Politics

[Polish Leppy 22]

Moran: 'Members of Congress are Underpaid' AUDIO

SMDH

Welcome to modern day progressivism. We are starting to live the book "Brave New World."

 

[chicago51]

What do you all think about this Hobby Lobby dealio? I personally think it's bullshit for a corporation to claim a religious exemption. If you, Mr. Craft Store want to claim religious exemptions, go for it. But don't try for form a corporation for protections from liability and think you can fuck society with your religious crap.

I also think it's faaaaaaar beyond bullshit that Hobby Lobby can claim a religious exemption because of contraceptives while their shitty craft store supplies are made in China, one of the worst human rights abusers in the world and by far the largest abortion-providing country in the world thanks to their one-child policy. If Hobby Lobby is what Christianity is, I'll have something else.

I agree.

So far most of the corporate personhood stuff that the Supreme Court has been granting corporations has had some relation to the bottom line. Example being that it was okay for corporations to give misleading information because it is their free speech and it helps them make money.

I genrally don't agree with corporate personhood but I especially don't see how having religous rights affects the corporations mission which in this day and age is all about the bottom line.

If we are gonna cross the line and give corporations all the rights of natural persons even when they don't affect profit then shouldn't I be able to take a corporation to criminal court if I was harmed in someway. I hate the damn double standard where a corporation wants all the rights under 1st amendment but then doesn't want to be criminally liable if say they have a bad product.

 

[Buster Bluth]

We'll see how much fun the socialist state of Vermont has with single payer.

Welcome to modern day progressivism. We are starting to live the book "Brave New World."

I bet you're a dandy when you call into Glen Beck.

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

I bet you're a dandy when you call into Glen Beck.

I'd rather be a caller on Beck's show than a 1:30 am poster on IE. And for the 300th time in this thread, I don't like/ listen to/ read/ enjoy Glenn Beck. Not my cup of tea.

 

[Buster Bluth]

Is this where I say "stop trying to tell me how to live my life!!" then call you an incorrigible progressive and compare you to Pol Pot?

 

[chicago51]

Maybe Leppy is Glenn Beck? I'm saying 8.7 percent chance he is.

 

[EddytoNow]

That's what I thought, but the chances are greater than 8.7%.

 

[chicago51]

http://nytimes.com/2014/04/07/us/po...-to-run.html?hpw&rref=politics&_r=0&referrer=

I'm just putting this out there, not sure what some of those who typically vote Republican think. I think it is pretty obvious the business wing of the Republican Party wants Jeb Bush to be President.

 

[RDU Irish]

If we end up with a Bush vs. Clinton election, the stage is perfectly set for a third party candidate to make a run.

 

[Cackalacky]

If we end up with a Bush vs. Clinton election, the stage is perfectly set for a third party candidate to make a run.

A 3rd party candidate will never make it out of the primaries on either side. The candidates to make it out of the Republican and Democratic primaries will be pro-business or at least have courted the pro-business money sources. Hilary has significant ties to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street entities.

I will be watching where the money goes for the most part.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

I will be watching where the money goes for the most part.

Why? The plutocracy owns both parties.

 

[RDU Irish]

An anti-establishment candidate would have the best chance against the two most establishment names I can think of.

Imagine if a less goofy Ross Perot had social media to leverage in the last Bush vs. Clinton election. Rand Paul, for example, already has quick access to rabid Tea Party & Libertarian boots on the ground that could quickly be mobilized and monetized through social media, while showing a very quick and respectable showing in early polls that would be hard to ignore.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

"The War on Antiwar Republicans":

The main event, however, is going after Rand Paul. Paul is unlikely to face a viable primary challenger for his Senate seat, but he is considered a top-tier candidate for the Republican presidential nomination. “Can he win Iowa, yes. Can he win New Hampshire, yes. Can he win the nomination, maybe—and that’s scary,” an unnamed Mitt Romney bundler fretted to Time.

The Time piece reports that casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson “is likely to spend vast sums against Paul if he appears to be well positioned in the Republican primaries.” Another donor is quoted as saying, “The best thing that could happen is Ted Cruz and Rand Paul run and steal each other’s support, but if not, we’ll be ready to take Paul down.”

With a Republican-controlled Senate in sight, why spend money on a purge of antiwar Republicans? Because the party’s most rabid hawks don’t want any competition in setting GOP foreign policy. Yet even with the number of non-interventionists, realists, and other skeptics still fairly small, they haven’t been able to primary everybody.

So far, efforts to recruit a serious primary challenger against Thomas Massie, a Paul ally and Republican congressman from Kentucky, have come up empty. Mark Sanford—who has quietly emerged as one of the most reliable libertarian-leaning Republicans in the House—is running unopposed in both the primary and the November general election.

Former Bush White House press secretary Ari Fleischer says of Paul, “there’s still a naiveté that’s going to be a problem. He represents a departure from something a lot of Republicans are used to.”

Hopefully a departure from losing wars and elections.

Any Republican that Adelson is ready to spend "vast sums" opposing has my attention.

 

[Cackalacky]

Why? The plutocracy owns both parties.

LOL. True. I meant simply that I want to pay attention to how the flow of money affects the candidates and what they say. The donors will have their candidates. We are simply left with the choice of the best desirable of the two.

 

[Cackalacky]

An anti-establishment candidate would have the best chance against the two most establishment names I can think of.

Imagine if a less goofy Ross Perot had social media to leverage in the last Bush vs. Clinton election. Rand Paul, for example, already has quick access to rabid Tea Party & Libertarian boots on the ground that could quickly be mobilized and monetized through social media, while showing a very quick and respectable showing in early polls that would be hard to ignore.

Would Rand Paul not have to run as a Republican? I am not sure of the nuances of current party affiliation and running for president. I assume he would have to run as an Independent to avoid the primary? If he had to primary with the Republicans, the establishment will choose someone else (IMO).

Also I don't think he would win a general against another establishment Dem.

 

[RDU Irish]

"[


Any Republican that Adelson is ready to spend "vast sums" opposing has my attention.

LOL - The anti establishment candidate has a leg up in garnering disenfranchised "Hope and Change" voters. Get ready for the old bible bangers to gripe about young'uns ruining the GOP and not understanding what it is supposed to stand for.

I don't think Rand will run independent. IMO- he wants to win within the Republican party and change the party rather than start a new one. When you consider the automatic votes that come with the nomination it is hard to argue that tactic.

It is so interesting to me to see the vitriolic hawk response within the party. With Ron Paul lamenting the military industrial complex from a position of influence instead of a fringe wacko there may be quite a few heads exploding in the GOP.

 

[RDU Irish]

Would Rand Paul not have to run as a Republican? I am not sure of the nuances of current party affiliation and running for president. I assume he would have to run as an Independent to avoid the primary? If he had to primary with the Republicans, the establishment will choose someone else (IMO).

Also I don't think he would win a general against another establishment Dem.

Since I think he could make a legit run as an independent (easily 20%+ of the popular vote), I think he would destroy the Dems if he gets the nomination. He gets 40% by default as the Nominee in a two party race.

 

[connor_in]

 

[GoIrish41]

Would Rand Paul not have to run as a Republican? I am not sure of the nuances of current party affiliation and running for president. I assume he would have to run as an Independent to avoid the primary? If he had to primary with the Republicans, the establishment will choose someone else (IMO).

Also I don't think he would win a general against another establishment Dem.

There is a possibility that Paul tests the waters early in the Republican primaries and if he finds it not to be productive, THEN jumping out and taking his supporters along with him to attempt a third-party run. The obvious downside of that is that he'd turn a crack in the Republican party into a gaping fissure. The end result would likely be a three party race with a unified Democratic candidate running against a party made up of two factions of the current GOP. All three sides would likely pull in some of the independents that are on the fence. Maybe Paul gets a few more than the other two sides, but he would lose the Republican base if this was his play. His chances as a third party candidate are not at all good. Indeed, his chances as a Republican nominee are not much better as he will expose deeper and deeper divisions within the party during the primaries. I can't think of a scenario in which this isn't a steep climb through through a lot of mud. I completely agree with your assessment. In the end, the GOP primary would result in a candidate other than Rand Paul.

 

[GoIrish41]

Since I think he could make a legit run as an independent (easily 20%+ of the popular vote), I think he would destroy the Dems if he gets the nomination. He gets 40% by default as the Nominee in a two party race.

As I said above, the chances of him getting the nomination are a longshot. But, if somehow he overcomes those long odds, I will concede that it would be a much tighter race. I still don't see him beating Hillary in a general election, though.

 

[Cackalacky]

Since I think he could make a legit run as an independent (easily 20%+ of the popular vote), I think he would destroy the Dems if he gets the nomination. He gets 40% by default as the Nominee in a two party race.

I am not following your statement. I don't see how a person who is not so friendly with Israel, weak with with foreign policy, and has major views opposite of the establishment GOP is going to make it out of the primaries, let alone crush an establishment DEM. I am not talking about Obama either as he gave the base exactly what it wanted (even though he is a liar). Paul does not strike me as one who will be that dishonest enough to toe the party line (the party line being where one's bread is buttered).

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

Obama gave a speech today praising LBJ. I wonder if Obama or any of his supporters have the slighest clue of what LBJ said about blacks before his presidential days...

 

[connor_in]

 

[Buster Bluth]

Obama gave a speech today praising LBJ. I wonder if Obama or any of his supporters have the slighest clue of what LBJ said about blacks before his presidential days...

I praise some Presidents who owned blacks..

 

[Polish Leppy 22]

I praise some Presidents who owned blacks..

As do I, but that's comparing apples and oranges.

 

[Cackalacky]

Obama gave a speech today praising LBJ. I wonder if Obama or any of his supporters have the slighest clue of what LBJ said about blacks before his presidential days...

Well he had the foresight to enact the Civil rights act as well as not even bother campaigning in the deep south to combat the Southern Strategy..... so politics as usual I guess.

 

[RDU Irish]

I am not following your statement. I don't see how a person who is not so friendly with Israel, weak with with foreign policy, and has major views opposite of the establishment GOP is going to make it out of the primaries, let alone crush an establishment DEM. I am not talking about Obama either as he gave the base exactly what it wanted (even though he is a liar). Paul does not strike me as one who will be that dishonest enough to toe the party line (the party line being where one's bread is buttered).

Those policies are the reason Republicans don't crush democrats in the general election. If they don't come to terms with the elements of their platform that are not popular they will never broaden their base and people like Paul are better off just going Independent.

Question I have is, how many Republicans and Democrats are really up for grabs A) for a third party candidate or B) vote for the opposite party EVER. My guess is 25% are "entrenched" in their party and would never vote outside of it. That makes getting 34% in a three party race pretty difficult and provides a huge incentive to get a traditional party nomination. At some point, don't non-traditional republicans have to go their own way if the "base" keeps obstructing.

 

[chicago51]

Third Party candidates tend to screw over one party or the other.

Ralph Nader albeit was not a serious challenger but took more than enough votes to prevent Al Gore from winning the election.

Ross Perot may have been the one candidate that took votes from both sides fairly evenly.

Teddy Roosevelt, when he came back from his post presidential Africa safari was pretty PO'd at Taft and the direction he had taken the party. He pretty much screwed Taft in 1912 when he ran as an independent. In fact Taft got like 12 electoral votes or something along those lines.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

The NYT's Ross Douthat just published a column titled Diversity and Dishonesty:

EARLIER this year, a column by a Harvard undergraduate named Sandra Y. L. Korn briefly achieved escape velocity from the Ivy League bubble, thanks to its daring view of how universities should approach academic freedom.

Korn proposed that such freedom was dated and destructive, and that a doctrine of “academic justice” should prevail instead. No more, she wrote, should Harvard permit its faculty to engage in “research promoting or justifying oppression” or produce work tainted by “racism, sexism, and heterosexism.” Instead, academic culture should conform to left-wing ideas of the good, beautiful and true, and decline as a matter of principle “to put up with research that counters our goals.”

No higher-up at Harvard endorsed her argument, of course. But its honesty of purpose made an instructive contrast to the institutional statements put out in the immediate aftermath of two recent controversies — the resignation of the Mozilla Foundation’s C.E.O., Brendan Eich, and the withdrawal, by Brandeis University, of the honorary degree it had promised to the human rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

In both cases, Mozilla and Brandeis, there was a striking difference between the clarity of what had actually happened and the evasiveness of the official responses to the events. Eich stepped down rather than recant his past support for the view that one man and one woman makes a marriage; Hirsi Ali’s invitation was withdrawn because of her sweeping criticisms of Islamic culture. But neither the phrase “marriage” nor the word “Islam” appeared in the initial statements Mozilla and Brandeis released.

Instead, the Mozilla statement rambled in the language of inclusion: “Our organizational culture reflects diversity and inclusiveness. ... Our culture of openness extends to encouraging staff and community to share their beliefs and opinions. ...”

The statement on Hirsi Ali was slightly more direct, saying that “her past statements ... are inconsistent with Brandeis University’s core values.” But it never specified what those statements or those values might be — and then it fell back, too, on pieties about diversity: “In the spirit of free expression that has defined Brandeis University throughout its history, Ms. Hirsi Ali is welcome to join us on campus in the future to engage in a dialogue about these important issues.”

What both cases illustrate, with their fuzzy rhetoric masking ideological pressure, is a serious moral defect at the heart of elite culture in America.

The defect, crucially, is not this culture’s bias against social conservatives, or its discomfort with stinging attacks on non-Western religions. Rather, it’s the refusal to admit — to others, and to itself — that these biases fundamentally trump the commitment to “free expression” or “diversity” affirmed in mission statements and news releases.

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it, that fill their ranks with ideologues and then claim to stand athwart bias and misinformation, that speak the language of pluralism while presiding over communities that resemble the beau ideal of Sandra Y. L. Korn.

Harvard itself is a perfect example of this pattern: As Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame pointed out when the column was making waves, Korn could only come up with one contemporary example of a Harvardian voice that ought to be silenced — “a single conservative octogenarian,” the political philosophy professor Harvey Mansfield. Her call for censorship, Deneen concluded, “is at this point almost wholly unnecessary, since there are nearly no conservatives to be found at Harvard.”

I am (or try to be) a partisan of pluralism, which requires respecting Mozilla’s right to have a C.E.O. whose politics fit the climate of Silicon Valley, and Brandeis’s right to rescind degrees as it sees fit, and Harvard’s freedom to be essentially a two-worldview community, with a campus shared uneasily by progressives and corporate neoliberals, and a small corner reserved for token reactionary cranks.

But this respect is difficult to maintain when these institutions will not admit that this is what is going on. Instead, we have the pretense of universality — the insistence that the post-Eich Mozilla is open to all ideas, the invocations of the “spirit of free expression” from a school that’s kicking a controversial speaker off the stage.

And with the pretense, increasingly, comes a dismissive attitude toward those institutions — mostly religious — that do acknowledge their own dogmas and commitments, and ask for the freedom to embody them and live them out.

It would be a far, far better thing if Harvard and Brandeis and Mozilla would simply say, explicitly, that they are as ideologically progressive as Notre Dame is Catholic or B. Y.U. is Mormon or Chick-fil-A is evangelical, and that they intend to run their institution according to those lights.

I can live with the progressivism. It’s the lying that gets toxic.

 

[ACamp1900]

This refusal, this self-deception, means that we have far too many powerful communities (corporate, academic, journalistic) that are simultaneously dogmatic and dishonest about it — that promise diversity but only as the left defines it,...

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