Once a school fails in AYP, kids start getting pulled. The kids who get pulled are the ones who have parents who care about education; that usually translates to the kids who do well in a school being pulled from it. You can see how much this would impact a school. The solution of course, is to prevent the bright kids from being pulled. You have to sacrifice a few eggs to make an omelet, and it's far more important to prop up a schools performance rating than to actually let bright kids fulfill their full potential by going to a competent institution.
Sorry, no. By Jane Doe aborting a baby, she's depriving me and the state of a future tax payer. Manifestly, that's about as substantive as your claim that the SUV driver makes it less safe for everyone else. The point about abortion isn't about tax payers, and the point about SUVs isn't about safety. It's about control. And me telling a woman she can't have an abortion is no different than you telling me I can't own and drive an SUV. The woman wanting the abortion and the would be SUV owner will both tell you it's none of your damn business. An SUV driver doesn't infringe on your freedom, and you're an idiot if you think he does. Does he stop you from voting? Does he stop your freedom of expression? Your freedom of association? Does the SUV owner prevent you from buying a green-friendly car? Oh I get it, he infringes on your freedom from being disgusted by wasteful SUV owners. For some reason, I don't think that's one of those Constitutionally protected rights.
The great thing about you nutroots guys is your fixation on the irrelevant. You're never going to convince me to vote for an Al Gore, and I'm never going to convince you to vote for a Fred Thompson. The battle is in the middle. A strong candidate is one that can lock up and motivate his or her base AND capture the majority of the voting middle. Meaning, you sorta have to take on a meely-mouth DLC position that you pissed on in your posts. The 20% nutroot leftist base isn't enough to win a national election because, as much as you might not like it, states like Texas and Tennessee matter.
With respect to candidates that appeal to their base and the middle, the field is pretty weak on both sides. Guiliani has cross over appeal, but very little support from the base. On a pure values match, Romney probably has the biggest match up with the base of the Republican contenders, but he has some issues with abortion and gun control. Plus the Mormon thing may drag him both in the primaries and the national elections. On the Democratic side, Hillary might appeal to women independents, but that's about it. Obama probably has the most cross-over appeal because he doesn't have the long legislative left-wing history that Hillary has, and he isn't as negative in his attacks on Republicans as Edwards has been (given that negative ads tend cause a loss of support among independents). Obama also has the proper base pedigree (anti-war, pro aborton, pro gun control, a minority). Obama has the makings of a strong candidate. The problem here is the Clinton machine. If Obama can survive that to make the nomination, he'll be a formidable candidate.
As for the conservative majority...I never said there was one. I said the US electorate was trending more conservative at the same time that Gore trending more liberal (especially on wedge issues). When elections are as close as they have been since 1992, movements of this nature make a difference. Now, it's trending the other way. That's politics.
As for the Supreme Court deciding, no, sorry, try again. Under every single rule of law scenario, Bush won in Florida. He won the initial recount. He won the subsequent Florida court ordered recounts. He would've won had it gone to the Florida legislature (as required by law if the vote can't be certified, not the make up the rules as you go along process that Democrats were trying to use to steal the election). The SCOTUS stepped in and squashed the partisan Democratic controlled court in Florida under the Equal Protection Clause, since they were ordering recounts only in areas specifically to help Gore. The ballot that supposedly confused so many people? Designed by a Democrat and approved by a Democratic board. Those military votes thrown out by the Democrats? We'll just ignore that. The voters that walked away after the media called Florida for Gore before the polls closed? We'll just ignore media collusion. Vote fraud is in the nutroot blood. If you can't win enough votes from dead Indians in North Dakota or the Daley machine in Chicago, maybe you can get the Court to vote your way. Well, not this time buddy.
Sorry for the late reply, didn't notice this until now. And despite your trollish vitriol, you have some legitimate points, I'll address them.
He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma.
This is almost as arbitrary as, 'most people didn't like the way he said "lockbox."' I mean, really it's a true testament to the thesis of The Assult on Reason that this ever gets mentioned at all when talking about why an election is won or lost.
Arbitrary? Hardly. Charisma counts. Presence counts. Especially in a close election.
fact: his charm and charisma landed him an oscar for a documentary of him essentially doing a filmed powerpoint presentation.
And in An Inconvenient Truth he was preaching to the choir. Global warming is very fashionable with Hollywood. Big surprise that a very left-leaning institution chose to reward their own. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left.
And in what ways does your 'revisionist' world view indicate that before the 2000 election, Gore was anything but a DLC stand-for-almost-nothing-in-the-'middle'-so-no-one -gets-mad puppet?
Huh? Can you try to write your English a little more effectively? Maybe include fewer nutroots-on-the-inside phrases so people who write and speak normal English can understand you...
Oh I get it, he veered to the left by choosing Leiberman as his VP, right? The same Lieberman we kicked out of the Democratic party because he's a better Republican than a Democrat?
No, idiot, he veered left because he tracked left on issues. Gore the Senator, pro-life. Gore the VP and Presidential candidate: pro-abortion rights. Gore the Senator, pro-gun rights. Gore the VP and Presidential candidate: pro-gun control. Abortion and gun control alone probably cost him Tennessee. And those 11 electoral votes were enough to win, everything else being equal (including losing Florida). An example of Gore's shift:
Would it be the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote by hundreds of thousands of votes? Was it the fact that more people voted against George Bush in 2004 than have voted against anyone else, ever?
Irrelevant straw man, since there were more voters in 2000 than ever before. I might as well bring up how in 2004 Bush got more votes than anyone else, ever, to illustrate what a popular guy Bush is.
Was it the fact that Al Gore actually got a higher percentage of the vote than Bill Clinton did in his elections?
The Bush-Gore election wasn't a 3-way race the way the 92 and 96 elections were. Nader in 2000, as far as percentage impact goes, was around an order of magnitude less significant than Perot in 92 and 96.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates [ sic ] his overall weakness as a candidate.
And he lost after a what? A successful election where he won the popular vote?
Wow, not only are you a nutroots DU kinda guy, you're a grammer Nazi. But I'll fill in the blanks...a successful incumbency as VP.
A successful appeal for a recount that was overruled when the supreme court gave the rest of us the
It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market.
You here this a lot, especially in reference to the price of gasoline. "The price is only low in the US because we ignore the externalities like environmental damage and CO2 emissions". The problem is, the market really doesn't have any way of pricing that information, does it? The extra taxes that Europeans are paying on their gas isn't going to fix those externalities, so the externalities are still there for Europeans, but the EU governments get a little tax money so they can do important stuff like publish new regulations mandating the minimum size of a banana.
52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government
RIF. 52.6% of Americans get some sort of financial assistance, not their entire financial means, from the government.
Nice crack about the communists!
Thanks. You'll notice I said we're getting their inch by inch. And we are. Between the folks that want to ban everything they don't like and the folks that think the government owes them something out of your pocket, there isn't much room for the folks that simply want to live their lives and be left alone.
For what it's worth, your personal attacks mean nothing to me.
It's not worth much. Hey, shouldn't you be out burning books you don't like or pulling cigarettes out of the mouths of smokers? An allen wrench through those detestable hummers would show those disgusting flaunters of wealth too.
I think stupid people should be banned. They take up oxygen that could be put to better users.
This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.
Interesting that you would say this, considering your being incredibly selfish and self-centered by trying to eliminate activity that you simply don't approve up but otherwise doesn't affect you. So, once you get SUVs banned, are you going to go after light trucks? And after light trucks, how about sedans that are more than 6 inches taller than the average econobox? What about folks that tint their windows and prevent you from being able to see through their windows. The argument that you use is nonsensical, because it can be pushed down and down until you're comparing skateboards to pedestrians.
Oh yeah, Bryan, I went to your web page. Some libertarian you are. I think you have a promising future as a commisar ahead of you. But I think you failed life as a libertarian.
I hate to break it to you, but most cowboy hats and cowboy boots aren't sold to real cowboys, and neither are most trucks for that matter. That rugged outdoorsman thing is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of SUVs. But I recoil against the holier than thou types that think they have a right to legally restrict me or any one else from purchasing a vehicle that is within one's financial means simply because they don't like them or think that soccer moms who own them are bad drivers. This isn't Communist Russia yet...although we are getting there inch by inch.
There is a side benefit to road maintenance with higher efficiency vehicles. The higher efficiency is often in part created by making the vehicle lighter, which saves wear and tear on the road.
No doubt it does, but unfortunately, we don't tax by mileage and gross weight not that we aren't far away from that being feasible. But right now, road use taxation is effectively based on gallons of gasoline used. And I think this is a pretty fair approximation of impact and use. If you compare a Prius owner driving 50 miles a day vs an Escalade owner driving the same, the Escalade owner is going to be paying out about 5x the taxes that the Prius owner is. We could probably come up with a complex formula using wheel base, gross weight, tire tread, and mileage and guestimate what the road impact is and assess a yearly tax, but it's probably simple and almost as accurate just to put a tax on each gallon of gasoline.
However, I must say that gas taxes are to low to account for several things. They do not collect enough tax to maintain the roads we currently have (witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota).
Here is where you get into the territory of unintended consequences. Road maintenance is paid for out of gasoline tax. Overall higher fuel efficiency means, on a per capita basis, declining maintenance revenue. In other words, the government NEEDS those gas guzzling SUVs for revenue generation. Some of the proposed taxes, like the $10,000 per year tax on SUVs, are idiotic. Yeah, you'll get SUVs off the road quite effectively. And you'll lose all of the state and Federal revenue that the SUVs were generating with their gas tax. The folks that are underpaying for road use are the people driving the 50 mpg hybrids, not the people driving 12 mpg Escalades.
Way more money is spent on roads than is collected from them - this makes the cost of traveling by car artificially low - ruining the market forces that you are talking about.
The taxes are collected from other buckets. With the exception of toll roads, there is no direct taxation on roads. Most of the money comes from gas taxes.
Any talk of market forces is kind of silly when you have state, local, and federal money dramatically subsidizing the cost of driving.
The building and maintenance of roads is one of the primary functions of government. Whether the money for that comes from direct road tariffs, income taxes, trade tariffs, or some other tax vehicle is immaterial. Government intervention in roads in critical because they are the only party that can resolve right of way and public use issues.
Look, a lot of your points are valid, but none of them have anything to do with SUVs. What you are basically doing is indicting the system, but your* solution is doing away with SUVs...something that won't fix the system, and will actually make it worse (because revenue to fix roads will go down). But again, this argument really isn't about problems and solutions, it's about moralizing people trying to outlaw behavior they find objectionable that otherwise doesn't really involve them**.
I personally don't have a dog in this fight...I have a Jetta TDI as my main commuter, and an old pickup truck that I keep around because it's paid for.
* "Your" is generic pronoun here, you may not be one of the folks in favor of banning SUVs and SUV drivers. I'm using "you" because you replied to me, and I'm elaborating on part of my point.
** Generally speaking, an SUV driver affects you about as much as Jane Doe aborting a baby affects me. I find abortion morally objectionable. You find driving an SUV morally objectionable. How about we ban both. No? Just SUVs? A lot of the netroots crowd are enthusiastic supporters of abortion on demand and banning SUVs while at the same time talk about how the right wants to restrict their rights. I find the irony amusing.
What a novel concept. Let the market and people decide individually. Assuming peak oil is a near term reality, market forces will make people adjust their transportation habits accordingly without any intervention on the part of government or the nanny state, which, as you aptly pointed out, usually makes things worse rather than better. The anti-SUV crusaders are the moralizing prohibitionists of the era. They view SUVs as profligate waste, and not content to merely express their opinion, they want to legislate you and everyone else out of their lifestyle and economic choices.
Oh, I never said I wasn't partisan. But I have a feeling that I'm a lot more anti-authoritarian and liberty minded than you. Your kind always ends with putting people up against the wall once they get power, being so convinced they are right and their enemies are evil. As for tells, this ain't poker buddy. And you really are an idiot. Good luck in life, because life is hard when you're stupid.
Hillary will win votes with her position on the war.
The problem is, when Hillary takes a position contrary to archectype, it has all of the appearance of being naked political calculation rather than an earnest position. In other words, she voted for Iraq because it would help her later on electorally, not because she thought it was the right thing to do. In all likelyhood, she probably thought it wasn't the right thing to do, but her electoral prospects are more important than mere morality. Now, I'm not saying this is what happened, but that perception is certainly something Hillary has to content with, and her war authorization vote won't bring many hawks to her side because inherently, she's not a hawk.
Here's the problem mosch. You really are an idiot. Not because you disagree with me. See, I'm fairly open minded. I think people can disagree amicably even over important and divisive issues without either one of them necessarily being evil or stupid. Substantively, we haven't even covered any issue, but yet you are ready to stake your claim that I'm a fascist extremist and I want to restrict your rights somehow or suppress you. What this is called is "projection" buddy, something you've been doing from the start. Your labeling someone a fascist or evil with little or no evidence is precisely what you are accusing me of doing.
I've only labeled you an idiot after giving you plenty of opportunity to prove otherwise by presenting some sort of substantive and thoughtful argument but that seems to be beyond you.
I know that most right-wingers, like yourself, assume that all those who disagree with you are America-hating, idiotic fucks, but the fact is you're wrong.
Wow, nice flame bait dude. BTW, you might want to work on your mind reading skills, because I think it's safe to safe you don't have a clue what "most right wingers such as myself" think. I don't think people who disagree with me are "American hating idiotic fucks"...vitriol of that type seems to be your domain and Wakko's. Case in point:
If you spent less time masturbating to Hannity, Malkin, Savage and O'Reilly, you'd recognize that a majority of Americans do not want one party to dominate, do not want to force ideologies on others, or anything of the sort.
Again, nice flame bait dude. The only one trying to pigeon hole anyone is you and your buddy Wakko. I'm not trying to force an ideology on anyone, and for that matter, neither is Karl Rove. Winning elections isn't forcing ideology down your throats, and you have ample opportunity to voice your opinion and work your own agenda. However, your agenda seems to be spewing vitriol as opposed to solving problems or constructive dialog. In short, you seem to have some pent up anger issues.
Well, you illustrate the problem with the left in a nutshell: "Anyone who disagrees with me is evil. Anyone who disagrees with me and is successful in presenting their agenda is evil incarnate". This of course, is the mindset that makes it possible to liquidate your opponents. They no longer have valid points of view or real interests, they are just evil. But yeah, that Karl Rove, he sure is driving a wedge...
I'm really not sure how you could get more hypocritical.
This is a man who had a well-known dream of creating a permanent Republican electoral majority and who really perfected the use of wedge issues to obtain and hold power.
I'm sure there are plenty of people on the Democratic side that dream of cementing a permanent Democratic electoral majority too. Neither objective is evil, unless of course, you consider the Democratic or Republican party as innately evil. And if you do, honestly, you have no business discussing politics.
The contention that we should be respectful towards him is absurd. He spent decades working as hard as he could to ensure that everyone's interests were not represented equally or fairly
My, aren't we naive. No one pursues "everyone's" interest, they pursue their own interests. In the case of political operatives, this usually (but not always) means following their base's interest. It's manifestly impossible for any one person to represent everyone else's interest. The fact that you would bring this up in a character assessment of Rove suggests that you aren't thoughtful enough to assess people. Why don't you be honest and say "I don't like Rove because he didn't represent me and he was successful"? That's why I don't like Rove.
One of the problems with political discourse is the inherent dishonesty like the parent's. Do we really think the parent wants folks like gun owners or trailer park residents fairly represented? No? Then stop acting like fairness is at issue here, because it isn't.
and helping to destroy the middle ground, to make the "us versus them" vision of politics more deeply entrenched.
Give me a break. Left-wing Democrats have been attacking the "middle ground" since the New Deal. Electoral ads against Bush in 2000 suggested he wanted to roll back the clock to slavery. And that's not hyperbole. Those were the ads. I don't like Rove (mainly because he's been disasterous for conservatives), but Rove was hardly some grand architect of "us versus them". If anything, he's a "big tent" Republican and tried to make the party more inclusive to traditionally Democratic voters like Catholics and Latinos. If anything, liberals, leftists, and Democrats should love Rove since, in the end, he's been the grand architect of the fracturing of the Republican party and the conservative base.
If Gore had campaigned on a platform of "keep doing what my predecessor did, except I'm faithful to my wife", he very well could have had an undisputable win in 2000.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Going by Clinton's approval ratings is misleading. Even against a lackluster candidate like Dole, Clinton was only able to muster 49.2% of the vote during his relection campaign in 1996, despite having around 60% approval ratings at the time. In other words, that high approval rating didn't translate very well into votes at election time.
Also...Gore manifestly had a lot of problems:
1) He wasn't Clinton.
2) He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma. Where Clinton came across as your buddy, Gore came across as the condescending guy no one likes.
3) From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left. Politically, he went from being a fairly conservative blue dog Democrat as a Tennessee Senator to being a left-wing idealogue VP. This happened at the same time that the country, as a whole, was trending more conservative. To give you an idea of the impact, Gore lost his home state of Tennessee to Bush in 2000. Forget about Florida, if Gore had simply won Tennessee, he would be President today.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates his overall weakness as a candidate. Good candidates win elections, bad candidates do not. A fairly simple formula that people, especially party operatives, seem to forget. The Democrats electoral success in 2006 hinged in no small part to them putting forth better candidates than the Republicans (who, in many cases, actually ran to the right of Republicans on certain issues like immigration).
As an aside, the problem with Hillary is...she's not a good candidate. Not because she isn't effective at politics...she is. She is immensely talented, ruthless, and goal oriented. She has a great fund raising machine, and a lot of people owe her favors. The problem is a little over half the voting population won't vote for her under any circumstance. She's extremely polarizing. As popular as Bill was across demographics and party lines, Hillary has never had cross over appeal. Feminists love her, west coast and east cost liberals love her. And that's it. And you can't win an election on that alone.
Actually, an even better way to prevent crime is to make sure everyone has a good job and a nice place to live and is content with life. People tend not to commit as many crimes when things are going well and they have too much to loose.
And while we're wishing for the impossible, can we throw in a request for world peace also?
The best way to prevent crime, on aggregate, is to take habitual offenders out of the population (because habitual offenders are the ones committing most of the crimes). In this sense, jails and prisons are very useful, because for at least the time that offenders are incarcerated, they aren't committing crimes against innocent citizens. There are certain types of people that can't hold down a bad job, much less a good one. There are certain types of people who will turn a nice place to live into a hovel. And there are people who will never be content. What's your solution for the would be rapist that covet's your wife? Give her up? (And lets assume for a second that you love your wife).
Within the same thread that you accuse critics of colonialism of a kind of romantic disregard for derogatory elements of non-Western cultures, you craft a fictitious history in order to tell another romantic story of the triumph of liberal capitalism.
I think you are confusing yourself and me. I don't have any romantic illusions about the triumph of liberal capitalism or illusions about the dirty underbelly of European / Western history. What I don't subscribe to is the belief that liberal capitalism or Western civilization is any more evil than any of the alternatives, past or present. So, rather than saying colonialism "wasn't bad", I only say it's better than what was before and what came after. You on the other hand say things like:
The Russian economy expanded with only a few hiccups right into the 60's.
Who has blinders on now? Hiccups like the Civil War? The liquidation of the kulaks? The famine and starvation of the Ukraine? The Great Terror? The Molotov-Ribbentrov pact? Russia was and is an immensely wealthy country, both in terms of natural resources and talent base. Once feudalism was abolished, Russia would've succeeded anyway. And, as a bonus, could've been done without the murder of tens of millions of people, which was the way the Communists did it (in Russia, and in China, plus a few million in Cambodia).
It's interesting to see the people that attack Western civilization, especially of the colonial era, try to sanitize the evils of Communism. And hell, even Communism is a by-product of Western civilization.
Will you then give credit to the role of Communism in creating two of the world's greatest powers and its most dynamic economy? In producing the greatest economic leaps forward of the 20th century? And then hand-wave over the millions of casualties it caused? Or is your "que sera, sera" attitude selective?
No, of course not. Communism crippled the Russian economy for 4 decades. It wasn't until the 60s that Russia started to recover from the damage that Lenin and Stalin did, and that was a short lived recovery. But hey, they were a great power. Most likely they would've been a great power regardless, but millions of people wouldn't have been disappeared by the NKVD, the KGB, and the gulag system.
As for China, China's economic success has very little to do with Communism, just like the LRA in Uganda has very little to do with Christianity. China may call itself Communist, but overall it's much more like a fascist nation ruled by an oligarchy than a Communist one. China's short lived attempt at "true communism" aka Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in pretty much the same result as Stalin's collectivization efforts in the Ukraine and Pol Pot's efforts in Laos...the starvation and deaths of millions of people. Go ahead and worship Communism if you want, but you are worshipping a coffin not a pinnacle.
Can you be clear on what was exagerated? The settlers came after the Army, having won the Civil War and now looking to kill and drive off every redskin they saw, had done its work. The Indians that remained were, understandably, extremely hostile to the white man.
You have it backwards. In almost every case, settlers preceeded the army, and it was attacks on settlers that precipitated army involvement, not the other way around. Additionally, the army was a very poor weapon against many of the Indians (comanches), who were broken by the Texans fighting light the Comanches rather than in the European/American Civil War Dragoon fashion.
At some point in the development of the notion of the Rights of Man, you have to hold Western Civilization accountable for not only falling short of those ideals, but in actively pursuing policies that ran counter to any notion of justice, decency and the rule of law.
Not when the only purpose of "holding Western Civilization accountable" is basically an attempt to devalue Western civilization to benefit other civilizations, cultures, and societies which are far more culpable and responsible for the evils of the world and/or their own plight. Western civilization didn't create or abolish the fact that there are winners and losers.
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Sorry, no. By Jane Doe aborting a baby, she's depriving me and the state of a future tax payer. Manifestly, that's about as substantive as your claim that the SUV driver makes it less safe for everyone else. The point about abortion isn't about tax payers, and the point about SUVs isn't about safety. It's about control. And me telling a woman she can't have an abortion is no different than you telling me I can't own and drive an SUV. The woman wanting the abortion and the would be SUV owner will both tell you it's none of your damn business. An SUV driver doesn't infringe on your freedom, and you're an idiot if you think he does. Does he stop you from voting? Does he stop your freedom of expression? Your freedom of association? Does the SUV owner prevent you from buying a green-friendly car? Oh I get it, he infringes on your freedom from being disgusted by wasteful SUV owners. For some reason, I don't think that's one of those Constitutionally protected rights.
The great thing about you nutroots guys is your fixation on the irrelevant. You're never going to convince me to vote for an Al Gore, and I'm never going to convince you to vote for a Fred Thompson. The battle is in the middle. A strong candidate is one that can lock up and motivate his or her base AND capture the majority of the voting middle. Meaning, you sorta have to take on a meely-mouth DLC position that you pissed on in your posts. The 20% nutroot leftist base isn't enough to win a national election because, as much as you might not like it, states like Texas and Tennessee matter.
With respect to candidates that appeal to their base and the middle, the field is pretty weak on both sides. Guiliani has cross over appeal, but very little support from the base. On a pure values match, Romney probably has the biggest match up with the base of the Republican contenders, but he has some issues with abortion and gun control. Plus the Mormon thing may drag him both in the primaries and the national elections. On the Democratic side, Hillary might appeal to women independents, but that's about it. Obama probably has the most cross-over appeal because he doesn't have the long legislative left-wing history that Hillary has, and he isn't as negative in his attacks on Republicans as Edwards has been (given that negative ads tend cause a loss of support among independents). Obama also has the proper base pedigree (anti-war, pro aborton, pro gun control, a minority). Obama has the makings of a strong candidate. The problem here is the Clinton machine. If Obama can survive that to make the nomination, he'll be a formidable candidate.
As for the conservative majority...I never said there was one. I said the US electorate was trending more conservative at the same time that Gore trending more liberal (especially on wedge issues). When elections are as close as they have been since 1992, movements of this nature make a difference. Now, it's trending the other way. That's politics.
As for the Supreme Court deciding, no, sorry, try again. Under every single rule of law scenario, Bush won in Florida. He won the initial recount. He won the subsequent Florida court ordered recounts. He would've won had it gone to the Florida legislature (as required by law if the vote can't be certified, not the make up the rules as you go along process that Democrats were trying to use to steal the election). The SCOTUS stepped in and squashed the partisan Democratic controlled court in Florida under the Equal Protection Clause, since they were ordering recounts only in areas specifically to help Gore. The ballot that supposedly confused so many people? Designed by a Democrat and approved by a Democratic board. Those military votes thrown out by the Democrats? We'll just ignore that. The voters that walked away after the media called Florida for Gore before the polls closed? We'll just ignore media collusion. Vote fraud is in the nutroot blood. If you can't win enough votes from dead Indians in North Dakota or the Daley machine in Chicago, maybe you can get the Court to vote your way. Well, not this time buddy.
He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma.
This is almost as arbitrary as, 'most people didn't like the way he said "lockbox."' I mean, really it's a true testament to the thesis of The Assult on Reason that this ever gets mentioned at all when talking about why an election is won or lost.
Arbitrary? Hardly. Charisma counts. Presence counts. Especially in a close election.
fact: his charm and charisma landed him an oscar for a documentary of him essentially doing a filmed powerpoint presentation.
And in An Inconvenient Truth he was preaching to the choir. Global warming is very fashionable with Hollywood. Big surprise that a very left-leaning institution chose to reward their own. I am Jack's complete lack of surprise.
From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left.
And in what ways does your 'revisionist' world view indicate that before the 2000 election, Gore was anything but a DLC stand-for-almost-nothing-in-the-'middle'-so-no-one -gets-mad puppet?
Huh? Can you try to write your English a little more effectively? Maybe include fewer nutroots-on-the-inside phrases so people who write and speak normal English can understand you...
Oh I get it, he veered to the left by choosing Leiberman as his VP, right? The same Lieberman we kicked out of the Democratic party because he's a better Republican than a Democrat?
No, idiot, he veered left because he tracked left on issues. Gore the Senator, pro-life. Gore the VP and Presidential candidate: pro-abortion rights. Gore the Senator, pro-gun rights. Gore the VP and Presidential candidate: pro-gun control. Abortion and gun control alone probably cost him Tennessee. And those 11 electoral votes were enough to win, everything else being equal (including losing Florida).
An example of Gore's shift:
The Veep casts himself as the hero of gun control, but didn't he use to be the NRA's good friend?
This happened at the same time that the country, as a whole, was trending more conservative.
And whose statistics would give you that idea?
I dunno, maybe it's the relative increase of the people identifying themselves as Republicans during the 90s Now, I know that Republicans and conservatives aren't exact matches, but it's a good enough back of the envelope approximation.
Would it be the fact that Al Gore won the popular vote by hundreds of thousands of votes? Was it the fact that more people voted against George Bush in 2004 than have voted against anyone else, ever?
Irrelevant straw man, since there were more voters in 2000 than ever before. I might as well bring up how in 2004 Bush got more votes than anyone else, ever, to illustrate what a popular guy Bush is.
Was it the fact that Al Gore actually got a higher percentage of the vote than Bill Clinton did in his elections?
The Bush-Gore election wasn't a 3-way race the way the 92 and 96 elections were. Nader in 2000, as far as percentage impact goes, was around an order of magnitude less significant than Perot in 92 and 96.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates [ sic ] his overall weakness as a candidate.
And he lost after a what? A successful election where he won the popular vote?
Wow, not only are you a nutroots DU kinda guy, you're a grammer Nazi. But I'll fill in the blanks...a successful incumbency as VP.
A successful appeal for a recount that was overruled when the supreme court gave the rest of us the
It's only within peoples financial means because the externalities are being largely ignored, distorting the market.
You here this a lot, especially in reference to the price of gasoline. "The price is only low in the US because we ignore the externalities like environmental damage and CO2 emissions". The problem is, the market really doesn't have any way of pricing that information, does it? The extra taxes that Europeans are paying on their gas isn't going to fix those externalities, so the externalities are still there for Europeans, but the EU governments get a little tax money so they can do important stuff like publish new regulations mandating the minimum size of a banana. 52.6% of Americans get their financial means from the government
RIF. 52.6% of Americans get some sort of financial assistance, not their entire financial means, from the government.
Nice crack about the communists!
Thanks. You'll notice I said we're getting their inch by inch. And we are. Between the folks that want to ban everything they don't like and the folks that think the government owes them something out of your pocket, there isn't much room for the folks that simply want to live their lives and be left alone.
For what it's worth, your personal attacks mean nothing to me.
It's not worth much. Hey, shouldn't you be out burning books you don't like or pulling cigarettes out of the mouths of smokers? An allen wrench through those detestable hummers would show those disgusting flaunters of wealth too.
I think SUVs should be banned for these reasons.
I think stupid people should be banned. They take up oxygen that could be put to better users. This is disgusting to me; it's the ultimate example of selfishness and self-centeredness, where one's own comfort/safety/style outweigh any consideration of the consequence to others.
Interesting that you would say this, considering your being incredibly selfish and self-centered by trying to eliminate activity that you simply don't approve up but otherwise doesn't affect you. So, once you get SUVs banned, are you going to go after light trucks? And after light trucks, how about sedans that are more than 6 inches taller than the average econobox? What about folks that tint their windows and prevent you from being able to see through their windows. The argument that you use is nonsensical, because it can be pushed down and down until you're comparing skateboards to pedestrians.
Oh yeah, Bryan, I went to your web page. Some libertarian you are. I think you have a promising future as a commisar ahead of you. But I think you failed life as a libertarian.
I hate to break it to you, but most cowboy hats and cowboy boots aren't sold to real cowboys, and neither are most trucks for that matter. That rugged outdoorsman thing is a marketing tool, nothing more, nothing less.
Personally, I'm not a big fan of SUVs. But I recoil against the holier than thou types that think they have a right to legally restrict me or any one else from purchasing a vehicle that is within one's financial means simply because they don't like them or think that soccer moms who own them are bad drivers. This isn't Communist Russia yet...although we are getting there inch by inch.
There is a side benefit to road maintenance with higher efficiency vehicles. The higher efficiency is often in part created by making the vehicle lighter, which saves wear and tear on the road.
No doubt it does, but unfortunately, we don't tax by mileage and gross weight not that we aren't far away from that being feasible. But right now, road use taxation is effectively based on gallons of gasoline used. And I think this is a pretty fair approximation of impact and use. If you compare a Prius owner driving 50 miles a day vs an Escalade owner driving the same, the Escalade owner is going to be paying out about 5x the taxes that the Prius owner is. We could probably come up with a complex formula using wheel base, gross weight, tire tread, and mileage and guestimate what the road impact is and assess a yearly tax, but it's probably simple and almost as accurate just to put a tax on each gallon of gasoline.
snip.
However, I must say that gas taxes are to low to account for several things. They do not collect enough tax to maintain the roads we currently have (witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota).
Here is where you get into the territory of unintended consequences. Road maintenance is paid for out of gasoline tax. Overall higher fuel efficiency means, on a per capita basis, declining maintenance revenue. In other words, the government NEEDS those gas guzzling SUVs for revenue generation. Some of the proposed taxes, like the $10,000 per year tax on SUVs, are idiotic. Yeah, you'll get SUVs off the road quite effectively. And you'll lose all of the state and Federal revenue that the SUVs were generating with their gas tax. The folks that are underpaying for road use are the people driving the 50 mpg hybrids, not the people driving 12 mpg Escalades.
Way more money is spent on roads than is collected from them - this makes the cost of traveling by car artificially low - ruining the market forces that you are talking about.
The taxes are collected from other buckets. With the exception of toll roads, there is no direct taxation on roads. Most of the money comes from gas taxes. Any talk of market forces is kind of silly when you have state, local, and federal money dramatically subsidizing the cost of driving.
The building and maintenance of roads is one of the primary functions of government. Whether the money for that comes from direct road tariffs, income taxes, trade tariffs, or some other tax vehicle is immaterial. Government intervention in roads in critical because they are the only party that can resolve right of way and public use issues.
Look, a lot of your points are valid, but none of them have anything to do with SUVs. What you are basically doing is indicting the system, but your* solution is doing away with SUVs...something that won't fix the system, and will actually make it worse (because revenue to fix roads will go down). But again, this argument really isn't about problems and solutions, it's about moralizing people trying to outlaw behavior they find objectionable that otherwise doesn't really involve them**.
I personally don't have a dog in this fight...I have a Jetta TDI as my main commuter, and an old pickup truck that I keep around because it's paid for.
* "Your" is generic pronoun here, you may not be one of the folks in favor of banning SUVs and SUV drivers. I'm using "you" because you replied to me, and I'm elaborating on part of my point.
** Generally speaking, an SUV driver affects you about as much as Jane Doe aborting a baby affects me. I find abortion morally objectionable. You find driving an SUV morally objectionable. How about we ban both. No? Just SUVs? A lot of the netroots crowd are enthusiastic supporters of abortion on demand and banning SUVs while at the same time talk about how the right wants to restrict their rights. I find the irony amusing.
What a novel concept. Let the market and people decide individually. Assuming peak oil is a near term reality, market forces will make people adjust their transportation habits accordingly without any intervention on the part of government or the nanny state, which, as you aptly pointed out, usually makes things worse rather than better. The anti-SUV crusaders are the moralizing prohibitionists of the era. They view SUVs as profligate waste, and not content to merely express their opinion, they want to legislate you and everyone else out of their lifestyle and economic choices.
Oh, I never said I wasn't partisan. But I have a feeling that I'm a lot more anti-authoritarian and liberty minded than you. Your kind always ends with putting people up against the wall once they get power, being so convinced they are right and their enemies are evil. As for tells, this ain't poker buddy. And you really are an idiot. Good luck in life, because life is hard when you're stupid.
Hillary will win votes with her position on the war.
The problem is, when Hillary takes a position contrary to archectype, it has all of the appearance of being naked political calculation rather than an earnest position. In other words, she voted for Iraq because it would help her later on electorally, not because she thought it was the right thing to do. In all likelyhood, she probably thought it wasn't the right thing to do, but her electoral prospects are more important than mere morality. Now, I'm not saying this is what happened, but that perception is certainly something Hillary has to content with, and her war authorization vote won't bring many hawks to her side because inherently, she's not a hawk.
Here's the problem mosch. You really are an idiot. Not because you disagree with me. See, I'm fairly open minded. I think people can disagree amicably even over important and divisive issues without either one of them necessarily being evil or stupid. Substantively, we haven't even covered any issue, but yet you are ready to stake your claim that I'm a fascist extremist and I want to restrict your rights somehow or suppress you. What this is called is "projection" buddy, something you've been doing from the start. Your labeling someone a fascist or evil with little or no evidence is precisely what you are accusing me of doing.
I've only labeled you an idiot after giving you plenty of opportunity to prove otherwise by presenting some sort of substantive and thoughtful argument but that seems to be beyond you.
Mod parent up. Increasing the recording quality or encoding quality won't improve a lot of what passes for music these days.
I know that most right-wingers, like yourself, assume that all those who disagree with you are America-hating, idiotic fucks, but the fact is you're wrong.
Wow, nice flame bait dude. BTW, you might want to work on your mind reading skills, because I think it's safe to safe you don't have a clue what "most right wingers such as myself" think. I don't think people who disagree with me are "American hating idiotic fucks"...vitriol of that type seems to be your domain and Wakko's. Case in point: If you spent less time masturbating to Hannity, Malkin, Savage and O'Reilly, you'd recognize that a majority of Americans do not want one party to dominate, do not want to force ideologies on others, or anything of the sort.
Again, nice flame bait dude. The only one trying to pigeon hole anyone is you and your buddy Wakko. I'm not trying to force an ideology on anyone, and for that matter, neither is Karl Rove. Winning elections isn't forcing ideology down your throats, and you have ample opportunity to voice your opinion and work your own agenda. However, your agenda seems to be spewing vitriol as opposed to solving problems or constructive dialog. In short, you seem to have some pent up anger issues.
Well, you illustrate the problem with the left in a nutshell: "Anyone who disagrees with me is evil. Anyone who disagrees with me and is successful in presenting their agenda is evil incarnate". This of course, is the mindset that makes it possible to liquidate your opponents. They no longer have valid points of view or real interests, they are just evil. But yeah, that Karl Rove, he sure is driving a wedge...
I'm really not sure how you could get more hypocritical.
can I propose an amendment that others win by default? or do u care to tell me how Bush won both terms as a "good" candidate?
Well the obvious answer is Bush was a good candidate because he won and his opponents were not because they lost;-).
Actually, Bush was a bad candidate, especially in 2004. He just had the fortune of running against Al Gore and John Kerry.
This is a man who had a well-known dream of creating a permanent Republican electoral majority and who really perfected the use of wedge issues to obtain and hold power.
I'm sure there are plenty of people on the Democratic side that dream of cementing a permanent Democratic electoral majority too. Neither objective is evil, unless of course, you consider the Democratic or Republican party as innately evil. And if you do, honestly, you have no business discussing politics.
The contention that we should be respectful towards him is absurd. He spent decades working as hard as he could to ensure that everyone's interests were not represented equally or fairly
My, aren't we naive. No one pursues "everyone's" interest, they pursue their own interests. In the case of political operatives, this usually (but not always) means following their base's interest. It's manifestly impossible for any one person to represent everyone else's interest. The fact that you would bring this up in a character assessment of Rove suggests that you aren't thoughtful enough to assess people. Why don't you be honest and say "I don't like Rove because he didn't represent me and he was successful"? That's why I don't like Rove.
One of the problems with political discourse is the inherent dishonesty like the parent's. Do we really think the parent wants folks like gun owners or trailer park residents fairly represented? No? Then stop acting like fairness is at issue here, because it isn't.
and helping to destroy the middle ground, to make the "us versus them" vision of politics more deeply entrenched.
Give me a break. Left-wing Democrats have been attacking the "middle ground" since the New Deal. Electoral ads against Bush in 2000 suggested he wanted to roll back the clock to slavery. And that's not hyperbole. Those were the ads. I don't like Rove (mainly because he's been disasterous for conservatives), but Rove was hardly some grand architect of "us versus them". If anything, he's a "big tent" Republican and tried to make the party more inclusive to traditionally Democratic voters like Catholics and Latinos. If anything, liberals, leftists, and Democrats should love Rove since, in the end, he's been the grand architect of the fracturing of the Republican party and the conservative base.
If Gore had campaigned on a platform of "keep doing what my predecessor did, except I'm faithful to my wife", he very well could have had an undisputable win in 2000.
Woulda, coulda, shoulda.
Going by Clinton's approval ratings is misleading. Even against a lackluster candidate like Dole, Clinton was only able to muster 49.2% of the vote during his relection campaign in 1996, despite having around 60% approval ratings at the time. In other words, that high approval rating didn't translate very well into votes at election time. Also...Gore manifestly had a lot of problems:
1) He wasn't Clinton.
2) He didn't have ANY of Clinton's charm or charisma. Where Clinton came across as your buddy, Gore came across as the condescending guy no one likes.
3) From 1992-2000, Gore veered to the left. Politically, he went from being a fairly conservative blue dog Democrat as a Tennessee Senator to being a left-wing idealogue VP. This happened at the same time that the country, as a whole, was trending more conservative. To give you an idea of the impact, Gore lost his home state of Tennessee to Bush in 2000. Forget about Florida, if Gore had simply won Tennessee, he would be President today.
The fact that Gore lost after a successful illustrates his overall weakness as a candidate. Good candidates win elections, bad candidates do not. A fairly simple formula that people, especially party operatives, seem to forget. The Democrats electoral success in 2006 hinged in no small part to them putting forth better candidates than the Republicans (who, in many cases, actually ran to the right of Republicans on certain issues like immigration).
As an aside, the problem with Hillary is...she's not a good candidate. Not because she isn't effective at politics...she is. She is immensely talented, ruthless, and goal oriented. She has a great fund raising machine, and a lot of people owe her favors. The problem is a little over half the voting population won't vote for her under any circumstance. She's extremely polarizing. As popular as Bill was across demographics and party lines, Hillary has never had cross over appeal. Feminists love her, west coast and east cost liberals love her. And that's it. And you can't win an election on that alone.
Actually, an even better way to prevent crime is to make sure everyone has a good job and a nice place to live and is content with life. People tend not to commit as many crimes when things are going well and they have too much to loose.
And while we're wishing for the impossible, can we throw in a request for world peace also?
The best way to prevent crime, on aggregate, is to take habitual offenders out of the population (because habitual offenders are the ones committing most of the crimes). In this sense, jails and prisons are very useful, because for at least the time that offenders are incarcerated, they aren't committing crimes against innocent citizens. There are certain types of people that can't hold down a bad job, much less a good one. There are certain types of people who will turn a nice place to live into a hovel. And there are people who will never be content. What's your solution for the would be rapist that covet's your wife? Give her up? (And lets assume for a second that you love your wife).
Within the same thread that you accuse critics of colonialism of a kind of romantic disregard for derogatory elements of non-Western cultures, you craft a fictitious history in order to tell another romantic story of the triumph of liberal capitalism.
I think you are confusing yourself and me. I don't have any romantic illusions about the triumph of liberal capitalism or illusions about the dirty underbelly of European / Western history. What I don't subscribe to is the belief that liberal capitalism or Western civilization is any more evil than any of the alternatives, past or present. So, rather than saying colonialism "wasn't bad", I only say it's better than what was before and what came after. You on the other hand say things like: The Russian economy expanded with only a few hiccups right into the 60's.
Who has blinders on now? Hiccups like the Civil War? The liquidation of the kulaks? The famine and starvation of the Ukraine? The Great Terror? The Molotov-Ribbentrov pact? Russia was and is an immensely wealthy country, both in terms of natural resources and talent base. Once feudalism was abolished, Russia would've succeeded anyway. And, as a bonus, could've been done without the murder of tens of millions of people, which was the way the Communists did it (in Russia, and in China, plus a few million in Cambodia).
It's interesting to see the people that attack Western civilization, especially of the colonial era, try to sanitize the evils of Communism. And hell, even Communism is a by-product of Western civilization.
Will you then give credit to the role of Communism in creating two of the world's greatest powers and its most dynamic economy? In producing the greatest economic leaps forward of the 20th century? And then hand-wave over the millions of casualties it caused? Or is your "que sera, sera" attitude selective?
No, of course not. Communism crippled the Russian economy for 4 decades. It wasn't until the 60s that Russia started to recover from the damage that Lenin and Stalin did, and that was a short lived recovery. But hey, they were a great power. Most likely they would've been a great power regardless, but millions of people wouldn't have been disappeared by the NKVD, the KGB, and the gulag system.
As for China, China's economic success has very little to do with Communism, just like the LRA in Uganda has very little to do with Christianity. China may call itself Communist, but overall it's much more like a fascist nation ruled by an oligarchy than a Communist one. China's short lived attempt at "true communism" aka Mao's "Great Leap Forward" resulted in pretty much the same result as Stalin's collectivization efforts in the Ukraine and Pol Pot's efforts in Laos...the starvation and deaths of millions of people. Go ahead and worship Communism if you want, but you are worshipping a coffin not a pinnacle.
Can you be clear on what was exagerated? The settlers came after the Army, having won the Civil War and now looking to kill and drive off every redskin they saw, had done its work. The Indians that remained were, understandably, extremely hostile to the white man.
You have it backwards. In almost every case, settlers preceeded the army, and it was attacks on settlers that precipitated army involvement, not the other way around. Additionally, the army was a very poor weapon against many of the Indians (comanches), who were broken by the Texans fighting light the Comanches rather than in the European/American Civil War Dragoon fashion.
At some point in the development of the notion of the Rights of Man, you have to hold Western Civilization accountable for not only falling short of those ideals, but in actively pursuing policies that ran counter to any notion of justice, decency and the rule of law.
Not when the only purpose of "holding Western Civilization accountable" is basically an attempt to devalue Western civilization to benefit other civilizations, cultures, and societies which are far more culpable and responsible for the evils of the world and/or their own plight. Western civilization didn't create or abolish the fact that there are winners and losers.