RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

philliesphhan wrote:It almost amazes me how human, and even kinda funny, some recent losing presidential candidates are, but we didn't see any of it until after: Dole, Gore, Kerry, evidently even Romney.

The flip side of that is that, generally, if a candidate is anything other than a robot, he/she gets destroyed. You cannot go off message and win... nuance just gives the other side fodder. Guys like Clinton, Obama, and GWB are exceptions to that rule in how much humanity they show while stumping--and even then, Obama often gets ripped when he starts using nuance in his speeches.

philliesphhan wrote:

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

philliesphhan wrote:It almost amazes me how human, and even kinda funny, some recent losing presidential candidates are, but we didn't see any of it until after: Dole, Gore, Kerry, evidently even Romney.

The flip side of that is that, generally, if a candidate is anything other than a robot, he/she gets destroyed. You cannot go off message and win... nuance just gives the other side fodder. Guys like Clinton, Obama, and GWB are exceptions to that rule in how much humanity they show while stumping--and even then, Obama often gets ripped when he starts using nuance in his speeches.

If the last three winners were like that, can it really be the exception anymore? I feel like the last few (three of the last four in particular Romney Kerry Gore) lost because they were so robotic.

jerseyhoya wrote:The Welfare Queen - Ronald Reagan made Linda Taylor a notorious American villain. Her other sins were far worse.

An absolutely wild read. It's not very political in its content, but it has a few bits (on both sides) of politics, so I'm putting it here. More a tale about a life so absurd and horrifying, you have to read it to believe it could have happened.

....Illinois embodied a nationwide trend....welfare fraud investigations increased 729 percent across the country between 1970 and 1979. This wasn’t because fraud was on the rise...it was because Illinois and other states criminalized welfare overpayments that had once been handled administratively. The rising level of prosecutions didn’t correspond to an increase in benefit levels either. In fact, monthly welfare benefits (that is, payments via Aid to Families With Dependent Children and, after President Bill Clinton’s 1996 welfare reform legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families) began a long, steady decline in real dollars around the time of Taylor’s trial, one that’s continued to the present day.... the story of the welfare queen instantly infected the policy debate over welfare reform. Sociologist Richard M. Coughlin notes that in 1979, AFDC families had a median of just 2.1 children and a very low standard of living compared to the average American. In 2013, Bureau of Labor Statistics data continue to bear out the stark economic gap between families on public assistance and those who are not. Linda Taylor showed that it was possible for a dedicated criminal to steal a healthy chunk of welfare money. Her case did not prove that, as a group, public aid recipients were fur-laden thieves bleeding the American economy dry.

If Linda Taylor had been seen as a suspect rather than a scapegoat, lives may have been saved.

Even so, Ronald Reagan regularly dusted off the welfare queen’s lurid misadventures, arguing that rampant fraud demanded decisive government action. In pushing for welfare reform as president in 1981, he told members of Congress that “in addition to collecting welfare under 123 different names, she also had 55 Social Security cards,” and that “there’s much more of [this type of fraud] than anyone realizes.” The recent debate over cuts to the federal food stamp program, too, has featured Republican claims that we can save $30 billion by “eliminating loopholes, waste, fraud, and abuse.”

In truth, Reagan wrung savings out of the federal welfare program by slashing benefit levels and raising eligibility requirements. And with regard to today’s food stamp cuts...“none of the savings actually come from fraud, but rather from cutting funding and tightening benefits.”

President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties in drug cases, on Thursday commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison.

It was the first time retroactive relief was provided to a group of inmates who would most likely have received significantly shorter terms if they had been sentenced under current drug laws, sentencing rules and charging policies. Most will be released in 120 days. The commutations opened a major new front in the administration’s efforts to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and to help correct what it has portrayed as inequality in the justice system.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said that each of the eight men and women had been sentenced under what is now recognized as an “unfair system,” including a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses that was significantly reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”

The commutation recipients also included Reynolds Wintersmith, of Rockford, Ill., who was 17 in 1994 when he was sentenced to life in prison for dealing crack, and Stephanie George, of Pensacola, Fla., who received a life sentence in 1997, when she was 27, for hiding a boyfriend’s stash of crack in a box in her house. In both cases, the judges criticized the mandatory sentences they were required to impose, calling them unjust.

In December 2012, The New York Times published an article about Ms. George’s case and the larger rethinking of the social and economic costs of long prison terms for nonviolent offenders. Mr. Obama mentioned the article in an interview with Time magazine that day and said he was considering asking officials about ways to do things “smarter.”

In 2010, there was bipartisan support in Congress for reducing the disparity in sentences between crack and powder cocaine, against a backdrop of crime rates that have plunged to the lowest levels in four decades. And in August, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. instructed prosecutors to omit listing any quantities of illicit substances in indictments for low-level drug offenses in order to avoid triggering mandatory minimum sentences.

But those moves have left unanswered what, if anything, to do about federal inmates serving lengthy sentences for crack offenses committed before the Fair Sentencing Act.

A bill co-sponsored by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, and Mike Lee, Republican of Utah, would make the Fair Sentencing Act retroactive for some offenders, allowing inmates to apply to a judge for a review of whether a reduced sentence would be appropriate.

The Obama administration supports that bill, the White House said on Thursday, as an orderly way to ensure case-by-case analysis in addressing the broader problem.

“In the new year, lawmakers should act on the kinds of bipartisan sentencing reform measures already working their way through Congress,” Mr. Obama said. “Together, we must ensure that our taxpayer dollars are spent wisely, and that our justice system keeps its basic promise of equal treatment for all.”

Mr. Obama, who has made relatively little use of his constitutional clemency powers to forgive offenses or reduce sentences, also pardoned 13 people who completed their sentences long ago. Those cases involved mostly minor offenses, in line with his previous pardons.

pacino wrote:it's a survey that's been happening for 40 years. i'm not sure what's new with it that it's now news. if you want to go to the source and click around, you certainly can



PIRE

jerseyhoya wrote:I read the end. That was the author's quick personal take on what he thought was one of the takeaways.

The nation's GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.1 percent in the third quarter, the Commerce Department reported Friday, the fastest quarterly pace since the end of 2011. The estimate also represents an acceleration from second-quarter estimates of 2.5 percent and is well above economists' consensus estimates, which were at 3.6 percent, according to Bloomberg.

The department revises its GDP figures as it receives more complete data on economic activity. This, the department's third estimate of economic output last quarter, represents the second sharp upward revision in third-quarter GDP. The initial estimate had been at 2.8 percent, and the second estimate came in at 3.6 percent.

This revision reflects the fact that increases in consumer spending and nonresidential fixed investment – business investment in areas such as equipment and software – were higher than previously estimated. That is encouraging, as the second upward revision had come mostly from business inventory investment, a spending category that can signal only temporary economic growth. If businesses stocked up on inventories in the third quarter, economists said, they might choose to hold off on inventory spending in the next.

The acceleration from the second quarter was largely due to greater business inventory investment, slower imports, and faster spending both by state and local governments as well as consumers.

Meanwhile, another measure of economic output remains muted. Gross domestic income, an alternate measure of GDP, remains modest but was also revised upward, from 1.4 percent growth to 1.8 percent. While GDP tracks money spent within the economy, GDI tracks incomes. Though the two measures track together over the long term and should in theory be equal, they on an individual quarterly basis register different readings, as the two measures use different source data.

Quarterly GDP growth of 4.1 percent represents not just an acceleration from the third quarter; it shows longer-term steady recovery from weaker figures at the end of 2012. In the fourth quarter of last year, GDP growth was only at 0.1 percent. Though that climb since then is encouraging, it's important to note that quarterly GDP measures can be volatile; annual measures smooth out the bumps. In the past year, GDP has only grown by 2.0 percent, exactly where annual growth was at the end of both 2012 and 2011, and below the 3.1 percent growth rate seen one year ago, in the third quarter of 2012.

HUCKABEE: Do you remember when America was a free country. Religious liberty, so foundational to our nation's origin, that faith was embedded in the very first amendment in our Bill of Rights. The government is forbidden to prefer or prohibit an expression of religion. Religion is free to express, but government has never been free to infringe.

In recent days, a small, but vocal and militant group of same-sex marriage advocates have co-opted religious liberty to force industry and government to go beyond tolerating homosexuality, but to approve it. Now I'm told to shut up advocating for traditional marriage, but those who force acceptance, approval and activism of same-sex marriage allow no deviation from their views. Wedding caterers and wedding photographers are being forced, by government, to serve same-sex weddings, even if it violates the conscience and religious convictions of the provider.

It's not just government. A&E network found a successful formula to save it financially from its beginnings of "Arts and Entertainment." Reality shows have turned it into a cash cow, but none of its shows has ever rocketed it to the stratosphere of green and gold like its most popular show ever, "Duck Dynasty."

Elites have never understood its popularity in "fly over" country, but for those of us who live in the part of America, Duck Dynasty wasn't about the beards or the ducks, but the strongly knit sense of family that the Robertson clan embodied. Their Christian faith is apparently a little too real for reality TV.

hey live life happy, happy, happy. They're not straight-laced snobs or Puritans, but they are people who laugh, they play, and they pray. They reflect a family who loves each other. And they also reflect a view of marriage that's been the standard for all of human history and the norm for Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

A&E tossed Phil Robertson off TV because he believed what he said, and he said what he believed. A&E is insulting and snobbing the millions of Americans who hold the same view, albeit perhaps expressed in less graphic terms.

I doubt that very members of the gay rights group even watch Duck Dynasty. Gay rights groups used to lobby for tolerance. Now they're lobbying for intolerance.

Reality TV has given us such high brow viewing as Jersey Shore, Temptation Island and Cheaters. It's okay for shows to glorify adultery, binge drinking, teen sex and serial promiscuity, but if someone on a reality show should actually reflect the reality of his Christian faith, then God better help him, because the network won't.

So just who do the suits at A&E think those millions were who watch Duck Dynasty? Muslims aren't criticized, ostracized or banned from the public square, and their views are far more harsh and intolerant of homosexuality.

Most Christians I know (including me) are respectful and tolerant of those who are homosexual and engage in friendship with, employment with, social interaction with people who are openly gay. I can accept anyone, but I shouldn't be forced to embrace a view of sex that is at odds with my faith.

I've got friends who accept me and love me, but they think I'm a religious nut for believing the Bible and in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. So are the militant homosexuals so insecure that they're incapable of tolerating anyone who disagrees with them? Can we maybe get back to free speech and religious liberty? Or will we one day be told by the government what we can and can't say or can't believe. It starts in the marketplace and it ends when it gets enforced by the state. And folks, we're getting close. We're getting close.

pacino wrote:Our favorite idiot supreme court justice Antonin Scalia has also been exposed as not understanding the first amendment, either. HIS FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS ARE NOT BEING INFRINGED. sheesh

jerseyhoya wrote:

pacino wrote:Our favorite idiot supreme court justice Antonin Scalia has also been exposed as not understanding the first amendment, either. HIS FIRST AMENDMENT RIGHTS ARE NOT BEING INFRINGED. sheesh

I love so much that you think Scalia thinks the Duck Dynasty fella's first amendment rights have been violated, and that this exposes him as an idiot