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Thread: US elections, 2016 - Page 22







Post#526 at 05-04-2015 02:17 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Quote Originally Posted by Ragnarök_62 View Post
Chris Christie: Seems to be a "machine politician". Did an anti corruption campaign, but he later dished out favors only to his supporters or some such.
I love one of his lines - "Pot is a gateway drug". Uh, no. There is no such animal.
There are few if any candidates running (or who may run) for president in 2016 who have such a high negative score in my horoscope rating system as Christie. His positives are high too, but the score sure fits. Like the reporters say, he has a lot of talent and attractive no-nonsense leadership qualities, but his other personality traits get in the way. A big mouth, bullying, and maybe corruption. Even though he's a Joneser, he's like a Gen X poster boy. If nominated by Republicans and elected president, he'd be a right-winger most of the time. A lot of the right-wing base don't see him as conservative enough, so he'd have to run hard to the right.

He may not be able to run, thanks to the scandal. If he does, though, he will get some benefit from Jupiter in his sign this October, and much more again next year, especially in May. It don't think the boost will be enough to get him nominated though.

It's possible that I have his negative score a bit too high. Plus, a couple of his negative aspects are, like Hillary's, the same as mine, and I'm not quite sure about them. So I wouldn't count him out as a nominee. The new moon indicator favors a Democrat win (not to mention the electoral college), so it will take someone who has a much better score than Hillary to beat her. I think only Bush and maybe Rubio have a shot.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 05-05-2015 at 12:54 AM.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

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Post#527 at 05-05-2015 05:21 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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US Senate, 2016

I was waiting to see how Arizona would go before I suggested any possibility of a Democratic wave in 2016. With approval of 41% against disapproval of 50% for a high-profile incumbent not having legal problems and in a Republican-leaning state, I would guess that John McCain has about a 30% chance of winning in the general election -- if he does not die, retire, or lose in a primary.

Anyone with an approval rating below 45% has trouble.


PPP, Arizona, Senator John McCain, R-AZ

Q1 Do you approve or disapprove of Senator John
McCain’s job performance?

41% Approve -- 50% Disapprove -- 9% Not sure

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/p...e_AZ_50515.pdf




Approval polls only.





White -- retiring incumbent or (should it happen) an incumbent defeated in a primary, with "D" or "R" for the party in question.
Yellow -- incumbent under indictment or with a terminal diagnosis short of the completion of his term, with "D" or "R" for the party in question.


Light green -- Republican incumbent apparently running for re-election, no polls.
Light orange -- Republican incumbent apparently running for re-election, no polls.

Blue -- Republican running for re-election with current polls available.
Red -- Republican running for re-election with current polls available.


Intensity percentage shows the first digit of the approval of the incumbent Senator --

"2" for approval between 20% and 30%, "3" for approval between 30% and 39%... "7" for approval between 70% and 79%.

Numbers are recent approval ratings for incumbent Senators if their approvals are below 55%. I'm not showing any number for any incumbent whose approval is 55% or higher because even this early that looks very safe.

An asterisk (*) is for an appointed incumbent (there are none now) because appointed pols have never shown their electability.

Approval only (although I might accept A/B/C/D/F) -- not favorability. I do not use any Excellent-Good-Fair-Poor ratings because "fair" is ambiguous. A fair performance by a 7-year-old violinist might impress you. A 'fair' performance by an adult violinist indicates something for which you would not want to buy a ticket.

NO PARTISAN POLLS.

This shows less than many would like to see. I'm not rating the strength of the opponent or the likelihood of the incumbent seeing himself in good-enough health to last into the election.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#528 at 05-05-2015 06:49 PM by Ragnarök_62 [at Oklahoma joined Nov 2006 #posts 5,511]
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Quote Originally Posted by Eric the Green View Post
There are few if any candidates running (or who may run) for president in 2016 who have such a high negative score in my horoscope rating system as Christie. His positives are high too, but the score sure fits. Like the reporters say, he has a lot of talent and attractive no-nonsense leadership qualities, but his other personality traits get in the way. A big mouth, bullying, and maybe corruption. Even though he's a Joneser, he's like a Gen X poster boy.
A slight edit. "Big Mouth" = Boomer quality Eric.

Anyhow here's another problem I have with Republicans.

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
H. L. Mencken





Let's substitute the "pie in the sky when you die" brigade sort of Republicans for "Puritans" and we have a winner.

I have a name as well for said Republicans. "The boo boo bam boosie brigade".
MBTI step II type : Expressive INTP

There's an annual contest at Bond University, Australia, calling for the most appropriate definition of a contemporary term:
The winning student wrote:

"Political correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical minority, and promoted by mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a piece of shit by the clean end."







Post#529 at 05-05-2015 07:39 PM by Cynic Hero '86 [at Upstate New York joined Jul 2006 #posts 1,285]
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Selfish baby boomers, are governing the country like a man who has sex with a women even after the woman said no. Repeal citizens united, we don't like being governed by bought-out weakling, institute the meritocratic state.







Post#530 at 05-05-2015 08:12 PM by XYMOX_4AD_84 [at joined Nov 2012 #posts 3,073]
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Quote Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86 View Post
Selfish baby boomers, are governing the country like a man who has sex with a women even after the woman said no. Repeal citizens united, we don't like being governed by bought-out weakling, institute the meritocratic state.
Just think if campaign spending were strictly limited (and, no matter whether from a Super PAC or from one's own pocket, strictly limited under threat of Federal Prosecution and off to Lompoc or Leavenworth), and instead, modestly funded at the same level for all candidates by the Federal Government, then candidates would have to earn respect the hard way. Just like Abe Lincoln did it.







Post#531 at 05-05-2015 08:23 PM by Brian Beecher [at Downers Grove, IL joined Sep 2001 #posts 2,937]
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Quote Originally Posted by Odin View Post
Casey is a DINO and anti-choice. Screw him.

I want Liz Warren and Julian Castro.
This is the same thing as I have said about Chicago's last two mayors. Both have been very heavily in the pockets of big moneyed interests. All candidates for every public office have always had the tendency during their campaigns to Set their goals and take responsibility for what they believe is right. That doesn’t mean they need to be righteous, yet they often are, seemingly forgetting that others have a right to their opinions and may be worth listening to. Getting back to Chicago, Emanuel was forced into a runoff election for the first time in the city's history. This alone signaled plenty of dissatisfaction.







Post#532 at 05-06-2015 01:16 AM by MordecaiK [at joined Mar 2014 #posts 1,086]
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Quote Originally Posted by Classic-X'er View Post
Well, if we are past the point of preventing it and don't have the capability to reverse it, then our children and their children won't be dodging it either. So, we'll all just have to accept it and then adapt and adjust to climate change.
I concur with this. The evidence that I am seeing is that methane emissions from a combination of melting permafrost and clathrates is probably not stoppable--and concentrated in the Arctic. So we are probably looking at at least a 4 degree centigrade rise in average world temp--a return to pre-ice age Pliocene conditions. Fortunately, we have the technology to deal with the worst effects of higher temperatures. Look up Saltech online. This company has found a way to remove 97% of the water from salt water (the wet salt can be dried and processed for valuable minerals). Their process can be scaled down to process oil field waste including frakking waste or scaled up to remove nitrates and phosphates from sewage and farm runoff--or desalinise seawater--inexpensively, and the cost is still going down. If we can desalinise seawater we need not fear drought in most places. Unless of course we listen to malthusian environmentalists who believe we should live within whatever limits the weather imposes on us. Same thing with Malaria--for which a vaccine is in the final stages of development. All this melting permafrost apparently is leaving a lot of carbon in newly unfrozen soil in the North which likely will make that soil quite fertile in places like the Mackenzie Valley and Alaska's Yukon and Tanana regions. Couple this with Siberia and we may have enough new land to compensate for land lost to rising sea levels--which will rise slowly enough so that homes can be either moved or salvaged. New habitats for displaces species can be created in places the new climate will support them. It's all doable--if we are flexible and above all, if we reduce inequality. We need to continue to grow--into the rest of the Solar System. For inequality to be reduced, the overall pie must continue to grow. Human beings are terrible at living in steady state conditions despite the rhetoric of sustainability. Steady state conditions invite elites to fix social relations to protect their children and grandchildren's positions. Which leads to social tension and authoritarianism (think of China's one child policy) and ultimately a crash because steady states are as unnatural as a maintained garden. So when it comes to global warming, the facts are there. But like everything else in the economy, the devil is in the measures and policy those facts are used to justify.







Post#533 at 05-06-2015 02:13 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by MordecaiK View Post
I concur with this. The evidence that I am seeing is that methane emissions from a combination of melting permafrost and clathrates is probably not stoppable--and concentrated in the Arctic. So we are probably looking at at least a 4 degree centigrade rise in average world temp--a return to pre-ice age Pliocene conditions. Fortunately, we have the technology to deal with the worst effects of higher temperatures. Look up Saltech online. This company has found a way to remove 97% of the water from salt water (the wet salt can be dried and processed for valuable minerals). Their process can be scaled down to process oil field waste including frakking waste or scaled up to remove nitrates and phosphates from sewage and farm runoff--or desalinise seawater--inexpensively, and the cost is still going down. If we can desalinise seawater we need not fear drought in most places. Unless of course we listen to malthusian environmentalists who believe we should live within whatever limits the weather imposes on us. Same thing with Malaria--for which a vaccine is in the final stages of development. All this melting permafrost apparently is leaving a lot of carbon in newly unfrozen soil in the North which likely will make that soil quite fertile in places like the Mackenzie Valley and Alaska's Yukon and Tanana regions. Couple this with Siberia and we may have enough new land to compensate for land lost to rising sea levels--which will rise slowly enough so that homes can be either moved or salvaged. New habitats for displaces species can be created in places the new climate will support them. It's all doable--if we are flexible and above all, if we reduce inequality. We need to continue to grow--into the rest of the Solar System. For inequality to be reduced, the overall pie must continue to grow. Human beings are terrible at living in steady state conditions despite the rhetoric of sustainability. Steady state conditions invite elites to fix social relations to protect their children and grandchildren's positions. Which leads to social tension and authoritarianism (think of China's one child policy) and ultimately a crash because steady states are as unnatural as a maintained garden. So when it comes to global warming, the facts are there. But like everything else in the economy, the devil is in the measures and policy those facts are used to justify.
I didn't know that Herman Kahn was reincarnated!

Global warming is going to mess up our world badly. Sure, we might cope with it if it happens slowly enough so that people can adjust. Agronomy is the biggest reality of all when pressure builds upon food supplies, a certainty when prime farmland is inundated or dessicated. If people starve, then everything else becomes insignificant. There is no techno-fix for hunger.

The boreal lands of Siberia and Canada might be more temperate in the wake of global warming -- but also infertile. Soil fertility takes centuries to develop; much prime farmland could be taken away from humanity in decades.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#534 at 05-06-2015 10:59 AM by playwrite [at NYC joined Jul 2005 #posts 10,443]
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Adios amigos!

It's early, but HC has just eliminated both Jeb and Marco as serious contenders -

http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/ar...l-election-day

Hillary Clinton's Immigration Stance May Haunt Republicans Until Election Day

Amid concern that probable Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush is attempting to court Hispanic voters away from the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton staked her claim to that increasingly important electorate by restating her support for easing immigration laws and saying she'd go beyond President Obama's controversial executive orders to protect certain undocumented workers from deportation.

Clinton's move on Tuesday to not just make immigration reform a central issue so early in her presidential campaign but to also appeal directly to immigration activists is a reminder of how crucial the Hispanic vote has been for Democrats, and highlights the long road Republicans have with that voting bloc, even if they pick Bush as their nominee.
Here's the killer -

Bush supports a path to citizenship or legal status for many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S., which is a deal-breaker for many Republican voters. He's attempted to frame his position in economic terms, saying that to spark growth the country needs to add more workers. And while he's criticized Obama's executive orders on immigration as going beyond the constitutional powers of the office, Bush has refused to say whether he'd repeal those actions without Congress approving an overhaul of immigration laws.

On Thursday, Clinton exceeded expectations for many immigration activists, reinforcing her previous positions and saying she would protect Obama's executive actions and "go even further." She also described her immigration position as separate from "everyone on the Republican side."

"Not a single Republican candidate, announced or potential, is clearly and consistently supporting a path to citizenship," Clinton said. "Not one. When they talk about legal status, that’s code for second-class status."
The big appeal for both Jeb and Marco was there potential to make a dent in the Dems 70/27 advantage with Hispanic voters, particularly as favorite sons in Florida. Both would love to hammer some reasonable immigration planks into the GOP platform, but Marco was already hammered for his earlier effort in the Senate. Walker has staked out a further to the Right stance suggesting we need to deport LEGAL immigrants. Anything less than Walker will make Jeb/Marco just Clinton clones and dead in the GOP primaries; anything other than refuting Walker OR sticking with the now albatros of "legal status" makes them dead as viable candidates in the general.

At this point, its Walker or a seriously-wounded Bush in the general - neither will take Florida.

It's been over for some time, but another inevitable nail in the GOP coffin is not a bad thing.

She's just toying with them now.
Last edited by playwrite; 05-06-2015 at 11:07 AM.
"The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start" - R. Service

“It’s not tax money. The banks have accounts with the Fed … so, to lend to a bank, we simply use the computer to mark up the size of the account that they have with the Fed. It’s much more akin to printing money.” - B.Bernanke


"Keep your filthy hands off my guns while I decide what you can & can't do with your uterus" - Sarah Silverman

If you meet a magic pony on the road, kill it. - Playwrite







Post#535 at 05-06-2015 01:20 PM by XYMOX_4AD_84 [at joined Nov 2012 #posts 3,073]
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Quote Originally Posted by MordecaiK View Post
I concur with this. The evidence that I am seeing is that methane emissions from a combination of melting permafrost and clathrates is probably not stoppable--and concentrated in the Arctic. So we are probably looking at at least a 4 degree centigrade rise in average world temp--a return to pre-ice age Pliocene conditions. Fortunately, we have the technology to deal with the worst effects of higher temperatures. Look up Saltech online. This company has found a way to remove 97% of the water from salt water (the wet salt can be dried and processed for valuable minerals). Their process can be scaled down to process oil field waste including frakking waste or scaled up to remove nitrates and phosphates from sewage and farm runoff--or desalinise seawater--inexpensively, and the cost is still going down. If we can desalinise seawater we need not fear drought in most places. Unless of course we listen to malthusian environmentalists who believe we should live within whatever limits the weather imposes on us. Same thing with Malaria--for which a vaccine is in the final stages of development. All this melting permafrost apparently is leaving a lot of carbon in newly unfrozen soil in the North which likely will make that soil quite fertile in places like the Mackenzie Valley and Alaska's Yukon and Tanana regions. Couple this with Siberia and we may have enough new land to compensate for land lost to rising sea levels--which will rise slowly enough so that homes can be either moved or salvaged. New habitats for displaces species can be created in places the new climate will support them. It's all doable--if we are flexible and above all, if we reduce inequality. We need to continue to grow--into the rest of the Solar System. For inequality to be reduced, the overall pie must continue to grow. Human beings are terrible at living in steady state conditions despite the rhetoric of sustainability. Steady state conditions invite elites to fix social relations to protect their children and grandchildren's positions. Which leads to social tension and authoritarianism (think of China's one child policy) and ultimately a crash because steady states are as unnatural as a maintained garden. So when it comes to global warming, the facts are there. But like everything else in the economy, the devil is in the measures and policy those facts are used to justify.
Methinks you overplay "Rrrrrrth Changes" just a bit. You and Art Bell.







Post#536 at 05-06-2015 05:54 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Quote Originally Posted by XYMOX_4AD_84 View Post
Methinks you overplay "Rrrrrrth Changes" just a bit. You and Art Bell.
I think he overplays the fixes offered by business as usual.

We need the steady state. There's nothing wrong with social programs to reduce inequality; just junk the Republican ideology, and it's A-OK. It's a lot cheaper to just junk a failed idea, than to try and terraform other planets!

We may need to desalinate, and move people, if we make the wrong decisions. We've already made a lot of wrong decisions (electing Republicans for the last 35 years being #1), so some adjustments like these will be needed to compensate for our bad votes and non-votes. But since it's relatively easy just to shift to green energy, and largely avoid the severe drought and rising sea levels and floods by so doing, why not? Just to save the convenience of a few powerful fuel barons? I don't think so. Government and enterprise can work together to make the shift within a decade, if we decide to throw off both the deniers and the economic-libertarians and just do it. It's already starting (thanks to some good businesspeople and some good voting decisions like electing Barack Obama).

Brower makes a good point about the lack of arable land in those northern regions. Adjustment will be harder than just fixing the cause.
Last edited by Eric the Green; 05-06-2015 at 05:58 PM.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#537 at 05-06-2015 08:44 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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I wouldn't show this poll except that the 'new' state polled is Arizona. Barack Obama lost the state twice, and it wasn't really close either time. The pollster in question (Public Policy Polling) is generally good, so this is not likely an outlier. Arizona has gone for a Democratic nominee for President only once since 1948 -- 1996, barely, for Bill Clinton. If Arizona is close in 2016, then Republicans are going to have a bad year. The pollster also has a hideous approval rating for Senator John McCain, an incumbent Senator with a high profile.

Not that they don't deserve to get blown out in a wave.

Hillary Clinton vs. Jeb Bush





Hillary Clinton vs. Mike Huckabee



Hillary Clinton vs. Rand Paul

The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#538 at 05-06-2015 08:45 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Hillary Clinton vs. Marco Rubio



Hillary Clinton vs. Scott Walker



blue -- Republican lead
red -- Democratic lead
white -- tie

30% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 3% or less
40% -- lead with 40-49% but a margin of 4% or more
60% -- lead with 50-54%
70% -- lead with 55-59%
90% -- lead with 60% or more
Last edited by pbrower2a; 05-07-2015 at 09:55 AM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#539 at 05-06-2015 09:26 PM by MordecaiK [at joined Mar 2014 #posts 1,086]
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Looking back on Herman Kahn's predictions, many of them came true. And humanity is the better for them, at least so far. see
As for the boreal lands of Siberia and Canada being infertile, remember when people believed that the Amazon rainforest should be preserved because the tropical soils were too infertile for anything else? Guess what, Brazilian farmers figured out how to grow soy on former rainforest. And some of that soil, in certain river valleys are quite fertile. The Amazon rainforest is not natural, but the result of epidemics started by Europeans and Africans from smallpox to malaria that wiped out these civilisations before conquistadors could discover them. Even in Africa, agriculture is becoming prevalent on savannah land (though much of that agriculture is commercial agriculture benefiting overseas, particularly Chinese interests). So when I see reports of high amounts of microbes and carbon being released when permafrost melts see http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...oxide-quickly/, I find that there is more reason for those soils to be fertile (since those soils were quick frozen in one or another of the Pleistocene glaciations and the climate prior to those glaciations was mid latitude deciduous forests) than tropical soils are. http://www.economist.com/node/16886442 .
I take comparisons to Herman Kahn to be a compliment. Kahn had the courage to say no to the Malthusians and refute them during a time (the Nixon Administration) when Malthusians were at their most fashionable. Malthusianism has a long and dark pedigree. Perhaps the Malthusian ethos started with Chinese gentry who believed that limits enhanced harmony--a justification for forbidding Chinese from building ships that could travel far from China which ended Zheng He's voyages in the 1430s. The French "physiocrats" such as de Quensay got this idea from the Chinese as part of their infatuation with things Chinese and Malthus picked it up from them. Malthus's ideology became popular in the early 19th Century in the British aristocracy. Malthusianism guided British decisions to permit the potato famine in Ireland to kill millions of Irish and a similar famine in India to kill millions of Indians (see https://understandingevil.wordpress....still-with-us/ ) Later in the 19th Century, Malthusianism got subsumed into Social Darwinism and the Eugenics Movement. see http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/...nIdeology.html .
The Eugenics perspective dominated much of non-Marxist social thought and political economy right up until World War II. Eugenics and scientific racism was something that most educated people outside of the USSR accepted axiomatically, right up until the end of World War II. It was at that point that a Eugenicist named Garrett Hardin apparently recruited a coterie of students, disciples and colleagues, most of whom were young enough not to have been tainted by association with eugenics, such as Paul Ehrlich, former Colorado Governor and current University of Denver Professor Richard D. Lamm and John Tanton to create the current population control wing of the environmental movement, a wing that has also successfully infiltrated the Republican Tea Party with an anti-immigrant agenda see http://www.splcenter.org/get-informe...Garrett-Hardin . Also see http://www.amazon.com/The-Legacy-Mal.../dp/0252007905 . It may well be that the nativist aspects of Malthusianism helped to make environmentalism bipartisan during the Nixon Administration, a period in which our formative environmental legislation was written in ways that incorporated a great deal of Malthusian assumptions into law. Such as the Endangered Species Act, which writes into law a) legal definitions of species which have no relationship to scientific reality and b) assumptions about ecosystems which have been found to be scientifically incorrect --species are formed and become extinct a lot more fluidly than was realised in the 1970s--rather like product lines--and extinctions are as often the result of hybridization--barred and spotted owls--pizzlys--as species dying out. So much for "settled science"). Certainly, Nixon made no bones about his Malthusian sentiments. see http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents...0s/ch20_p4.php . And in Roe v Wade, so did Justice Blackmun who wrote the law (which does not mean that women do not have the right to effective birth control; sometimes we do the right thing for the wrong reasons (see https://www.all.org/abac/eugen02.htm).
Small wonder that there was a backlash against the more Malthusian aspects of environmentalism beginning in the 1980s that translated into policies such as allowing Chinese women who faced prison for having a second child to get political asylum in the US. Walter Hickel and James Watt attempted to stop environmentalism in it's tracks. But environmentalists were able to retreat into local and incremental action, using the public attorneys general provisions that they had gotten written into environmental law in the US and other Western developed nations to challenge projects that they were able to build opposition to. Which did not stop and indeed encouraged corporations to move environmetally harmful activities overseas to authoritarian nations could and did imprison and kill environmental activists and journalists who supported them. ( A classic example of this is the unchecked pollution that journalists embedded with the US Navy found in the Persian Gulf and reported on before the military could stop them from doing so. US policies against drilling in Alaska and elsewhere contributed to the "drain America last" model that put the US in the position of encouraging dependence on the Mideast, which in the 1980s was relatively easy to defend in return for OPEC nations denominating oil in US dollars and accepting no other currency for oil. Which is where and how our current Mideast troubles began. It seemed like a good idea at the time).
The conservative backlash may have forced the environmental movement to trim it's sails and move away from some of it's more outwardly Malthusian positions but this did not prevent it from learning Saul Alinskian insurgency politics and work at the local level, often making a decent living doing so. Herman Daly explained this as "Think globally! Act locally!". And environmentalists and Malthusians waited for an issue that could put their overall program back on the agenda. Which was what global warming has turned out to be.
In the process of doing this, the environmental movement sucked a lot of political oxygen away from the concerns of the poor and working Americans. Environmentalists were not responsible for the AFL-CIO's abandonment of the Democrats over the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. But they arguably made it easier for the Democratic Party to abandon Labour to the tender mercies of the Republicans, who distracted them with social issues (not the least of which was abortion) while encouraging corporations to break unions in the private sector. While Democrats reinvented themselves as "New Democrats", becoming the party of minorities, the college educated and public employees--and willing to make dishonourable compromises with Republicans on issues from health care to welfare reform that they knew would harm poorer and working class Americans as soon as the Clinton Era boom ended.
So now we come to the question of global warming as it has been put to us. Global warming is an issue, yes. So was the pollution that came out of the post WWII economic boom in the US--and which was finally controlled through pollution control technology. But Malthusians took a very real pollution problem and parlayed it into a particular agenda of how they wanted the US and the world to operate. And they are doing the same thing with global warming--which we CAN live with and prosper with even though we may not want to.







Post#540 at 05-07-2015 02:13 AM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by MordecaiK View Post
Looking back on Herman Kahn's predictions, many of them came true. And humanity is the better for them, at least so far. see
As for the boreal lands of Siberia and Canada being infertile, remember when people believed that the Amazon rainforest should be preserved because the tropical soils were too infertile for anything else? Guess what, Brazilian farmers figured out how to grow soy on former rainforest. And some of that soil, in certain river valleys are quite fertile. The Amazon rainforest is not natural, but the result of epidemics started by Europeans and Africans from smallpox to malaria that wiped out these civilisations before conquistadors could discover them. Even in Africa, agriculture is becoming prevalent on savannah land (though much of that agriculture is commercial agriculture benefiting overseas, particularly Chinese interests). So when I see reports of high amounts of microbes and carbon being released when permafrost melts see http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...oxide-quickly/, I find that there is more reason for those soils to be fertile (since those soils were quick frozen in one or another of the Pleistocene glaciations and the climate prior to those glaciations was mid latitude deciduous forests) than tropical soils are. http://www.economist.com/node/16886442 .
In general the boreal forests are on thin soils close to bedrock. The trees grow slowly. South of those forests the soils are much richer due to deposition of fine material that could become soil.

I take comparisons to Herman Kahn to be a compliment. Kahn had the courage to say no to the Malthusians and refute them during a time (the Nixon Administration) when Malthusians were at their most fashionable. Malthusianism has a long and dark pedigree. Perhaps the Malthusian ethos started with Chinese gentry who believed that limits enhanced harmony--a justification for forbidding Chinese from building ships that could travel far from China which ended Zheng He's voyages in the 1430s. The French "physiocrats" such as de Quensay got this idea from the Chinese as part of their infatuation with things Chinese and Malthus picked it up from them. Malthus's ideology became popular in the early 19th Century in the British aristocracy. Malthusianism guided British decisions to permit the potato famine in Ireland to kill millions of Irish and a similar famine in India to kill millions of Indians (see https://understandingevil.wordpress....still-with-us/ ) Later in the 19th Century, Malthusianism got subsumed into Social Darwinism and the Eugenics Movement. see http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/...nIdeology.html .
A larger population means more need for food -- and more depletion of resources. The Irish potato famine was a consequence of an economic decision to commit Ireland to a monoculture of potatoes which made Irish agriculture more vulnerable to a blight. That had little to do with overpopulation. India? Landlords used their power to take everything that the peasants grew. In both cases, greed meant mass death.

The Eugenics perspective dominated much of non-Marxist social thought and political economy right up until World War II. Eugenics and scientific racism was something that most educated people outside of the USSR accepted axiomatically, right up until the end of World War II.
Eugenics was a two-edged sword -- an effort not only to reduce the number of 'undesirable' births to 'undesirable' people but also to seek more births among 'desired' people. That had nothing to do with the size of population. It was to improve humanity by improving the stock -- as if Humanity could be improved as if people were breeding better cattle or horses. The smartest of dogs include German Shepherds... arguably the most dangerous breed of dog. Take away the good behavior and it is a "German Leopard".





It was at that point that a Eugenicist named Garrett Hardin apparently recruited a coterie of students, disciples and colleagues, most of whom were young enough not to have been tainted by association with eugenics, such as Paul Ehrlich, former Colorado Governor and current University of Denver Professor Richard D. Lamm and John Tanton to create the current population control wing of the environmental movement, a wing that has also successfully infiltrated the Republican Tea Party with an anti-immigrant agenda see http://www.splcenter.org/get-informe...Garrett-Hardin
Anti-immigrant sentiment by racists implies that a larger white population is a good idea, but a larger non-white population is a disaster. The pure Malthusians do not look at the 'quality' of immigrants as a criterion for deciding who should be let in and who should not; thus a brilliant engineer from India is as unwelcome as a peasant from India. Immigration is but one form of population growth.

Hardin is troublesome not for his ecology but for his racism. But that is for another post.

Also see http://www.amazon.com/The-Legacy-Mal.../dp/0252007905 . It may well be that the nativist aspects of Malthusianism helped to make environmentalism bipartisan during the Nixon Administration, a period in which our formative environmental legislation was written in ways that incorporated a great deal of Malthusian assumptions into law. Such as the Endangered Species Act, which writes into law a) legal definitions of species which have no relationship to scientific reality and b) assumptions about ecosystems which have been found to be scientifically incorrect --species are formed and become extinct a lot more fluidly than was realised in the 1970s--rather like product lines--and extinctions are as often the result of hybridization--barred and spotted owls--pizzlys--as species dying out. So much for "settled science"). Certainly, Nixon made no bones about his Malthusian sentiments. see http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents...0s/ch20_p4.php . And in Roe v Wade, so did Justice Blackmun who wrote the law (which does not mean that women do not have the right to effective birth control; sometimes we do the right thing for the wrong reasons (see https://www.all.org/abac/eugen02.htm).

Biology is not a closed subject. As do other sciences, biology culls out questionable parts of the acquired wisdom and adds new. Duh!

Small wonder that there was a backlash against the more Malthusian aspects of environmentalism beginning in the 1980s that translated into policies such as allowing Chinese women who faced prison for having a second child to get political asylum in the US.

The one-child policy in China was adopted for the purpose of allowing living standards to rise. Stabilize the population, and economic development can make life better -- and perhaps forestall famines and revolutions. If the one-child policy in China has prevented a bloody revolution or civil war, then so be it.

Walter Hickel and James Watt attempted to stop environmentalism in its tracks. But environmentalists were able to retreat into local and incremental action, using the public attorneys general provisions that they had gotten written into environmental law in the US and other Western developed nations to challenge projects that they were able to build opposition to. Which did not stop and indeed encouraged corporations to move environmentally harmful activities overseas to authoritarian nations could and did imprison and kill environmental activists and journalists who supported them.
Sure, so that we can have more economic growth we need to imprison or kill any 'Enemies of Progress' (see also Enemies of the People as identified in the infamous Section 58 of the Soviet penal code) -- strikers, gripers, environmentalists, muckraking journalists, opponents of those in power... I know how that sort of progress works --more income going to economic elites as sweating becomes the norm.

( A classic example of this is the unchecked pollution that journalists embedded with the US Navy found in the Persian Gulf and reported on before the military could stop them from doing so. US policies against drilling in Alaska and elsewhere contributed to the "drain America last" model that put the US in the position of encouraging dependence on the Mideast, which in the 1980s was relatively easy to defend in return for OPEC nations denominating oil in US dollars and accepting no other currency for oil. Which is where and how our current Mideast troubles began. It seemed like a good idea at the time).
The last of a limited resource is always the most valuable.

The conservative backlash may have forced the environmental movement to trim it's sails and move away from some of it's more outwardly Malthusian positions but this did not prevent it from learning Saul Alinskian insurgency politics and work at the local level, often making a decent living doing so. Herman Daly explained this as "Think globally! Act locally!". And environmentalists and Malthusians waited for an issue that could put their overall program back on the agenda. Which was what global warming has turned out to be.
In the process of doing this, the environmental movement sucked a lot of political oxygen away from the concerns of the poor and working Americans.
What contradiction is there between environmentalism and the poor? The poor usually take the brunt of environmental problems from heavy metal poisoning from smelters to toxic dumping. The anti-environmental agenda of the Koch interests is to maximize profits by cutting corners The Koch family will get the enhanced profits and the poor will get a wrecked world.

So now we come to the question of global warming as it has been put to us. Global warming is an issue, yes. So was the pollution that came out of the post WWII economic boom in the US--and which was finally controlled through pollution control technology. But Malthusians took a very real pollution problem and parlayed it into a particular agenda of how they wanted the US and the world to operate. And they are doing the same thing with global warming--which we CAN live with and prosper with even though we may not want to.
Do you have a problem with a country like Bangladesh being inundated before the current zone of boreal forests become fertile enough to farm?
Last edited by pbrower2a; 05-07-2015 at 09:59 AM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#541 at 05-07-2015 02:21 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Here is the stench:

Unsurprisingly, Hardin evinced a lifelong interest in eugenics and racial differences. He fiercely denounced the “equalitarians” who pointed out that there was no evidence to support his racist beliefs in the intellectual, psychological, and moral inferiority of nonwhites. Hardin was one of 52 signatories to Linda Gottfredson’s infamous 1994 Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Mainstream Science on Intelligence,” which claimed, among other things, that the average IQ among the black population was only 85, and that the average black 17-year-old was the mental equivalent of the average white 13-year-old. His beliefs about black intellectual inferiority take on even darker connotations when laid alongside his assertion in an undergraduate biology textbook that “[t]here seems to be little danger of society’s being deprived of something valuable by the sterilization of all feeble-minded individuals.” Demonstrating definitively that his concern with overpopulation was primarily a cover for his racist ideology, Hardin opposed groups like Zero Population Growth, which encouraged their primarily white membership to remain child-free. Richard Lynn, another signatory of “Mainstream Science on Intelligence” and noted purveyor of racist psychological theories, praised Hardin for his willingness to argue “that this would be dysgenic because the peoples of the first world are more intelligent than those in the third world.”
http://www.splcenter.org/get-informe...Garrett-Hardin
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#542 at 05-07-2015 04:28 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Gubernatorial approval, incumbent governors between the 2014 and 2016 elections

http://uselectionatlas.org/FORUM/ind...c0102d12dd1ce4



A positive approval rating under 45% is treated as a tie.

blue -- Republican incumbent with positive or neutral approval
20% -- tie (less than 1%) or positive approval under 45%
40% -- approval 45 - 49%
50% -- approval 50 - 54%
60% -- approval 55 - 59%
80% -- approval over 60%

green -- Republican incumbent with negative approval

20% -- approval 45 - 49%
40% -- approval 40 - 44%
50% -- approval 35 - 39%
80% -- approval under 35%


red --Democratic incumbent with positive or neutral approval
20% -- tie (less than 1%) or positive approval under 45%
40% -- approval 45 - 49%
50% -- approval 50 - 54%
60% -- approval 55 - 59%
80% -- approval over 60%

orange -- Democratic incumbent with negative approval

20% -- approval 45 - 49%
40% -- approval 40 - 44%
50% -- approval 35 - 39%
80% -- approval under 35%

No governor, governor in transition, or non-partisan governor -- white.

Positive approval under 45% -- (now treated as if a tie).

The newest poll takes precedence, but no internal polls or polls commissioned by a partisan entity, trade group, or union.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 05-07-2015 at 04:31 PM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#543 at 05-07-2015 05:07 PM by Cynic Hero '86 [at Upstate New York joined Jul 2006 #posts 1,285]
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Hillary being the nominee would snatch defeat from what should be a decisive victory for the democrats. Hillary would lose for the same reasons she lost in 2008.







Post#544 at 05-07-2015 05:16 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86 View Post
Hillary being the nominee would snatch defeat from what should be a decisive victory for the democrats. Hillary would lose for the same reasons she lost in 2008.
President Obama is not running for a third term.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#545 at 05-07-2015 05:19 PM by Cynic Hero '86 [at Upstate New York joined Jul 2006 #posts 1,285]
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Quote Originally Posted by pbrower2a View Post
President Obama is not running for a third term.
Yes, but Hillary is still Hillary, she would have the same negative factors that made her unpalatable in 2008. Not least the fact that she is known to be backed by special interest groups, as much or even more so than your typical GOP candidate.







Post#546 at 05-07-2015 09:07 PM by TnT [at joined Feb 2005 #posts 2,005]
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Quote Originally Posted by MordecaiK View Post
Looking back on Herman Kahn's predictions, many of them came true. And humanity is the better for them, at least so far. see
As for the boreal lands of Siberia and Canada being infertile, remember when people believed that the Amazon rainforest should be preserved because the tropical soils were too infertile for anything else? Guess what, Brazilian farmers figured out how to grow soy on former rainforest. And some of that soil, in certain river valleys are quite fertile. The Amazon rainforest is not natural, but the result of epidemics started by Europeans and Africans from smallpox to malaria that wiped out these civilisations before conquistadors could discover them. Even in Africa, agriculture is becoming prevalent on savannah land (though much of that agriculture is commercial agriculture benefiting overseas, particularly Chinese interests). So when I see reports of high amounts of microbes and carbon being released when permafrost melts see http://www.scientificamerican.com/ar...oxide-quickly/, I find that there is more reason for those soils to be fertile (since those soils were quick frozen in one or another of the Pleistocene glaciations and the climate prior to those glaciations was mid latitude deciduous forests) than tropical soils are. http://www.economist.com/node/16886442 .
I take comparisons to Herman Kahn to be a compliment. Kahn had the courage to say no to the Malthusians and refute them during a time (the Nixon Administration) when Malthusians were at their most fashionable. Malthusianism has a long and dark pedigree. Perhaps the Malthusian ethos started with Chinese gentry who believed that limits enhanced harmony--a justification for forbidding Chinese from building ships that could travel far from China which ended Zheng He's voyages in the 1430s. The French "physiocrats" such as de Quensay got this idea from the Chinese as part of their infatuation with things Chinese and Malthus picked it up from them. Malthus's ideology became popular in the early 19th Century in the British aristocracy. Malthusianism guided British decisions to permit the potato famine in Ireland to kill millions of Irish and a similar famine in India to kill millions of Indians (see https://understandingevil.wordpress....still-with-us/ ) Later in the 19th Century, Malthusianism got subsumed into Social Darwinism and the Eugenics Movement. see http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/...nIdeology.html .
The Eugenics perspective dominated much of non-Marxist social thought and political economy right up until World War II. Eugenics and scientific racism was something that most educated people outside of the USSR accepted axiomatically, right up until the end of World War II. It was at that point that a Eugenicist named Garrett Hardin apparently recruited a coterie of students, disciples and colleagues, most of whom were young enough not to have been tainted by association with eugenics, such as Paul Ehrlich, former Colorado Governor and current University of Denver Professor Richard D. Lamm and John Tanton to create the current population control wing of the environmental movement, a wing that has also successfully infiltrated the Republican Tea Party with an anti-immigrant agenda see http://www.splcenter.org/get-informe...Garrett-Hardin . Also see http://www.amazon.com/The-Legacy-Mal.../dp/0252007905 . It may well be that the nativist aspects of Malthusianism helped to make environmentalism bipartisan during the Nixon Administration, a period in which our formative environmental legislation was written in ways that incorporated a great deal of Malthusian assumptions into law. Such as the Endangered Species Act, which writes into law a) legal definitions of species which have no relationship to scientific reality and b) assumptions about ecosystems which have been found to be scientifically incorrect --species are formed and become extinct a lot more fluidly than was realised in the 1970s--rather like product lines--and extinctions are as often the result of hybridization--barred and spotted owls--pizzlys--as species dying out. So much for "settled science"). Certainly, Nixon made no bones about his Malthusian sentiments. see http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/presidents...0s/ch20_p4.php . And in Roe v Wade, so did Justice Blackmun who wrote the law (which does not mean that women do not have the right to effective birth control; sometimes we do the right thing for the wrong reasons (see https://www.all.org/abac/eugen02.htm).
Small wonder that there was a backlash against the more Malthusian aspects of environmentalism beginning in the 1980s that translated into policies such as allowing Chinese women who faced prison for having a second child to get political asylum in the US. Walter Hickel and James Watt attempted to stop environmentalism in it's tracks. But environmentalists were able to retreat into local and incremental action, using the public attorneys general provisions that they had gotten written into environmental law in the US and other Western developed nations to challenge projects that they were able to build opposition to. Which did not stop and indeed encouraged corporations to move environmetally harmful activities overseas to authoritarian nations could and did imprison and kill environmental activists and journalists who supported them. ( A classic example of this is the unchecked pollution that journalists embedded with the US Navy found in the Persian Gulf and reported on before the military could stop them from doing so. US policies against drilling in Alaska and elsewhere contributed to the "drain America last" model that put the US in the position of encouraging dependence on the Mideast, which in the 1980s was relatively easy to defend in return for OPEC nations denominating oil in US dollars and accepting no other currency for oil. Which is where and how our current Mideast troubles began. It seemed like a good idea at the time).
The conservative backlash may have forced the environmental movement to trim it's sails and move away from some of it's more outwardly Malthusian positions but this did not prevent it from learning Saul Alinskian insurgency politics and work at the local level, often making a decent living doing so. Herman Daly explained this as "Think globally! Act locally!". And environmentalists and Malthusians waited for an issue that could put their overall program back on the agenda. Which was what global warming has turned out to be.
In the process of doing this, the environmental movement sucked a lot of political oxygen away from the concerns of the poor and working Americans. Environmentalists were not responsible for the AFL-CIO's abandonment of the Democrats over the nomination of George McGovern in 1972. But they arguably made it easier for the Democratic Party to abandon Labour to the tender mercies of the Republicans, who distracted them with social issues (not the least of which was abortion) while encouraging corporations to break unions in the private sector. While Democrats reinvented themselves as "New Democrats", becoming the party of minorities, the college educated and public employees--and willing to make dishonourable compromises with Republicans on issues from health care to welfare reform that they knew would harm poorer and working class Americans as soon as the Clinton Era boom ended.
So now we come to the question of global warming as it has been put to us. Global warming is an issue, yes. So was the pollution that came out of the post WWII economic boom in the US--and which was finally controlled through pollution control technology. But Malthusians took a very real pollution problem and parlayed it into a particular agenda of how they wanted the US and the world to operate. And they are doing the same thing with global warming--which we CAN live with and prosper with even though we may not want to.
Gawd-almighty!! Put some paragraphs in! Endless single-space puts one to sleep.
" ... a man of notoriously vicious and intemperate disposition."







Post#547 at 05-07-2015 11:04 PM by pbrower2a [at "Michigrim" joined May 2005 #posts 15,014]
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Quote Originally Posted by TnT View Post
Gawd-almighty!! Put some paragraphs in! Endless single-space puts one to sleep.
Rule #1 of competent writing -- think in paragraphs, even if you do stream-of-consciousness.
Last edited by pbrower2a; 05-08-2015 at 12:50 AM.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."


― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters







Post#548 at 05-11-2015 10:21 AM by '58 Flat [at Hardhat From Central Jersey joined Jul 2001 #posts 3,300]
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Quote Originally Posted by Cynic Hero '86 View Post
Yes, but Hillary is still Hillary, she would have the same negative factors that made her unpalatable in 2008. Not least the fact that she is known to be backed by special interest groups, as much or even more so than your typical GOP candidate.

But "special interest backing" is to politics - at least Presidential politics - what height and reach are to MMA fights: Sure, it is possible for a fighter to overcome deficiencies in that area - see Rashad Evans, who has been able to to do it on a consistent basis for a dozen years now! - but it is the exception, not the rule.

A far-left Democratic candidate; e.g. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, would have far too great a disadvantage to overcome to have any realistic chance of defeating a Koch brothers-financed candidate in a general election. Face it: Hillary is the only one who could do it.
But maybe if the putative Robin Hoods stopped trying to take from law-abiding citizens and give to criminals, take from men and give to women, take from believers and give to anti-believers, take from citizens and give to "undocumented" immigrants, and take from heterosexuals and give to homosexuals, they might have a lot more success in taking from the rich and giving to everyone else.

Don't blame me - I'm a Baby Buster!







Post#549 at 05-11-2015 11:05 AM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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AND to point out that Hillary was quite "palatable" in 2008. She did well, and was beaten only because her opponent was more charismatic and strategically smart, and because of the strong anti-war sentiment which Obama appealed to and Hillary did not.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece







Post#550 at 05-13-2015 12:47 PM by Eric the Green [at San Jose CA joined Jul 2001 #posts 22,504]
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Newsmax article on Democratic primary:

Kerry, O'Malley Among Top 10 Hillary Challengers

Wednesday, 13 May 2015 09:40 AM
By John Gizzi

(with my horoscope presidential rating for each challenger) (Hillary = 9-8 plus Uranus rising add 2 or 3 + points)

Amid a stream of unfavorable news reports about Hillary Clinton’s emails, the ongoing Benghazi probe, and the dealings of the Clinton Foundation, there is growing buzz among leading Democrats that Hillary Clinton may expect a stiff challenge to her once certain grasp on the party’s presidential nomination next year.

Possibilities range from past presidential nominees John Kerry and Al Gore to “newbies” such as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

But strategists say the most successful challenge would come from a left-wing candidate and a women. Elizabeth Warren fits the bill but has vowed not to run. Or so she says.

Massachusetts Sen. Warren has become the darling of the left. Her opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement earned her criticism from President Barack Obama, but her successful Senate effort to block the bill has earned her more plaudits from party comrades.

For now, Clinton’s lone opponent for the nomination is Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent who votes with Democrats in the Senate.

A just-completed Quinnipiac poll showed that among voters in Iowa, Clinton leads Sanders at next year’s first-in-the-nation caucuses there with 60 percent support to 15 percent.

But given recent developments and some nationwide polls, this could change rapidly.

The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed the former secretary of state rated favorably by 42% of likely voters nationwide and 42% unfavorably. This is down from March, when the same poll showed Clinton’s favorable-unfavorable at 44%-36%.

Here are some “Hillary challengers” being mentioned:

1. John Kerry, 71, Clinton’s successor as secretary of state, was the nearly-successful Democratic nominee against George W. Bush in 2004. The former Massachusetts senator remains a sentimental favorite among his party’s liberal grass roots and can always count on needed funding, thanks to wife Teresa Heinz Kerry (widow of the late Republican Sen. John Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune). No friend of the Clintons, Kerry delivered a key endorsement to Obama at a critical point in the ’08 nomination battle with then-New York Sen. Hillary Clinton. Some Obama acolytes are said to be courting Kerry, who came within the electoral votes of one state (Ohio) of unseating Bush in ’04.
score: 7-9

2. Al Gore, 67, also evokes warm sentiments among grass-roots Democrats, many of whom believe he actually won the disputed 2000 election against Bush. It is no secret that Bill Clinton’s vice president has grown distant from his ticket mate and, like Kerry, he supported Obama over Hillary Clinton in ’08. Working against a “Gore II” bid are his divorce from wife Tipper, unfavorable reviews for recent speeches on his personal crusade for climate change, and some weight gain. Climate change continues to animate the Democratic left, so Gore remains viable.
score: 13-6 (most viable score, besides Sanders. He virtually won before, after all.)

3. Jerry Brown, 77, incredibly, is governor of California today and its oldest governor, 40 years after becoming the Golden State’s youngest governor. Once ridiculed as “Gov. Moonbeam” for his meanderings about outer space, Brown has lost three past bids for the Democratic nomination. Now legally termed out from ever running for governor again in 2018, no one rules out a fourth Brown bid for the nomination.
score: 2-8, plus a few + points for two rising planets (adds "personality" to a candidate). Not good.

4. Andrew Cuomo, 57, was just re-elected to his second term as governor of New York and, having served as Bill Clinton’s housing secretary, has good relations with the Clinton family and its political organization. The son of the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo —a beloved liberal icon in his heyday — the younger Cuomo has tried to hold the line on spending in the Empire State to the consternation of the left. Known for his hair-trigger temper, Cuomo lives with girlfriend Sandy Lee. With the indictment of Democratic Assembly Speaker and close ally Sheldon Silver, recent polls show the governor's popularity plummeting.
score: 10-7

5. Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, 69, insists he’s running, but as nationally-syndicated columnist Michael Barone noted to Newsmax, “he won his only Senate term [in ‘06] with anti-war Northern Virginia liberals who don’t want him as president now." A best-selling novelist, decorated U.S. Marine Corps veteran in Vietnam and briefly secretary of the navy under Republican President Ronald Reagan, Webb stunned Old Dominion Democrats by unseating Sen. George Allen in ’06 only to announce his retirement in ’12.
score: 14-8

6. Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, 52, dubbed during his stint as mayor of Baltimore as the Democratic Party’s “hottest political property since Jack Kennedy” by Chris Matthews, is seriously exploring the race. Working against him is a record number of tax increases while he was governor and his chosen heir losing the governorship to Republican Larry Hogan in a state that went 62 percent for Obama.
score: 14-14

7. Rahm Emanuel 55, is an intriguing prospect, months after being re-elected mayor of Chicago over a spirited left-of-center challenger. Once top political adviser in the Clinton White House and Obama’s first chief of staff, Emmanuel as mayor took a hard line against demands of striking teachers. Uber-agent brother Ari could bring in heavy Hollywood endorsements.
score: 12-13

8. New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio, 54, an unabashed leftist, has sparked recent speculation about running. He recently made a tour through the Midwest touting a progressive agenda. De Blasio’s black wife and son, whom he proudly points to as a modern mixed family, could draw significant black votes in Democratic primaries.
score: 5-17

9. Deval Patrick, 58, was the first black governor of Massachusetts (he left office in January) and one-time head of the Civil Rights Division in the U.S. Department of Justice. Reportedly a personal friend of President Obama’s, the former governor made news recently with a spirited defense of the rollout of Obamacare in his state. Obama proved that a black candidate in the Democratic party starts with an enormous base.
score: 5-7

10. Joe Biden, 72, brings out one intriguing common denominator among political scientists and Democratic operatives Newsmax spoke to: not one so much as mentioned the name of the vice president, who no doubt would like to be a candidate. Biden, who will be 73 in 2016, is the second-youngest vice president in history after fellow Democrat Alben Barkley (Harry Truman’s vice president, who was 74 when he left office). Said to be disliked by Obama and his entourage, Biden is popular among rank-and-file Democrats.
score: 14-11
Note: I had always heard that Obama likes him. And they no doubt mean "oldest" above, not "youngest."

For the moment Hillary Clinton looks certain to be the nominee. But she appeared to be certain this time in 2007 when a freshman senator from Illinois stunned the political world in Iowa. It could happen again.


Read Latest Breaking News from Newsmax.com http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/hil...#ixzz3a2LDZiL2
Last edited by Eric the Green; 05-13-2015 at 12:54 PM.
"I close my eyes, and I can see a better day" -- Justin Bieber

Keep the spirit alive,

Eric A. Meece
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