _paying_ for spending, and they are spending too much, and they are _paying_ for it, they might actually cut back on it. But if they aren't feeling it, why would they cut back?
The problem for Republicans is that, as I said, taxes _are not actually hurting people_, they were not too high, and wouldn't be in normal circumstances even if we taxed enough to cover spending. (Doing it now would be a bad idea, though.) People were basically happy with the level of government, so to reduce it, Republicans had to embark reducing taxes to start with, and hope, at some point, the government just falls over.
On “Election 2012 Recap: Getting the Triumphalism Right”
So, to recap: In 2000, Republicans win the presidency by _one_ electoral vote for a president we've never seen before and hence don't really know what he wants. He loses the popular vote. The Republicans also lose two seats in the House and lose four seats in the Senate.
And Bush proclaims _that_ is a mandate for Republican policies.
In 2012, Democrats win the presidency by 97 (+/-29) electoral votes for a president we've just seen four years of and presumably know what policies to expect from. He also wins the popular vote. The Democrats also win twenty-two seats in the House and two seats in the Senate.
And Obama wins during a _high unemployment_, where incumbents are supposed to be at a disadvantage. Oh, and he's black, and hence there's a small fraction of the population who will never vote for him.
And this blowout, of course, is _not_ a mandate for Democratic policies.
Speaking of blowout, I think the ultimate hypocrite on how to describe an election goes to Dick Morris. Apparently, his prediction of Romney winning by 325-213, aka, Romney winning by 60.4% is called 'a blowout ', but Obama winning, without Florida, by 303-206. That is, for reference, 59.5% of the (decided) EC. And Dick Morris calls it 'a squeaker'.
Who knew that 0.9% made such a difference! I guess 50.1%-59.9% is 'a squeaker' (Also known as 'a mandate' when it's a Republican), exactly 60.0% is 'a win', and 60.1%-100% is 'a blowout'.
Please note I'm not talking about his _prediction, which was even stupider than that, as Obama is actually going to win by 332 EV, aka, 61.7% of the total EC. I'm just talking about the word he used to describe Obama's victory when FL was still in doubt, when Obama had, tada, 59.5% of the EC. vs. the word he used to describe his prediction of a 60.4% win.
On “It’s the Party, Stupid, Ctd. : How we deal with the peccadillos is actually pretty important, too”
And we really need another party of some sort.
I'm rather hoping that classic liberals end up in one and the progressives end up in another, and we can run around debating _how_ to accomplish basically the same goals, and whether or not, for example, we should 'play favorites' to redress past wrong, or instead come up some other way to help people. And whether restricting people's ability to do drugs helps society, and even if it does, should we do it? Aka, a 'freedom' party vs a 'making society work' party, with both sides having to compromise to some exist, and both of them having basically the same goals. That would be an interesting and useful discussion.
Instead of this idiotic discussion we're apparently having about the delusional idea that cutting taxes increases revenue, and the delusional idea we should decrease spending during a recession, and the delusional idea that voter impersonation is an issue, and all the other delusional ideas that the Republicans keep coming up with.
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Well, yes, the demographics problem is sorta on top of the crazy problem. And, yes, it's actually the demographics that will kill them.(Or, rather, _have_ killed them.) The crazy problem is just why they are unable to solve the demographics problem.
In fact, they almost _did_ solve part of the demographics problem, with Bush's rather reasonable immigration reform...and the first major success of the crazies was to destroy that.
The crazy problem happened _right_ as Republican party was ready to pivot on immigration, expanding their tent _just_ wide enough to keep a majority. So it is the reason they fell down...but it's sorta just random, that was the first thing they got caught up on.
If we look into an alternate universe where the internet was ten years later, we'd see a universe where the Republicans were still in charge, and the crazies were just now taking over in blogs...and in ten years the Republicans would lose because crazies held them steady on the LGBT issue while the rest of the country moved on.
And an internet (And fox news) ten years earlier than our universe, the 1992 blogs would be full of crazy about flag burning and how Clinton was secretly a Soviet spy or whatever. (The Soviet union's breakup obviously being some sort of liberal trick.)
So, basically, whatever issue destroys a party taken over by crazy is whatever issue comes up next that the crazies think crazy things about. Currently, that appears to be racial minorities. Admitted, the Republicans would have had a hard time pivoting on that _anyway_, but probably could have managed it.
What's also seriously helped is the Republicans continuing to demonstrate that both parties _aren't_ the same by having all sorts of crazy local people and laws.
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Indeed. And the fact is, it's hard to see anything the right did wrong, except not predict the future.
The plan was obvious...keep stirring up the crazies with the newly invented cable news and talk radio, and keep gutting and criticize the mainstream media so the media doesn't report on this. Appear moderate to the public, appear far right to the base, and govern as basically moderate plus low taxes, ignoring the deficit, which was just something to yell around the Democrats about.
This actually seems like a perfect plan. It got them into power in 1994, and while it didn't get rid of Clinton in 1996, it did manage to get frickin George Bush in office in 2000.
And they managed to move the Overton window to the right, where suddenly we've all realized we need welfare reformed framed how the right says it. So the left moved away from their crazies (And plenty of sane leftish people), and into, functionally, a center-right party _barely_ to the left of the Republicans, which were also center-right.
But Al Gore had his revenge: The internet.
Suddenly, the crazy had a platform, and, worse, could _compare notes_. And realized that the Republicans were actually standing pretty close to the center, except for a few things like hurting unions (Which helped them politically) and lower taxes on the rich (Which also help them politically in donations). None of the Republican actually _cared_ about the lunatic issues that the far-right had been feed for two decades. Yes, that was somewhat obvious to everyone, but the far right had a lot of, to be blunt, fucking morons, and more importantly they were able to talk to each other and gin up the outrage.
Fox news then said 'Holy shit, right wing outrage, That's ratings gold!' (Insert video of a controlled detonation to take down a building.)
At this point, the right had two ways to jump. One option was to the left (On top of the Democrats) and disavowed their crazies, likes the Democrats did. Except the Democrats did that slowly, with the help of the media, the right had no time at all and the media had picked the other side. So they jumped rightward, a jump which half of them didn't manage to pull off and got replaced anyway.
That was _really_ the wrong choice. Well, perhaps the right choice for any individual's political career, as jumping to the left or even staying in the same place got people primaried out already. But it was _really_ the wrong choice for the party because of one simple fact:
WE CAN SEE YOU GUYS IN THERE.
On “No, but it would help”
Yes. Almost all hobbies look like wastes of time from the outside to other people. And a boatload of them are more dangerous than drugs.
Drugs sometimes cause a physical dependency, but so what? Skiing sometimes cause broken legs. A lot of hobbies, like computer games, TV watching, etc, sometimes cause people to not get enough exercise. Sports sometimes cause fights and riots. D&D sometimes causes players to think the game is real and go on murderous rampages for 'experience'...wait, that one is made up, nevermind.
It is legal for people to put specialized pieces of cloth in their backpack, hire an airplane, and then _jump out of that airplane_ and use the cloth to maybe land safely. This is entirely _legal_. People _sell_ other people this service, and the government is completely aware of this.
Compared to all that, someone who needs a specific amount of heroin each day to function is _nothing_.
And frankly, within a _functioning_ treatment system, it's a hell of a lot easier and cheaper to detox someone vs. fixing a broken leg or a heart attack caused by not enough exercise. (We do not have a functioning treatment system.)
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