The Good Post Gallery

[Antonio the Sixth]

Nothing makes me prouder, this election cycle, than the fact that when it comes to making voting decisions a decent chunk of whites here in Ohio are thinking more about their class than their "culture" or race. If only that would happen more often. Thinking with their heads.

See, I think this is total junk. Why would we want people to vote based on "class" or "culture?" Wouldn't it be nice if people voted based on, you know, policies?

The main point is, I guess, that they stop voting for policies that completely screw them.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Nothing makes me prouder, this election cycle, than the fact that when it comes to making voting decisions a decent chunk of whites here in Ohio are thinking more about their class than their "culture" or race. If only that would happen more often. Thinking with their heads.

See, I think this is total junk. Why would we want people to vote based on "class" or "culture?" Wouldn't it be nice if people voted based on, you know, policies?

What policies are in people's interest, or what policies they think are in their interest, are usually based on class, culture, or some combination thereof.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I have noticed recently that many posters on the forum (and journalists too) appear to have a mistaken idea of what a "media market" is. In particular, many people appear to think that viewers typically don't see stations from outside their media market. This is incorrect.

What "media markets" actually are has to do with the FCC's "must carry" rules. Cable providers are legally required to carry local stations within a certain area - so, say, you can't offer a cable package in New York and omit a New York local affiliate from your basic cable package. (I'm not endorsing this one way or the other, but the thinking behind the rule is that since cable infrastructure uses public property, it's legitimate to prevent them by regulation from colluding with certain broadcasters to exclude other ones). So the country is divided into market areas within which local channels must be carried. Neilsen also uses these same areas for market research and ratings purposes. (The FCC uses the term "Television Market Area" and Neilsen uses the term "Designated Market Areas", and the informal term "media market" applies to both, but their boundaries are co-extensive so there's never a problematic ambiguity.)

But although providers must carry local channels within a media market, there's no prohibition at all on carrying channels outside the media market. In fact this is quite common. For example, when I lived in Mercer County NJ, my basic Comcast cable package included the main network affiliates for both New York and Philadelphia even though I was in the Philadelphia media market so offering the New York channels was a voluntary market decision. A more politically relevant example now: when I google "Toledo cable", the first result is a company called "Buckeye Cable", which seems to be the main provider in the area, and  their Toledo "standard service" (pdf) includes not only the Toledo affiliates for all the national networks but also all the Detroit affiliates as well (plus even CBC Windsor). So actually all Detroit channels are widely seen in northwestern Ohio, even though this is a different "media market". And small markets don't necessarily have their own affiliates at all - Zanesville for example has a local PBS station and it gets its own media market so that Columbus cable companies aren't forced to show Zanesville PBS, but ABC and CBS don't have Zanesville channels so they just show Columbus affiliates there.

In addition to all this, if you have just an antenna, then what channels you get is just based on signal reception which obviously has nothing to do with county boundaries.

So, the lesson is, media markets are actually not that relevant at all to where ads are being seen and you have to look at the actual channel lineups offered by companies in the area, or distance from signal towers.

[Donerail]

Most "liberals" tend to be socialists who hate the rich man & want to spread the wealth & bring everyone under one large zionist jewish socialist government these are facts. the rich now a days are not southern true rich folk they are dirty jews who are using blacks and there servants to destroy the white race. & liberals are the devil.

[Franzl]

Most "liberals" tend to be socialists who hate the rich man & want to spread the wealth & bring everyone under one large zionist jewish socialist government these are facts. the rich now a days are not southern true rich folk they are dirty jews who are using blacks and there servants to destroy the white race. & liberals are the devil.

You share that opinion?

[Donerail]

Most "liberals" tend to be socialists who hate the rich man & want to spread the wealth & bring everyone under one large zionist jewish socialist government these are facts. the rich now a days are not southern true rich folk they are dirty jews who are using blacks and there servants to destroy the white race. & liberals are the devil.

You share that opinion?

Of course I do.

[courts]

One of the most ridiculous things I can think that has ever happened in this country is that the 2003 Bush tax cuts, which contained enormous tax cuts for the rich that didn't take affect for another several years were somehow an economic stimulus. The so called media of course went along with this nonsense, but just because no one called the Republicans on the insanity of that didn't mean that it wasn't totally absurd.

[patrick1]

Well who cares about rural white men anyway?

Obama and the Democrats owe them nothing. They've done nothing for this country but stoke race and class resentment at home and serve as cannon fodder for unnecessary wars abroad. They hate minorities, gays, pretty much anyone who isn't like them.

Romney and the Republicans don't owe them anything either. Guys like Romney would just as soon replace them with robots. Or if you can't get a robot, get some little Chinaman to do the same job for a tenth the cost. Cap their SSI benefits. Make it impossible for them to afford to retire and next to impossible for their kids to go to college. They'll still vote for the "working man's" party (even if most of them are laid off).

And they'll go on living in their alternate reality where they think the rest of us are mooching off them and that they're always being cheated and put upon. They always point their pitchforks at the wrong people. Schoolteachers. Black single moms. Do they really think they're to blame for the fact that a high school education doesn't get you into the middle class anymore? They ought to pick on somebody their own size for a change. Like their fellow white men - the ones who laid them off, for example.

^This post is the embodiment of out of touch, arrogant, smug dickishness. Attitudes like yours are the main reason why more and more working-class white people are voting Republican, or at least, not voting Democratic (often not even voting, period). How can you have a Party of the People when the party leaders and activists mock, sneer at, or worse, actively endorse policies that all working people suffer from?

Hate to break it to you, buddy, but the Democratic Party's emphasis on "Third Way" policies of vague "social progressivism", combined with accommodation and deference to the Reaganite program on the most foundational economic issues, insure that the vast majority of Americans of all colors, creeds, sexual orientation, genders, ethnicities, and ages will have their standard of living decline.

Yeah, social issues are important, but they must be tied to economics at their core-otherwise, you will have growing inequality, a country of haves and have nots. But hey, if one half-black man can become President, and if gays can marry in a few states, and if the Fortune 400 includes a few more highly educated white women, and if your party pays lip service to "social justice" in its rhetoric, while taking the positions of 90s Republicans in practice-the right-wing neo-liberal economic policies are worth that trade-off, eh?

The point is, a lot of poor and working-class white people feel forgotten by the Democratic Party, and rightly so. Yeah, there's racism and cultural ignorance among segments of the population there, but you can just as easily say that for "educated"  middle and upper class white counterparts (who, I'd argue, are better at hidingt heir racism, not that they have less of it). 

So why pick on poor whites-in particular, poor rural whites? Because they vote Republican? Or maybe it's something else entirely; maybe their voting Republican is an indicator of the Democratic Party's abandonment of economic, bread-and-butter issues, in favor of a harsh "meritocracy" that a token number of non-whites would participate in, but would not fundamentally alter power relations.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Came to post that, patrick.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

Al delivers as usual with the traditional post about coal country:

Unfortunate, but not entirely surprising; plenty of reasons to vote against Obama (of course not all of these are what we might think of as entirely legit, but then electoral analysis should shy away from passing moral judgment), and essentially none to vote for him - other than the 'D' next to his name. And it's clear that that doesn't really matter that much these days, which is quite a remarkable cultural shift and worthy of comment in itself.

Also, when voters think a party or a candidate is hostile to them, they tend to be hostile to said party and/or candidate. I think the intensity of that in this case is quite clear. The question is whether this is just a reaction to Obama's obvious indifference combined with his obvious Otherness (which produces an image of hostility) or whether it's something that will now be held against the entire national Democratic party; Manchin, Tomblin and Rahall were all re-elected, so the state Dem brand has some life in it for now.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I had good insurance with my job before obama came into office.

It isn't really possible for 'private' insurance to be good, I'm afraid.  Insurance companies don't want to pay you if they can avoid it, you see.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Just going by personal anecdote.. I've always felt the more liberal parts of Iowa were similar to the adjacent areas of SW WI and SE MN (as well as the MN River Valley)... they have a distinctly upper-midwestern culture dominated by northern German and Scandinavian heritage that brought with them very moralistic politics, as Angus pointed out above.

Things like good public schools, healthcare, and welfare aren't done because it is practical or serves some purpose to keep the masses sated while a small minority run everything... but because it's the 'right thing to do'.

An uncanny sense of shared culture coupled with a complete lack of cultural awareness (trust me, it's possible) means that "the right thing to do" governs political leanings rather than tradition or pragmatism.  It's why Minnesota has put forth politicians like Paul Wellstone or the Happy Warrior that championed civil rights for blacks as part of the Democratic Party platform (and began the long, bloody slide of the south over to their mortal enemy party, the GOP).

Ask an Iowan or Minnesotan to define their culture... and they'll shrug their shoulders and say "I dunno... ask the next guy"... because he will have no idea what his culture actually is.. but he knows the next guy is part of that same, undefined culture.  That or they'll start on a rant of self-deprecating anecdotes involving a guy named Ole, his friend Sven, and a boat load of hotdish.

At the same time, when I've been to Nebraska.. I get a much more "individualistic"/western feel.  The big businesses in Omaha were meat packing from cattle that came in from ranches in the western part of the state.  And oddly, an influx of Italians there means you often get a side of spaghetti with your steak at the steakhouse.  Nebraska seems to have a competent state government and excellent schools... and I can never get over how good their freeways are in Omaha compared to the Twin Cities (which are all functionally obsolete, narrow, grid-locked, and riddled with old fashioned clover leafs that require heroic acts of weaving through speeding traffic just to change freeways)... but yeah... Iowa seems to be more the land of family farms where they're likely to have fields of corn and soybeans and a barn full of pigs.. where individualism and self sufficiency is encouraged... but accepting aid from a neighbor, or more importantly, offering aid to a neighbor in need, is most important.  Meanwhile Nebraska has more of the cattle ranchers that rely on themselves or their immediate family. 

Chucking it all off onto farm subsidies and unionization is over simplifying it and completely ignoring the cultural fabric of the state.  Like Angus said above, and if I might take it a step further... those things are effects... not causes... of their political culture.

I'm really glad Snowguy is back.

[Landslide Lyndon]

Alright is it time to call BS on all the pundits?  All we heard for YEARS is "Bush's brain."  All Rove was was lucky.  Had Bill Clinton smoked his cigar instead of doing weird sh-t with it Bush would never have been elected.  We kept hearing what a genius Rove is.  Turns out he was in the right place at the right time and just didn't F'up too bad.  Now this go around while Obama was putting together the craziest ground game this country has ever seen Rove's strategy was to buy half a billion dollars worth of TV ads.  Unbelievable.  I could have done that.

What pisses me off about this is Karl Rove walks away with literally MILLIONS for doing nothing.  Actually he didn't do nothing he actually burned money that could have been used for something useful.  But yet somehow Karl Rove is better than a single mother living on welfare.  How does that make any sense?  50 single mothers on welfare wouldn't waste as much money as Karl Rove but he is a glorious small business owner and a single mother is scum of the earth.  How does that make any sense?

And it's not just Karl.  What about all the TV pundits on the left and the right?  They get paid six figures to tell us how amazing Rove is for years.  They were 100% wrong.  We would have done better without them.  So are they better than single mothers living on welfare?  When are we going to wake up and realize a swindled six or seven figure paycheck does not make you a glorious "small business" owner that we should worship!

The fact of the matter is our society is full of self important leeches who tell us how critical their work is for our society while they talk about all the single mother's getting welfare checks.  It makes me sick.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

I'm a Christian, not an atheist, but I'd like to butt in on defense of atheists and atheism here.  Stalin doesn't give his belief system a bad name, because unlike the other options, his actions are not the result of atheism - there is no atheist doctrine, commandments, or anything.  Just like golfers follow the rules of golf, an a-sportsperson (an analogous made up term for someone who doesn't play sports) has no actions that are reflected by the concept of the rules of sports.

What he did was in spite of atheism - it wasn't his atheism that had any effect on his actions (this is functionally impossible, seeing as atheism isn't a spiritual belief system as much as just a term for having a lack of one).  His "belief system" that influenced his actions was the Leninist bolshevik interpretation of Marx and Engel's writings on economics and the organization of the working class (or, in my opinion, organization of the bureaucratic class).

So to put Stalin on here without clarifying it's Leninism that is his belief system of contribution, and not atheism (which is not a belief system)  - is, in my opinion, misleading and not representative of the reality of it.  And I only infer this poll as referring to his atheism because numerous times in the media I've seen Stalin as a critique back at atheists (which is intellectually dishonest) when they bring up religious extremists.  But certainly correct me if I misinterpreted the poll.

[opebo]

Yeah, but the real question for 2016 is whether Obama's coalition turns out for all future democratic candidates or whether his coalition recedes back into the shadows with a Biden or Clinton candidacy.  I also wonder if the black vote holds up for say the fake Obama down in Texas, Julian Castro.  By the way, are there any VP's who have lost their party's nomination once they chose to run?

My hunch is that Obama built a coalition for himself and that it won't be nearly as strong in the next election, especially when faced with a Rubio/Martinez (or vice versa).

I agree. I think the coalition is Obama's coalition, not the Democrat's.

Somebody owes me $10, the "those people will never turn up in 2016" argument from the GOP is what I was expecting to emerge in late 2015... so congrats on being early.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Arguing that Communist repression of religious practice and organisation had nothing to do with the personal atheism of Communist leaders is actively and openly absurd.

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

Arguing that Communist repression of religious practice and organisation had nothing to do with the personal atheism of Communist leaders is actively and openly absurd.

I would argue they would have repressed religion regardless.  It was incompatible with the "ideal" they were striving for.  The atheism was not to blame, the Marxism/Leninism was.  Plus, is it's hard to argue that that the Communist leadership was ALL atheist.  

I think the main thing I liked about that post was that he was trying to point out that communism is not the idealistic implementation of atheist thought.  I'm an atheist, yet surely what you would call a capitalist when you really get to the core of my views.  Often times, this view is not shared by many Americans who worship money, and you can see how they wind up getting to this conclusion. 

[Yelnoc]

Republicans are all too quick to think in terms of skin color. That's why - right off the bat - they begin hitting around the idea of putting a brownface on the ticket. "That'll solve everything", they seem to think. When it comes to policy, they go for the most expedient solution instantly. "Let's solve the immigration problem after we had our asses handed to us and then they'll like us", they say.

It's much deeper than that and it is something that must be corrected through substantiated policy shifts, tones and attitudes. Latinos by and large do not agree with Republican governance because the economic policies go against their values systems. Sure, you can argue that social conservatism is heavily ingrained in Latino culture, but Latinos do not vote on social issues. Those are first-world problems and until the entire Latino community is integrated fully within American society, they will not be voting as a bloc on issues like gay marriage and abortion. Even better, by the time they do, they will be Americanized enough to not fall victim to right-wing social pandering.

The other big problem is how Republicans discuss matters of race and those from other races. At the micro level, I cringe every time I hear a local conservative begin to discuss race - or even simply an event pertaining to a person of a different race. They don't even know how offensive they are being when they associate concepts such as laziness, criminality and difference with people from other races. If a born and bred whitey can identify these racist statements and be offended by them, then someone to whom it (supposedly) pertains will certainly be able to identify it even easier. Unfortunately, the trend at the upper echelons of the Republican Party hasn't been much better.

It's hard to tell an entire party and many of its supporters to simply stop being racist, but that's the issue at hand here. It may not be overt racism in all cases, but the smell of it is still strong and it's what is sending people of color fleeing in droves from the Republican Party. Fortunately for Democrats, those mouth-breeders who are the local "emissaries" for the Republican Party will continue to scare off the future demography of the United States for many years to come.

[opebo]

That sounds like a slight variation on the "Real America" of Sarah Palin. Republicans make a huge mistake by demonizing urban America -- which now increasingly includes Suburbia as it takes on urban characteristics. The great urban areas have the high-cost infrastructure and high-cost public services. A four-lane freeway that exists in rural areas so that it can connect Louisville and Cleveland is superfluous for local needs... but it is wholly inadequate in Louisville, Cincinnati, Columbus, or Cleveland. Small towns can pay teachers and cops badly by big-city standards because of a lack of alternatives... but in a great city teachers have the ideal skill set for selling big-ticket objects and cops have to be paid well enough so that they don't become de facto parts of the payroll of criminal gangs. Want good roads, good teachers, and honest cops? You have to pay for those if you live in a city.

Such is one of the divides between rural and urban America. A century-old house in a small town might be one of the finest buildings in town and well taken care of. In a giant city it is probably a slum subdivided into apartments similar in size to prison cells.  In a city one needs to take a pooper-scooper along if one walks the dog. Deep in farm country? Nobody will ever know where your dog defecates.

The Republicans miss something that Barack Obama has caught onto: that Suburbia is becoming legitimately urban in its problems, including decaying infrastructure. Note well that the post-WWII suburban sprawl is approaching 70. Think of what is happening to all those once-new sewers and streets built to last a lifetime. The lifetimes of the people who first bought into that suburban sprawl are mostly no longer living. 

[Lief 🗽]

Bravo BRTD! The last two lines especially.

And for the record, McCain has really done nothing in service to the US. He fought to defend a fascist regime that in no way benefited US interests and simply bloated and benefited the military-industrial complex, was imprisoned by an enemy of that regime for several years, and then used a political career rife with corruption to benefit individuals like Charles Keating, attention whored the hell out of his limelight for a couple years just because he managed to lose to an even worse human being in the GOP primary, in his own campaign picked someone as his running mate that basically forever destroys his credibility on stating if someone is qualified for ANYTHING, lost, and then pandered to the far right to survive a primary challenge only to end up a standard backbencher tool of the GOP leadership. He is nothing more than a bitter washed up old man. Obama appointing Rice and getting her through would be another fantastic showing of his superiority over McCain and how McCain can't ever beat him. Obama beat him in 2008 and should use every opportunity to beat him as much as possible from here on.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

Reading Naso's worshipful idealization of a decade he was about 15 years too young to experience never fails to amuse.

His knowledge of the 80's based on sitcoms is like basing one's knowledge of medieval history on a Rennaissance Faire.

[Donerail]

SJoycle- you're forgetting the rule of the board... any one who makes comments supporting the Democratic Party gets a standing ovation from the members in front of their computer monitor...any other comment gets that person attacked as stupid, irrelevant, evil- you name it!

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Wait, you went to the same high school as your mother? That seems awfully... provincial. Unless you both went to the same private school or something. But I suppose you're old enough that if your mother had gone to a private school, it would have been an all girls school.

But that's not it, right? You've stayed in the same place for decades. That's actually kind of depressing. Perhaps I shouldn't be so critical of "cosmopolitanism"...

Dude, what would it matter if he did. It seems just an rather obnoxious point of pretense.  How many generations were your ancestors/relatives in Ethiopia for?  Sometimes people like where they grew up, consider it their home and are not keen to social climb to supposedly greener pastures.

[opebo]

The judge should turn over the factories to the worker.

[Mechaman]

No, the two big parties are plenty horrible enough now for me not to vote for them, I don't need to go fishing for reasons from 50 (or even 5) years ago.