Congratulations, Obama

[swansont]

That explains the lack of declaration! They have decided to remain perpetually un-declared and thus avoid the wrath of the hurricane gods

The hurricane gods hate indecisiveness.

[iNow]

And then there's this:

 

 

[Ringer]

And then there's this:

 

. . .

 

When I saw Indiana on there my thought process went, "What the hell? We're not that stu. . . wait, yes we are. Dammit."

[overtone]

This is a very good point. It's far too easy to claim the other guy is crazy, and indeed it has been my kneejerk reaction to the majority of Republican actions of late, and it bothers me greatly. I know it clouds objectivity to dismiss a whole group of people because of the unreasonableness of the most vocal fringe elements.

They are not fringe elements. The central power holders and most influential voices and established intellectuals are who we are talking about here.

 

The leader of the House Republicans (the Majority Leader), the leader of the Senate Republicans, the official candidates for President and Vice President, the best selling authors and highest paid commentators and most quoted intellectuals and central Think Tank organizations and official cabinet members and highest rated TV news deliverers and famous Supreme Court justices and founders of major Caucuses and chief K Street fundraisers and so forth and so on and on and on for thirty years and more, here, are not vocal fringe elements.

 

And they are flat out, goofball, reality-divergent, fanaticism-mining, wingnut stereotypical, crazy. It's either that or pandering to evil - terminally corrupt.

 

This is the Party that renominated W for the Presidency, and reelected him, after he mired the country in Iraq on blatantly trumped up evidence of WMDs, while promising that the war would be over in six months and would pay for itself in captured oil revenue, while putting the whole thing on the credit card without including the debt in his "budget". And this is the Party whose official reps and powers and intellectuals still, to this day, in public, with every appearance of sincerity, assert that the deficits W ran were those he claimed on his silly books, the ones that did not include the costs of his taking the country to war.

 

This is the Party whose every serious 2008 candidate for President of the entire nation, sitting on stage and with the TV cameras running, solemnly raised their hands in the air and claimed to doubt the reality of biological evolution.

 

This is the Party whose major and most influential public voices openly discuss "2nd Amendment remedies" to government policies they find objectionable.

 

This is the Party whose every single top level political figure agreed with their formally appointed Supreme Court justices that large sums of money from unnamed sources handed to them without attribution or public accounting for specious reasons had no appearance of corruption, and were instead forms of protected political speech.

 

This is the Party whose top officials both elected and appointed claim Ayn Rand as their most important source of ideology and viewpoint more frequently than any other except the Christian Bible.

 

This is the Party that invented and publicly defended the kinds of "interrogation" centers set up at Guantanamo and Bagram and Abu Ghraib and Diego Garcia and various clandestine sites worldwide, while increasingly turning over management of military logistics, security and crowd control, and even actual combat, to highly paid contract mercenary organizations whose executives provided political support (see "money speech" above).

 

This is the Party whose chief contracting executives, for those mercenaries, variously: claimed he did not live in the State where he was registered to vote and licensed to drive and counted in the Census and going to work every day - and was "believed"; spent his tenure in office privately consulting with unnamed oil company and defense industry executives on matters of public policy; publicly justified serious underperformance of said contracted companies by asserting “You go to war with the army you have—not the army you want or might wish to have at a later time” in reference to a war they themselves started ; somehow shot somebody in the face and refused to be questioned by the police until the next day; claimed that Iraqis would greet the American military as liberators and settle down into peaceful submission to imposed government because they had no history of sectarian strife; when the major justification for launching a four thousand soldier casualty land war in Asia Minor turned up missing clowned in the Oval Office lightheartedly pretending to look under his desk, stood on a podium overlooking a flooded city with drowned people still floating in the debris and made jokes about going drinking on a nearby street; and so forth and so on in a litany of the alternately goofy, tragic, and ugly, that never let up for eight fucking years.

 

Yes, they are crazy. It's a reality we have to deal with, in the US.

[JohnB]

iNow, does that prove that better educated people lean to the left or that Universities are indoctrination areas for left wing thinking? I'm not arguing either way, but I'll bet a case can be made for the second....

 

ydoaps, the onlt problem I have with your answer, and it is quite possibly due to the differences in our systems is that you are essentially saying that when the Democrats control both Houses and the Presidency but fail to pass their Bills, it is the Republicans fault. So when the Republicans hold both Houses and the Presidency and fail to pass their Bills, whose fault is it?

 

On a much lighter note (and to appease the Hurricane Gods);

 

[CaptainPanic]

iNow, does that prove that better educated people lean to the left or that Universities are indoctrination areas for left wing thinking? I'm not arguing either way, but I'll bet a case can be made for the second....

 

I cannot speak for all universities. I have experience at only 1 university, where I was educated.

 

At my university, I have been totally indoctrinated with many things: thermodynamics, mass transfer phenomena, catalysis and even some physics and maths!

But I cannot remember a single organized activity which focused on any political ideology. Students were mostly influencing each other... and that certainly influenced my political beliefs to this day. But indoctrination suggests that there is a plan behind it, and I object that.

 

But even more interesting, if universities are indeed (1) the largest accumulation of smart people and (2) generally left wing, and (3) generally at the forefront of new developments, then is it maybe possible that it is the right wing which has somehow been indoctrinated?

 

Indoctrination suggests that people don't use their own brains, but just blindly follow some leader. The students at universities that I know generally think for themselves.

[JohnB]

Unfortunately Cap, it has been my experience that they are often the easiest to fool too.

[CaptainPanic]

Unfortunately Cap, it has been my experience that they are often the easiest to fool too.

Please, I wrote a lengthy post with multiple arguments. You just dismiss all of that without any decent argument. If this is all you can say, this discussion is over before it even started.

[Phi for All]

It seems to me that conservatism has always been synonymous with cautious advancement. Caution is usually considered good until it starts to paralyze action. I think the ultra-conservative movement we've seen in the last 50 years is a reaction to the rapid pace of technological progress that's become the hallmark of the industrial era. Computers and global communication have allowed such rapid progress that it seems to many there is no longer any caution being exercised.

 

What they fail to take into consideration is the increased cooperation among ever-increasing numbers of people who lead advancement in all areas. A large number of people think science is running amok and smashing atoms apart without regard to what it could mean to life as we know it. They're afraid of the ever-growing body of knowledge they have failed to keep pace with and assume that the world could end in a puff of unrestrained technological advancement if the brakes of caution and common sense aren't applied heavily.

 

Why wouldn't a university environment seem to lean towards liberal learning and advancement? Isn't the conservative approach often anathema to progress and knowledge, especially the brand of ultra-conservatism that denies the redefined realities we discover from liberal learning?

[iNow]

iNow, does that prove that better educated people lean to the left or that Universities are indoctrination areas for left wing thinking?

Neither. It proves that the states with the best education statistics in the US voted democratic in this election while states with the worst education statistics in the US voted republican.

 

Data also suggests that this is a regular occurrence through each election cycle, as is the fact that the states who rage out most vocally against aid from the federal government tend to use a larger share of federal government funding per capita than those states that continue to vote for and speak out in support of that federal funding.

[JohnB]

Sorry Cap, I wasn't out to dismiss or even argue the points. I was making an observation concerning another factor that needs to be added to the equation. People are not cut and dried and so move according to many factors, a major one being belief. (Although now you know how I feel a lot of the time. )

 

People who are confident in their intelligence and knowledge are quite unlikely to change their stance even when shown to be wrong. To admit to being wrong if to admit to being inferior and many people just can't do that. Intelligent people are also more easily fooled because they have confidence in their abilities, but mostly because they believe that only silly people get conned and since they are smarter than most of the population they are not silly and therefore cannot get conned. Most especially they believe they are smarter than the conman involved, and that is their downfall.

 

On the political front, Democrat supporters believe themselves to generally be intelligent and educated and therefore "wise", they also believe their opponents to be uneducated and unintelligent, possibly even a majority are young earth creationists. People such as these cannot possibly have anything intelligent to say or a decent idea to add to the conversation as they are obviously far too dumb to think beyond their 2,000 year old book. Given that as an opening mindset, why would a Democrat even bother listening to what the inferior Republican has to say? More to the point, how could any argument sway him? To do so would be to admit that the "always wrong" right, might actually be correct on something which leaves the door to being open to them being right on a number of things. And this cannot be so, for the superior must be correct always....

 

The above point isn't so much about left and right as it is about the inevitable result of acute partisanship. If you cannot admit fault on your own side, why do you demand that those opposed admit fault on theirs? Even the Alvin Green thing in SC was blamed on the Republicans and they had nothing to do with it yet the only left of centre commentator who spoke out runs a comedy show. It's pretty sad when your best political reporter is a comedian. Where did Maddox (for example) question the Democrat Senator that said the situation had "Elephant dung all over it" and call him out on such stupidity. How about Hank Johnsons fear that the isalnd of guam would "tip over and capsize"? Is it only those on the right that think he is an idiot? Partisanship means that you will sacrifice "Truth" on the altar of "Political Solidarity", but once you sacrifice the truth, do you really have anything left?

 

What is even sadder is that I've seen Stewart interviewed on real news and current affairs shows and they treat him like a newsman, especially the left leaning cannot tell the difference between the Daily Show and a real news show, a point that Stewart himself keeps making.

 

Indoctrination suggests that people don't use their own brains, but just blindly follow some leader. The students at universities that I know generally think for themselves.

 

The first part is incorrect though, indoctrination can be quite subtle and based on an ideology rather than a person. The second part is certainly true for the harder sciences, but do students in the humanities and other soft sciences pass if they disagree with what the professor says?

 

Neither. It proves that the states with the best education statistics in the US voted democratic in this election while states with the worst education statistics in the US voted republican.

 

Data also suggests that this is a regular occurrence through each election cycle, as is the fact that the states who rage out most vocally against aid from the federal government tend to use a larger share of federal government funding per capita than those states that continue to vote for and speak out in support of that federal funding.

 

iNow, I'm not sure the figures do show this. They show that the States with the most University graduates tend to vote Democrat. I don't know about US Unis, but in ours the hard sciences are losing out to the soft ones. Physics, Chemistry and Engineering are losing out to Humanites that produce people with PhDs in medieval folk dancing. The vast majority of social worker types are in government jobs, as are many lawyers and many from a lot of other departments. All those who do not have qualifications of value to the private business world would vote for the party that will keep them in a job, the Democrats.

 

I'm not saying that this is the case, but I think it is very likely that the truth is far more nuanced than the raw figures would seem.