I wrote that the donor demographics for Bush, Kerry and Edwards were roughly the same. You haven't shown anything that contradicts that.
What in the hell constitutes different for you then? Fully 50% more of Bush's contributors were over $2000 than Kerry's. That's what I would call significant.
Quote:
Bush gets the same percentage of his money from small contributions as does Kerry.
So you're talking about proportions. Ok.
Quote:
And four times of Bush's money comes from small contributions than does Edwards.
Wait. No you're not. Double speak.
edit: I looked wrong. You were right. My apologies.
Quote:
Bush gets more from big contributors than does either Kerry or Edwards but not dramatically more. Edwards relies on large donors more than does Kerry but not as much as Bush does. Dean deviated sharply from this pattern which I also indicated in my post.
Again, what constitutes different in your world? 10%? 40%? Both would be considered significant by any statistical test known to man.
Quote:
As for untruthful assertions, you were the one who suggested Bush was getting illegitimate contributions from Halliburton and Enron. Physician, heal thyself.
Have you proved it untruthful? Nothing in your semi-coherent ramblings and failing logic indicates that.
How can anyone think that the voters would be upset that the economy added say 2.4 million jobs instead of 2.6 million jobs and thus declare the policy behind it bad, and toss the man behind the policy out?
I don't know? How can they? Did anyone make that point?
The conversation has moved on, but as I've been away a lot of the day I didn't have the opportunity to point out that I said that Dean had been "sufficiently divergent" from the Democratic mainstream. I never claimed that he was a fire-breathing dragon. Heck, I'd pick him to be on my baseball team. Just not as Prexy.
The rest of the thread has devolved back into hammers on heads. Come on you guys...this was about Dean dropping out...not kurts-whatsis. An you guys have to remember that even though Torrifile lives in 'rural' Georgia that it's also the home of kick-ass bands like REM and the University of Georgia's School of Journalism....to call Athens a bastion of liberal expression would be damning it with faint praise.
So the question is, who will Governor Dean endorse and how soon will he do it? I think he names Edwards just to gall the Clintons....but I ain't Screamin' Dean, my new shortstop.
So the question is, who will Governor Dean endorse and how soon will he do it? I think he names Edwards just to gall the Clintons....but I ain't Screamin' Dean, my new shortstop.
It's a sad day for the democratic party. I didn't think that Dean could win after the problems he's been having but I liked the fact that it was more than just a two man race. Now we need to vote for the person that will make GWB look as foolish as possible (not a difficult task in itself, but it needs to be magnified as much as possible for all the lemmings to see).
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
In an ideal world, I would like to do the same. But as the last election reminded us, that doesn't always happen. As a matter of fact, I don't think we've have the 'best' person in that position in years.
Goodbye Democratic party. I won't ever vote for a Democrat again until they can nominate truely progressive candidates for local and federal positions. The Democratic leadership needs to be punished. My vote cannot be taken for granted.
Goodbye Democratic party. I won't ever vote for a Democrat again until they can nominate truely progressive candidates for local and federal positions. The Democratic leadership needs to be punished. My vote cannot be taken for granted.
Yes, that'll send a strong, unambiguous message to Democrats that they need to be more progressive. No way they'd, oh, maybe decide to go for a bigger chunk of the 51% by shifting right than scramble for all of that 2% by shifting left. Nah, that couldn't happen.
Yeah, you'll show 'em! You'll punish the Democrats, you'll punish the wildlife in the new Arctic National Oil Park, you'll punish kids who aren't even born yet with more of Bush's debts, etc., etc. Boy, that'll teach those naughty Democrats what's what.
Goodbye Democratic party. I won't ever vote for a Democrat again until they can nominate truely progressive candidates for local and federal positions. The Democratic leadership needs to be punished. My vote cannot be taken for granted.
What's funny to me is that the Dean people have always argued that he was actually a moderate to conservative Democrat, and his reputation as a lefty was false.
It seems to me that this Dean phenomenon was largely about personality. The fact is, he has the same baggage as other politicians, the same inconsistencies, the same pandering and self-aggrandizement. People liked him because he wasn't shy about Bush-bashing, that's all.
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
Then I assume you won't be voting for the one with English as a second language? No disrespect to the lawful immigrants.
Existence: if that's how you feel, do you think voting for Bush---sorry, voting Green is a vote for him this year---will help the Democrats? And you say you don't want your vote to be taken for granted?
Then I assume you won't be voting for the one with English as a second language? No disrespect to the lawful immigrants.
Existence: if that's how you feel, do you think voting for Bush---sorry, voting Green is a vote for him this year---will help the Democrats? And you say you don't want your vote to be taken for granted?
Man, Karl Rove LOVES people who think like you.
The Democrats are not progressive and will not change a thing. There is very little difference and it's in degree, not in kind.
I don't expect that Kerry or Edwards will win anyway.
Ok, let's assume you're absolutely right and the difference is just a matter of degrees between both parties. I recommend you do some reading about the people around Bush. They're the scary ones. People like Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Abrams, Armitage,Zoellick ,Bennett etc. Read about PNAC. Those guys may be different by degrees...like 180 degrees!
Besides, look at the job the current admin. has done. Are you happy with it? If not then it's time for new people to screw things up. And please, not Nader. Is that the best they have??
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson?s utopianism, Harry Truman?s anticommunism, and John Kennedy?s militant universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman?s and Kennedy?s roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used ?cold warrior? as an epithet. In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan?s ?illegal war in Central America?--and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, anti-ballistic missiles, etc.
Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would ?provide us with a valuable tool?--the ?moral suasion of the entire international community.?
Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And the landmine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet--ours.
[/snip]
Would a Democratic President mark a return to isolationist trade and military policies (please correct me if I'm wrong in stating that Senator Edwards favors this policy)?
These are but a few of my concerns about a Democratic/Leftist President. Some of the social, ecological planks they support are also my concerns. It would be nice if we could all take a and shape that leader to be more well-rounded and less of a characterization of that parties most extreme elements.
I could create a similar chart that "proves" there's really not much differences between PCs and Macs. Emphasize the similar things, downplay or gloss over differences... easy enough to do.
It would be nice if we could all take a and shape that leader to be more well-rounded and less of a characterization of that parties most extreme elements.
That's what we have now. My god. You want a more moderate moderate?
Comments
Originally posted by zaphod_beeblebrox
Whatever the mean donations are, they eventually bump up against the legal limits. In other words, it's only going to skew so far.
I guess you haven't heard about 527's?
I wrote that the donor demographics for Bush, Kerry and Edwards were roughly the same. You haven't shown anything that contradicts that.
What in the hell constitutes different for you then? Fully 50% more of Bush's contributors were over $2000 than Kerry's. That's what I would call significant.
Bush gets the same percentage of his money from small contributions as does Kerry.
So you're talking about proportions. Ok.
And four times of Bush's money comes from small contributions than does Edwards.
Wait. No you're not. Double speak.
edit: I looked wrong. You were right. My apologies.
Bush gets more from big contributors than does either Kerry or Edwards but not dramatically more. Edwards relies on large donors more than does Kerry but not as much as Bush does. Dean deviated sharply from this pattern which I also indicated in my post.
Again, what constitutes different in your world? 10%? 40%? Both would be considered significant by any statistical test known to man.
As for untruthful assertions, you were the one who suggested Bush was getting illegitimate contributions from Halliburton and Enron. Physician, heal thyself.
Have you proved it untruthful? Nothing in your semi-coherent ramblings and failing logic indicates that.
Originally posted by trumptman
How can anyone think that the voters would be upset that the economy added say 2.4 million jobs instead of 2.6 million jobs and thus declare the policy behind it bad, and toss the man behind the policy out?
I don't know? How can they? Did anyone make that point?
The rest of the thread has devolved back into hammers on heads. Come on you guys...this was about Dean dropping out...not kurts-whatsis. An you guys have to remember that even though Torrifile lives in 'rural' Georgia that it's also the home of kick-ass bands like REM and the University of Georgia's School of Journalism....to call Athens a bastion of liberal expression would be damning it with faint praise.
So the question is, who will Governor Dean endorse and how soon will he do it? I think he names Edwards just to gall the Clintons....but I ain't Screamin' Dean, my new shortstop.
Originally posted by drewprops
So the question is, who will Governor Dean endorse and how soon will he do it? I think he names Edwards just to gall the Clintons....but I ain't Screamin' Dean, my new shortstop.
Probably Edwards- but not for your reason.
Originally posted by torifile
It's a sad day for the democratic party. I didn't think that Dean could win after the problems he's been having but I liked the fact that it was more than just a two man race. Now we need to vote for the person that will make GWB look as foolish as possible (not a difficult task in itself, but it needs to be magnified as much as possible for all the lemmings to see).
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
Originally posted by SDW2001
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
From a shortlist of right wing zealots, yes.
Originally posted by SDW2001
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
In an ideal world, I would like to do the same. But as the last election reminded us, that doesn't always happen. As a matter of fact, I don't think we've have the 'best' person in that position in years.
Green Party, here I come.
Originally posted by Existence
Goodbye Democratic party. I won't ever vote for a Democrat again until they can nominate truely progressive candidates for local and federal positions. The Democratic leadership needs to be punished. My vote cannot be taken for granted.
Green Party, here I come.
Let's see how this works. Next election...
Bush gets 51%
Kerry (or another Dem) gets 49%
Nader gets 2%
Yes, that'll send a strong, unambiguous message to Democrats that they need to be more progressive. No way they'd, oh, maybe decide to go for a bigger chunk of the 51% by shifting right than scramble for all of that 2% by shifting left. Nah, that couldn't happen.
Yeah, you'll show 'em! You'll punish the Democrats, you'll punish the wildlife in the new Arctic National Oil Park, you'll punish kids who aren't even born yet with more of Bush's debts, etc., etc. Boy, that'll teach those naughty Democrats what's what.
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
cool, sdw is voting democrat...welcome to the party...
g
Originally posted by BRussell
Typical psychologist.
kurtosis...
Hey, it's one of the 4 moments of any data! Don't knock it til you try it!
Originally posted by Existence
Goodbye Democratic party. I won't ever vote for a Democrat again until they can nominate truely progressive candidates for local and federal positions. The Democratic leadership needs to be punished. My vote cannot be taken for granted.
Green Party, here I come.
What's funny to me is that the Dean people have always argued that he was actually a moderate to conservative Democrat, and his reputation as a lefty was false.
It seems to me that this Dean phenomenon was largely about personality. The fact is, he has the same baggage as other politicians, the same inconsistencies, the same pandering and self-aggrandizement. People liked him because he wasn't shy about Bush-bashing, that's all.
Originally posted by SDW2001
Funny, I like to vote for who would make the best President.
Then I assume you won't be voting for the one with English as a second language? No disrespect to the lawful immigrants.
Existence: if that's how you feel, do you think voting for Bush---sorry, voting Green is a vote for him this year---will help the Democrats? And you say you don't want your vote to be taken for granted?
Man, Karl Rove LOVES people who think like you.
Originally posted by Gilsch
Then I assume you won't be voting for the one with English as a second language? No disrespect to the lawful immigrants.
Existence: if that's how you feel, do you think voting for Bush---sorry, voting Green is a vote for him this year---will help the Democrats? And you say you don't want your vote to be taken for granted?
Man, Karl Rove LOVES people who think like you.
The Democrats are not progressive and will not change a thing. There is very little difference and it's in degree, not in kind.
I don't expect that Kerry or Edwards will win anyway.
http://www.therealdifference.com/issues2.html
Originally posted by Existence
The Democrats are not progressive and will not change a thing. There is very little difference and it's in degree, not in kind.
I don't expect that Kerry or Edwards will win anyway.
http://www.therealdifference.com/issues2.html
Ok, let's assume you're absolutely right and the difference is just a matter of degrees between both parties. I recommend you do some reading about the people around Bush. They're the scary ones. People like Perle, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Abrams, Armitage,Zoellick ,Bennett etc. Read about PNAC. Those guys may be different by degrees...like 180 degrees!
Besides, look at the job the current admin. has done. Are you happy with it? If not then it's time for new people to screw things up.
Would a Democratic President mark a return to Liberal Internationalism?
[snip]
In the 1990s, it was liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism is the foreign policy of the Democratic Party and the religion of the foreign policy elite. It has a peculiar history. It traces its pedigree to Woodrow Wilson?s utopianism, Harry Truman?s anticommunism, and John Kennedy?s militant universalism. But after the Vietnam War, it was transmuted into an ideology of passivity, acquiescence and almost reflexive anti-interventionism.
Liberals today proudly take credit for Truman?s and Kennedy?s roles in containing communism, but they prefer to forget that, for the last half of the Cold War, liberals used ?cold warrior? as an epithet. In the early 1980s, they gave us the nuclear freeze movement, a form of unilateral disarmament in the face of Soviet nuclear advances. Today, John Kerry boasts of opposing, during the 1980s, what he calls Ronald Reagan?s ?illegal war in Central America?--and oppose he did what was, in fact, an indigenous anticommunist rebellion that ultimately succeeded in bringing down Sandinista rule and ushering in democracy in all of Central America.
That boast reminds us how militant was liberal passivity in the last half of the Cold War. But that passivity outlived the Cold War. When Kuwait was invaded, the question was: Should the United States go to war to prevent the Persian Gulf from falling into hostile hands? The Democratic Party joined the Buchananite isolationists in saying No. The Democrats voted No overwhelmingly--two to one in the House, more than four to one in the Senate.
And yet, quite astonishingly, when liberal internationalism came to power just two years later in the form of the Clinton administration, it turned almost hyperinterventionist. It involved us four times in military action: deepening intervention in Somalia, invading Haiti, bombing Bosnia, and finally going to war over Kosovo.
How to explain the amazing transmutation of Cold War and Gulf War doves into Haiti and Balkan hawks? The crucial and obvious difference is this: Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo were humanitarian ventures--fights for right and good, devoid of raw national interest. And only humanitarian interventionism--disinterested interventionism devoid of national interest--is morally pristine enough to justify the use of force. The history of the 1990s refutes the lazy notion that liberals have an aversion to the use of force. They do not. They have an aversion to using force for reasons of pure national interest.
And by national interest I do not mean simple self-defense. Everyone believes in self-defense, as in Afghanistan. I am talking about national interest as defined by a Great Power: shaping the international environment by projecting power abroad to secure economic, political, and strategic goods. Intervening militarily for that kind of national interest, liberal internationalism finds unholy and unsupportable. It sees that kind of national interest as merely self-interest writ large, in effect, a form of grand national selfishness. Hence Kuwait, no; Kosovo, yes.
The other defining feature of the Clinton foreign policy was multilateralism, which expressed itself in a mania for treaties. The Clinton administration negotiated a dizzying succession of parchment promises on bioweapons, chemical weapons, nuclear testing, carbon emissions, anti-ballistic missiles, etc.
Why? No sentient being could believe that, say, the chemical or biological weapons treaties were anything more than transparently useless. Senator Joseph Biden once defended the Chemical Weapons Convention, which even its proponents admitted was unenforceable, on the grounds that it would ?provide us with a valuable tool?--the ?moral suasion of the entire international community.?
Moral suasion? Was it moral suasion that made Qaddafi see the wisdom of giving up his weapons of mass destruction? Or Iran agree for the first time to spot nuclear inspections? It was the suasion of the bayonet. It was the ignominious fall of Saddam--and the desire of interested spectators not to be next on the list. The whole point of this treaty was to keep rogue states from developing chemical weapons. Rogue states are, by definition, impervious to moral suasion.
Moral suasion is a farce. Why then this obsession with conventions, protocols, legalisms? Their obvious net effect is to temper American power. Who, after all, was really going to be most constrained by these treaties? The ABM amendments were aimed squarely at American advances and strategic defenses, not at Russia, which lags hopelessly behind. The Kyoto Protocol exempted India and China. The nuclear test ban would have seriously degraded the American nuclear arsenal. And the landmine treaty (which the Clinton administration spent months negotiating but, in the end, met so much Pentagon resistance that even Clinton could not initial it) would have had a devastating impact on U.S. conventional forces, particularly at the DMZ in Korea.
But that, you see, is the whole point of the multilateral enterprise: To reduce American freedom of action by making it subservient to, dependent on, constricted by the will--and interests--of other nations. To tie down Gulliver with a thousand strings. To domesticate the most undomesticated, most outsized, national interest on the planet--ours.
[/snip]
Would a Democratic President mark a return to isolationist trade and military policies (please correct me if I'm wrong in stating that Senator Edwards favors this policy)?
These are but a few of my concerns about a Democratic/Leftist President. Some of the social, ecological planks they support are also my concerns. It would be nice if we could all take a and shape that leader to be more well-rounded and less of a characterization of that parties most extreme elements.
Originally posted by Existence
The Democrats are not progressive and will not change a thing. There is very little difference and it's in degree, not in kind.
I don't expect that Kerry or Edwards will win anyway.
http://www.therealdifference.com/issues2.html
I could create a similar chart that "proves" there's really not much differences between PCs and Macs. Emphasize the similar things, downplay or gloss over differences... easy enough to do.
Originally posted by drewprops
It would be nice if we could all take a and shape that leader to be more well-rounded and less of a characterization of that parties most extreme elements.
Originally posted by ShawnJ
Uh, we talking about Bush here? Or is the definition of moderate a bit askew?
Originally posted by torifile
I said exactly what I intended to. That this country is full of stupid people. Nothing more nothing less. What you interpret is up to you.
This country is indeed filled with stupid people... and they vote for Democrats