StrangeSox

I actually caught a BBC world service segment on the very topic of why internet polls are garbage and scientific ones aren't on my way home from the airport at 1am last night. If you want a quick primer on this, you can read the transcript or listen to this segment here.

This recent segment on O'Reilly about Asians...just....uhh... Fox News Outdoes Itself With a Ridiculously Racist Segment About Trump and Asians So not exactly shocking that Clinton's up by more than 40 points against Trump with Asians. Thank you people of color for saving white america from its trump-voting self.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Oct 6, 2016 -> 11:02 AM) The economy is very much up over the last several years with huge growth in many industries like real estate and tech. We are literally in the middle of a gigantic tech boom. Also people arent being killed at an alarming rate, murders are down overall in the US. I'm sure some of this is the scare tactics you hear on the radio or wherever you get your info, but its all simply not true. There are always parts of the population that are going to be hurting for jobs and money, its like that under any government in any era. To be fair, greg does live in Kansas, and Gov. Brownback and the Republican legislature there have lit the entire economy in that state on fire.

yess yesssssssssss unskew Unskew UNSKEW those polls! brett do you follow Bill Mitchell on twitter? Seems like he'd be right up your alley re: polls

That means they carry zero value, though.

good look kalapse, hope it goes well

He also ignored the court ruling on NC voter disenfranchisement, insisting that it wasn't racially motivated because nuh uh. Greg, please never read about the 1960'S, I don't think you could handle it.

The Atlantic offers only its third endorsement for president in over a century and a half. https://mobile.twitter.com/AdamSerwer/statu...751884939137024 Trump still has zero endorsements a month out from election day.

Trump taking credit for pence's "win" last night is the most Trump thing ever, and also confirms that he is super pissed at being upstaged. I put won in quotes because although he won the instant polls mostly on style, the news coverage has at least been equally about this

Man remember when the court just decided to give itself the power to review the legislature? And this was back in 1803 when every person (or close to it) who drafted the Constitution was still very much alive and in power? The idea that there is a singular correct interpretation of a document that's 5 years old let alone 200+ and how it applies to every possible situation that arises is just plain nutty, let alone a political document drafted by many parties and ratified by many, many more.

QUOTE (Steve9347 @ Oct 5, 2016 -> 01:02 PM) Of these issues, I believe the highlighted is the only one he actually is in control of - and I have no idea why you think the economy is down. The economy is still pretty bad for segments of the population, and we seem to be trending towards a bigger split between haves and have-nots with not as much of a robust middle class any more. So for those people, the economy still sucks in ways that the DJIA or GDP or baseline employment numbers might not reflect.

The military is so large and diverse that literally every single opinion or stance, including having no opinion or stance at all on a given topic, will be offensive to someone who's in or was in the military.

balta vs ss2k5, vintage filibuster!

Commercialized patriotism in the form of the anthem before every sporting event should be more offensive than some players making a silent protest.

QUOTE (Chicago White Sox @ Oct 5, 2016 -> 12:41 PM) I'll go a step further and say if you have young children, how could you not vote for Hilary? Trump as the POTUS is the most dangerous proposition the US, hell the world has faced in years. Hilary may be a unlikable candidate, but she's not going to do something stupid that has grave consequences across the globe. The thought of my son having to deal with the aftermath of a Trump presidency is beyond terrifying. Honestly, I think any US citizen throwing away their vote on an independent candidate in this election is being selfish. Either you're for or against everything Trump stands for, and if you're against like all rational people should be, then you have no choice but voting for Hilary. Maybe that's a hit to your pride, but it's better than living in a world where Donald Trump is the POTUS. Also global warming, which Democrats will at least do something about even if it's not nearly enough (see EPA rules). Which is another point in favor of my stance that I don't care as much about the individual person in the White House as the policies they'll implement and the direction/staffing the executive branch will see under them.

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Oct 5, 2016 -> 10:08 AM) To me, the Supreme Court is an extremely good reason to vote for Hillary Clinton if you care at all about social issues. Supreme Court positions are lifetime appointments. If the next President replaces Scalia and Ginsburg, they are shaping the Court for the next 40 years potentially. And with the gay marriage decision out there, and the Right's push to overturn that decision, if you are moderate or progressive on social issues, Clinton is the obvious choice... To the other point, I've said it before in this thread, but it's a binary decision. Either Trump or Hillary are going to be the next President of the United States. I think we know, generally, what we'll get with Clinton. It will be a center left government that will probably be to the right of Obama on foreign policy, and will struggle to get any major reforms passed because the Republicans will control the House. I don't know what you get with a Trump Presidency, beyond the fact that he's a thin skinned narcissist who flies off the handle at the smallest slight. I know you are in CA, and so you can get away with a protest vote. But to me, voting for Hillary Clinton because she is not Donald Trump is absolutely a good argument for voting for her in any state that can swing either way. This is where I come down, too, and it's different from my POV in say 2008. We may not like that we're only left with two real options, and we may really not like those two particular options this time, but we can't wish away the current system. You can definitely work towards changing the system in the future, but you still have to play by the rules of the game as they exist today. I view my vote as a tool to try to push policy towards my preferred direction not as a moral stance on the individual candidates. Even if I don't particularly like Clinton, I still feel I'm "voting my conscience" when I'm using one of the few tools I have to directly influence policy. I couldn't in good conscience cast a protest vote that would make a Donald Trump presidency incrementally more likely. I care about the executive branch being run by competent liberals and the courts being staffed with more liberal justices because, in the long run, that's a lot more important than the individual person occupying the White House for 4-8 years. If Scalia is replaced by a Republican, we'll likely get someone very similar to Scalia's ideology and we'll have lost the opportunity to fundamentally shift the court's outlook for years to come. It's hard to overstate how important the next couple of appointments to the court will be, and that's without getting into the impact staffing the lower courts has as well.

QUOTE (RockRaines @ Oct 5, 2016 -> 08:33 AM) Do you make long highway trips? I can literally drive from Detroit to Chicago without touching a pedal. Thats invaluable to me, especially with knees that ache when driving. The few times I've had it have been in rentals in California that were for long-ish drives. I dunno, maybe I just wasn't used to it.

But that's still not what Romney's argument was, and it still doesn't address the reasons why Romney's argument was wrong. His argument was a political one about what sort of people would or wouldn't vote for him with explicitly saying that the 47% of non-federal-income-tax-payers were just going to vote for the other guy because of "free stuff." The actual breakdown of who comprises that 47% contains a pretty big chunk of retirees who generally skew conservative/Republican and people in the military (same). The rest are the working poor and the lower end of middle class who are a mixed bag politically. The points you raise may be legitimate, but Romney's comments weren't a nuanced microeconomic critique of tax policy.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Oct 5, 2016 -> 08:53 AM) If you actually want to get into the policy parts of course, those 46.9% who "pay no taxes" are mostly paying the payroll tax, which is still a 10% slice off the top plus the behind the scenes part. It doesn't count because it doesn't hit rich people so it gets ignored. I don't know whether you can use $900 million in losses to offset the payroll tax, but because it is capped to the first $100k of your income it doesn't matter when your income is in the millions. Interestingly, Clinton's proposal to establish some new version of the AMT would actually deal with situations like Trump - high incomes have their deductions limited, as would expanding the payroll tax. Not just payroll, don't forget state and local taxes that are also typically regressive. I'm fairly certain that you can't deduct payroll taxes, but I would doubt that much if any of Trump's income is in the form of a W-2.

Literally whatever Trump accuses someone else of, he's guilty of to a much more bigly extent. It's amazing.

Especially good this year because of who's at the top of the ticket.

Kaine allegedly has a very deep and personal dislike for what he views as pence's perversion of Christianity and ignored a bunch of his prep to go after him strongly. His debate makes more sense in that light.

"Now" but yeah pence advocated that hiv/aids funding be tied to shaming gay people and tried to pass his own awful version of HB2. He's really just an awful person. Of course this is trump's reaction, lol people are going to vote for a raging crazy narcissist https://mobile.twitter.com/samsteinhp/statu...512170424307714

QUOTE (Ezio Auditore @ Oct 4, 2016 -> 10:46 PM) This debate was a snooze fest. I mean even more than VP debates usually are. Only in American politics does style count more than substance, and this election, and hopefully ONLY this election, is one where one of the VP candidates can pretend he has an imaginary running mate who actually didn't say all the things he said, and pretty much lie about that for the entire 90 minutes, and it's going to be treated like it's not a big deal. Pence's debate performance was basically "Donald Trump? Who the hell is that?" Absolutely, and he'll get some media praise for it. The attack ads will probably write themselves though.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Oct 4, 2016 -> 08:55 PM) As much as I despise Pence, I'd much rather see him elected than either Clinton or Trump. He would set LGBT rights back decades.