StrangeSox

I'm bitter that this team has been garbage for years and has one weak playoff showing in the last decade. Continually sucking isn't exactly building good will.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:55 PM) BTW, I prefer to think of free college more in terms of expanding public education from 13 years to 15 or even 17 years. A good start would be 15 years. That would then include either two years extra of remedial K-12 years, a couple years of trade, tech, or community college, or if you do enough concurrent enrollment or AP classes, it would get you pretty darn close to a bachelor's degree. And that is really what is being proposed, extending the 13 years that we already provide. Exactly.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:48 PM) I'm trying to point out the difference in the personal responsibility. My point is in the case of driving the person IS responsible for their actions, in the case of having sex the person is not responsible for their actions. Same level of drunk, same person. While drunk we are responsible for some things, but not others. Am I making sense? I know this is my explanation, not your ability to read and think. The difference is in the person doing the actions. We hold the driver accountable, not the people the driver hits. We hold the rapist accountable, not the rapee. I think I get what you're driving at, that the drunk person 'chose' to drive even though they were impaired beyond rational thinking in the same way they're too impaired to consent to drive, but I think there's a pretty clear difference in those situations. As pettie said, there may be hard edge cases where both parties are blackout drunk, but I don't think that's the general case. Drinking to the point that your judgement is impaired beyond the ability to consent isn't a crime and doesn't inherently pose risks to anyone else.

A health care access system that's on par with every other industrialized nation on the planet and a plan for expanding free school to include college (something that worked well for California for decades and works for other countries as well!) is not on par with calls to essentially abolish the federal government, to build the largest wall in the world to keep out immigrants, or a blanket ban on visas for a particular religion.

Some battleground polls from PPP: We find a close race in Pennsylvania- Hillary Clinton 41, Donald Trump 40, Gary Johnson 6, Jill Stein 3: Why PA is so close- GOP more unified around Trump (79/8) than Dems are around Clinton (75/15). Same in FL yesterday: however If Clinton eventually won over even half of Sanders supporters in PA who say they aren't for her right now, her lead would go from 1 pt to 7

Koch's team to meet Trump's camp

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:39 PM) That is the inconsistency I am trying to explain, but not very well. A person is charged with DUI. We agree they are responsible for their actions. Now do we also believe that they are too drunk to consent to having sex and if someone has sex with them the other person would be charged with rape? DUI has nothing to do with consent, though. That's the difference.

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:30 PM) That sounds quite archaic and reckless. Welcome to libertarianism! As bmags said, there's a reason* 3rd parties in this country only get a small percentage of voters. They may look nice as a protest vote, but dig into their ideology and it goes crazy fast. Like the "5 minute rule" with Ron Paul--listen to him talk for five minutes, and he might sound reasonable. As soon as he hits that five minute mark, the pants go on the head. *structural reasons too based on the way our government is set up and how elections are won forcing two major coalition parties rather than more fractured parties who form coalitions within government after elections e.g. British parliament.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:30 PM) In general. A drunk gets in the car and causes a crash. After staggering out of the car the drunk has a sexual encounter. They are responsible for the crash, but too drunk to give consent to the sex? How is consent relevant in the case of drunk driving? QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:31 PM) Agreed. Can that drunk driver also be too drunk to give consent to sex? Yes. Drunk driving presents a grave risk to others. Being too impaired to consent is about your own personal safety.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:28 PM) The difference is I hear Bernie's platform as a special amount of crazy. It's more or less boilerplate New Deal Democrat stuff; it doesn't come close to approaching the crazy of "nukes for everyone! ban muslims! build a wall!" or "reset the federal government to 1885". But good news! Bernie Sanders is not going to be the Democratic candidate, so your concerns are abated.

QUOTE (Tex @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:20 PM) Isn't that part of the issue? Neither person really can say no, but that is different than giving consent. In other areas, such as driving, we tell the drunk driver, you are responsible for your actions while drunk. Then we might tell that same person that they aren't responsible for having a sexual encounter because they were too drunk to consent. We have this patchwork of responsible and not responsible when drunk. I don't have a solution, but it seems like we are not consistent. I'm not seeing the inconsistency. If I'm walking down the sidewalk while heavily intoxicated and get hit by a drunk driver, there's no question who's at fault there. The drunk driver is responsible, as is the drunk rapist.

QUOTE (pettie4sox @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:13 PM) The whole deal with every f***ing problem yourself policy? from the 3rd party thread QUOTE (StrangeSox @ May 13, 2016 -> 02:21 PM) A reminder that the Libertarian Party's official stance is against essentially all regulations including environmental, safety and health and that they oppose the public accommodations requirements of the Civil Rights Act. They oppose the government issuing debt aka US Treasury Bonds; want to abolish the income tax; want to abolish all social safety net programs such as social security, medicare and medicaid; and they oppose a standard legal tender issued by a central bank, instead favoring competing currencies offered by different banks (this has been tried to disastrous results in the past). They would abolish public education. This is all straight from their official party platform. I would not agree that they are a reasonable party and instead argue that they have a very radical ideology, with the ultimate goal to essentially reset the government to what is was in the late 19th century. edit: of course, a vote for a party doesn't mean you embrace their entire platform, but they're not the "cut taxes a bit and legalize pot, who cares about conservative social issues" party. If you want to mainline some of the good (terrible) stuff that's the core of libertarian philosophy, poke around places like lew rockwell and mises institute. Hope you like hearing about things like why child labor laws are actually bad, confederate apologia, arguments for why slavery wasn't so terrible/taxes slavery and thus the cruelest thing ever, etc.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 04:09 PM) Compared to the rest of this election cycle, meh. Hillary's policy proposals are all fairly standard Democratic positions. I can concede that the Libertarian Party's craziness is comparable to Trump's (in amount of crazy, not specific policies), though. Wanting to completely abolish all federal regulations, public education, and public health (Medicare) while also wanting competing (non-fiat, of course!) currencies is bonkers.

On the other hand, the LP policy platform is pants-on-head crazy

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:48 PM) Oh but he didn't actually mean that. And the wall may be a metaphorical wall. So perhaps he has no policies. Sure, but you only need to wait another hour or maybe even just one more sentence for him to actually double-down on those policies and grow the wall by another 10'.

For the best Trump research, follow @BuzzFeedAndrew on twitter. BuzzFeed's clickbait garbage funds one of the better political research/reporting groups out there right now.

QUOTE (bmags @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:45 PM) Josh Barro wrote this up. http://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trum...andidate-2016-5 It's annoying that I have to be forced to concede the flloor to people in this thread who hate Hillary Clinton and democrats under the assumption that they are terrible, but the reality is that even if they are terrible, they are terrible in a way that will not lead to possible nuclear war or degradation of the institutions of the country. Hillary Clinton on her own is a very strong candidate with policies you can point to as helpful to this country. Donald Trump is an idiot with a single policy, to build a wall between the US and Mexico, and then a bunch of other crap that he can't remember day to day, and a foreign policy that consists of saying a bunch of things about how he built hotel deals in places. All the while he has threatened the freedom of the press, Americans of Mexican descent as being mentally unfit to hold public office and inherently unpatriotic, Muslim Americans, and a horrendous life of hatred of women. All that so bad that serious issues like the fact that he begged for business from Gaddaffi, a leader who had performed terrorist acts against the United States: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldvi...gaddafis-money/ This is not about a candidate with a difference in policy. If you back Trump I have to wonder if you care about not only the United States, but the greater world out there. If you have ever known anyone of color, a woman, anyone. In a world of cynical politics, this is the most cynical candidate I've ever seen. And he emerged straight from the Repulbican ID. So yeah, Hillary Clinton routinely finds herself in conflicts of interest she doesn't turn down or avoid. But her worst scandal probably is on par with non-scandals from Trump, like when he rescinded the contracts to the early buyers of the Trump Tower in Chicago when he realized they were worth more, after they took the initial risk in the build of the building. But please, do more research. We haven't yet seen enough. No, two policies. Don't forget his Muslim ban.

QUOTE (CrimsonWeltall @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 02:38 PM) Didn't he also call for Romney and McCain landslides? People who live in echo chambers aren't the best at predicting election outcomes. Limbaugh: Romney Will Win in a Landslide Rush: Everything But Polls Say Romney Landslide Limbaugh is a conservative entertainer, he knows his audience. I don't know how much he genuinely believes what he's saying when he comes out with claims like that.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:32 PM) I don't think I have any problem with a judge being recalled over one particularly bad sentence. Do we generally trust this judge's decision making process if it on one occasion led to this sentence? Can you give an argument why we should just assume this is "one bad sentence" and not representative of the way the judge deals with cases in general? I don't know about this judge's history at all aside from this one case, which I guess is sort of the point. The recall campaign would be entirely about this one sentence and not whether he is actually a good and well-qualified judge. I know this is along the lines of a "notably rare exceptions" argument, but I'm not really a fan of recalls in general.

QUOTE (DrunkBomber @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:36 PM) I think the fact that the judge was also an athlete at Stanford is pretty damning. That's what that article I posted above gets into--empathy, and the sorts of people our judicial system will more typically feel it for.

QUOTE (DrunkBomber @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:29 PM) This election is tough. For how much I dislike Hillary there is still no way I could vote for Trump. Im just going to vote for Gary Johnson. It's only June so polls only matter so much, but it's looking like this year will be the LP's best showing. They may break 5%, which means they'd be eligible for federal election funds (irony!), but it's tough to see Johnson polling consistently above 15% to get in the debates.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:28 PM) There are plenty of problems ie. honesty and integrity on the other side as well. I think those problems are vastly outweighed by Trump's own problems with honesty and integrity, plus he has the temperament and bigotry problems as well. Maybe that's not enough to get you to vote for Clinton because you have those issues with her plus don't agree with her on policy, but it seems like a pretty compelling reason to at least not vote for Trump.

QUOTE (ptatc @ Jun 8, 2016 -> 03:21 PM) This is why deciding between the two is really going to be tough. Voting for the one who isn't a thin-skinned con artist with no apparent grasp on policy at all and is a big racist to boot seems like a pretty easy call? edit: or at least not voting for Trump seems like an easy call!

As for what could be done to prevent something like this from happening again, I'm not really sure there are any 'solutions' that wouldn't create even worse problems. Mandatory minimums have been pretty disastrous, and calling for a judge to be recalled over one bad sentencing would seem to set a bad precedent.