Favourite latest post by previous poster

[TDAS04]

ff.  certainly better than the boob we currently have as vp.

Please.

[Potatoe]

@$$hole. 

[J-Mann]

Robbie was a good guy in the Senate, don't know much about his family though.

Oh, the Band? Eh, never cared about them.

[Grumpier Than Uncle Joe]

Jeff, open that thread back up! I've got stuff to add! And since my memory is an absolute piece of s[hit], I won't remember my pearls of wisdom in 15 minutes.

[Atlas Has Shrugged]

No.  The guy gets ripped and never attacks back. Put him on iggie.

[Potatoe]

He has said this from the beginning, which is part of the reason I like King. He is open about his desire to be a Senator, and nothing more. I'm a huge fan of his for that reason.

[traininthedistance]

Ugh, just a Conservative Isolationist Jackass, glad FDR dropped him in 1940.

[windjammer]

Good luck, man.  Hope things work out, and hope you come back older, wiser, and more at peace with yourself.

[Potatoe]

Pryor says he'd vote for Obamacare again.

He is going to get Blanched now.  No, he will probably do even worse than her.

lol

I will still stand by my statment.

JerryArkansas, I'm curious. Why do you support Tom Cotton but not Asa Hutchinson? You know Cotton is much more to the right than Hutchinson!

[ElectionsGuy]

LaRouche, 'cuz I'm evil like that.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I think this links transparency with elections and voter turnout together. I notice that Wisconsin and Minnesota are near the top (both much higher than average turnout), and states like Arkansas, Oklahoma, and West Virginia at the bottom (some of the lowest turnout states).

[Tetro Kornbluth]

I know basically nothing about it, apart from the fact it's still a monarchy. Could someone familiar with the country enlighten me?

(Disclaimer: I've met and discussed politics with several Bhutanese people, but it was a few years ago now.)

To put it glibly but only slightly misleadingly, what’s good and bad about Bhutan is what’s good and bad about the Central Tibetan Administration, but taken to extremes.

Bhutan is a conservative Buddhist sacerdotal monarchy that for the past five or six years has been undergoing quasi-democratization under Dragon King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck (who until last year was the youngest sovereign monarch in the world and indeed does look a little like an Asian Elvis), according to terms spelled out by the previous Dragon King (who's still alive), Jigme Singye Wangchuck. House Wangchuck presents its political ideology--which is shared by both major political parties, although the current governing party is considered marginally less pro-monarchy than the other, which won the first democratic elections in 2008 and was in power until last year, despite having been founded by somebody who is Jigme Singye's brother-in-law four times over (see below)--as based on the idea of 'Gross National Happiness', which Jigme Singye advanced as an alternative to Gross National Product based on (obviously) much more subjective measurements. A lot of people both in Bhutan and in the West are enamored with the idea of Gross National Happiness to the point where they fail to recognize that it's by its very nature so subjective as to lack any real accountability as a benchmark for specific policy. A lot of people also think it comes across as vaguely Orwellian, which it does for reasons that I’ll get into in the next paragraph, although it must be said that Bhutan is far from the most Orwellian country in Asia right now.

The specific things for which the Bhutanese government has been criticized are its treatment of the Nepalese minority and the fact that it is deliberately stalling Bhutan's industrial and technological development as a means to preserve traditional Bhutanese culture (the logic here, whose validity or lack thereof I won’t comment upon, is that since Bhutanese cultural mores are strongly traditionalist, preserving traditional culture makes most Bhutanese people, at least in the short term, happy and thus causes the Gross National Happiness of Bhutan to increase). Preserving traditional Bhutanese culture is not an inherently bad motivation in and of itself, and it would obviously be a shame if it were to be subsumed into the broader culture of India or China or wherever else, but in the case of the Dragon Kings preserving it also means preserving their own power at the apex of a combined (but bifurcated) religious and political structure that, as politicus alludes to, doesn’t really have room for a significant portion of the population that isn’t Buddhist, ethnic Ngalop or Sharchop, and primarily conversant in a Bodish language. It’s notable that expulsions of and discrimination against Nepalese in Bhutan started getting worse around twenty-five years ago, which is also around when Jigme Singye started solidifying the terms of the current official House Wangchuck ideology. The justification for doing this had to do with the circumstances under which the neighboring kingdom of Sikkim had collapsed in 1975: Nepali Hindus became such a large proportion of the population that they brought down the royal government and forced not only the abolition of the monarchy but an ultimately successful referendum on annexation to India (which, obviously, is majority-Hindu).

It must be said that among the Ngalop and Sharchop, Bodish-language-speaking, Buddhist majority in Bhutan support of House Wangchuck and its policies does appear to be genuine and deep as well as broad, and that Jigme Khesar Namgyel is in general a little more open to the type of development that the international community is traditionally concerned with for poor countries than his father is/was. But it also must be said that for liberals in the West to think that Gross National Happiness and Bhutanese cultural policy sound like entirely nice and unproblematic ideas just because they have a whiff of the ‘exotic Orient’ and the state-enforced traditional Bhutanese culture happens to be aesthetically downright gorgeous is more than a little shallow and ignores very real concerns about what happens when a country that decides to pursue genuinely traditionalist cultural policies has a minority whose traditional culture isn’t the same.

(It should also be noted that Jigme Singye is a polygamist--he's married to all four of the sisters of the founder of the current ruling party (see above)--and that the almost surreally high regard in which he’s held in certain circles obscures the very real achievements of his father and predecessor, Jigme Dorji, who ended slavery and serfdom, introduced mechanized vehicles and central economic planning, built dozens of schools and half a dozen hospitals, had almost two thousand kilometres of roads constructed, and established the first quasi-independent judiciary and advisory National Assembly with the power to impeach the Dragon King, but was unfortunately very sickly and died young while receiving medical treatment in Kenya in 1972.)

[free my dawg]

As a non-Atlasian I feel concerned enough just to note this about the proposed act.

[LeBron]

^^^^^

[windjammer]

Still lean R, but let's keep in mind, early polls in 2011-2012 showed Rehberg leads and his campaign ultimately flopped with a Tester win courtesy of the Libertarian in the race and his backing from organized labor, women, independents, moderates and environmentalists. Walsh, like Tester, is getting major help to from the state party, the national party, Planned Parenthood, MEA-MFT, has a strong fundraising team that's giving Walsh these early high favorable ratings, and there's also a Libertarian in this race to steal votes from Daines. As the campaign goes on, Walsh will bring this race closer and bring some of the Tester voters home to him. Plus Daines supported the govt shutdown which was huge to the national parks and veterans in MT, so there's another effective strategy.

I should point out to that this is the 3rd Republican pollster in a row (Harper, Rasmussen and now Magellan). The last time PPP polled here was November when barely anybody knew who Walsh was, so I would wait for another poll from them before we say that Daines is highly favored.

[Potatoe]

Unfortunately, the republican candidates aren't controversial at all. So even if the dem nominee, David Domina, is decent, he has no chance to win: SAFE REP .

[TDAS04]

'Cuz why not?

Anyway, I support Gay Marriage 100%, and it should be legalized statewide, I'm surprised it's taken the US this long to finally start to support it.

[World politics is up Schmitt creek]

I’m a huge flip flopper on this issue, to be honest. I question the moral justification of the death penalty, and the states right to end the life of one of its citizens, but I also think that 99.99% of those executed in the last twenty years deserved it. I also had a relative who was murdered in a home invasion in 2011, which is a personal bias.

What exactly are you basing this on?

Empirical data. Like I said, I really don't care about the issue, and IIRC, only 30-40 people out of the thousands of people executed in the United States were of questionable guilt. Only five of them have been completely exonerated. Obviously that is the fault of the justice system in general and not the act of execution.

I'm not sure where you get 99.99%.  The remainder would be 1 in 10,000.  There have less than 5,000 executions in the US in the last 20 years.

30-40 people of questionable guilt?  Still way too much.  There is no justification to risk executing a single innocent person.  Sure, it's the fault of the justice system, but the justice system should not have the authority to kill people.  The justice system can never be perfect.

I don't see how anyone could support the death penalty after reading this.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/12/after-nearly-30-years-on-death-row-glenn-ford-is-exonerated-and-free/
This is the victim of the corrupt justice system.  Innocent people can be executed because of corrupt police officers who know their innocence, and because of judges liking to appear "tough" for political purposes.

Many consider the human capacity for evil as a justification for harsh authority.  The problem is, people with authority can also be evil.  Human society will never be perfect enough to precisely determine who deserves to live and who deserves to die.  There should be punishment for lawbreaking, and the risk of punishing the innocent is unavoidable.  However, the negative effects of the imperfect justice system can at least be moderated by nixing the right of society impose death sentences.  Life imprisonment is appropriate for the very worst crimes.  It's harsh, but at least the wrongly convicted would have the rest of their lives to prove their innocence (and it would also be easier on the convicts' families).

I personally think some people deserve to die, but I have no faith in society to make accurate determinations on who does deserve death.  Occasionally, I hear about horrific cases that cause my emotional side to want the disgusting criminals dead, but then I remind myself that allowing even the worst of the worst to live is necessary to prevent the justice system from committing the ultimate injustice against an innocent person.

[Potatoe]

No, this seems like an unnecessary and silly idea, although not really much worse than that.

ONLY if the British monarchy is abolished. No American should accept or recognize the authority of any monarch; all monarchies are by their nature illegitimate and insulting to the principles of the American republic. Recognizing Queen Elizabeth as anything other than a parasitic usurper, a leech upon the liberty of our British cousins, would be to throw away our ancestors' blood and sweat for independence and a republican, free society.

This isn't wrong as such but the blood and sweat in that case was already kind of pointless in the final analysis, I think.

Pointless in what way? I'm not trying to be coy here, I'm genuinely interested in what you mean there.

I mean, obviously there was a certain symbolic value in what the American Revolution accomplished, but I agree with socialisthoosier that whether or not we kept a monarchy wasn't really in and of itself that important a consideration since the class character of the United States didn't change in any way, shape, or form--i.e., that that symbolic value wasn't what I'd consider worth shedding that amount of blood for--and for a while now I've had a lingering suspicion that the narrative of the Revolution may have actually made things worse because it gave the country an explicitly political and explicitly bourgeois founding myth, which Britain, despite being indeed much more explicit about its class distinctions, lacks (and also because, well, remember the experiences and general alignments of minorities in the conflict).

[Badger]

Most of them not involving gun control, actually.

[TDAS04]

Fuc#in' A, yes.

[Flake]

There is no rational argument against it. Opponents complain about the "bigot" label, but obviously opposition to SSM is based an erroneous bias against gay people.  A stupid argument is that disliking gays is OK while disliking blacks is bad, since opposition to homosexuality is supported by "legitimate religious values".  Actually, people can use religious scripture to justify racism or anything else as well.  Homosexuality does not threaten people or society.  People have the right to oppose it personally, and no one is going to force churches to teach that gay marriage is OK, but trying to impose scripture-based hateful values on neighbors they don't even know is repulsive.

Are all opponents of SSM bigots?  I suppose that most SSM-opponents are not exactly like the virulent segregationists of the Jim Crow South, since most SSM-opponents (at least in the US) don't condone violence against gays.  Some people who may oppose SSM are still willing to be friends with me, regardless of my orientation.  They are not bad people overall; we are all probably guilty of mild bigotry at one point or another.

However, opposition to gay marriage is very difficult to respect at all.  It's not like holding different views on economic issues or even abortion (you can actually say abortion harms someone).  Trying to stop the right of gays to get married is rooted in nothing but the belief that gays are so inferior to straights that society's laws must put gays "in their place".  Sorry, but that's bigotry.

I would like to stay single myself, but that should not be for the government to decide.  Society has no business declaring that straights are superior to me.

Not all people who vote to ban gay marriage are bad people on balance, but when people vote for these bans, they are at least oblivious to the fact that passing these bans results the following message from society to struggling, bullied LGBT youth:  

"You're gay, you're not normal, there is something wrong with you, your classmates should not be nice to you, you're not worth it."

This is often the message heard by gays thinking about suicide.

[IceSpear]

Is there a chance that Paul Bbroun gets the nomination?

Yes. This is Georgia.

And then we'll get Michelle Nunn (since he is Paul Broun)

[MadmanMotley]

This made me laugh:

Of course she wants it!  She's ego-driven, and has endured a lot of personal humiliation to get where she is.  She has always wanted to prove that whatever her husband could do, she could do better, and that includes the task of being President.

I consider folks with Hillary's personal issues to be suspect, not because of any issue position, but because one has to wonder how they'll handle power.  Hillary is someone who views herself as owed the Presidency; she's had to sit behind her husband, and when it was her time, she was passed over for a novice.  This is kind of Nixonian, and a major reason why, despite having voted for Bill both times, I am very cool toward Hillary.

I love these armchair psychologists. I don't see any difference between her and any other person with the psychology for running for president.

Hillary isn't allowed to be ambitious because she has a vagina, you see.

[tik 🪀✨]

Gary Johnson Campaign Schedule:

Dec. 7th:
Rally/Fundraiser in Nashua, NH
Barnstorm and Rally in Manchester, NH
Barnstorm and Town Hall in Portsmouth, NH

Dec. 8th:
Barnstorming and GOTV in Dover, NH
Barnstorming and Town Hall in Somersworth, NH
Rally and Barnstorming in Rochester, NH

Dec. 9th:
Meet and Greet in Berlin, NH
Rally in Lebanon, NH
Barnstorming and Town Hall in Claremont, NH

Dec. 10th:
Rally and Speech in Concord, NH
Barnstorming and Rally in Franklin, NH
Barnstorming and Town Hall in Laconia, NH

Dec. 11th:
Rally and Fundraiser in Davenport, IA
Town Hall in Iowa City, IA
Rally and Campaign Speech in Cedar Rapids, IA

Dec. 12th:
Town Hall in Dubuque, IA
Rally and Barnstorm in Waterloo, IA
Rally and Campaign Speech in Ames, IA

Dec. 13th:
Town Hall in Fort Dodge, IA
Rally in Sioux City
Rally/Fundraiser in Council Bluffs, IA

Surrogates:

Rep. Ron Paul:

Dec. 7th: Fundraising in New Hampshire
Dec. 8th: Congressional Duties
Dec. 9th: Barnstorming Iowa
Dec. 10th: Fundraising in Iowa
Dec. 12th: Meeting with Congressmen to support Gary Johnson
Dec. 13th: Attend Rallies with Johnson in Iowa

Fmr. Gov. Jesse Ventura:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 9th: Touring Iowa small towns for Johnson
Dec. 10th-Dec. 13th: Fundraising in Iowa

Fmr. Rep. Barry Goldwater Jr:

Dec. 7th-9th: Fundraising in Arizona
Dec. 10th-13th: Rallies for Johnson in Arizona

Fmr. Gov. Buddy Roemer:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 13th: Barnstorming and Rallies in Missouri

Clint Eastwood:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 10th: Fundraisers for Johnson in California
Dec. 11th-Dec. 13th: Rallies for Johnson in Iowa
Gary Johnson is the only guy in this race who has the guts to be president, a real Republican. You other candidates feeling lucky?

Fmr. Rep. Bob Barr:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 13th: Barnstorming and Rallies in South Carolina
Governor Johnson is the true conservative, who stands for economic freedom and is the champion of small business!

Fmr. Gov. William Weld:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 13th: Rallies and Barnstorm New Hampshire
Governor Johnson is the true candidate, one with conviction and experience. He is the right man to be president.

Drew Carey:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 13th: Fundraisers in California
Now, I'm not one for speeches, or the Republican party. But Governor Johnson is the only candidate that stands for true freedom in the United States.

Fmr. Rep. Joe Scarborough:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 13th: Barnstorming and Rallies in South Carolina
Governor Johnson is the only candidate our Republican party needs right now, he is the candidate that will lead the party to national success. Gary Johnson knows how to govern, and is the true future of the party, lets support Gary Johnson!

Economist and Reagan Adviser Paul Craig Roberts:

Dec. 7th-Dec. 9th: Rallies for Johnson in Iowa
Dec. 10th-Dec. 13th: Fundraising in Iowa
As adviser to Ronald Reagan, I was a strong proponent for the fiscal conservatism that led us through the 1980's. Governor Johnson is the only candidate with that drive, vision, leadership and principles to take us back to true fiscal conservatism!

TV and Radio Ad to run in the following states:

A candidate with proven leadership, a candidate that has proven that he is will to stand apart and do right. Not beholding to anyone but the people, ready to take on the real problems America faces. Gary Johnson is not just a Republican candidate for president, but the people's candidate for president. With endorsements from Independents and Republicans alike, he is the candidate that shows conviction, and will be a man of the people.