I agree. The fact that the older members of the Supreme Court are largely on the left makes the next election extremely important.
I fear Hillary's main problem will be people seeing her as too calculating.
Jeb Bush seems to lack the ability to excite people. Let's see if that changes.
I know some people like Rand Paul, but he seems to buckle under any questioning of his past and go full crybaby.
Christie doesn't seem to be taken seriously anymore on the right. Can't blame them, he's been a fucking failure in NJ. I live here and sick to my stomach he's still around.
The rest on the right are just batshit crazy or pretending to be, which is actually worse.
No justice is going to always agree on everything with their ideological similar co-workers. Plus issues don't always divide along right left lines.
Also, a lot of the times justices seem like they are going against their ideology, they actually aren't. You might be like "Oh, that right wing judge voted for X left wing issue. How interesting." And then you read their argument and it's all like "I voted X because state's rights!" and you realize they're as right wing as ever.
The only reason Bernie hasn't got a chance is that the media will repeat that he hasn't got a chance ad nauseum, and people like you will take up the meme under the auspices of "understanding politics." Fuck that.
Just saw this, and muppet you're wrong. Not because Bernie's a socialist - which is a factor, mind you, as folks who vote in primaries tend to care about him not being an actual democrat - but because he doesn't have a path to raising enough money to be competitive.
I know some people like Rand Paul, but he seems to buckle under any questioning of his past and go full crybaby.
He also pissed his Dad's supporters by trying to court the evangelicals (which he failed at). That lost him a lot of ground, and with Cruz's star being higher than his, he won't find much support.
Christie doesn't seem to be taken seriously anymore on the right. Can't blame them, he's been a fucking failure in NJ. I live here and sick to my stomach he's still around.
IMHO, he's destined for jail. Seriously, that GW Bridge shutdown was a dumb move.
The rest on the right are just batshit crazy or pretending to be, which is actually worse.
Scott Walker is he dark horse this year. As long as he doesn't flub by comparing unions to ISIS, he could easily rally the Republican base. He's also scarily good at fanning the flames of white resentment, almost as good or even better than Reagan was, while showing himself to be more moderate than he actually is. He does have problems, mostly in the same vein as Bobby Jindal in Louisiana, but if he can overcome those he could do pretty well for himself.
I don't agree. There's LOTS of vectors for fund raising now. It's about how strongly he can motivate his base. Shooting his horse before the gate opens will definitely become a self fulfilling prophecy, though.
That's not true there were a lot of Obama nah sayers in the beginning and look where he ended up. Problem Bernie has is he's not even close to where Obama was in his primary bid at this time.
I don't agree. There's LOTS of vectors for fund raising now. It's about how strongly he can motivate his base. Shooting his horse before the gate opens will definitely become a self fulfilling prophecy, though.
Yeah, but Sanders doesn't have any of those vectors on deck.
Back dating massively, but I did this as well and got Sinn Féin strangely high up. Very strange as my dads family was on the other side during the troubles, best not tell them about that.
The somewhat scary thing is that the only candidates who seem to have really excited supporters right now are Sanders, Cruz, and Rand Paul. Sanders simply doesn't appear to have a base big enough to contend with Hillary, but I think it may be distinctly possible for Cruz to win primaries based on the same kind of grassroots excitable-dedicated-people effort that let Obama win primaries. That is, assuming Cruz doesn't manage to absolutely destroy himself doing stupid shit in the next seven months, which isn't really that unlikely. But if Cruz gets the primary and Democratic apathy continues to hold, it could be a very scary election.
But if Cruz gets the primary and Democratic apathy continues to hold, it could be a very scary election.
Nah, Hillary would tear him to shreds. I've said it before, but the man's a walking, talking political hypocrisy. He rails against the Affordable Care Act but his entire family is insured through the exchanges. He consistently spouts pro-freedom rhetoric, but forced people to attend his announcement or face a fine. There's so much bad press just bubbling under the surface of Ted Cruz that Hillary and her team will have to change their underwear once they start sorting through it.
He's also a technological idiot and is poised to make the same mistakes as Mittens did four years ago in terms of a digital media campaign. How do I know this? His website was on a Wordpress platform when he announced. He's so not ready to run that it isn't really funny. If he hadn't managed to raise 30 million in a week then I'd write him off as a joke.
Y'know, I think back to all the times that people told me "as you grow up and get a job and become a real adult you'll become conservative like me," and then I look at the way my political views have skewed more and more liberal over time.
I think, by and large, nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about.
I have grown steadily more leftist over the past decade, but I might slip right a bit in the future. To what Scott said, I would add access to food, clothing, and shelter to the list of things that people should get solely on the basis of being human. The sad thing is that doing that appears to be an infeasible problem at the moment. I hope that someday it will be feasible.
But seriously, we should have free health care, free education, and a basic living stipend for all the humans in the US. It's the right thing to do.
"According to popular myth, it was Winston Churchill who said, “Any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.” He didn’t say it, but his imprimatur turned a clever quip of uncertain provenance into an axiom of political biography: Radicalism is a privilege of youth, conservatism a responsibility of age, and every thinking person eventually surrenders the first for the second. From Max Eastman to Eugene Genovese, Whittaker Chambers to Ronald Radosh, intellectuals migrate from left to right as if obeying a law of nature.
Or do they? After all, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women when he was sixty-three. In the last ten years of his life, Diderot hailed the American Revolution and blasted France as the reincarnation of imperial Rome. And when George Bernard Shaw addressed the question of politics and aging, he suggested just the opposite of what Churchill is supposed to have said. “The most distinguished persons,” Shaw wrote in 1903, “become more revolutionary as they grow older.”" -The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin (Source)
Mostly those "conservatism is a temperament types" push idea of a natural development that all people go through that ends in conservatism, but that is mostly made up nonsense. They are simply saying that because they think they are right, that everyone smart will come to agree with them eventually. Most optimists of many different sorts of politics say similar things in their lives. Conservatives aren't unique in that regard, oftentimes they just get more press about it. Age is often used as a substitute for a range of social/political factors and that clearly doesn't encompass an entire age cohort(or the majority of a cohort) any more than the idea that all young people are progressive by nature.
I remember reading an article about a poll(dubious, I know) that showed that though young people as a group looked more progressive, digging into the breakdowns, on things like healthcare, a scarily large majority of 18-35 year old white males gave answers that were more to the right than even the oldest white males. The oldest white males were statistically the most conservative cohort but young white males were further to the right of them on a few categories. I wish I could find the source though. It was about six months ago and I can't find it for the life of me.
So in the most vulgar sense, the youth will inherit the earth, but that asks the question, "Which youth?"
Except for joining hands with the rest of the political right to undo much of the positive social change of the twentieth century, but you know, besides that.
But seriously though, that is a rather unfair characterization of the section of the political right that calls themselves libertarian, even though many times it is libertarians themselves that put themselves down. It is similar to the way conservatives call themselves dumb, which serves a political purpose but is honestly a rather untrue pejorative. It took a lot of thought and organization to forge the radically unfree and unequal society that exists today out of the bones of the social democracy of Europe and the brittle welfare state of America. They should be given credit for that fact.
Most "Libertarian" politicans are just Republicans who don't want to call themselves republican for whatever reason, much like the Tea Party.
Leaving aside that the Right stole the word Libertarian from the Anarcho-Communists, and that I think that the only truly libertarian society is a socialist society, when we talk of contemporary "Libertarianism" we are talking about, especially in American, a political ideology on and of the Right.
Libertarianism is just like almost every other political ideology. They are a bunch of statists that believe that the government should tacitly and explicitly support who they think of as good people(in their case capitalists and other assorted property owners) and support them in defending themselves or just defend them outright from their political enemies(The Left), their pretensions to Non-Aggression being a pile of nonsense. They are not as special as they like to think they are.
Considering that they are a part of a broader political family(The Right), which means that who they want to protect from whom is the vast majority of the time functionally indistinguishable from conservatives, it makes sense that someone is both a Libertarian and a conservative and that they belong to, donate to, or vote for the Republican Party. Movement conservatism having taken over the Republican Party, it is a rightist's natural home.
But to get to the substance of your point, sometimes they need to disassociate from one of their brands in order to better accomplish their goals. It doesn't mean that they don't fall under the other brand that they like more too.
You're right, Its just interesting how to many individuals Libertarianism seems to be about a high priority of individual freedoms while the actual politicians don't give a shit about that and just use it as an excuse to fight any regulations on their corporations.
Insert generic [whoever's running the show is rigging the fuck out of it] here. The lack of auditing on those machines was abysmal last I checked and I haven't heard any compelling reversals of that situation. Having worked (briefly) for state level government... it's a fuckshow.
So Hillary possibly had her first blunder. The TPP fast-track failed yesterday thanks entirely to Senate Democrats blocking it from going to vote. This killed Obama's big policy objective in recent months and caused him some serious damage, and Hillary had an easy middle ground response, especially with how this issue was polling with Democratic voters. She could have said she was in favor of trade agreements, which would have blunted any attack against in in regards to NAFTA and GATT, and broadly supported TPP, she can't come out against it since the State Department had a huge aprt in the negotiations and any comment against it would be off message, but said something about how the secrecy and the fast-track process wasn't a good way to accomplish this.
On the subject of TPP, it's likely dead. Without the fast-track, TPP now gets to be hacked up by Congress. Considering it took years of negotiation between twelve participating countries to create it, this essentially resets the whole thing at zero. Good job guys.
In other news, Jeb Bush made a comment about how he would have gone to war in Iraq if he was in the same position as his brother. His group is trying to say it was meant as a "message test" against Hillary, who had voted for the war as a Senator, but was more likely an attempt to nail down the National Security Hawks of the Republican Party, who have only been courted by Lindsay Grahm recently. Now this would've been a non-news news story -- the Iraq War is a third-rail issue at best -- had he not almost immediately started backtracking in the worst possible way: trying to unsay what he'd said while still trying to be in the headlines. Had Jeb simply reiterated his comments, but toned down the hawk rhetoric, then it would have likely passed by. Now he gets to deal with the fallout, and he gave Hillary a weapon to use against him.
Eh. TPP was estimated at raising income of Americans by about 0.4% per year. TTIP was estimated at raising it by around 1.4%.
Since the economic gains of TPP were fairly low, it's been argued that the point was geopolitics and not economics. It would have placed the USA as the center of a huge, overlapping free trade zone that would account for a large part of the global economy.* It's importance is that it set trade standards largely by US models and completely excluded China. TPP combined with TTIP would have cemented the USA as the center for global trade for decades to come.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also glad it's dead after I read about the IP chapter that got released, but there was more going on than just that one thing.
* "The TPP is a negotiation with 11 countries, most importantly Japan. Its partners account for 36 per cent of world output, 11 per cent of population and about one-third of merchandise trade. The TTIP is between the US and the EU, which account for 46 per cent of global output and 28 per cent of merchandise trade."
You would have to be like 4 inches away to get any juice. Mythbusters did a thing on it. The stream breaks up into individual droplets before it gets too far from the, uh, nozzle.
Comments
I fear Hillary's main problem will be people seeing her as too calculating.
Jeb Bush seems to lack the ability to excite people. Let's see if that changes.
I know some people like Rand Paul, but he seems to buckle under any questioning of his past and go full crybaby.
Christie doesn't seem to be taken seriously anymore on the right. Can't blame them, he's been a fucking failure in NJ. I live here and sick to my stomach he's still around.
The rest on the right are just batshit crazy or pretending to be, which is actually worse.
But if Cruz gets the primary and Democratic apathy continues to hold, it could be a very scary election.
He's also a technological idiot and is poised to make the same mistakes as Mittens did four years ago in terms of a digital media campaign. How do I know this? His website was on a Wordpress platform when he announced. He's so not ready to run that it isn't really funny. If he hadn't managed to raise 30 million in a week then I'd write him off as a joke.
"According to popular myth, it was Winston Churchill who said, “Any man under thirty who is not a liberal has no heart, and any man over thirty who is not a conservative has no brains.” He didn’t say it, but his imprimatur turned a clever quip of uncertain provenance into an axiom of political biography: Radicalism is a privilege of youth, conservatism a responsibility of age, and every thinking person eventually surrenders the first for the second. From Max Eastman to Eugene Genovese, Whittaker Chambers to Ronald Radosh, intellectuals migrate from left to right as if obeying a law of nature.
Or do they? After all, John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women when he was sixty-three. In the last ten years of his life, Diderot hailed the American Revolution and blasted France as the reincarnation of imperial Rome. And when George Bernard Shaw addressed the question of politics and aging, he suggested just the opposite of what Churchill is supposed to have said. “The most distinguished persons,” Shaw wrote in 1903, “become more revolutionary as they grow older.”"
-The Reactionary Mind by Corey Robin (Source)
Mostly those "conservatism is a temperament types" push idea of a natural development that all people go through that ends in conservatism, but that is mostly made up nonsense. They are simply saying that because they think they are right, that everyone smart will come to agree with them eventually. Most optimists of many different sorts of politics say similar things in their lives. Conservatives aren't unique in that regard, oftentimes they just get more press about it. Age is often used as a substitute for a range of social/political factors and that clearly doesn't encompass an entire age cohort(or the majority of a cohort) any more than the idea that all young people are progressive by nature.
I remember reading an article about a poll(dubious, I know) that showed that though young people as a group looked more progressive, digging into the breakdowns, on things like healthcare, a scarily large majority of 18-35 year old white males gave answers that were more to the right than even the oldest white males. The oldest white males were statistically the most conservative cohort but young white males were further to the right of them on a few categories. I wish I could find the source though. It was about six months ago and I can't find it for the life of me.
So in the most vulgar sense, the youth will inherit the earth, but that asks the question, "Which youth?"
But seriously though, that is a rather unfair characterization of the section of the political right that calls themselves libertarian, even though many times it is libertarians themselves that put themselves down. It is similar to the way conservatives call themselves dumb, which serves a political purpose but is honestly a rather untrue pejorative. It took a lot of thought and organization to forge the radically unfree and unequal society that exists today out of the bones of the social democracy of Europe and the brittle welfare state of America. They should be given credit for that fact.
Took that test some whiles ago.
Libertarianism is just like almost every other political ideology. They are a bunch of statists that believe that the government should tacitly and explicitly support who they think of as good people(in their case capitalists and other assorted property owners) and support them in defending themselves or just defend them outright from their political enemies(The Left), their pretensions to Non-Aggression being a pile of nonsense. They are not as special as they like to think they are.
Considering that they are a part of a broader political family(The Right), which means that who they want to protect from whom is the vast majority of the time functionally indistinguishable from conservatives, it makes sense that someone is both a Libertarian and a conservative and that they belong to, donate to, or vote for the Republican Party. Movement conservatism having taken over the Republican Party, it is a rightist's natural home.
But to get to the substance of your point, sometimes they need to disassociate from one of their brands in order to better accomplish their goals. It doesn't mean that they don't fall under the other brand that they like more too.
On the subject of TPP, it's likely dead. Without the fast-track, TPP now gets to be hacked up by Congress. Considering it took years of negotiation between twelve participating countries to create it, this essentially resets the whole thing at zero. Good job guys.
In other news, Jeb Bush made a comment about how he would have gone to war in Iraq if he was in the same position as his brother. His group is trying to say it was meant as a "message test" against Hillary, who had voted for the war as a Senator, but was more likely an attempt to nail down the National Security Hawks of the Republican Party, who have only been courted by Lindsay Grahm recently. Now this would've been a non-news news story -- the Iraq War is a third-rail issue at best -- had he not almost immediately started backtracking in the worst possible way: trying to unsay what he'd said while still trying to be in the headlines. Had Jeb simply reiterated his comments, but toned down the hawk rhetoric, then it would have likely passed by. Now he gets to deal with the fallout, and he gave Hillary a weapon to use against him.
Since the economic gains of TPP were fairly low, it's been argued that the point was geopolitics and not economics. It would have placed the USA as the center of a huge, overlapping free trade zone that would account for a large part of the global economy.* It's importance is that it set trade standards largely by US models and completely excluded China. TPP combined with TTIP would have cemented the USA as the center for global trade for decades to come.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also glad it's dead after I read about the IP chapter that got released, but there was more going on than just that one thing.
* "The TPP is a negotiation with 11 countries, most importantly Japan. Its partners account for 36 per cent of world output, 11 per cent of population and about one-third of merchandise trade. The TTIP is between the US and the EU, which account for 46 per cent of global output and 28 per cent of merchandise trade." Not really. She basically did the opposite. Huh. I've always used it to refer to tertiary issues that aren't that important. More I know.