College Hoops, Disrespection, and More
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Wasn't expecting that one.In FL, POTUS carried the Cuban-American vote--something a D hasn't done for more than half a century.
You're kidding right? Which is more likely? Some young, slightly out of control kids, do something equivalent to fraternity initiation to people they consider an enemy or a high ranking officer a thousand miles removed orders the same kids to create a dog pile of naked prisoners and take pictures?eCat wrote:that girl went to prison.
there is no fucking way a private or corporal , whatever rank she held, was the master mind to those photos
McConnell is worried about a tea party challenge in 2 years and a challenge from Jim Demint (sp?) for leadership. A grand bargain is there though for the taking.eCat wrote:Boehner and McConnell both say they aren't raising taxes
Do they think its wise to go against a lame duck president who doesn't have to set the stage for his VP to be president?
we'll see
Owlman wrote:McConnell is worried about a tea party challenge in 2 years and a challenge from Jim Demint (sp?) for leadership. A grand bargain is there though for the taking.eCat wrote:Boehner and McConnell both say they aren't raising taxes
Do they think its wise to go against a lame duck president who doesn't have to set the stage for his VP to be president?
we'll see
I'm sure Hedge will pop in shortly to argue how that his morning of the election vague prediction is far superior to this guy's...eCat wrote:"In January 2010, more than a year before Mitt Romney had formally announced he was running for president, political historian Allan Lichtman predicted President Obama would be re-elected in 2012.
On Tuesday, Lichtman extended his record of correctly forecasting the winner of the popular vote to eight straight elections.
What makes Lichtman interesting is that he makes predictions early, long before eve-of-election polls, long before October surprises, and sometimes even before the nominees have been chosen.
Lichtman says he sees elections the way geophysicists see earthquakes — as events fundamentally driven by structural factors deep beneath the surface, rather than by superficial events at the surface.
He said he came to this idea after happening to meet a Russian geophysicist. They got to talking about earthquakes and asked themselves whether elections might follow the same principles as earthquakes.
"Everything we know about elections, we've already stolen from geophysics," Lichtman said in an interview shortly before Tuesday's election. "Tremors of political change, seismic movements of the voters, volcanic elections, political earthquakes. It's all geophysics anyway."
Rather than think of elections as battles between liberals and conservatives, or even between two candidates, Lichtman said he decided to test the idea that elections follow earthquake principles: You either have stability, or you have upheaval.
Translated to elections, if the incumbent party in the White House kept the White House after the election, that meant you had stability. If the incumbent party lost, that meant there was upheaval — an earthquake.
Lichtman analyzed presidential elections between 1860 and 1980. Over that 120-year period, he looked for markers of stability and markers of upheaval.
Much of what he found is intuitively obvious: When the country was in recession or there was a foreign policy disaster during the tenure of the last administration, the incumbent party was likely to lose. When there was a major domestic or foreign policy success, the economy was doing well, or an incumbent president was running for re-election, the party in power tended to hold on to power.
What Lichtman did was take his data seriously: He found that in every election between 1860 and 1980, when the answers to six or more of the 13 questions he devised went against the party in power, there was an upheaval — the challenger won.
He applied the model to subsequent elections. Starting in 1984, the model has correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote in every election — sometimes months or even years before the election takes place"..............
Before the 2012 election, Lichtman said his model showed the answers to only three of the 13 questions — he calls them "keys" — turning against Obama: One was the long-term state of the economy. A second was the fact that the incumbent party in the White House had taken a shellacking during the previous midterm elections. The third was that Obama's sizable disapproval ratings meant he could not be considered a once-in-a-generation charismatic leader.
Party Mandate: After the midterm elections, the incumbent party holds more seats in the U.S. House of Representatives than after the previous midterm elections.
Contest: There is no serious contest for the incumbent party nomination.
Incumbency: The incumbent party candidate is the sitting president.
Third party: There is no significant third party or independent campaign.
Short term economy: The economy is not in recession during the election campaign.
Long term economy: Real per capita economic growth during the term equals or exceeds mean growth during the previous two terms.
Policy change: The incumbent administration effects major changes in national policy.
Social unrest: There is no sustained social unrest during the term.
Scandal: The incumbent administration is untainted by major scandal.
Foreign/military failure: The incumbent administration suffers no major failure in foreign or military affairs.
Foreign/military success: The incumbent administration achieves a major success in foreign or military affairs.
Incumbent charisma: The incumbent party candidate is charismatic or a national hero.
Challenger charisma: The challenging party candidate is not charismatic or a national hero.
http://davidsimon.com/inevitabilities-and-barack-obama/You want to lead in America? Find a way to be entirely utilitarian — to address the most problems on behalf of the most possible citizens. That works. That matters. Last night, it mattered just enough to overcome the calcified political calculations of men who think that 47 percent will vote against them because they are victims, or that 53 percent are with them because the rest of us vote only from self-interest and without regard for the republic as a whole. It was a closer contest than common sense and the spirit of a truly great nation should dictate. But unless these white guys who have peddled “normal” for so long — normal as in racial majority, normal as in religious majority, normal as in sexual orientation — unless they have a hard moment of self-reflection and self-awareness, well, it will not be this close again.
Eighty years ago, the Democratic party became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics.
Well, a new voting bloc as formidable as the New Deal coalition certainly isn’t yet complete, and the political results are still fitful. To be sure, venality has transformed the upper house of our national legislature into a paralytic failure, with a new standard of a filibuster-proof supermajority now the norm. The lower house of that legislature reflects less of any national consensus than it does the absurdity of post-census gerrymandering. Never mind Obama. If Romney had won this election, our government would be just as broken. It is the legislative branch that remains an epic systems failure.
For lost and fretful white men, unwilling to accept the terms of a new America, Congress is the last barricade against practical and inevitable change. But there, too, the demographic inevitabilities are all in play. All the gerrymandering in this world won’t make those other Americans, those different Americans, go away. And the tyranny of minority and lack of compromise that you employ to thwart progress now will likely breed an equal contempt when the demographics do indeed provide supermajorities.
Hard times are still to come for all of us. Rear guard actions will be fought at every political crossroad. But make no mistake: Change is a motherfucker when you run from it. And right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
So much for Yankee ingenuity and the free market"“There is no place in our democracy for a statistical blog that is more powerful and pivotal than all the big-money donors combined,” said Karl Rove, a political consultant and former deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush."