U.S. Election - Onward to New Hampshire

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

9 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Tell that to my friend who died at 69 two months ago having retired a whole month before he passed.  Predetermining retirement ages based on profession seems, to me, to be a prima facia violation of the equal protection clauses.

Er... do you know the first thing about Equal Protection jurisprudence? This is just not even remotely true. "Profession" is not a protected or suspect category like race, national origin, sex, religion, etc. At best you would have a claim evaluated under the "rational basis" test, which means that the government wins. 

But more obviously... the state treats different professions differently all the time. See, for example, licensing requirements for doctors, lawyers, etc. See also, for example, mandatory retirement ages for police officers, air traffic controllers, pilots, federal law enforcement agents, etc. 

This is actually not a new issue. When Congress amended the Social Security Act in 1983 to increase the retirement age, the Social Security Administration did a number of studies to evaluate the impact this would have on American workers. As part of this, the SSA specifically looked at the impact of increased retirement ages on workers in physically demanding occupations. Surprise surprise - it sucks a lot worse for them. It would be trivially easy to amend the law to pass constitutional muster. The real impediment to such amendments to the law being passed are political - it would just be wildly unpopular. 

[Bonesy]

Political acumen or distasteful tactics?

A Nevada resident speaks about being push-polled.

http://www.nolandalla.com/i-just-got-push-polled-by-hillary-clintons-nevada-campaign/

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

10 minutes ago, Bonesy said:

Political acumen or distasteful tactics?

A Nevada resident speaks about being push-polled.

http://www.nolandalla.com/i-just-got-push-polled-by-hillary-clintons-nevada-campaign/

I assume there's a way that could have been written without Mr. Dalla sounding like an obnoxious, self-righteous, thin-skinned baby. Unfortunately, he did not find that way. 

[Bonesy]

Waaaaaaaaah.

Does the style change the message?

[NestorMakhnosLovechild]

8 minutes ago, Bonesy said:

Waaaaaaaaah.

Does the style change the message?

What really blunts the message about OMG HOW TERRIBLE the Clinton campaign is the fact that the Sanders campaign is, you know, not at all above dirty tricks like... accessing proprietary Clinton campaign data, distributing campaign materials that falsely imply Sanders is being endorsed by organizations that don't endorse him, and having campaign workers falsely pretending to be Culinary Union members to gain access to private union areas to solicit the workers there. 

[Bonesy]

Those are legitimate criticisms.

Feel free to address the asked question at your leisure.

[DireWolfSpirit]

17 hours ago, A Prince of Dorne said:

I agree that votes should not be cast based on debates. Debates are typically a complete sham.

On the three items you mentioned: anti-union isn't so bad, unions deserve some heat for the way they've been operating the past 20 years. Privatized prisons, I'll pass on that, not a good idea. Planned parenthood, I just wish they would stop talking about it. I really couldn't care less

I agree privatizing prisons is a shaky practice imo. But you post is a bit contradictory when you consider avoidance of a union workforce is one of, if not the top, motivations for privatizing in the first place, thereby making the practice a darling to the anti-union.

[mormont]

5 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

I disagree. 

That's fine, but you're disagreeing with a factual statement, not an opinion.

Comments on opinion pieces have much more significant validity problems than even telephone polls. For one thing, you're relying on people having an internet connection, which may or may not be as common as having a landline, but undoubtedly leaves out a lot of the same people who are excluded from telephone polling and whose absence makes those unreliable. In addition, as Ormond points out, it's a self-selecting sample, as if you'd given out a number for people to call the telephone poll rather than being called by them, so it's non-random. And it's a sample drawn from people who frequent those particular sites in the first place, compounding that problem. On top of all that, you presumably don't have any age, income, gender or racial data about the commenters, so can't even say whether the sample is balanced or representative of the population at large.

So yeah, the telephone polls are still more reliable and valid than your ad hoc sampling. You may believe differently, but beliefs don't change facts, I'm afraid. What you're doing is more like divination than polling.

Now, if you want to say that the telephone polls could in theory be replaced or supplemented by some sort of systematic, balanced internet polling, I'd agree, but the main polling companies have been looking for a good way to do that for quite a while.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Living in SC we've gotten lots of telephone poll calls.  We don't respond.

Nestor,

Interesting, licensure for different professions having different standards makes sense as they are regulating different professions.  Giving an attorney the medical boards wouldn't make much sense.

Social Security is a monentary benefit provided to everyone in the US who reaches a certain age, or, who is declared disabled.  It is offered across the board and has no strings beyond the age you must reach to get the full benefit.  As the framework of retirement ages based upon profession wasn't adopted by the Social Security Administration can you say with certainty that it wouldn't have equal protection problems if adopted?  Different attorneys, different doctors, differnent truck drivers all have very different experiences and carrers.  Does attempting to averages those out across an entire profession rather than having a single uniform retirement age really promote a more equitable system or just make the system's subjectivity more pronounced?  

You may find my speculation of equal protection problems with a carrer based retirement age system unfathomable but until it is tested in the courts we will not know if such a system would pass muster.

[Ordos]

Some more useless trivia: The Democratic party have a primary for Democrats abroad. I think Americans in foreign countries can vote at the embassies or consulates. Why no Republicans abroad primary?

[TrackerNeil]

Norm Ornstein tells it like it is on Bernie Sanders' envisioned revolution: 

Quote

But the notion that public opinion governs the agenda or the actions of Congress is, at best, a stretch. Going over the heads of Congress has long been a staple of frustrated presidents, and it has almost never worked; see Bill Clinton on health care and George W. Bush on Social Security among other recent examples. And these days, with most congressional districts resembling homogeneous echo chambers, created by a combination of people sorting themselves geographically and the distortions of redistricting, national public opinion has limited bearing on congressional leaders.

 

[OnionAhaiReborn]

Hillary Clinton and the Anti-Democratic Origins of American Politics

It has long been a truism of American politics that electoral success is impossible without genuflecting to the founders and the flag. This is always absurd, not to mention frequently ahistorical, as when Thomas Jefferson, who prescribed a revolution every twenty years or so, is toasted as the paragon of stable conservatism. In recent years, however, the tendency has reached new heights of idiocy. When he announced his campaign for the presidency last year, self-described “constitutional conservative” Ted Cruz compared himself to Patrick Henry, the Virginia revolutionist who fiercely opposed the Constitution in the debate over its ratification. “I have the highest veneration of those Gentlemen,” Henry said of the propertied elite who took it upon themselves to write a new, more creditor-friendly Constitution. “But…what right had they to say, We, the People?”

It is refreshing, then, that a candidate for the highest office in the land appears to possess an at least slightly nuanced understanding of the American founding and all its annoying complexity—including the class struggle that contemporaneous participants and observers understood to be at the core of the intense battle over it. The argument that American politics is and ought to be fundamentally anti-democratic appears to be the latest pin with which Hillary Clinton is trying to pierce the Bernie Sanders balloon.

In an interview last week with MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, who alley-ooped the former Secretary of State by saying of Sanders, “You can call for a revolution but it ain’t gonna happen,” Clinton responded:

"Our system is set up to make it difficult. Checks and balances. Separation of powers. Our Founders knew, if we were going to survive as the great democracy that they were creating, we had to have a system that kept the passions at bay. We had to have people who were willing to roll up their sleeves and compromise. We couldn’t have ideologues who were just hurling their rhetoric back and forth. We had to actually produce results. That hasn’t changed since George Washington."

First, let’s dispense with the contradiction at the core of this argument. Very simply, and incontrovertibly: the Founders did not intend to create a “great democracy.” They were terrified of democracy, and of the people. That’s why they secretly gathered in Philadelphia in the first place: bands of angry and indebted Revolutionary War veterans were marching around the countryside in Massachusetts and elsewhere, threatening to shut down courts and to take over military arsenals if the state governments didn’t stop burdening them with oppressive taxes to pay off the wealthy bondholders who had snatched up promissory notes given to soldiers at the end of the war against Britain. Robbed both coming and going—by the weak federal government, who tried to create a new American aristocracy by giving military officers far more lavish pay than their men, and by tax-happy state governments in hock to those nascent aristocrats—the rebels demanded less taxation and more representation. The point of the Constitution was to give them exactly the opposite.

...

Then there’s the part about compromise as the great attribute of American politics. Is Clinton referring to the several 19th century compromises that preserved slavery? Or does she mean for us to think of Abraham Lincoln’s attempts to bring the South back into the Union by proposing a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution—not the one ratified in 1865 that banned slavery, but the one in 1861 that would have enshrined it in the Constitution forever? How about the 1877 compromise that granted Rutherford B. Hayes the presidency so long as he pulled troops out of the South, ending Reconstruction? Well, we already know how Clinton feels about that one. It’s unclear who Clinton expects will be persuaded by this argument. The only possible explanation is that Clinton really does believe that these kinds of compromises represent the best of the American political tradition, and that the country ought to elect a president who promises more of the same.

Yet we must give Clinton-as-historian credit where due: there is, indeed, much support for the idea that the Founders instituted checks and balances within the federal government not to prevent any one branch from dominating another—the standard grade-school explanation, which is to say, in America, the standard explanation—but rather to keep the passions of the people at bay, and this is why her citation of George Washington is so astute, and so revealing.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

Historicially speaking I find it profoundly ironic that the Constitution loving "tea party" has the most in common with the Anti-Federalists who warned that adoption of the US Constitution would lead to the enevitable strengthening of the National federal government at the expense of the States and argued against adoption and ratification on that basis.

I wonder how many tea-party activists realize they are repeating the arguments of people who opposed the ratification of the document they appear to deify?

[DireWolfSpirit]

^^^ Or what a tremendous influence the "dastardly French" had on its crafting.

[Martell Spy]

Looks like the Democratic primary is heating up. Even Bill Clinton got in on attacking Sanders recently.

[Trebla]

So Donald Trump basically just called Ted Cruz a p*ssy. When I say "basically", I mean Trump repeats why a lady yelled out while pretending to chide the lady. Wow.

[mormont]

I mean, I expect that sort of thing from Trump at this point. I think he's established very firmly that there's nothing he won't say if he thinks it gives him an advantage of any sort. Nothing's shocking when it comes from Trump any more. Awful, reprehensible, disgraceful, embarrassing, perhaps, but not shocking.

In a way that's becoming a problem for him. It's not newsworthy any more when he says awful things. He doesn't get so many free headlines out of it.

[Lyanna Stark]

On 2016-02-08 at 1:03 AM, Bonesy said:

High profile Clinton supporters continue to insult the fuck out of young women. This should go well.

http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/02/07/rebuke-swift-after-albright-declares-special-place-hell-women-who-dont-vote-clinton?utm_campaign=shareaholic&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source=socialnetwork

 

I actually feel Albright is getting too much critique about this, since if you read the longer transcript, it's clear it's aimed at promoting a female president as a good thing. The headline is misleading, since she doesn't say there is a special place in hell for women who don't vote for Clinton.

Besides, the "there's a special place in hell..." used in conjunction with some sort of construction like "for women who don't support other women" is not uncommon with feminists or in feminist commentary. I cannot say whether Albright knew or didn't know this, but generally the commentary is aimed at women who put other women down to get ahead, or who are Unique Snowflake Women (i.e. the only woman good enough to be counted among the men). At its basic level it is a criticism of internalised sexism.

 

EDIT: Actually, upon googling it, Albright has used that exact saying before, it seems. And in general, I agree with her on that.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Lyanna,

So, by that logic women who don't support Sec. Clinton for President are betraying women and need to go to a "special hell" because they aren't supporting a woman?  How is that different from saying "if you are a woman and don't vote for Sec. Clinton you should go to a special hell"?

[TrackerNeil]

51 minutes ago, Lyanna Stark said:

I actually feel Albright is getting too much critique about this, since if you read the longer transcript, it's clear it's aimed at promoting a female president as a good thing. The headline is misleading, since she doesn't say there is a special place in hell for women who don't vote for Clinton.

Besides, the "there's a special place in hell..." used in conjunction with some sort of construction like "for women who don't support other women" is not uncommon with feminists or in feminist commentary. I cannot say whether Albright knew or didn't know this, but generally the commentary is aimed at women who put other women down to get ahead, or who are Unique Snowflake Women (i.e. the only woman good enough to be counted among the men). At its basic level it is a criticism of internalised sexism.

Yes, I think that the reaction to Albright's remarks reveal more about the reactors than they do about Albright herself.