pacino wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:No - just observing that you are no different than they are in terms of winning at all costs, means to an end, settling in order to achieve the larger agenda, etc. That doesn't bother me one bit, pretending otherwise does.

Winning at all costs? OH please. I am about setting policies in place. I don't like campaigns, I don't like campaigning, I don't like raising money, I don't like the sport of politics. I don't like politics. I like macro-level changes and slow, steady, level-headed policy decisions and governance. I don't need to 'win' campaigns and races because it's gets my blood boiling or I feel something in that special place; I want to 'win' so they can actually run things.

It takes winning to do those things. But the frustration is that, thanks to Republican discipline/perversity/derangement/principles, it takes a higher level of winning than was ever previously the case to govern.

And that is the difference I perceive: I honestly have no idea what the Republicans even would do if they got in charge again. More tax cuts and war, I guess, because they seem to believe that those things are always called for, and no action on health care (including Medicare, every cent of which is now evidently sacrosanct) or of course the hoax of climate change. I think pacino's point (and certainly mine) is that there seems to be no constructive (in a non-partisan sense) answer to the question of "now you've won, what are you going to do with your power?"

jerseyhoya wrote:

Code: Select all

County         ADJ R TOT       ADJ D TOT
Barnstable     56.74%          43.26%
Berkshire      35.51%          64.49%
Bristol        48.12%          51.88%
Dukes          38.88%          61.12%
Essex          54.18%          45.82%
Franklin       39.49%          60.51%
Hampden        49.94%          50.06%
Hampshire      38.50%          61.50%
Middlesex      48.52%          51.48%
Nantucket      47.99%          52.01%
Norfolk        53.01%          46.99%
Plymouth       58.51%          41.49%
Suffolk        34.90%          65.10%
Worcester      55.90%          44.10%
Total          50.00%          50.00%

So I threw random numbers together from 2002, 2004 and 2008, and got this as a sort of baseline for watching the results tomorrow. Hampden is Springfield/Springfield suburbs, and it looks like an almost perfect bell weather for the state. Middlesex (Boston suburbs) has been a bit more Democratic than the state, but Romney won it when he won in 2002. It is also the biggest county in the state. Suffolk is Boston.

dude - in your line of work, you should be aware that bellwether is one word, not 2, and not about meteorology (sorry SK790).

now you've won, what are you going to do with your power?"

GET MORE POWER

drsmooth wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:

Code: Select all

County         ADJ R TOT       ADJ D TOT
Barnstable     56.74%          43.26%
Berkshire      35.51%          64.49%
Bristol        48.12%          51.88%
Dukes          38.88%          61.12%
Essex          54.18%          45.82%
Franklin       39.49%          60.51%
Hampden        49.94%          50.06%
Hampshire      38.50%          61.50%
Middlesex      48.52%          51.48%
Nantucket      47.99%          52.01%
Norfolk        53.01%          46.99%
Plymouth       58.51%          41.49%
Suffolk        34.90%          65.10%
Worcester      55.90%          44.10%
Total          50.00%          50.00%

So I threw random numbers together from 2002, 2004 and 2008, and got this as a sort of baseline for watching the results tomorrow. Hampden is Springfield/Springfield suburbs, and it looks like an almost perfect bell weather for the state. Middlesex (Boston suburbs) has been a bit more Democratic than the state, but Romney won it when he won in 2002. It is also the biggest county in the state. Suffolk is Boston.

dude - in your line of work, you should be aware that bellwether is one word, not 2, and not about meteorology (sorry SK790).

I do numbers, not English

traderdave wrote:

dajafi wrote:More good times at the Gitmo vacation resort

A very disturbing article; with stories like this circulating it really should be no surprise that Americans are hated around the globe.

According to the NCIS, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

clearly these terrizzes will stop at nothing

On another note, the US is really going after the Taliban leader in Pakistan, but have been unsuccessful to this point. 11 drone attacks in two weeks. The most recent did get several other leaders of al-Queda and the Taliban.

pacino wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:No - just observing that you are no different than they are in terms of winning at all costs, means to an end, settling in order to achieve the larger agenda, etc. That doesn't bother me one bit, pretending otherwise does.

Winning at all costs? OH please. I am about setting policies in place. I don't like campaigns, I don't like campaigning, I don't like raising money, I don't like the sport of politics. I don't like politics. I like macro-level changes and slow, steady, level-headed policy decisions and governance. I don't need to 'win' campaigns and races because it's gets my blood boiling or I feel something in that special place; I want to 'win' so they can actually run things.

I'm not really attacking you here - I'm just saying that, as you describe above, you see yourself as different - but you aren't - your rhetoric is the same. FWIW I wasn't accusing you of getting a woody from the 'game', that wasn't the context I was in when I wrote "win at all costs" - I'm specifically referring to the sentiment you espoused (the second paragraph was quite good, and applies to both parties right now) - to paraphrase: this might not be the best person but look at the ramifications if you don't help that person win out of misguided message-sending or spite and look at some awful examples of when "we" let a preson slip in because of situations like this. Keep your eye on the ball and recognize that if you do this now the agenda will pay later. It's the exact same thing Republicans were saying - exact. The criticism of the party politics, the weakness of the candidate, the sake of the agenda.

It boils down (between yours and dajafi's follow up comment) to "yeah but it's different because I'm right and they're wrong and they're monsters", to which "they" respond "yeah but I'm right and you're wrong because you are the monster." to which you respond...

Nonetheless, it's the same sentiment - win for the agenda, win to get the votes, damn the crummy candidate we have, the other side can't be allowed to win no matter what because he's worse than our crummy candidate - he's a zebra and I'm a horse and a lame horse is always better than any zebra.

VoxOrion wrote:.... it's the same sentiment - win for the agenda, win to get the votes, damn the crummy candidate we have, the other side can't be allowed to win no matter what because he's worse than our crummy candidate - he's a zebra and I'm a horse and a lame horse is always better than any zebra.

sort of an ersatz parliamentarianism in the making

Thought this was a pretty good summation of where we are and what's at stake:

Brown is not a step forward; he's a throwback to the Bush years: more debt, more executive power, more war, more spending, more politics over governance, more Rove tactics and no substantive proposals except more tax cuts. He has no plans to help the uninsured or to control healthcare costs.

But it seems pretty clear to me that he will win, which means that the FNC/RNC machine has succeeded in perpetuating the meme that somehow Obama is a communist elitist out of touch with real Americans who want their government slashed, while they want no cuts at all in any entitlements, who want the budget balanced without any tax hikes or spending cuts, who demand access to unrestricted healthcare for ever, but refuse to support ways to reduce soaring costs. They want an end to crippling occupations overseas, but they also don't want to retreat or surrender to terrorists. They want to restore America's moral standing but retain the torture camp at Gitmo. And when told they cannot have all this, they vote for someone else who can promise it, however utopian their plans are.

A politician cannot change this mood. But Obama now has a clear warning that he must adjust his program for change in a more populist direction. How to do this will not be easy. But the attempt to offer a centrist path against a populist wave on both right and left has clearly been overwhelmed by the passion and anger of the moment and the barrage of lies and propaganda promulgated by a shameless GOP and a pusillanimous media.

But we know where we are now. Obama's George H W Bush-style focus on the merits of government has served the interests of the country well, in my judgment. But it has met the fury and shamelessness of the hard and ever more extreme right and the staggering amnesia of the electorate. With one major propaganda channel perpetuating an alternative reality and an opposition party motivated by anger, rage and populism, Obama's careful centrism is the right path but a tough sell. That tension - between substance and politics - will define the rest of his first term.

Emphasis mine. This isn't (primarily) on the Republicans, of course, but on the voters; there seems to be no understanding anymore (and maybe there never was) that solving problems takes time, that a pluralistic system with many built-in checks and balances is particularly designed to frustrate fast, dramatic action, and that there aren't very many actors operating in good faith. (I guess to Vox's point, I think Obama actually is--but he's almost the only one IMO.)

A semi-digression: however it comes out, the politics of the 2009-2010 health care reform effort have now almost perfectly tracked those of 1993-94 (other than the fact that Obama obviously has gotten much further down the road than did the Clintons, who never even saw their proposals come up for a vote). At the outset, public opinion was overwhelmingly in favor of big, sweeping reform. As time went on, the residual distrust of government in the electorate began to manifest itself, the Republicans did a better job of framing the issue, and the media breathlessly covered the horse race rather than the underlying issues. By the end, health care reform seemingly was as unpopular as it was popular at the outset.

Of course, if this goes down in flames, in a year we'll again see 70-75 percent majorities calling for fundamental change in the system. If your conclusion is that basically we're a population of fucking amnesiac dumbasses, that's understandable.

Coakley's closing ad: "pretend I'm Obama"


[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNYhkeCnKy0&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

drsmooth wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:.... it's the same sentiment - win for the agenda, win to get the votes, damn the crummy candidate we have, the other side can't be allowed to win no matter what because he's worse than our crummy candidate - he's a zebra and I'm a horse and a lame horse is always better than any zebra.

sort of an ersatz parliamentarianism in the making

That's where are though, don't you think?

VoxOrion wrote:

pacino wrote:

VoxOrion wrote:No - just observing that you are no different than they are in terms of winning at all costs, means to an end, settling in order to achieve the larger agenda, etc. That doesn't bother me one bit, pretending otherwise does.

Winning at all costs? OH please. I am about setting policies in place. I don't like campaigns, I don't like campaigning, I don't like raising money, I don't like the sport of politics. I don't like politics. I like macro-level changes and slow, steady, level-headed policy decisions and governance. I don't need to 'win' campaigns and races because it's gets my blood boiling or I feel something in that special place; I want to 'win' so they can actually run things.

I'm not really attacking you here - I'm just saying that, as you describe above, you see yourself as different - but you aren't - your rhetoric is the same. FWIW I wasn't accusing you of getting a woody from the 'game', that wasn't the context I was in when I wrote "win at all costs" - I'm specifically referring to the sentiment you espoused (the second paragraph was quite good, and applies to both parties right now) - to paraphrase: this might not be the best person but look at the ramifications if you don't help that person win out of misguided message-sending or spite and look at some awful examples of when "we" let a preson slip in because of situations like this. Keep your eye on the ball and recognize that if you do this now the agenda will pay later. It's the exact same thing Republicans were saying - exact. The criticism of the party politics, the weakness of the candidate, the sake of the agenda.

It boils down (between yours and dajafi's follow up comment) to "yeah but it's different because I'm right and they're wrong and they're monsters", to which "they" respond "yeah but I'm right and you're wrong because you are the monster." to which you respond...

Nonetheless, it's the same sentiment - win for the agenda, win to get the votes, damn the crummy candidate we have, the other side can't be allowed to win no matter what because he's worse than our crummy candidate - he's a zebra and I'm a horse and a lame horse is always better than any zebra.

The point remains she's a better candidate that better represents the values of those like Warasdfasdf. I see what you are trying to say but I don't get the mentality of taking your ball and going home, that's all.

pacino wrote:The point remains she's a better candidate that better represents the values of those like Warasdfasdf. I see what you are trying to say but I don't get the mentality of taking your ball and going home, that's all.

I agree - but folks do change their minds - how many people voted for Reagan and Clinton? How many people voted for W and Obama? Heck, how many people voted for both Specter and Santorum? A pretty good number, you'd think. Your point remains though, it's a bit soon to turn tail.

pacino wrote:Vox is completely correct that Brown isn't really campaigning on anything here. He's portraying himself as a moderate, which he of course isn't. That's the way it's been done in the past to have more conservative candidates elected when the numbers say they really shouldn't have a chance. It truly amazes me how easily moderate and progressive Democrats are basically tricked into staying home or changing their votes. THIS IS HOW RICK SANTORUM GOT ELECTED. This is how Pat Toomey may get elected, by ignoring the super conservative aspects of his record. It's really so transparent to me, and so obvious, and yet people continually buy it.

sounds also alot like how obama ran in 2008.

Why is Brown of course not a moderate?

VoxOrion wrote:

drsmooth wrote:sort of an ersatz parliamentarianism in the making

That's where are though, don't you think?

yes indeed - your precis captured it pretty well

Rococo4 wrote:

pacino wrote:Vox is completely correct that Brown isn't really campaigning on anything here. He's portraying himself as a moderate, which he of course isn't. That's the way it's been done in the past to have more conservative candidates elected when the numbers say they really shouldn't have a chance. It truly amazes me how easily moderate and progressive Democrats are basically tricked into staying home or changing their votes. THIS IS HOW RICK SANTORUM GOT ELECTED. This is how Pat Toomey may get elected, by ignoring the super conservative aspects of his record. It's really so transparent to me, and so obvious, and yet people continually buy it.

sounds also alot like how obama ran in 2008.

other than that the reason he's in his current pickle is the opposite.

jerseyhoya wrote:Why is Brown of course not a moderate?

he's no toomey, but he's an avid fiscal conservative.

pacino wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Why is Brown of course not a moderate?

he's no toomey, but he's an avid fiscal conservative.

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/01/scott-brown-is-liberal-republican.html

I dunno

One of the random non Nate Silver 538 people has a formula for putting state legislators on a spectrum, and they have Brown left of the national median.