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2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

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Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Kepler said:
Frothy is not going gently into that dark night. I love the little "Saw" scare chords.

It's Bush League (in so many ways), but that sort of thing can really work on that target demographic. They should check to see whether the DNC is financing these ads. :)
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If only he had stayed. :(

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ttJxtSCjGWQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Primary day here in MD. At least the Romney "vote for me and I'll set you free" cold calls will end tonight.

How many times can I say "No!"?
 
FadeToBlack&Gold said:
"Yes" and "no" are not in Mitt's vocabulary; only "maybe".
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There is an old accountants joke that when asked what 2+2 is, the answer the accountant gives is "What do want the number to be?".

That's Mitt. He gives you the answer you want to hear, not the truth or what he believes.

He can't handle the truth?
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

joecct said:
Primary day here in MD. At least the Romney "vote for me and I'll set you free" cold calls will end tonight.

How many times can I say "No!"?
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I didn't get a single call.

God bless having no landline.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

joecct said:
There is an old accountants joke that when asked what 2+2 is, the answer the accountant gives is "What do want the number to be?".

That's Mitt. He gives you the answer you want to hear, not the truth or what he believes.

He can't handle the truth?
Click to expand...

Maybe he's just Deconstructionist. What's "truth," after all? Or Jamesian. "Truth is what works."

Jon Stewart did a very nice bit about the RNC "embracing" (guh!) Mitt.

<div style="background-color:#000000;width:520px;"><div style="padding:4px;"><iframe src="http://media.mtvnservices.com/embed/mgid:cms:item:comedycentral.com:411453" width="512" height="288" frameborder="0"></iframe><p style="text-align:left;background-color:#FFFFFF;padding:4px;margin-top:4px;margin-bottom:0px;font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:12px;"><b><a href="http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/mon-april-2-2012/indecision-2012---endless-suffrage-2012---jump-on-the-bandwagon-edition">The Daily Show</a></b><br/>Get More: <a href='http://www.thedailyshow.com/full-episodes/'>Daily Show Full Episodes</a>,<a href='http://www.indecisionforever.com/'>Political Humor & Satire Blog</a>,<a href='http://www.facebook.com/thedailyshow'>The Daily Show on Facebook</a></p></div></div>
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

back in the day, our CFO had a joke - which numbers do you want to see, the ones for the IRS, the ones for the Bankers or the real ones? :)
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Maybe I should titled this thread "Release the Incumbent!"
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

joecct said:
Maybe I should titled this thread "Release the Incumbent!"
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I love this title. Very apropos. Lots of little deaths coming this election season.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

leswp1 said:
I love this title. Very apropos. Lots of little deaths coming this election season.
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We'll see. The definition of a broken system would be a Congress with a 10% favorability that returned 90% of incumbents. But with gerrymandering that's possible in the House.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

What really irks me is that people are trying to tell me to vote against someone. I was uncomfortable with that in 2008, and I have no intentions of doing that this year. I'd rather not vote.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Kepler said:
We'll see. The definition of a broken system would be a Congress with a 10% favorability that returned 90% of incumbents. But with gerrymandering that's possible in the House.
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Finding some way around gerrymandering would probably do more to fix our system then anything else. A majority or large minority of the House would have to be concerned about their re-election and not just the odd primary challenger. You'd still have 100+ in both parties that roll to victory anyway, but that's not enough to gum up the works and turn everything into a war instead of a situation to find compromise.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

bronconick said:
Finding some way around gerrymandering would probably do more to fix our system then anything else.
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I agree that removing politicians from drawing district lines would help improve the situation. In many cases, it appears that both parties collude with each other....OK we'll give you xx safe districts and you'll give us yy safe districts.....that seems to be happening in NY state as they are losing two seats in the House due to the 2010 census.

I'm not sure that it "would do more than anything else" but that's a story for another day....it would be a big improvement.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

If there were a rational way to have public financing of elections, that would likely help more, but a party-blind method of drawing districts would be great. I'm sure there are computer models that could draw districts according to population distribution.

These are two problems where the parties collude to maximize members' personal power at the expense of the voters (and the republic).
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

bronconick said:
Finding some way around gerrymandering would probably do more to fix our system then anything else. A majority or large minority of the House would have to be concerned about their re-election and not just the odd primary challenger. You'd still have 100+ in both parties that roll to victory anyway, but that's not enough to gum up the works and turn everything into a war instead of a situation to find compromise.
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There already is a way, and its starting to become more common. Maybe the best movement in politics today is citizens referedums to put redistricting in the hands of an independent commission. This happened in California and a modified version in Florida (where the legislature drew the districts but couldn't take incumbent protection into account). Also in Arizona despite the efforts of the governor to overturn it. While I'm fully aware this would undo some gerrymanders that benefit the Dems (IL & MD come to mind), so be it.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

Kepler said:
I'm sure there are computer models that could draw districts according to population distribution.
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I'm pretty sure that would not work given existing Federal law. I seem to recall reading somewhere that a Federal law requires a certain amount of "gerrymandering" to make sure there are districts in which "minorities" are the "majority" if you know what I mean. District lines drawn solely on the basis of population distribution are seen by some as a way to covertly disenfranchise minorities by 'spreading them around' to the extent that they can never concentrate their vote in any one place to elect 'one of their own.'

It seems that this viewpoint assumes that the single most important quality a candidate can have is racial or ethnic identification with potential voters; apparently this viewpoint seems to think that what a candidate might actually "stand for" doesn't matter much.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

FreshFish said:
I agree that removing politicians from drawing district lines would help improve the situation. In many cases, it appears that both parties collude with each other....OK we'll give you xx safe districts and you'll give us yy safe districts.....that seems to be happening in NY state as they are losing two seats in the House due to the 2010 census.

I'm not sure that it "would do more than anything else" but that's a story for another day....it would be a big improvement.
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Don't remind me... they're trying to gerrymander the conservative part of Syracuse's district by throwing Ithaca in with us.
 
Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

FreshFish said:
I'm pretty sure that would not work given existing Federal law. I seem to recall reading somewhere that a Federal law requires a certain amount of "gerrymandering" to make sure there are districts in which "minorities" are the "majority" if you know what I mean.
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Yep, there are laws from the 60's mandating minority-majority districts. The problem they were addressing was itself gerrymandering: southern states with say 30% black population would draw their districts so that every district was 30% black. Since the white population was, shall we say, highly color sensitive, no black candidate could be elected under that system.

The two reasons I can think of to phase out those laws are (1) it's fifty years later and most of us have grown up a bit, and (2) if you did have blind districts you would eliminate the initial abuse the law was designed to address.

For that matter, since people tend to self-segregate even in the absence of institutionalized racism, you'd probably wind up with "minority majority" districts in a blind system anyway.

It would be even better if voters just voted for the policies they favored rather than the demographics of the candidate, but alas that seems like too much to ask. It's really interesting that race and ethnicity are such enormous weighting factors in voting patterns while gender doesn't seem to matter at all. I assume it's because genders do not self-segregate, so everybody is aware at any given time that both genders are equally full of crap, while racial and ethnic groups in isolation fear The Other.

Nice species.
 
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Re: 2012 Elections - Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little death....

My computer model would be that all district lines are strictly north-south from the state's northern border to southern. Distribute the lines east-to-west so that each chunk contains the same number of people.

Who would this benefit? I have no idea - as it should be.

:D
 
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