Werthless wrote:

Monkeyboy wrote:But when your citizens are educated on the issues and are willing to look to the greater good rather than always voting their own interests, it's actually pretty nice.

El Oh El

that looks sort of spanish

swiss is like a non-guttural german, so maybe lohl?

or lolli (they like diminutives, too)

it's the start of a libertarian haiku, doc. obviously.

Monkeyboy wrote:
The way it works in california, I agree. I almost mentioned that fact. But when your citizens are educated on the issues and are willing to look to the greater good rather than always voting their own interests, it's actually pretty nice.

HaHa

Politics, I guess:

Went to a panel discussion on the pinelands yesterday at Princeton, featuring John McPhee, Brendan Byrne, James Florio, Carleton Montgomery (head of the Pinelands Preservation Association, and tremendous) and Michele Byers of the NJ Conservation Foundation. It was interesting to hear how Pinelands preservation acts got passed in the late 70s early 80s and to see the political machinations behind it. Having a strong governorship in New Jersey is cool w hen they're doing something you agree with. And incidentally, something that most everyone would agree with now, but faced huge opposition then.

Other takeaway is that while I had mellowed on Christie he really is a dick whose main goal is to get as many foxes into the environmental chicken coop as possible.

he's a huge right-winger, despite not being insane during the storm and praising the president for doing a good job. i think at this point the Republican party's turn away from him is just a huge ploy to get the stain of what people currently think of the party off of their #1 golden boy so he can run in 2016 and not have the bush/tea party/romney stuff attached to him.

I think you underestimate how much rank-and-file Republicans hate President Obama, and how much damage Christie did to himself (not so much to Romney) by being all buddy-buddy with the Prez right before the election.

I also am convinced Christie doesn't give a shit, so there's that.

Frankly, I also am kind of convinced Christie really doesn't want to run for President, and is hoping that his perceived closeness with Obama will pre-eliminate him as a candidate and take the pressure off of him in terms of the feeling he "has" to run because he is the Republicans' best hope. Do I think Christie wants to put himself on the diet it would require, or his family through the terrible, awful stress it would cause? No, I don't. I think he's pretty content being governor of NJ and then being something much more low-impact than Prez. Nothing he has done in the last few years has been indicative of someone who has the "itch."

pacino wrote:he's a huge right-winger,

WELL HE'S HUGE ALL RIGHT!!!

Right-winger, meh. Pro-business, pro-individual property rights, hostile or indifferent to the concept of general welfare, politician, with politician used as an adjective. Although that's giving him more credit for a political philosophy than he really deserves or would even want.

At any rate, the Pine Barrens would be a cluster retirement villages and Walmarts if he'd been in charge back in the day.And a lot of people would be okay with it, because they wouldn't have been able to conceive of the alternative.

pacino wrote:he's a huge right-winger, despite not being insane during the storm and praising the president for doing a good job. i think at this point the Republican party's turn away from him is just a huge ploy to get the stain of what people currently think of the party off of their #1 golden boy so he can run in 2016 and not have the bush/tea party/romney stuff attached to him.

Yes, we get it. He's fat.



(I know you didnt mean it like that.)

Edit: Damnit swish!

One study explains why it’s tough to pass liberal laws

Friend-of-the-blog David Broockman and Christopher Skovron, graduate students at Berkeley and Michigan, respectively, have released a working paper based on that research and the findings are rather astonishing.

Broockman and Skovron find that all legislators consistently believe their constituents are more conservative than they actually are. This includes Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. But conservative legislators generally overestimate the conservatism of their constituents by 20 points. “This difference is so large that nearly half of conservative politicians appear to believe that they represent a district that is more conservative on these issues than is the most conservative district in the entire country,” Broockman and Skovron write.

and a jamison foser analysis of the article. maddow has previously made this point, too.

My attempt at explanation is that politicians are influenced by the people in their district that they interact with, and the donors that support their campaigns. These people (on average) may tend to be older, wealthier, and more conservative than the rest of the people in their district. Thus, their calibration may be off.

Of course, that's not a refutation of the findings, but an explanation.

makes sense to me

State after state, Arizona, even Florida and Ohio, and now maybe even Texas, and Arkansas are accepting the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. I think that leaves only Louisiana and South Carolina as the states that are refusing expansion. The deal from the Feds is just too good for the states to pass up. I wonder if Jindal and Haley are having any regrets about their ideological purity.

our very own PA remains on that dwindling list

It also probably helps that the people/groups giving the most money to their campaigns tend to be more conservative than their average constituent.


Also, I'm not quite sure what was so funny about an educated electorate leading to better democracy. It seems like common sense.

Soooo... no mention of the news that the prostitution charges against Sen. Menendez were totally fabricated?

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/ ... de_up.html

dajafi wrote:Soooo... no mention of the news that the prostitution charges against Sen. Menendez were totally fabricated?

http://politicalwire.com/archives/2013/ ... de_up.html

Well obviously she was paid off by Menendez to say she was paid off by others to say she was paid off by Menendez.

My apologies for not posting on BSG this evening.

There were lots of accusations of prostitution. One of them falling down doesn't mean the charges were completely fabricated. The investigation has uncovered at the very least he was taking private flights for free from a mega-donor whom he was aiding using the power of his office. If he wasn't sleeping with underage prostitutes in the DR, he's less reprehensible but still a corrupt piece of shit.

The Daily Caller's response is that the Washington Post confused one prostitute with different prostitute in their article

i bet she works for Friends of Hamas

So is Jeb Bush posturing for a VP or Prez run with Christie in 2016 or is he out there as part of a grand plan by the GOP to make Rubio and Christie look like centrists?