Puterbac News Network and Political Discussion Thread

[Professor Tiger]

Are you saying the party of tolerance will riot if they don't get their way?

I'm saying if Obama wins the popular vote but somehow loses the election, it will be Watts '65 + Newark '67 + LA '92 x100.

[DooKSucks]

If there is a popular/electoral split, it will be Obama winning the electoral and Romney winning the popular vote.

[Jungle Rat]

Riots? Too funny.

[Professor Tiger]

If there is a popular/electoral split, it will be Obama winning the electoral and Romney winning the popular vote.

Then instead of urban riots, it will be business executives jumping out of skyscrapers and evangelicals jumping off steeples.

[Jungle Rat]

I can live with that.

[sardis]

Riots? People are too lazy to riot nowadays. Just look at the occupiers. What ever happened to them?

[hedge]

"The movement in the polls after Denver had nothing to do with changing perceptions of Obama — with one important exception I’ll explain shortly — and everything to do with changing perceptions of Romney."

I agree with that...

[Professor Tiger]

The day before the election, I will move from one of the most pro-Obama states in the country (Illinois) to one of the most anti-Obama states in the country (Alabama).

If Romney loses, I should have a front row seat for the steeple jumps, but not the skyscraper jumps.

[hedge]

Are you moving to Alabama for the mexican cuisine?

[Professor Tiger]

No, for the BBQ. The greens, black eyed peas, and okra are an added bonus.

[Johnette's Daddy]

The day before the election, I will move from one of the most pro-Obama states in the country (Illinois) to one of the most anti-Obama states in the country (Alabama).

If Romney loses, I should have a front row seat for the steeple jumps, but not the skyscraper jumps.

http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2011/03/ala ... on_gr.html

Alabama's Hispanic population grew 145 percent between 2000 and 2010, the nation's second-largest percentage growth in that time, according to analysis of U.S. Census numbers released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

South Carolina is the only state ahead of Alabama on the list. Three other Southern states -- Tennessee, Kentucky, and Arkansas -- round out the top five.

The real reason we don't have a coherent immigration policy is because Big Bubba (the agriculture oligarchs) don't want it. Drove from Memphis to Lake Charles a couple of summers ago and was stunned to see Hispanics picking cotton in Mississippi. They must've swam from Veracruz to Biloxi, because I know that Big Bubba wasn't paying coyotes to smuggle in cheap labor.

[Professor Tiger]

The reason the immigration policy remains unchanged through both D and R governments is both parties want to keep it as is. The D's like illegal immigration is they believe that all those illegals will become Dem voters. The R's like illegal immigration because they make some business owner somewhere a lot of money.

Illegal immigration is about the only issue where both parties agree.

[Professor Tiger]

Rasmussen just moved NC and FL from undecided to Romney leans. Woah.

[puterbac]

Seeds of our dysfunction

By George F. Will,  Published: OCTOBER 19, 7:44 PM ET

Elections supposedly prevent convulsions, serving as safety valves that vent social pressures and enable course corrections. November’s election will either be a prelude to a convulsion or the beginning of a turn away from one.

America’s public-policy dysfunction exists not because democracy isn’t working but because it is. Both parties are sensitive market mechanisms, measuring more than shaping voters’ preferences. The electoral system is a seismograph recording every tremor of public appetite. Today, the differences that divide the public are exceeded by the contradictions within the public’s mind.

America’s bold premise is the possibility of dignified self-government — people making reasonable choices about restrained appetites. But three decades ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington postulated that America suffers regularly recurring political convulsions because the gap between the premise and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Now Michael Greve, a constitutional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues: “We like to tell ourselves that all our constitutional stories must have a happy ending.” The Founders’ foremost problem, Greve says, was debt. To establish the nation’s credibility, they needed to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. “We,” Greve says, “merely have to return to it, if we can.” He wonders whether we can.

Tom Toles on the budget battle: Collection of cartoons on the federal budget and economy.
The official national debt of $16 trillion (growing $4 billion a day), plus what the government owes its various trust funds, is more than 100 percent of gross domestic product. Ninety percent is where economic anemia seems to deepen. States’ debts are about $3 trillion, and their unfunded pension liabilities probably are another $4 trillion. “Debts of this magnitude,” Greve says, “will not be paid.”

Barack Obama’s risible solution is to add 4.6 points to the tax rate for less than 3 percent of Americans. Some conservatives have the audacity of hope — expecting 5 percent economic growth (the post-1945 average: 2.9 percent) and planning to continue financing the debt by borrowing at negative interest rates. Of our long slide into financial decrepitude, Greve says: “The rate of deterioration does not correlate in any obvious way with political control over the presidency and Congress.”

The housing debacle was not the result of “a spontaneous outbreak of private irresponsibility.” Public institutions and policies provided occasions and incentives for the exercise of private vices. Washington pays up to 80 percent of state Medicaid expenses, so state citizens demand more Medicaid services. Although the elderly consider Social Security and Medicare benefits earned, Greve says: “Most retirees could not have earned their expected payment streams if they had worked two or three jobs.”

“Our politics,” says Greve, “aims at inspiration on the cheap.” We should reduce government’s complicity in illusions by, for example, sending retirees “a statement showing the estimated present value of their old-age benefits; their lifetime earnings and contributions; and the earnings and contributions that it would have taken to ‘earn’ those benefits. We might then ask them who precisely should earn and remit the missing millions and in what sense it would be ‘unfair’ to modify the empty promises.”

Rash promises were made, Greve says, “in an era of prosperity, when and because we thought we could afford them.” Now they “are far too entrenched to be dislodged in the course of ordinary politics.” Even granting Mitt Romney’s embrace of something like his running mate’s reforms, this year’s politics are terribly ordinary. Although consensus is supposedly elusive, it actually is the problem. “Our operative consensus,” says Greve, “is to have a big transfer state, and not pay for it.”

Democracy is representative government, which is the problem. Democracy represents the public’s preferences, which are mutable, but also represents human nature, which is constant. People flinch from confronting difficult problems until driven to by necessity’s lash. The Claremont Institute’s William Voegeli, commenting on Greve and the dubious postulate of continuous 5 percent growth, says: “There’s good reason to fear that if the economy builds a 5 percent levee the polity will just come up with a 6 percent flood. We humans adroitly use scant and equivocal evidence to convince ourselves that the most congenial interpretation of events is also the most plausible and durable.”

Writing in 1830, Thomas Babington Macaulay asked, “On what principle is it that, when we see nothing but improvement behind us, we are to expect nothing but deterioration before us?” Greve’s gloomy answer is: Because we actually see behind us protracted abandonment of the Founders’ flinty realism about the need to limit government because of the limitations of the people.

georgewill@washpost.com

[hedge]

Pretty good take, which isn't entirely unusual for Will. Except this part:

"But three decades ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington postulated that America suffers regularly recurring political convulsions because the gap between the premise and reality becomes too wide to ignore."

I think it's a different sort of gap that is driving current voting patterns. I do appreciate Will's nod and tacit agreement with this entirely nonpartisan statement of blame:

"Although consensus is supposedly elusive, it actually is the problem. “Our operative consensus,” says Greve, “is to have a big transfer state, and not pay for it.”"

Consensus indeed...

[innocentbystander]

Seeds of our dysfunction

By George F. Will,  Published: OCTOBER 19, 7:44 PM ET

Elections supposedly prevent convulsions, serving as safety valves that vent social pressures and enable course corrections. November’s election will either be a prelude to a convulsion or the beginning of a turn away from one.

America’s public-policy dysfunction exists not because democracy isn’t working but because it is. Both parties are sensitive market mechanisms, measuring more than shaping voters’ preferences. The electoral system is a seismograph recording every tremor of public appetite. Today, the differences that divide the public are exceeded by the contradictions within the public’s mind.

America’s bold premise is the possibility of dignified self-government — people making reasonable choices about restrained appetites. But three decades ago, Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington postulated that America suffers regularly recurring political convulsions because the gap between the premise and reality becomes too wide to ignore.

Now Michael Greve, a constitutional scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, argues: “We like to tell ourselves that all our constitutional stories must have a happy ending.” The Founders’ foremost problem, Greve says, was debt. To establish the nation’s credibility, they needed to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution. “We,” Greve says, “merely have to return to it, if we can.” He wonders whether we can.

Tom Toles on the budget battle: Collection of cartoons on the federal budget and economy.
The official national debt of $16 trillion (growing $4 billion a day), plus what the government owes its various trust funds, is more than 100 percent of gross domestic product. Ninety percent is where economic anemia seems to deepen. States’ debts are about $3 trillion, and their unfunded pension liabilities probably are another $4 trillion. “Debts of this magnitude,” Greve says, “will not be paid.”

http://www.ejectejecteject.com/archives/000062.html

I contend that there is a single litmus that does indeed separate the nation and the world into two opposing camps, and that when you examine where people will fall on the countless issues that affect our society, this alone is the indicator that will tell you how they will respond.

The indicator is Responsibility.

Political Correctness, Deconstructionism, Trans-National Progressivism, Liability mania, Crime and Punishment, Terrorism, Welfare, Gun Control, Media Bias, Affirmative Action, Abortion, Education Reform, Social Engineering �- all of it �- will divide people according to their idea of Responsibility.

I suspect that there are really only two schools of political thought, and these are based on competing theories of how the human creature is constructed.

Again, a caveat about the ever-changing quicksand about labels. But with that said, it appears that people we generally group as �the left� are convinced that society is responsible for pretty much everything that happens in our lives, that group responsibility trumps individual responsibility because they see the forces of the group �- culture, history, economic background �- as overwhelming determinants to individual outcome.

Those on the other side see individual responsibility as the final arbiter of human behavior. The United States of America is, without question, the most individual-centric nation in the history of the world. We have enshrined in the structure of our culture impressive guarantees of individual freedoms, and because of that, we see an enormous spectrum of behaviors �- some noble, others... shall we say, �colorful,� and some completely vile and disgraceful �- that are the natural outcome of allowing people a great deal of personal freedom. Such a society will produce a US Constitution, a Bill of Rights, a Voyager probe�and unlimited episodes of COPS and The Jerry Springer Show.

We all profess to be in favor of more freedom. Freedom is the Platinum Visa card. We all want one. Responsibility is the credit rating. Not so much enthusiasm for the kind of discipline needed to earn one of those.

Great-grandma isn't interested in being told that she wasn't responsible enough to save enough of her earnings during her working years to pay for her care in her retired years. And she probably isn't emotionally stable enough to get a reality slap across the face that her social security check and her medicare health claims are indebting her great-grandchildren. She wants to live, not be turned into Soilent Green.

This is the ultimate problem with Democracy. It can not exist as a perminant form of government. We (as human beings) are not responsible enough to have it.

[Professor Tiger]

George Will nails it, as always.

The Dem's are always going to try to dole out government goodies to their friends (blacks, gays, feminists, unions, environmentalist wacko's). The R's are always going to try to dole out government goodies for their friends (Big Business).

The government needs to get out of the business of doling out goodies to ANYBODY's friends by returning to Constitutional restraint. Libertarianism is the only way to go. Either Paul or Johnson.

[Toemeesleather]

Hate to burst your bubble again, but Romney has a snowball's chance in hell of actually winning.

From this..



..to this...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 12978.html

in less than 5 months....even NBC says it's a toss-up.

[puterbac]

Something seems amiss. I have a hard time seeing how polling n MO and OH are so divergent.

Rcp avg show oprama up 2.2 in OH but Romney up 10.4 in MO?

That seems like a huge disparity in two states that usually are pretty close with each other. Seems very very odd.

[puterbac]

Textbooks round the world

It ain’t necessarily so

The textbooks children learn from in school reveal and shape national attitudes—and should provoke debate

Oct 13th 2012 | BRAUNSCHWEIG | from the print edition

http://www.economist.com/node/21564554