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House Majority Leader Defeated In Primary
An anonymous reader writes "For the first time in United States political history, the House Majority Leader has been defeated in his primary election. Long time Republican congressman and House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was defeated by 10 percentage points in the Virginia primary by Republican Tea Party challenger Dave Brat. This shocking defeat is likely to upset the political balance of power in the United States for years to come."
Open primaries allow this sort of thing to happen. If you think about it, it isn't really fair, but we allow it in a lot of states, so this sort of thing should be expected.
This government is ineffective, and seems to be more about getting things for themselves than their constituents. They use the taxes we give them to spy on us and arm our police forces with tanks rather than give us nationalized healthcare. They take bribes from special interest groups. We need new blood in politics.
It's a safe republican district.
This is not unlike the reds that are elected from downtown SF. The real election is the primary.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
VA has an open primary. No signing up necessary.
http://leg1.state.va.us/cgi-bi...
The Tea Party may be taking all the credit for this, but the reality is is far more grim than any political insider is willing to admit: this has been the most unpopular Congress since the Do-Nothing Congress of 1947-49.
And if anyone paid attention to history, what happened then is what will happen this time, too. The incumbents are in the crosshairs.
Reports of the Tea Party's death are greatly exaggerated.
My only qualm is it's been hijacked well beyond its initial namesake cause of shrinking the bloated spending into almost every old Republican grievance.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
I don't know the rules in Virginia, but can't he run as a third-party candidate in the general election, just like Lieberman did?
I'm pretty sure that's how McCain won the primaries. He was regularly booed at from the audience in his own rallies, especially when it came to amnesty or "path to citizenship" or whatever you want to call it. It makes me wonder if these types of primaries are a good idea or not. My state was thinking of doing away with letting undeclared voters pick a ballot on primary day and at the time I was against it, but I can certainly see now how it could be misused. Of course then it's a matter of changing your declared party well enough in advance and then switching it back. So I'm not sure changing it really solves anything.
im all for getting rid of establishment republicans and replacing them with libertarians and te party members. Just as im all for getting rid of establishment democrats and replacing them with greenies
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Don't count on it. Only 14% bothered to vote, which shows a dislike for the party in general.
With the Snowden leaks, the NSA issues still roaming around, with the Supreme Court looking at Aereo, do you think that anything that affects national politics does NOT hit technology?
Virginia has an open primary. It wouldn't be the first time crossover voters affected the outcome.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's a Republican district, but nowhere near as strongly as SF is a Democratic district. Cantor's district (VA 7th) is R+10, while downtown SF (CA 12th) is D+34. An example of a D+10 district is northwest Indiana (IN 1st).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
2 Things: 90--100 million non-working adults & lowest labor force % in 45 years.
I will believe it when I see it. Money talks, and a good PR campaign can turn a psychopath into someone holier than $DEITY.
In the past, congresscritters had to survive on merit. Now, no matter what they can do, a couple million dollars can right -any- wrong.
-ANY- wrong, period.
The surge of people we're getting at the border right now are only showing up because they think they'll get amnesty. Its a related concept.
Really the sick thing is the whole immigration problem is driven by a shadow economy of cheap labor.
People say "oh I want these people to get US citizenship" but if they have it will they work for below minimum wage under currently illegal health standards with no insurance or legal rights?
Probably not. And the corporate interests that are pushing for amnesty are very strange in this regard as well because again if they actually get amnesty they're not going to show up for work. They're going to go get EBT cards and welfare because it pays better then those terrible jobs. Which is why most americans don't do those jobs. We're paid more to do nothing then we are to do that stuff.
By all means argue against the welfare state if that's what gets you going but the point is that the whole immigration issue is irrational.
Our society cannot survive open borders. We can't afford it. And if we did that all the cheap labor the companies think they're going to get would suddenly be gone because they'd just sit in subsidized apartments laughing about when they got up at 3 in the morning to go to work.
And that doesn't address how the whole thing depresses the wages of actual citizens or causes all sorts of other distortions of our economy.
The whole thing is sick.
The first thing that needs to happen is that hiring illegal immigrants needs to be something that is ACTUALLY illegal. As in few do it because you go to jail or suffer huge crippling fines.
Do that and most of the illegal immigration stops immediately without having to do anything at the border.
A really effective mean to police the thing would be to offer people a bounty for catching it. Say 10 to 50 percent of collected fines. So if you're fining companies 10 thousand dollars per illegal employee... and some of these operations employ thousands... you'll be looking at 10 thousand times thousands. Who wouldn't turn that in?
It would police itself. Sure, you'd get witch hunts and false positives etc. But I'm not saying you show up with SWAT teams either. Just a federal official with a camera, notebook, and badge. He goes in, sees what is going on, makes some notes, takes some pictures, and then goes back to the office to process the paper work. Nothing aggressive needed. You don't even go after the illegals directly. You go after their employers.
If they can't find work here they won't come. Just that simple.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Republicans are falling victim to their own success redistricting. The result is safe districts where the nominee has no need for independent voters to win in the general election. The party nomination effectively becomes the election and in these, candidates are much more vulnerable to small groups of highly motivated, very vocal and very involved fringe groups, then they would be in general elections. Democrats engage in this behavior as well but for better of for worst, they are not as good at gerrymandering when they get the chance.
you're literally advocating dragging our entire system of government to a grinding halt.... forever... well played anarchist, well played.
This Congress actually did less than the do-nothing Congress. Least productive in US history.
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
The current GOP is worthless anyhow. No one on the right likes it: they don't serve a financially conservative agenda at all, the don't serve the socially conservative agenda beyond lip-service, and the anti-illegal-immigration feeling on the right is far stronger than the GOP seems to realize.
A new party is needed, as this one is done. If the so-con portion represents a new generation who not racist and rabidly anti-gay (eject the Boomer so-cons) then it has a future again. We'll see.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Not really... They are not going nuts...
What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically). Some folks think that this is a good thing, some don't. But I don't think you can make the case that this is a symbol of the party self destructing or going crazy. What is going on though is the party is being forced to recognize that it's base is not happy with it's leadership and that the Tea Party's conservative message has at least some resonance with the base. From my perspective, it is a good thing when a party's leadership represents it's members.
Now, it remains to be seen if this movement to the right translates into more votes and more success in elections or not. I have my theories on that... But the most telling fact one needs to consider is how the other party and the talking heads reporting are becoming apathetic about this. Remember back in May when they declared the Tea Party dead? Now, when it's obvious they where wrong, they are in a panic for some reason? Right....
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Republican voting base has gone full bat shit, the party won't last much longer now.
The Tea Party may be trying to spin this into a "win" (since they've been soundly defeated elsewhere this primary season) but at the end of the day this really comes down to Politics 101. Mr. Cantor was more interested in running the House than he was in providing consistent services. Drill past the national media's obsession with the Tea Party and/or immigration for a moment and look at the local media in his district. Read some of the complaints about him that have nothing whatsoever to do with ideology. Then ask yourself how frequently incumbent Legislators manage to lose primary elections, particularly ones in a leadership role that give them all manner of opportunity to funnel pork (err, I mean "investment") to the folks back home.
All politics are local. The Tea Party didn't win this. Mr. Cantor lost it. The funny/sad (depends on your perspective I guess) thing is he probably didn't see it coming until the first returns started coming in. This is what happens when you've held elective office long enough to treat elections like mere formalities.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Climatologists say no such thing.
In fact, NASA says that 9 of the last 10 years have been the hottest on record
Who has her fingers in her ears now?
Most incumbents get reelected even when Congress's approval ratings overall are low, however, because people's approval ratings of their own Congresspeople are almost always considerably higher. People generally think Congress sucks, but they usually blame it on everyone else's Representatives.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
You can be positive that K Street and its myriad of lobbying firms will be more than happy to employ him.
I totally agree.
They came over from another country and then rewrote the laws so they could stay. That's just illegal no matter how you think of it.
It's really time the Europeans go back to Europe.
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Curry isn't the only one to suggest flaws in established climate models. IPCC vice chair Francis Zwiers, director of the Pacific Climate Impacts Consortium at the University of Victoria in Canada, co-wrote a paper published in this month's Nature Climate Change that said climate models had "significantly" overestimated global warming over the last 20 years — and especially for the last 15 years, which coincides with the onset of the hiatus.
good enough for ya???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Clearly you don't know what you're talking about. The voting base were turned off by Cantor's amnesty stance, and were quite comfortable voting for the libertarian minded economics professor instead. The result is a refreshing change to the usual politics in America, where uninformed or uninterested voters continue to vote for the same idiots simply because of the name. If the voters were more engaged and paying attention to what the politicians said and did, instead of just what party banner they run under, you'd never have politicians like Reid, Pelosi, Boehner, McCain, or Sharpton getting reelected.
Because being a US citizen has benefits that are paid for by the US economy where as being a citizen of Mexico or Honduras or Guatemala has few benefits and Americans can't enjoy them even if they try to go through the legal process.
Riddle me this... which country do you think its easier to become a citizen in... The United States or Mexico?
Do you know what you have to go through to become a citizen in either? Compare them. The US has pretty much the loosest immigration policy in the Americas. I don't think there's any other country in the America's that even close... north or south America.
And yet as loose as our policies are it is we that are called the racists and monsters for having a policy more humane and inclusive and permissive then any other in in the Americas.
Explain the logic on that.
You want open immigration? Fine... no really... we'll do that. But understand this, if you do that and leave the welfare system intact the country will go broke very quickly.
The welfare state and open immigration are exclusive concepts. You cannot do both at the same time. The simple math on that should be obvious to anyone that thinks about it.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So a couple equates to the vast majority now? Also overestimate is not the same thing as saying it does not exist.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
Why should Duke or Kucinich not be allowed to be on the ballet?
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Congressman Cantor was voted out of office for a candidate that proudly demonstated that his head was rammed further up his ass than Cantor's was; amazing.
and the anti-illegal-immigration feeling on the right is far stronger than the GOP seems to realize.
If you look at polling that sentiment is shared in the center and center-left. Opposition to immigration is one of the few truly bipartisan things in the American electorate. The political establishment doesn't acknowledge it because big business wants cheap labor and Democrats think Hispanics are always going to vote for them. You can see similar trends in any developed country, fly over to one of the better developed EU countries and ask John Q. Public how he really feels about immigration. It's not popular even when it comes from other EU members (migration from Eastern Europe into Western Europe or the Nordic States), and $deity help you if you're one of the poor bastards coming there from Africa or the Middle East.
Another issue with a broad consensus in the electorate that's soundly ignored by the political establishment is non-interventionism. People are sick of interventionism, be they left, right, or center. The establishment ignores the electorate on this issue because of a combination of perceived economic interest, bureaucratic inertia in the national security apparatus, and entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
A pure political story, with absolutely no geek angle whatsoever, has no place here. It brings in a lot of page hits, and a lot of comments from politically-frothy Slashdot posters, but long-term it rather undermines the credibility of the site.
The balance of power between Washington vs. the rest of America has improved slightly.
I really think the GOP has a strong future if it can become the "pro-capitalism, anti-big-corp" party. The Left thinks that's impossible, so that ground is unoccupied (ha!) today. Get the focus back to trust-busting and local monopoly breaking and consumer rights, and leave the Left wondering what just happened to them. But the current guys are too entrenched with the current sources of funding, not realizing they're stuck in an ever-diminishing local maximum.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
“One Hundred Authors Against Einstein was (a short book) published in 1931 [which said the Theory of Relativity is wrong]. When asked to comment on this denunciation of relativity by so many scientists, Einstein replied that to defeat relativity one did not need the word of 100 scientists, just one fact.”
Same applies here.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
According to the climate scientists, there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.
That's most used climate myth #50. Also, you are behind on the denialist canon, which currently pins "the end of climate change" at 2010. Not that I can blame you for that; it's been revised so many times it's easy to lost track.
In the CA system, (which is a great idea) there are not separate, closed party nomination elections.
There is a primary, and the top two candidates run in the general election. Therefore, if, hypothetically Democrats voted for a right-wing-nut in mass, the wing-nut and a Republican will be in the general election, not an outcome a Democrat would prefer.
In practice, when people have their actually favored candidate on the ballot and are able to vote for them, they do.
The primary purpose of the top-two election system is to change the nature of the candidates who decide to run and think they can win.
It's an approximation to ranked preference voting.
The simple fact is that Eric Cantor signed on to support immigration reform and that killed his career. Dead. It sent a message to the Republicans that just because their corporate masters want open boarders doesn't mean the voters do.
This looks like a secondary effect coming from an order-of-magnitude increase in interpersonal communication speed. Where in the past you might have to call an in-person meeting or conference call with many people, an individual can now communicate in a richer, distributed, asynchronous way with anyone who's marginally interested in considering your message.
With the communication landscape changed and resource access barrier lower, unless an incumbent uses their greater political and financial resources to improve their leverage in the new communication landscape, that area will be a more level playing field, and if you don't accommodate for that, the odds significantly change.
It seems like established institutions and scenarios that have a large part of their foundation on communication -- e.g., publishers, politicians, market pricing -- are going to see a lot more of these sorts of never-before-in-history kinds of disruptions. Things that don't depend on human-speed communication so much, such as hard sciences, construction, farming, will see changes, but maybe not quite as rug-pulled-out-from-under-you disruptively.
The forced movement to the right is only going to mean less compromise and progress in congress. The tea party doesn't want a functioning government.
Yes, science is never settled and is also always highly political, in spite of most scientists fooling themselves that it is "the search for the Truth". But dude, honestly, just stop it. I really can't believe how nay-sayers with half a brain can keep it up - there is a MASSIVE pro-oil/gas/coal lobby that tries to sow the seeds of doubt. What do the 98% of scientists that maintain AGW is real have to gain? It's not like there is some secret society of super-rich Gaia Illuminati that is trying to brain-wash the world into... spending less by using less. Sure, some are benefiting - some are even financing pro-AGW studies - but it is NOTHING like what is happening in the other direction. And still there are only 2% that hold on to the "it's not happening" or "it's not because of what humans are doing" line.
Politics and self-interest are everywhere and in everything. But if you are going to posit a major global conspiracy then it at least has to be realistic - a government/group-of-super-rich would have great interest in hiding an alien visitation to keep the tech for themselves but "use energy more efficiently, spread generation around the globe using various different technologies that don't upset the current atmospheric balance" is hardly something that qualifies as something of interest for some nefarious group of super-villains...
Or make them like an episode of American Ninja and have them run an obstacle course. Now THAT would be worth funding by the taxpayers.
Romney hinted at this in one of the Presidential debates, with a line about too big to fail that was predictably ignored by the mainstream media. George Will picked up on it in one of his op-eds. Will has written extensively on the subject of crony capitalism, with a focus on the unholy alliance of business and regulators. Will speaks for the intellectual wing of the GOP, such as it is, so it's not as though they aren't aware of this problem.
Romney was probably the wrong person to try and make this argument, though it would have been refreshing to see him try. I can't recall him saying anything on the matter other than the throw away line about too big to fail, which is a pity, because it's an issue he could have made headway on.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Dear God.
I used to know this guy. It took me a little while for it to register, but the goofy grin confirms it: this is the same doofus I went to college with. The college is a haven for Republican Calvinism (i.e. God chooses certain people to be successful), steeped in the worship of capitalism (God's invisible hand rewarding hard work). (The Amway/Blackwater dynasty are major donors.) I didn't know Dave well (sorry, no damaging stories to tell), but he was active in student government, and struck me as a classic empty suit: superficially charming with an upper-middle-class sense of entitlement. Not stupid, but not a deep thinker, the sort who doesn't question the values he was taught as a child... because they've always worked for him. (One of the key ways I differ from him.) I should've known he'd run for Congress someday.
I'm sorry.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
OK. Just remember that at this point your opinion is not objective, but subjective. The elections are what really matter, and THAT is the real objective measure of the Tea Party's success or failure....
BTW, I consider anybody who uses the "teabagger" name a dishonest broker and liberal robot. If you start by trying to offend your opponent (and make no mistake, this term is intended to offend) you really must have nothing better to say than the standard liberal talking points, which I find boring on top of being offensive. You could at least try to be clever or somehow unique, other wise, I don't have the time for boring offensive leftist ideologues.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
I'm glad Cantor lost, just out of spite. He ran the meanist, ugliest, lyingest, dirty campaign I've ever seen. Running attack ads left and right which were outright lying, just because he could because Bratt didn't have the money to run opposing ads. Cantor was known for not appearing at town halls, snubbing the VCDL and other local conservative groups, and generally treating his own constituents and elections as a nuisance - like a ruling class elite. Apparently, on the day of the election, Cantor was in Washington bragging about how he out-spend Bratt 50-1 in order to crush him to prevent future primary contestants.
Assuming "being productive" is passing laws.
Doing nothing might be the best thing.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
True, though Reagan was promised border enforcement in return for that. The deal as understood at the time was "I'll give you amnesty now as a one time deal and in return we fix the system"...
Reagan delivered his end and then fixes promised never happened.
Its something republicans are still extremely bitter about and one of the reasons they're not respective to the same idea all over again. We're being told "just give us amnesty now and we'll fix the border after"... well... one bitten twice shy.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Look at the number of nuts who have used the word treason to apply to President Obama. At least half of that caused by the president not being snow white in color.
If you really believe that even a sizable minority of the negative feelings about Obama are racially motivated, then you're just mistaken. Sure, the racists are out there, but they are really just background noise.
I live in the south, and I personally know dozens of people who traditionally vote Republican who voted for Obama in 2008 specifically because he is black. My father was one of these people, and he said to me after the election that "it's just time for a black president." If anything, Obama received a huge boost from the fact that he was the first credible black candidate for president, and it helped that his competition was lackluster at best.
No, the people calling Obama treasonous or calling for impeachment are much more likely to be basing this on Obama's actions while in office. By and large, it's not the color of Obama's skin that they're judging, but rather the content of his character.
entangling alliances set up after WW2 specifically to prevent an American retrenchment.
There's nothing of that sort. The US went to Iraq against the will of a majority the UN (it wasn't just France, who simply got scapegoated for speaking out a bit more loudly than everyone else). And that's a general pattern; whenever there's talk about intervening somewhere, the US are the ones enthusiastically firing up the rhetoric while mostly everyone else is calling for cool. It's so predictable that Russia has started exploiting this to make the Americans look like fools (I'm talking about the Syria chemical weapons debacle here). The "our allies asked our help" argument is just a convenient casus belli if your military-industrial complex begs to show off its shiny new toys. Truth is, if you're the biggest bully on the block, whenever there's conflict, you will be asked for help. Most often by both sides. All the US has to do is pick a "long-time ally" on the spot, then send the cruise missiles on the other guy's ass.
Apart from that, +1 good post!
Well, Romney had the problem of being seen as exactly the wrong sort of crony capitalist. I don't think it was true, but I also don't think he had a chance on that issue. I'd love to see a GOP candidate who was a wealthy small business owner instead of a wealthy corporate head next time around. Someone to deliver a message of "pro-business, pro-capitalism, but the current system is fucked".
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
"Just that simple"? You like the idea of closing borders, evidently, but do you like the idea of produce prices, meat prices, service-economy costs, and just about every other menial-labor field seeing its labor costs double overnight? Because that's the consequence of requiring that citizens do those jobs. Stoop work is awful, backbreaking work that pays bullshit. It only survives because the immigrants who do it are so desperate for the work that they'll take it.
The moment you kick the immigrants out, you see cases like these ones, where billions of dollars of produce were left to rot in the fields because all the immigrants who would have picked them were driven out by tough anti-immigrant laws.
The US agricultural economy -- and a lot of the service economy -- is built on a steady influx of sub-minimum-wage labor, and only survives because of undocumented immigrants. Take it away, and large swaths of the economy collapse.
At the risk of Godwinizing the discussion... that's probably what those who voted for the NSDAP party thought too, out with the Old Guard and in with the New Blood.
This guy may be "new blood", but he's still running on the ticket and with the approval of the Tea Party. Read his biography on Wikipedia, and be careful what you wish for.
Do you honestly believe that? Less than half the country votes in a presidential election, far fewer vote in congressional elections, and fewer still in primaries. Just how many do think would bother to vote in the other parties primary? Sure they will be some radical nut jobs willing to do this but not anywhere near enough to matter.
there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.
Please read this Scientific America article, titled "Has Global Warming Paused?": http://www.scientificamerican....
Here is an extract:
'So as a measure of global warming, surface temperatures are not a good yardstick, because the atmosphere can only hold a small percentage of the heat that is trapped, he said.
Rather, the oceans should be the primary barometer of global climate change.
And they are certainly changing. Sea levels are going up "like gangbusters," Willis said'
Except that saying "global warming is over estimated" is not the same as saying, "there is no global warming"
When you cant win, ad hominem.
...and the anti-illegal-immigration feeling on the right is far stronger than the GOP seems to realize.
As an independent voter, it is stronger than most politicians realize. My ancestors (verified family history) fought in the American Revolution and came across via Ellis Island as legal immigrants. Today, you run across the border and hope the border patrol doesn't catch you. Those people wanted to be in this country so much, the first thing they did was to violate its laws. That is crap.
All government benefits should be denied to all persons, until proof of citizenship/legal residency has been established. If you are not a citizen or legal resident alien, you are not entitled to a drivers license, food stamps, etc., and voting is limited to citizens only. In Oregon for example, there is a history of giving illegals food assistance, drivers licenses and granting them in-state resident college tuition rates. Denying those funds to Americans and legal aliens.
All companies that hire illegal aliens should be forced to pay a penalty to the gov't (half to border protection and half to the general fund) of twice the monies paid to the illegal. Pay the illegal $500, the fine is $1,000 for a total of $1,500 to use that person. That person is also transported back to their own country at the employers expense. Now the cost of the illegal alien is $1,500 + transportation for $500 of work.
If benefits stop and employers stop hiring them, most of them will leave the way they came here. On their own...
The first word in "illegal alien" is "ILLEGAL". By being here, they are violating the laws. Treat them that way and most of them will leave.
Procrastination; I'll think of a sig tomorrow.
Too bad you don't have any facts on your side, then, isn't it?
You people are as bad as the creationists with your science denial. There's overwhelming evidence that the earth is warming, that it's caused by mankind, and that it's going to be really bad for us in another one or two hundred years. It's so overwhelming that 97% of climate scientists agree with that.
And then you like to point out irrelevant local phenomena as "evidence" against this, like the antarctic sea ice extent increasing this year while ignoring the actual volume of it, ignoring arctic sea ice, ignoring greenland ice melt. Or you like to point to 1998 as being a very hot year and saying "look, we've only had a couple of years hotter than that" while ignoring the trend lines, as if one year of temperature means everything.
Which is why you're as bad as the creationists. You think your tiny little facts, like an incorrectly dated fossil, or some scientific misconduct around one hominid fossil, disproves an enormous body of evidence. You've got your head in the sand and you seem to like it there.
What's going on is the Tea Party is apparently dragging the republican party to the right of center (politically).
The Republican party has been well to the right of the center since long before there was ever talk about this Tea Party. The Tea Party is pulling them towards the extreme right abyss, where there be totalitarianism (just like at the extreme left). From an international point of view, even the Democrats are center-right. The US political system is unbalanced, with no credible left. Maybe one will spring up once the Republican party has crashed and burned and the Democrats have been pulled a little bit more to the right by non-extremist Republican refugees. It's even possible the new left will call itself "Republicans", just like in the early years of the two-party system.
Even that isn't entirely remote, if he plays his cards right. We had something similar happen in Alaska back in 2010 when the incumbent Lisa Murkowski lost the primary to the Tea Party favorite Joe Miller. She went on to win as a write-in candidate with something like a 40% margin, because it didn't take long for the more crazy extreme side of Joe Miller to show up and public opinion of him quickly flipped.
I'm not an American so just out of curiosity: What is a write-in candidate? ....and: Why is somebody who looses a primary election held by a political party banned by law from running as an independent? What ever ones opinion of sore losers may be, passing laws against them running as independents seems a bit anti-democratic to me. In my country we occasionally get a splinter candidate running as an independent. Usually this is after a disagreement in one of the mainstream parties where somebody is dissatisfied about being bumped down to the bottom of the elction list in local elections or because they were sidelined for a parliamentary seat (i.e. because of party internal backstabbing). Recently, for example, this has been common in right wing parties whose leaders are EU skeptic and have been keen to prevent any EU friendly party members from gaining parliementary seats. Some of these independents have even been known to get elected because they were simply put more competent than the nimrod that the party bosses helped to win the primary. So far nobody has even considered passing laws against such independents.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
.... a review with praise in Common Dreams, a self-identified "Progressive" website, about the surprise winner in Virginia's Republican primary:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"... Republican Dave Brat, a college economics professors who spoke about GOP hypocrisy and railed against Wall Street greed, unseated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a primary challenge.
âoeAll of the investment banks, up in New York and D.C., they should have gone to jail.â ... Thatâ(TM)s a common campaign slogan repeated by Dave Brat, the Virginia college professor ....
The national media is buzzing about Bratâ(TM)s victory, but for all of the wrong reasons...."
-----
The media will talk about anything except the real problem
I've got a son graduating high school next year. According to the climate scientists, there has been no increase in global temperatures during his entire lifetime.
Who's got their fingers in their ears? Maybe the one's saying "The science is settled!!!!". Hint: Science is never settled.
You have that backwards. Any person that has been born after 1978 has never seen the year-over-year global temperature DECREASE during their lifetime: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/global-land-ocean-mntp-anom/201301-201312.png -- it has increased every year. The levels of atmospheric CO2 hasn't decreased since we began recording it in 1959 (after the International Geophysical Year, which sparked a concerted effort to make systematic global measurements of a wide range of phenomenon, including atmospheric composition). In 1959, the CO2 concentration inout atmosphere was about 315 ppm, today it's about 400 ppm (just a bit under 30%; see http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/global.html).
The science on the subject is "settled" in that both CO2 levels and global temperatures are rising - it's an objective and verifiable measurement of a physical phenomenon; as are related measurements of ice sheet thickness, sea-level rise, marine salinity, and marine pH. Those are all very simple data points that are not contended even by those paid to deny climate change for political reasons. It is also settled in that there are no publications in scientific journals that refute the conclusion that there's a rapid warming of global climate and the connection to CO2 (check your local university library) - all of that has unanimous consensus.
There were a few articles early on (late 80's and early 90's) that questioned anthropogenic (man-made) causes for the increases, but the authors of all of those papers have since identified issues in their work and joined the consensus that the causes are largely anthropogenic and compounded by other physical phenomenon.
The only areas of disagreement today, scientifically, are on the models used to predict the effects. We've seen that many models have under-estimated the rate of change by not properly accounting for albedo changes, methane releases from warming tundra, and glacial shifts. We also know that the rate of change in sea level rises is somewhat under-estimated. However, the most difficult things to predict with any accuracy are the effects on food and water availability.
I think that policy makers are slowly adjusting their rhetoric as well. Policy makers no longer deny global warming outright and rarely make claims based on science on the record. Rhetoric has shifted to the perceived economic cost of remediation and the possibility that remediation efforts might be unsuccessful versus a sense that we to respond quickly and decisively to avoid the risk of a catastrophic outcome, whatever the cost may be.
Sure it is. It's just not one they can take credit for. This guy says it better than I did. FWIW I'm somewhat sympathetic to the Tea Party, except for a few minor gripes:
1) They keep blowing perfectly winnable elections, thus ensuring that we have a Democrat who votes with us 0% the time rather than a RINO who votes with us "only" 80% of the time.
2) They rally around idiots like Cliven Bundy, and seemingly have no problem with Americans aiming guns at other Americans over something as stupid as cattle grazing rights. Really, everything that's wrong with our country, and this is the issue they rally around? 200+ years of history as a Republic and there's only been one issue (slavery) that we couldn't resolve without reaching for the guns.... now they think we should reach for them over fucking cattle grazing?!?
3) They haven't produced a single Statesman, someone who is willing to compromise in order to tackle the big problems of the day. If the Tea Party had been at the Constitutional Convention we'd still be arguing over who was going to take the minutes of the first meeting. You think these clowns could have solved issues as divisive as how to fairly allocate representation, how to elect the POTUS, or (god help us) slavery?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Whatever happened to "Give me your tired, your poor, your labored masses yearning to be free?" Heard a story about the approximately 40,000 children who came to the US without their parents who are current being held in custody because we have little legal framework for dealing with cross border teenaged runaways. Deport them? They're minors, and some of them are claiming outright refugee status because they feared for their lives at home due to gang violence. Send them to orphanages? They have none of the paperwork for that. It's a total clusterfuck right now. We can either pretend these kids are here to steal our freedoms, or or we can tackle the reality we're given and stay true to the promise of America.
My ancestors came over to the US as 16 and 19-year-old brothers with nothing but the clothes on their backs and a wish to own their own farm. A century later and we're a family of doctors, lawyers, educators, and software developers. They spoke no English - now I speak no Russian or German. They formed their own ethnic enclave with others like them out in the midwest, but my generation has become mobile and we've fully scattered and integrated across the country. Why did my teenage ancestors deserve that chance, but these kids don't?
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
"BTW, I consider anybody who uses the "teabagger" name a dishonest broker and liberal robot. If you start by trying to offend your opponent (and make no mistake, this term is intended to offend) you really must have nothing better to say"
I'm gonna let you chew on that statement for a while...
The reason you see a 95% retention rate, even when anti-Congress sentiment is high is because:
"*MY* Congresscritter is doing good. It's all those other assholes that are the problem."
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
A cynic might wonder whether Cantor's bigger crime was expressing insufficient callousness to "illegals", or expressing a willingness to "work with the President".
Ah, now THAT was clever enough to be interesting.... LOL
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
It also depresses automation that we would have put in place ages ago and of course removed labor that was traditionally done by teenagers.
My father worked in a California fruit boxing warehouse for a few summers. Not because he was poor but because kids were expected to get summer jobs back then.
We did just fine before the rampant illegal immigration. Those that think we can't survive without it either suffer from an unforgivable lack of imagination or are spinning tales.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
...courtesy of xkcd: https://xkcd.com/1127/ .
First off, there never was a scientific consensus that there was going to be global cooling. There was a Newsweek article on it in 1975, but you'd have to really stretch to claim that a scientific consensus was warning of global cooling. At the time the two major competing mechanisms going on was cooling due to atmospheric aerosols, and warming due to greenhouse gases. You also have to keep in mind that in the 1970s the aerosol issue was dramatically addressed by banning CFC aerosols, which dramatically reduced the aerosols in the atmosphere (and thus, dramatically reducing their cooling potential), so we're left with greenhouse gases dominating. It isn't "they keep changing their story," it is that one of the issues was successfully addressed. Now, it would be nice if the other issue could be addressed.
You can see what the guy who wrote that Newsweek article has to say about it in retrospect.
Hey... Citation was requested... I provided. No idea to whom the website belongs. It very well may be a 'denialist' site... but the author of the article seems to clearly and honestly outline the important details and scope of the data presented. Indeed, one of the longer time-scale graphs shows a warming trend... The author doesn't appear to DENY this. He simply exhibits the data from this particular source and indeed the data shows no warming trend for the last ~17 years. He also observes that the longer-scale actual OBSERVED warming trend is significantly less than the IPCC 1990 PREDICTED trend... even significantly less than the low-end of their predictions. Right this moment - the global warming appears to have leveled-off. These are simply facts... no parlor tricks here. In fact the author states that the warming could crank right back up next year.
This, but only because of rampant gerrymandering.
"Just find me enough people that like me, and call that my district. I don't care if they're spread out all over creation. Just draw a line around everyone who voted for me last time, and call it done."
Politicians have been, for years, systematically altering their districts so that their particular flavor of nutjob are all in the same district. Be it birthers, gun nuts, 9/11 conspiracy folks, or whatever. Pick your favorite flavor, wrangle up enough people, wherever they may be, and reelections will take care of themselves. We can sprinkle the sane/moderate people around so that their votes are barely heard. Certainly not enough to cause a ruckus
The real problem, however, is just now starting to surface. If you wrangle up enough staunch believers of any one type in a particular area, a crazier candidate will surface and take advantage of that. We no longer get anyone with a hint of "moderate" in a general election, because they get destroyed in the Primaries by someone even crazier than they are.
This signature is false.
One of the fundamentally dishonest things that conservatives do when this topics comes up is mention George Soros. But nothing compares to the Koch brothers, and conservative money in general:
http://billmoyers.com/2014/04/...
It's not 2 sides of the same coin when you compare the amount of money, although neither side is likely to offer reform on this matter.
That he was the first house majority leader defeated in a PRIMARY, he isn't the first sitting speaker to be defeated from that position. Democrat Tom Foley lost his house majority seat in 1994 Democrat Tom Daschle lost his senate majority seat in 2004 Personally, I don't care the party, but anyone that is over 70 years old, and has spent "a lifetime" in politics needs to removed. They quit becoming politicians of their respective states, and simply become politicians of lobbyist & special interest groups. Another reason the 17th amendment needs to be repealed! The states should be put back in charge of electing the members of the senate to return equal branches of government & allowing the states to have a say in what goes on in DC. The president is the chief executive officer, the house is the house of the people, giving the people a say in DC, and the senate, in accordance to the constitution, was suppose to have appointed senators from the legislators in the states, to give the states a bit of say so, in DC.
Note that no competent scientist would claim that there's been no increase in global temperature, especially since all the data shows that the glabal temperature has increased over that time. So you had to lie to make your statement. Why is it that lying is the only option the deniers and fake skeptics reach for?
If you give them amnesty, they become legal then. Legal is what the law defines to be legal, no more and no less. Yet he has problems with that - in fact, a decidedly non-libertarian objection:
"Adding millions of workers to the labor market will force wages to fall and jobs to be lost."
(hey, what happened to free market? or does that not apply to labor somehow?)
| Progressive Christians. Socially conservative but poor and beaten people that have started to realize the filthy-rich republicans they used to vote for aren't looking out for anyone but the very very rich.
This will work when they realize the truth was: Republicans they used to vote for **weren't** looking out for anyone but the very very rich, and they should have stuck with Jimmy Carter instead of the fraud of Ronald Reagan.
When will that happen?
As explained in the link in my previous post (did you even read it?), if you take a set of data that fluctuates noisily but has an long-term upwards trend, you truncate it carefully so that the beginning of your truncated subset falls near a high point in the random fluctuations, and you use that to deny the upwards trend, then you are using a trick called "cherry-picking". You can argue you're presenting "simply facts", but it's dishonest. Watt's also dishonest is failing to declare a rather blatant conflict of interest.
Also, your own post contains contradictions. You're saying "...OBSERVED warming trend is significantly less than the IPCC 1990 PREDICTED..." (implying there is still a warming trend), and then you're saying "it has leveled off". Only one of them can be true, and it's the first one. There is still a warming trend, and yes, it's lower than the low-end 1990 predictions. Scientists have been debating over why that is for a while now. Heat getting trapped in the depths of the pacific ocean seems to be gaining traction as the most prevalent hypothesis, which is worrisome because once this finite heat reservoir is saturated, the heating will pick up with a vengeance. More info here, here, here and here (the 3 first links are all discussing the study in the 4th; I'll let you pick which source you like best).
So you are OK with the Social liberal agenda where we are regulated on things as stupid as how big of a soft drink we can buy at 7-11?
No, not really. I'm libertarian on social issues (including gun control), but far left on economic policies (basically, I support negative income tax or universal basic income guarantee).
However, the things that social conservatives want to regulate are more intrusive than the things that liberals want to regulate, in general. I'll take a guy who wants to ban large soda drinks over the guy who wants to ban abortions any day. Both are malicious control freaks, but one will do more evil than the other.
I think you are confused. The Tea Party is about LESS intrusion of government in your life, both in taxes and regulat
Well, reading this particular guy's platform on his website, it sounds like he wants to ban abortions and same-sex marriages. That's quite a lot of government intrusion.
Hey... Citation was requested... I provided.
A citation was requested, but you did not provide any citation worthy of consideration.
No idea to whom the website belongs.
It doesn't matter to whom the website belongs. What matters is whether the citation is either to a recognised (eg ISI listed) peer reviewed journal appropriate to the subject matter, or to some similar source of data carrying due authority and credibility. I mean a citation to someone's slashdot comment, for instance, would hardly be admissible would it?
Right this moment - the global warming appears to have leveled-off. These are simply facts... no parlor tricks here.
Just for a quick check throw the yearly anomalies (here's the GISSTEMP data) into R and see if the slope is flat. Here ... I'll make it easy for you to get stared (but do improve on this and double check my numbers for the likely transcription error %-) ) :
year <- c(1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013)
anom <- c(33, 46, 62, 41, 41, 53, 62, 61, 52, 67, 60, 63, 50, 60, 67, 55, 58, 61)
Then plot it and draw a line of fit. (For interest you can check the correlation using cor(year, anom).)
plot(year, anom)
fit <- lm(anom ~ year)
abline(fit)
Does that even look flat to you?!
Now given that this is part of a curve which is showing an unequivocal rise over the last 50 years, let alone the entire record, please devise a test to demonstrate that these 18 years show any significant "levelling off" of the long-term trend. And then get back to me with the code. Hell no, get back to the scientific community, with your code ... fame awaits you!
The real question you ought to ask however, is what relevance so short a period (15, 16, 17 or even 18 years) has to data which is not only extremely noisy, but is known to be subject to multi-decadal cycles? If someone asks you to look at climate data over a period of less than at least half a century ... grab your wallet tightly!
Facts? No parlor tricks? Having examined the data for yourself, do you still believe that?
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke