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[Mechaman]

Colleen Hanabusa would be the worst member of the senate

[Badger]

Oh God, not this republic/democracy nonsense again...

It's no use. It's one of those great myths that no amount of reasoning will eliminate. Like the notions that Republicans are "fiscal conservatives".

I should note there is an illogical strawman that conservatives (and even some liberals) make is the assumption that those that are advocating for expanded democracy on the electoral level are advocating for it on all levels, including the Judiciary (lol).  We, even some of us far leftists, realize that there is a need for safeguards to protect the interests of the minority while also not believe in an elitist fiefdom where only the few and the proud get to vote for who makes decisions.  Nobody in their right mind seriously believes that judges should be elected or that there is no need for a national legislature.  I mean really!

[Goldwater]

Fountain Hills is spitting distance from Phoenix, Scottsdale, and the rest of Maricopa Counties cultural, artistic, and nightlife attractions. Whereas Fargo is close to......abso-fricking-lutely nothing. The relative age of FH isn't important when you're in the middle of a multi-million person mettropolis with options for litterally every style and taste imaginable. Fargo, er...."not so much" is putting it nicely.

LoL! Fargo actually has no greater ethnic diversity than FH per the census numbers.

So unless you prefer lousy winters to lousy summers, or prefer isolated small cities on faetureless plains to a world-class metropolis in the desert mountains, yeah, Fountain Hills by a landslide.

All of Fargo's many enchanting "fests" aside, of course.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Go Laxalt!

[TDAS04]

Is it bad that I have a dark admiration for both of them while hating most of their political actions? .

[Lief 🗽]

I thought that people developed gray hair and wrinkles the instant they turned 50.

I also once thought that honesty was a prerequisite to becoming a president (after hearing about George Washington and the cherry tree).

[Flake]

Yes, telling people to keep in mind the advantages they have had in life and put in the effort to try and understand the viewpoints of historically marginalized groups is going to lead to some sort of queer matriarchal communist tyranny if we don't have more brave rich white men summon the courage to speak truth to feminists and gay activists and black student groups.

Also, "this viewpoint" is being articulated constantly. Arguing that racial and gender disparities don't exist in America, completely ignoring historical context and its continuing impact on social and economic conditions in this country, telling marginalized groups that their views and demands are too radical, these have been a thing for a long time. Random Princeton freshman who is calling for genocide of Palestinians and decrying the oppression foisted on white kids who can't say the n-word in his free time is not the first person to say that America is a meritocracy and if you disagree you have a victim complex.

[Mechaman]

Agree, as in all illegal (non-violent) immigrants should be granted amnesty immediately.

[SWE]

Typical feel good "reform" movement forced upon the nation by elitist WASPs in a desperate attempt to stop the momentum of left wing non-protestant hyphenated-Americans from gaining political influence.  A movement of which was at it's height with the reign of Theodore Oyster Bay Roosevelt and his two rightful upstanding men of high character successors William High Life Taft and Woodrow Princeton Wilson, went through a nadir phase during the 1920s before ending in the 1930s when Franklin Delano Class Traitor Roosevelt sold out the realm of the enlightenment to unreputable sorts, which continues to this day.

[Goldwater]

I just can't see Bush or Walker winning the nomination right now. Not with the Free Republic website and the uber-conservative crowd that controls the GOP voting bloc. I just can't.

Sort of like how they stopped McCain and Romney from winning the nomination?

[Flake]

I agree with the point about Snowstalker, but Adam is far better than he used to be.

[SWE]

Needs to learn that Hillary is not a lock, and that comas are a important part of a sentence...

I, for one, think that comas are not necessary in sentence structure.

[Oldiesfreak1854]

Bravo Gene Taylor. Bravo.

Cochran and McDaniel could go to a run-off, which would be a nightmare.

I'm a little surprised Annette Bosworth did so poorly, considering some of those tea party groups were getting excited for her.

And boy was I wrong in NJ. Murray Sabrin got last place. He had easily the most organized campaign, guess he just rubbed people the wrong way. Either way, the NJ Senate field was a bunch of perennial losers and a random business guy whose ads were totally weird, so Cory Booker may cross 60.

You're right about that. I also want to know why does Lonegan lose all the time? He lost in 2005 GOP gubernatorial, 2009 GOP gubernatorial, 2013 special Senate election, and now in 2014's House primary. What's wrong?

The problem of course, is that he's Steve Lonegan

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

Here are the unofficial results of the GOP primary for Idaho's 2nd Congressional District:


Source: http://www.sos.idaho.gov/elect/results/ENR/menu.html

[Mechaman]

Where is the "douche" option?

[SWE]

Before you read further, consider this note from the author:
I don’t intend to come into this claiming any objectivity.  In fact, a number of these points will be made with the expected amount of moral self-righteousness you would expect with this avatar.  I claim no shame in this admission, as I believe there are self-righteous revisionist views that are deserving to be addressed (really, the point of this thread, as well as to expose some of my own biases).

Part IV: Old New England, not the bleedingheart liberal region you think:

1. The divide over the slavery issue between Democrats and Whigs was nominal: In what will probably be a brainscrew for a lot of people reading this, I’d like to point out that in the North there were many Democrats who were abolitionists.  The whole “Whigs were anti-slavery and the Democrats were pro-slavery” spiel isn’t as concrete as many think it is.  While Whigs were more anti-slavery than the Democrats, that had more to do with regional appeal (having more of a base in the industrial bastions of the North vs. the agrarian South) than it did with actual political philosophy of the parties.  And even then, the extent to which Whigs were actually more anti-slavery than the Democrats is a lot less than many people now days think it was.  In fact, in the South the owners of the massive plantations preferred the Whig Party over the Democrats, whom they viewed as too populist for their own good.  In the North, some anti-slavery advocates preferred the egalitarian democratic views of the Democratic Party over that of the elitist Whigs.  Again, like the Federalists vs. the DRs, class played a lot in how somebody voted back then.  Sure, this is more of a general observation than one related to New England, but this lazy man’s argument needed to be addressed first.
Later on, most anti-slavery politicians (Whigs, Democrats, and Free Soilers) coalesced into the Republican Party, which was just as much of a successor to the spirit of Jacksonian democracy and even agrarianism (do you seriously think the Whigs would've supported the Homestead Acts, lol?) as it was to the economically nationalist mantra of the Federalists and Whigs.
The divide on slavery between Democratic Republicans and Federalists was more telling, but again that had to do with the regional divide (DRs started out having strength in the “west” and “south” regions before expanding to the Mid-Atlantic and parts of rural New England while the Feddies were mostly contained to their little corner in New England) than party ideology.

2. Contrary to popular thought on this forum and other places, the conservative (emphasis) political elites were far from the free thinking liberals they are thought of:
First, a Historically Inconvenient Map!

Take a good look at this map, it correlates well with what I'm about to say.  An important note to be made: Massachusetts and Rhode Island both had some of the strictest voting qualification laws as late as 1860.  Just a few years before their Congressmen overwhelmingly supported the passage of the 15th Amendment.  Fascinating.

While there is truth to what Yankee and other say about the established “conservatism” of New England manufacturers and economic interests, we should acknowledge that there was quite a fiery populist element in the region.  Of course, the conservative interest remained dominant because of a combination of anti-suffrage forces that worked to keep power strictly limited to the elite state legislatures and the upper classes.  In the upper New England states populism was much easier to spread and gain a successful electoral consensus than in the lower parts of the region like Massachusetts and Rhode Island where landed and aristocratic interests reigned supreme.  Generally, the early Democratic Republicans in the region consisted of immigrants, “dissenting” Protestants, Catholics, millworkers, fishermen, etc. etc.  Basically small interests and disadvantaged (at the time) minorities in the region.  And contrary to dumb history, these interests were more concerned with reversing the discriminatory taxes that kept them in poverty and gain the right to vote, not because they loved slavery.  As time went on, they split into Democratic and Free Soil camps.  The conservative elites, naturally, supported laws that kept these minorities disenfranchised and removed from political power.
So yes, there was a strong liberal tradition in New England that went back to the days of Shay's Rebellion, which was used as fetish fuel by that era's conservatives to push for a stronger central government and a Constitution.  Vermont Congressman Matthew Lyon, an immigrant from Ireland who was jailed under the Alien and Sedition Acts, was also an early New England liberal noted for his physical confrontation with a Connecticut Federalist over those very same laws.  Lyons would later be released from prison once the laws were overturned by Jefferson.  So yes, there was an element of liberalism in New England (hell, a good deal of the anti-slavery movement was by populists (which was a hodge podge of everyone from that era’s equivalent of social conservative to anti-racist liberals) who would later form the Free Soil Party and then later the Republican Party, whom the elite interest only later took advantage of for electoral success) that was fought tooth and nail by conservatives who sought to prevent them from having a voice or any power.
Like I alluded to before, the elites of New England had very little interest in allowing “the people” the right to a vote.  National Republican/Whig opposition to universal white suffrage had more to do with good old timey classism, ie “only producers should have the right to a vote” than it did with opposing racism, as some idiots have suggested elsewhere.  Whig support of universal voting rights, regardless of race, only came later after they were on the losing side of battles like the Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, and even then they settled for instituting a poll tax to dissuade the unlanded poor from voting.
Really, and some of you may not like this, there is a natural link to make between the plutocratic policies supported and enforced by New England aristocrats of the early 19th century with those later supported by the Jim Crow regimes of the South.  Now, I will concede that the elitist rule of New England upper class WASPs was certainly a lot less violent than the Dixie overlords, but as you will see later on in this chapter it was by no means missing.

3. It was called New England for a reason: Demographically it was overwhelmingly Anglo Protestant until the mid 19th century: This is a pretty vital piece of information that tends to go over a lot of people’s heads.  The early New England was by far probably the most monolithically Anglo region in the American colonies.  If this Wikipedia article’s link is accurate and legit, the state of Massachusetts, in particular, was almost 95% English in 1795!  Of course it is important to keep into consideration the history of the Bay Colony and New England, as Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and a considerable part of Connecticut were part of the original English settlements in America.  Unlike the mid-Atlantic colonies, which had a long history of settlement by the Swedish, the Dutch, some German, and other non-Anglo groups, the colonies of New England had relatively little diversity compared to its neighbors.  Sure, there were considerable French populations in Upper New England, but it wasn’t until immigration picked up in the 19th century (largely Irish and German immigrants, which I will comment at length on later).  I am noting this now for a few reasons, 1) the demographics of New England have greatly changed since then, 2) this does have a significant impact on political development, 3) and yeah, the cultures are significantly different.
This is a very relevant point to be made, given some of the reactionary movements by New Englanders against immigrants and non-protestant groups.

Due to the length of the rest of the entry I've had to split it up into two parts.  Part II should be up in about thirty minutes, pending revisions and hyperlinks.

[Lief 🗽]

That's a disgustingly high approval rating

[RR1997]

Don't listen to Phil, bronz. The guy literally supports the Italians.

You're not nearly that stupid to believe the U.S. has any shot at winning.

They might win against Ghana!

[TDAS04]

[Goldwater]

The race becomes surprisingly close before the election, and it even appears that Adam FitzGerald can pull off a victory. 

The two remain neck and neck as the votes are counted.  With counting almost complete, FitzGerald trails Kasich just barley.  Fitzgerald hopes to pick up enough votes in the few remaining uncounted precincts, precincts that usually lean Democratic.  Unfortunately for Fitzgerald, many of those precincts' Democrats are potheads, who tend not to vote unless there is a candidate who supports marijuana.

John Kasich hangs on in the end with a 49-48 victory.

[Warren 4 Secretary of Everything]

I'm probably the only Republican who voted FF...

[Oldiesfreak1854]

That show was hilarious when I was a kid. It's so random looking back at tv shows and cartoons. Who'd think to make a show named My Life As A Teenaged Robot.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Yes; I've had dreams of being pursued by a rattlesnake (although I understand they don't do that IRL).  I've also had dream of being pursued by a person trying to kill me.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Do you still fly with the Luftwaffe, Henreich? Are you knights of der sky? Have you a Jewess bitch at home to clean and cook and screw, Heinreich?

[tik 🪀✨]

Not big on disrespecting the dead in death threads, but it is 10 years later so those complaining about the disrespect are really just complaining that someone dare say something bad about King Reagan the Great.

On a personal level, may his family be at peace. On a public level, I disagreed with most of what he did and we will never forget his tepid response to apartheid government. In terms of modern politics, it is time for the GOP to calm down and stop using him as an American hero, if for no other reason than that they're creating a narrative about his Presidency that is inaccurate.

Basically this.

Inaccurate is an understatement.  For him to be viewed as anything less than a corporatist tool who drove the working class of America into the ground is a travesty.  I'm devastated that I have to live out the remainder of my Naval service on a ship named after that racist POS.