Religion, politics, sex .. and other taboo subjects

Looking at the horserace...

http://www.oddschecker.com/politics/us-politics/us-presidential-election-2016/winner

GETTING NOMINATED (R).
Ben Carson's chances are 200:1 if even offered at all, though one bookie is strangely optimistic at 139:1.
Mike Bloomberg is still holding at 100:1.
However, Mitt Romney's odds are continuing to improve, 40:1 or 50:1... which means he's about the same as Paul Ryan, who's considered dead in the water.
Kasich (who I think is by far the sanest GOP candidate) is holding at 10:1, likely on the basis of small-but-solid caucus blocs.
Rubio is slipping, 8:1.
Cruz is hanging on at 7:2 (or if you prefer 3.5:1)
Trump is no fun to bet at all, 2:5.

GETTING NOMINATED (D).
Speaking of "no fun to bet"...
Everyone's forgot about Joe Biden, but he's at 25:1.
Bernie is 12:1, so (apples & oranges) rated less likely than Kasich. He's polling quite well, especially for an aging, intelligent, policy-focused Socialist, but this isn't reflected in the odds due to the power of "more of the same."
That's why Clinton is at 1:20, waaaaay more likely to get on the ticket than even The Donald.

No matter who is on the ballot, right now the offered odds for a Democrat win are 1:2, for Repub 13:8. The only other choice offered is Independent, which may be a catch-all for EVERY weak-kneed, undefined, chihuaua party threatening to reach for the POTUS chair (whether Libertairan or Green or whatever flavor of teabagger is running around), at 25:1.

When you match up ALL the potential Presidential nominees, though, numbers shift.
At the bottom, Carson is gone, 325:1 to 500:1, but (again) that one bookie is offering 30:1.
Ryan/Romney/Biden, 100:1 each.
Weirdly, Bloomberg now ranks SEVENTH, 66:1.
Kasich is 25:1.
Rubio/Sanders are both 20:1, with Cruz a notch better at 16:1.
Clinton is 8:15, Trump 9:4. You don't have to do the math to see that's roughly 1:2 & 2:1, respectively.
 
nycindie said:
Anyone thinking about voting for Trump just needs to ask themselves if they truly feel comfortable about him meeting with other heads of state. I cringe at the idea of world leaders sitting down to discuss serious and urgent issues with the buffoon.
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Here's what Mr. President Dr. Harrumph says about THAT, girl:

"You know it. You love it. But, did you realize JUST how many flavors there are? Your favorite drink comes in so many varieties, it's a marathon for your taste buds. But the good kind of marathon where everything is delicious, and you don't have to train. Just stop in and choose an old favorite or check out our limited-time flavors. You can even make your own combo to your heart's desire.

7-Eleven. Home of the Slurpee® drink.

Slurpee, now with ELECTrolytes! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bo...zZcJT6TGYqx2rugR9guJTiTfEKP4wBj0d26w#t=83.138

Who you gonna vote for? Vote Slurpee® for pre$ident!"
 
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What did the one kid say? "Speak your mind, but do it in a way that isn't going to hurt people." And that's profound.
 
kdt26417 said:
What did the one kid say? "Speak your mind, but do it in a way that isn't going to hurt people." And that's profound.
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Gosh, that's a lot to ask of mortals. I'm obviously not up to the somewhat worthy task!:(
 
River said:
Okay, okay, I get it. Media-generated popularity / unpopularity / chances at winning / etc. is deemed important to a majority of suckers -- I mean people -- who answer polls and "oddschecker" and such. Self-fulfilling prophesy is almost bankable, then, right?:(
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Um... I think the most intelligent answer that I can offer would be "duh!!":p This was rather clearly established by the Reagan Revolution: people "on the fence" would rather be able to say "I voted for the WINNER" than "I voted for the best candidate."

In the present instance, the populace has for so long been indoctrinated with the belief that the are small & stupid & helpless (& incapable of becoming otherwise) that they are attracted to the biggest, loudest, meanest bully in the room.

And if you examined the shifting odds rather than feared them, you'd note a ray of hope against that dire statement: Kasich & Sanders -- IMO the two sanest & most (for lack of better term) nurturant candidates -- improved their chances. Trump actually slipped slightly.
________________

Do I hold a dim view of "the electorate"? Yeh, kinda.

Here's why. Back in September 1999, the Zogby Analytics poll asked one little clarifying question of people who said they were gonna vote for Bush.

It was two months before the election, & Zogby found that fully 1/6 of Bush supporters believed they were voting for George HW Bush... the candidate's father.

As Sam McCloud said, "There ya go!" :eek:
________________

Something thus far overlooked by EVERY pundit I've heard this season: while Trump is quite proud of "bringing people over" from the Dem & Indie & Other & None & Undecided columns, these ARE NOT votes for Trump or for ANY Republican. They merely cast a ballot as to the STATED leaning of the delegates being sent to the GOP Convention.

And those delegates can change their support.

And those voters can still vote for whoever the hell they wish.
 
Bernie Sanders as President would be awesome, in my opinion. Glad he won in Michigan.

Re (from Ravenscroft):
"In the present instance, the populace has for so long been indoctrinated with the belief that they are small and stupid and helpless (and incapable of becoming otherwise) that they are attracted to the biggest, loudest, meanest bully in the room."
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I believe you're onto something, Ravens.
 
"If Bernie Sanders were to defeat Hillary Clinton in Michigan’s Democratic primary, it would be “among the greatest polling errors in primary history,” our editor in chief, Nate Silver, wrote Tuesday evening when results started to come in. Sanders pulled it off, and now we’re left wondering how it happened. How did Sanders win by 1.5 percentage points when our polling average showed Clinton ahead by 21 points and our forecasts showed that Sanders had less than a 1 percent chance of winning?"

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-the-polls-missed-bernie-sanders-michigan-upset/

All I know is that Bernie may do quite a lot better in actual votes than in polls, and he could end up surprising most folks!

Let's not write him off so readily as the mainstream press seems to like to do.
 
The tendency to give so much weight to "studies," "polls," and "statistics" gets on my nerves. Every time I see this stuff, I think, "Nobody asked me." I know I could look around the room and ask other people, "Did anyone ask you <question>?" and most or all would say that no, they were not asked for their input. So when a sample group is supposed to be representative of the whole population, well, where are you getting that sample? And how can it really be expected to be something where you can just apply the mathematical proportions to everybody and assume it will paint an accurate picture?

It's like asking sex questions at a college and then assuming that the answers to them apply to the entire population including married suburbanites, the elderly, children, etc. That just doesn't make any sense.

So you want to talk about polling errors, how about unless the preliminary poll asked the same respondants that will be voting in the real thing, it's not valid to begin with...and even then you have to account for who is gonna show up and who isn't.

A socialist SHOULD be the last person on Earth I'd vote for given my voting history and my political leanings. Right now, no one is counting my voice. But if I can vote Bernie for Prez, I'm doing it....and no, I'm not telling most of my Libertarian and Conservative friends about that, because they would have fits and I don't want to hear it.
 
Go Spork! :D

I used to be Republican, and then Libertarian ... way back when.

Re (from Ravenscroft):
"It was two months before the election, and Zogby found that fully 1/6 of Bush supporters believed they were voting for George H.W. Bush.... the candidate's father."
Click to expand...

:eek: gods!
 
Spork said:
A socialist SHOULD be the last person on Earth I'd vote for given my voting history and my political leanings. Right now, no one is counting my voice. But if I can vote Bernie for Prez, I'm doing it....and no, I'm not telling most of my Libertarian and Conservative friends about that, because they would have fits and I don't want to hear it.
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This quoted material got me so curious that I went back and read the whole thread again, with special attention on Spork's comments.

I still can't quite "get it" how or why Spork would choose to shift all the way from the somewhat far right to the almost far left in this presidential election. Is it about Bernie being a man of integrity? Is this it, Spork? For surely he is a man of integrity. But he's so very far from a Libertarian! (with a capital L.)

I'm a left libertarian. (lower case l) Folks like me are barely recognized as existing. But we do! We really do!
 
Listening to the debates, I am so VERY weary of the Rightists griping about the EEEEEEVILLLS of Common Core education & blaming Obama (not even his Administration) for foisting this off on us.

(a) it was created as an offshoot of the socalled Standards & Accountability Movement... in the 1990s.

(b) the organization that laid the actual groundwork for Common Core was Achieve Inc -- founded in 1996.

(c) Achieve Inc was co-founded by (1) the National Governors Association & (2) "corporate leaders," a code-word which usually means Rightists who want to entirely privatize/deregulate education, like the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

(d) as a statement of purpose, Achieve Inc released a report entitled "Ready or Not: Creating a High School Diploma That Counts"... in 2004.

(e) the NGA supposedly began working on the standards (that would become CC) in 2009. When issued, they were copyrighted jointly by the NGA Center for Best Practices & The Council of Chief State School Officers.

(f) notice that there is no Federal office WHAT-SO-EVER involved at this point. While the Dept of Ed has allowed states to replaced the ghastly Bushista "No Child Left Behind" program with CC, & in 2010 offered "Race to the Top" :rolleyes: grants to try it out, the DoE was also specifically barred from trying to "influence, incentivize, or coerce State adoption of the Common Core State Standards ... or any other academic standards common to a significant number of States."

(g) the CC standards were adopted by 43 states + DC, though Minnesota refused the CC math standard.

(h) since then, at least 14 states have dropped CC, or "put it on hold," or refused to fully implement it. Sure, it needs to be put out of its misery & the corpse incinerated (along, IMNSHO, with its architects!), but it's rather harmless.


UPSHOT: anyone in the debates who blames Obama &/or the Federal Government for Common Core is either a damned LIAR who will in all likelihodd gladly lie again&agaoin&again... or FAR too stupid to even be considered for President. And I doubt that anyone who buys into such propaganda is any smarter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Core_State_Standards_Initiative
 
Ravenscroft said:
UPSHOT: anyone in the debates who blames Obama &/or the Federal Government for Common Core is either a damned LIAR who will in all likelihood gladly lie again&agaoin&again... or FAR too stupid to even be considered for President. And I doubt that anyone who buys into such propaganda is any smarter.
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In my observation, a good many (not all) of the folks you call "rightists" are not genuinely interested in truth, facts or understanding. They are being heavily manipulated, stirred up into a frenzy of anger, resentment and fear. When presented with an opportunity to discuss or check the actual facts on a matter they tend to resort to yelling louder, name calling, subject changing and sometimes drooling.

Without these sort of people I'm convinced the Republican party would have no influence or power whatsoever -- which goes a long way to explaining the nature and tactics of the Republican party over recent decades.

That the Republican party is such a farce only makes it easier for the right-leaning, establishment Democrats to avoid addressing the one most fundamental problem in American democracy -- which is that it is basically a sham or a hoax (which is to say there is no such thing). Instead of democracy in America we have money-power. Money-influence is so pervasive in American government that America is best understood as a pseudo-democracy of the sort political philosopher Sheldon Wolin has called "inverted democracy" and "managed democracy".

Ralph Nader has always been basically correct in pointing out that the two big parties (a duopoly) are equally implicated in sustaining a fundamentally corrupt pseudo-democracy in the US.

For a strong example of how the two duopolistic political parties in the US actually conspire TOGETHER to maintain establishment power, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commission_on_Presidential_Debates . The CPD was created by these two parties for the purpose of excluding all other political parties from the crucial televised presidential debates process. (Smoke and mirrors.) https://www.opendebates.org/

We should all understand progressivism in American politics as having "get money out of politics" at its core. Anyone not working on that project is not really a progressive.
 
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All the Republican candidates (with the possible exception of Kasich) are liars. Of course, Trump is the biggest liar of all. Not to mention a fascist racist misogynistic pig.

His supporters, wearing their Trump tshirts, have been photographed giving Nazi salutes.

Over 30 people were arrested at his rally in St Louis. He found the violence there "fun," stating it added "flavor and excitement." He has stated he himself would like to punch protestors in the face. He encouraged his supporters to beat up protesters, promising he'd pay their legal fees. His campaign manager assaulted a female reporter, almost taking her to the ground, and leaving bruises on her arms. She is suing. (Ironically, she works for a pro-Trump organization lol) Unrest in the streets in Chicago led to Trump cancelling his rally there yesterday. There were 5 arrests and 2 policemen were left bloody.

His young white ball-capped supporters have been videoed screaming at protesters such lovely things as, "Fuck you, you whore! You're all going to hell!" And taking fighting positions, fists up, screaming for a fight, with such encouraging words as, "Come on, you motherfuckers!"

When will the first protester or journalist be beaten to death?
 
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I refer to Rightists because (in my cynical experience) there's a continuum that includes "Compassionate Conservatives," teabaggers, GOP, "Independents," Libertarians (whether registered or just self-proclaimed), & heavily armed white "Christian" jihadists:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutaree
("Can you say 'RAHOWA'? Sure you can!")

By comparison, the Lefties are a bunch of wide-scattered laissez-faire hippie enclaves. The Rightists readily run interference for each other, mostly in hopes of seeing the end of the human race on Earth, & that is assuredly NOT mere hyperbole.

This, of course, means they are "pro-life." (Have I mentioned that they're a little insane...?)
 
For some bad news from the other side of the Big Pond...


I'm disgusted and horrified by the extrapolated results from three states' elections in Germany this weekend. The far-right populist AfD (anti-EU, anti-Islam, anti-refugee) is rapidly on the rise... it's worst of all in Saxony-Anhalt, where they jumped from zero mandates last time to second-strongest party (24.2 %) in S-A's new state parliament. It's all but guaranteed now that we'll end up with these bastards in the national parliament next year, probably at least around the 10-15% mark.

I'm scared of what's becoming of my home country... I didn't think that it could be this many folks who didn't learn the lesson from early-to-mid 20th century history. :(
 
River said:
This quoted material got me so curious that I went back and read the whole thread again, with special attention on Spork's comments.

I still can't quite "get it" how or why Spork would choose to shift all the way from the somewhat far right to the almost far left in this presidential election. Is it about Bernie being a man of integrity? Is this it, Spork? For surely he is a man of integrity. But he's so very far from a Libertarian! (with a capital L.)

I'm a left libertarian. (lower case l) Folks like me are barely recognized as existing. But we do! We really do!
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I have to rather indignantly express that I don't consider my beliefs to be "rightist" (I know, this is response to a post besides what I'm quoting. Embrace the chaos!)... I view my politics as a diamond, or square shaped thingie, not a left to right spectrum.

This deal here:
Republicans: For small government in economics and big government in the social end of governance.
Democrats: For big government in economics (higher taxes, more regulation of industry) but small government in social matters.
Socialists: For lots of government involvement in both economics and social policy.
Libertarians: Small government across the board (AND GET OFF MY LAWN!)
(lol) I believe that the Tea-baggers stole the word and don't actually know what it means.

But I also think that most politicians can NOT be counted on to uphold anything that is supposed to be party ideology...they do whatever profits them.

I sometimes call myself a Liberal-tarian. Because I like a lot of liberal ideas, but I have very serious trust issues. I think that almost all politicians are parasitical scum, and big business can't be trusted either. They are the same men in the same suits in different boardrooms speaking to different audiences. It's all a big circle jerk.

I have personal ethical discomforts with regard to abortion but I support fully the right to choose and to have safe procedures available. I am in charge of no one's uterus but my own. The idea of not being able to get an abortion at all is just as offensive to me as the idea of a woman casually sleeping around and getting one whenever she needs to be rid of an inconvenient pregnancy. There are better alternatives available to most of us but that ultimate power should be in the hands of each woman, in my opinion. We're not breeding cows.

I am uncomfortable with guns. However. I do believe that there is something inherently sacred about the right of Americans to bear them.

I want married gay couples to be able to smoke legal weed.

I wouldn't actually mind taxation so much if there were far more transparency and accountability to the people who pay said taxes. Sure. Tax the rich more. How exactly are you going to prevent them from simply adjusting their business practices so that ultimately the rest of us cover their losses? Sure. Raise minimum wage. How were you going to keep them from just raising the cost of everything we need, to cover that and keep their company's bottom line where they want it? I worry about ripples.

I am kindly disposed towards immigrants. That's a tricky one for me. I had a pretty horrible experience with an illegal immigrant from rural Mexico once. Our cultural differences were definitely a factor. BUT. I have to admit that the work ethics of the men I met during that time in my life were very impressive. They are absolutely contributing to society. Fuck a wall. We don't need no stinkin' wall.

I am pro death penalty, if enough incontrovertable evidence is present. In fact, I think it should be applied for repeat offenders in certain cases such as rape and molestation. I do think that some people should be put out of society's misery.

I don't think we should stop helping the victims of disaster and extreme poverty in other countries, and I do think we should help refugees. But I don't really like a lot of the "back room deal" flavor of some of our foreign policy especially with regard to military conflict.

So. I don't know. But ultimately, I feel a desperate wish for some dignity among our leadership. W couldn't even give a coherent speech, and I'm sorry, but public speaking is kind of important for the job. I am disgusted at the thought of Trump or Hillary being elected. Bernie...well. I like him. He's a good speaker. Unless he's lying through his teeth, he's a decent and dignified human being.

What worries me is that some of the social programs such as the ACA and that mortgage mod fiasco that were put in place did a lot more to give big insurance companies and banks new ways to screw people, than they did to actually help people. I'm afraid that Bernie might have all of this appeal and then put out these programs that wind up being scams. I'm also scared that if big business and the "1%" get hit with huge tax increases, it will very quickly flood (not trickle) down to massive price hikes in pretty much everything that will make it impossible to get by. However...I can only hope that Congress will provide a little push-back if he does try and pull a fast one, or do anything too extreme.

My friends are everything from NRA conservatives, to "guns, dogs, and get off my lawn" libertarians, to anarcho-capitalists, to hippie liberals. I don't go around talking politics too much but I'm not afraid to declare Bernie the least repugnant candidate by far. And if I had to choose today, I'd be voting for him.
 
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