Hard News: Unreasonable people vote
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'I am your senator and, to you who lobbied hardest and most expensively, I will remove the tax on fairy dust.'
The political ads running in my district basically go "The government has given you lots of money because I made them do it. Vote for me." So......yeah.
And the sad thing is: I am quite fond of the positions held by the incumbent congressman in my district. But that's simply not what he's campaigning on. (The congressman in the next district over has consistently won 98-99% of the vote in the last few elections. Imagine that in a New Zealand electorate.)
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Talking Points Memo has polling graphs of 38 key races.
Some well-known Democrats are going to be looking for work on Wednesday.
And Rand Paul's opponent going negative on him has backfired. I know they've had complete loons in the Senate before, but Paul is really quite special.
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If I was an American Democrat I would be pretty annoyed that Hillary Clinton is at the bottom of the world shaking hands with a right wing Prime Minister, rather than using all her celebrity power to get the Democrat vote out at this crucial time.
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Reposting this from elsewhere (just because it's relevant, I guess):
So I have this friend in the US I’ve been chatting to on and off for the last six months maybe? She seemed pretty cool, but kind of uptight (every day she’d be stressed about some minor thing one of her roommates had done.)
I knew that she was a PoliSci major, and was working for a “local political campaign” in Kentucky as some sort of aide, but she never mentioned the name of the campaign or the politician (probably assuming that, as a New Zealander, I wasn’t really up with the play with US politics.) I didn’t ask her too much about it, because I don’t like talking politics with people online except in the most general terms.
Anyway, a couple of days ago we were chatting, and she mentioned she was getting no sleep because of the run up to the congressional elections-she had that many rallies and events and media gigs and whatnot that she was fully booked until like a week after the election. Thinking that I was being awesomely witty and topical, I said, “Oh, geeze, I hope your guy doesn’t have you pencilled in to stomp on any protestors’ heads or anything, you’d have no time to yourself at all!”
So, yeah, turns out “her guy” is Rand Paul. And that the media is so biased (except Fox News) and that foreigners like myself have no right to make judgements on local political events and that that lady’s head totally got itself in the way of a completely innocent stomping motion, etc, etc
Needless to say, I am no longer her favourite person. Eh, what can you do.
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@ Hilary,
Hillary Clinton also motivates alot of Republicans and independents to vote agianst whatever she is for. Is NZ far enough away?
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Anyone who's name includes "Hussein", is black (and not even REAL American dinkum "black") is on a hiding to nothing. No amount of Democrat voting is going to overcome rabid right wing religious rantings of woe if you try and vote the party of this 'enemy' back into power.
As an exercise in futility this past weekend, I irrregularly checked out FOX NOOs. Woe woe woe. Nothing but Democratic Woe. And they have been at it for weeks. And it is all skin deep, shallow and lacking in any form of analysis.
What scares the living shit out of me is that people listen to it.
Maybe John Stewart is right about the place needing a sanity injection. The country is not run by "we the people" it is run by Washington marketing witches and technocrats who are paid to wheel and deal in fear.
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So, yeah, turns out “her guy” is Rand Paul. And that the media is so biased (except Fox News) and that foreigners like myself have no right to make judgements on local political events and that that lady’s head totally got itself in the way of a completely innocent stomping motion, etc, etc
So a PolSci major is working for a candidate who thinks the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a mistake, who belongs to a weird conservative doctors' group that questions the link between HIV and AIDS, and who has been regularly discussing the threat of the New World Order on Alex Jones' radio show.
America is fucked.
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America is fucked.
Nice sane T shirt methinks. :)
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The Tea Party-backed Republican candidate for Senate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, believes in the "Nafta Superhighway", a mythical 10-lane road supposedly being secretly built to help erase national borders and create a single North American state under a collective currency called the Amero. Did I mention he's fucking crazy? Crazier than his dad? And that he's going to enter the US Senate this week?
Sounds just like the 1st World equivalent of the Tin-Pot Dictator's Palace (TM). An expensive monument to ego, built while the proles starve.
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America is fucked.
Nice sane T shirt methinks. :)
put me down for 6
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America is fucked.
I'll bring you back a 'Rand Paul for President' button in January, if you like. ;)
(Throughout the Bush II years I thought about wearing a 'Nixon: Now, More Than Ever' vintage button but never got around to buying one.)
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So a PolSci major is working for a candidate who thinks the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a mistake, who belongs to a weird conservative doctors' group that questions the link between HIV and AIDS, and who has been regularly discussing the threat of the New World Order on Alex Jones' radio show.
America is fucked.
The worst thing is: these are not bad people. They're not stupid. They're not spending hours each day burning crosses on their neighbours' lawns. They're not uneducated or ignorant of history. They're lovely people and you could spend hours at their dinner table having the time of your life as long as politics and/or religion wasn't mentioned.
And yet they support the most extreme policies with this terrifyingly clear-eyed fanaticism. That's where the real disconnect occurs, I think-not between "sane Americans" and "insane Americans" but between almost all Americans and their political beliefs.
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(Throughout the Bush II years I thought about wearing a 'Nixon: Now, More Than Ever' vintage button but never got around to buying one.)
I gave the Bush T shirt 'A village in Texas is missing it's idiot" to my Dad. It's the sort of thing he collects.
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And yet they support the most extreme policies with this terrifyingly clear-eyed fanaticism. That's where the real disconnect occurs, I think-not between "sane Americans" and "insane Americans" but between almost all Americans and their political beliefs.
Well I think that it actually is your friends . Mine are not like that at all, around the dinner table or smoking a joint with them. They have no problem discussing politics without a brawl breaking out and as the Sanity rally showed ,there are lots of Americans like that.
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It's the sort of thing he collects.
What, ungrammatical T-shirts?
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If you haven't, read this - Matt Taibbi on the Tea Party
Vast forests have already been sacrificed to the public debate about the Tea Party: what it is, what it means, where it's going. But after lengthy study of the phenomenon, I've concluded that the whole miserable narrative boils down to one stark fact: They're full of shit. All of them. At the voter level, the Tea Party is a movement that purports to be furious about government spending — only the reality is that the vast majority of its members are former Bush supporters who yawned through two terms of record deficits and spent the past two electoral cycles frothing not about spending but about John Kerry's medals and Barack Obama's Sixties associations. The average Tea Partier is sincerely against government spending — with the exception of the money spent on them.
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Yeh, there's more money and mass for the irrationals over there and they have their own designated tv channel, but there are similar strong conservative waves over here, i hear the most outrageous things about race,economics and welfare down here everyday.
And the National Party always bring a mean spirirt to the state , at least the parts of the state poor folks have to use, welfare. The
attitude from WINZ and IRD always gets nastier and more judgemental. -
Sorry
A Village in Texas is missing. It's an idiot.
Nah jus' kiddiing.
"A Village in Texas is missing its idiot."
Happy now? -
If I was an American Democrat I would be pretty annoyed that Hillary Clinton is at the bottom of the world shaking hands with a right wing Prime Minister, rather than using all her celebrity power to get the Democrat vote out at this crucial time.
@Hillary: You do realise that Hillary Clinton resigned from the Senate to become Secretary of State? Perhaps Secretary Clinton should stick to the day job -- God knows she's got so many fences to rebuild she has a brilliant post-politics career as a carpenter to look forward to.
America is fucked.
Yeah, well not as deep dicked as we are if Winston Peters ends up holding the balance of power again.
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there are similar strong conservative waves over here, i hear the most outrageous things about race,economics and welfare down here everyday.
You've been reading comments at Yahoo!, too, have you? Bloody depressing. I tried to put them right, I really did, but I got banned "for harassment". Go figure.
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That is a true zombie-scenario-of-horror - Winston is baaaack! And holds a large gun to the foreheads of other democratically-elected parties! Arrrrgh!
Trust it just never happens...
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You've been reading comments at Yahoo
No, this is just people ya meet in the office and street, real time conversations. Mo Tucker is a political idiot, who would have thought, who knows what they look like.
One minute your having a conversation about the rugby and then the evil of the state. We haven't got a union problem in this country, we have a streak of conservative do-nothings who scare the shit out of you when they start preaching their empathy-free hardcore
"individualist-low taxes" views. -
I couldn't get motivated by the rally to restore sanity.
Your criticisms are sound. OTOH, at least it was a chance for 200,000 good-natured people to hang out.
And The 100 Best Signs At The Rally To Restore Sanity And/Or Fear is actually more interesting -- and funnier! -- than anything that was said on stage.
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"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever." - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty Four
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I got banned "for harassment"
Now that is funny. I hope you laughed, Petra. I put a comment on Deborah Coddington's Herald "articlette" where she banged on about, amongst other things, Robyn Malcolm's hair and her hand-waving. I thought it was a very mild comment along the lines of "Please let go of this nastiness before it affects your health" but hey! it was too much for the poor old Harold.
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