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US Politics: The Morning After


Xray the Enforcer

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So, the "Republican" tweets centering on the theme of moving to Australia has to be a bit of pre-organized trolling, right? A destination that just happens to have a female, atheist, very left-wing (at least by our standards) PM seems a suspiciously unanimous choice of destination for the petulant. I buy the stupidity but not the apparent unanimity.

ETA: If Republicans are looking for a country that matches their sensibilities to move to, I hear Iran is nice this time of year.

Well it's about as sensible as "Keep your gov't hands off my Medicare" or "This country's gotten too liberal, I'm moving to Canada." It's the end result of two generations' worth of a political movement cultivating anti-rationality.

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So, the "Republican" tweets centering on the theme of moving to Australia has to be a bit of pre-organized trolling, right? A destination that just happens to have a female, atheist, very left-wing (at least by our standards) PM seems a suspiciously unanimous choice of destination for the petulant. I buy the stupidity but not the apparent unanimity.

ETA: If Republicans are looking for a country that matches their sensibilities to move to, I hear Iran is nice this time of year.

We also have universal health care, a female, unmarried atheist leader, incredibly tight gun control, no death penalty, a carbon tax, and only evolution taught in schools. Also migrating here is a bitch, Australia is innately skeptical of refugees, and any clown claiming they're being politically opressed by the Obama administration would be laughed back on the plane.

Either it's trolling, or some seriously misinformed people.

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Well it's about as sensible as "Keep your gov't hands off my Medicare" or "This country's gotten too liberal, I'm moving to Canada." It's the end result of two generations' worth of a political movement cultivating anti-rationality.

Well yeah, but those were one or two idiots in a crowd. This seemed more organized.

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You can't make PR the 51st state. Whole swathes of British culture will have to be rewritten.

Hereward,

there are now only nine people in the UK who remember all the lyrics to Heartland and that's assuming Matt Johnson still knows them as well as we do.

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Ugh, so tired. Glad I put in to take the morning off.

Its interesting to me though I unemotional I feel right now. I'm happy, obviously, and I thought the President gave a great speech last night; but I'm so utterly unsurprised by how everything shook out that I just don't feel very strongly about it all. I became convinced Obama would win re-election in pretty much this exact manner back in July, and I never wavered from it at all, and it almost doesn't even feel like an event to me that he did; its something that I processed months ago.

Same goes for the distribution in the Senate and (roughly) the House (had hopes there'd be a few more gains there though). I'm actually more interested in seeing how all the ballot questions go and what happened in the state legislatures than anything else, since those were topics I didn't look at much (speaking of which, it appears that Democrats have finally taken supermajorties in California's chambers and may, may have finally taken New York State's senate).

I do greatly look forward to seeing what the President will do over these next four years of course. How he responding to the fiscal cliff will almost certainly be the defining moment of his legacy (even moreso than the ACA).

Four more years!

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We also have universal health care, a female, unmarried atheist leader, incredibly tight gun control, no death penalty, a carbon tax, and only evolution taught in schools. Also migrating here is a bitch, Australia is innately skeptical of refugees, and any clown claiming they're being politically opressed by the Obama administration would be laughed back on the plane.

Either it's trolling, or some seriously misinformed people.

I highly doubt a single person who said they're moving to Australia knows this.

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I don't really see how you can say the bolded?

Here I'll report my edit to post #73, as I'm not sure if you would have seen it before we moved on to the next page:

Took me awhile to figure this out, but according to Wiki (http://en.wikipedia....eferendum,_2012), voters vote on the second question regardless of their vote on the first question. So, if there's a "yes" on the first question, then the story will be that PR wants statehood.

That's a bit disingenuous, IMO, since you'd have to guess that phrased as one question, a plurality would want the status quo at 47%, with the other numbers looking something like 35% for statehood, 16.5% for sovereign free association and 2% wanting independence.

It would be like running the Presidential election by asking if voters wanted to keep Barack Obama - yes or no? And then, if no, who do they want to replace him? Wouldn't lead to the same result we got last night, I guarantee it.

In summary, what the results say to me is that if there has to be a change, 65% of the voters want statehood. But 47% don't want a change. Then, there's no link between which option those who do want a change actually want, so you can't even say that 65% of the 57% who want change want statehood.

As was suggested by many in Puerto Rico, this is not going to be a very solid basis for approving statehood and gives those who would oppose it something to work with on the basis of going with what "the majority wants" since, by the data, it is possible that more people want no change than want any one of the individual changes suggested - this is true if you assign an equal proportion of the yes/no votes on the first question to each option on the second question.

Of course it is totally statistically possible that the entirety of the 53% who voted for change also voted for statehood, which would make it a real majority for statehood, if only it had been asked that way.

Is it possible that the votes were tabulated showing the relationship between the two answers? Because that would really solve everything.

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Also, because I didn't get a chance when the Trump discussion was going on in the previous thread, let's revisit the moment Trump's desperate attempts to remain relevant Presidential ambitions ended: the White House Correspondents' dinner, when he was mercilessly squashed by Obama and Seth Meyer, and fled the room shortly thereafter with his hair billowing somewhere above him:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2011/05/01/obama-seth-meyers-joke-about-trump-at-white-house-correspondents-dinner.html

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OK, I suck at the internet sometimes. I want to find the Maddow rant people were talking about yesterday. Anyone got a link?

Where she was having a dig at Karl Rove and the right's inability to accept facts? Best version I've found of it is here;

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-slams-karl-rove-the-gop-questioning-what-used-to-be-basic-agreed-upon-data/

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I highly doubt a single person who said they're moving to Australia knows this.

Which forces me to ask the million dollar question; where did these people get the idea Australia is some kind of conservative paradise? A simple Google search would dispel this notion.

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I don't really see how you can say the bolded?

I believe the idea is that if you combined it into a single question, the outcome would look more like this (assuming the distributions still held, which is a big assumption):

Stay as-is: 46.1%

Change to full statehood: 53.9% * 61.15%, or roughly 32.96% overall.

Change to free state: 53.9% * 33.31%, or roughly 17.95% overall.

Change to total independence: 53.9% * 5.53%, or roughly 2.98% overall.

No option would have a majority, and the option with the highest vote would be the status quo.

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