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On November 10 2012 12:48 Sadist wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2012 12:26 {CC}StealthBlue wrote:
If the Republican Party becomes more socially liberal (embracing gay and abortion rights), they'll certainly lose the Bible Belt states. So I expect Santorum to come back with a vengeance, the Libertarians have got to start making their voices heard and attempt to either a) Influence the party from the outside or b) Wrestle control from the neoconservaties. the thing i wonder is.......if the republicans lose the bible belt states....who cares? Do you think those bible belters will vote for democrats? Do you think a 3rd party would actually win (assuming they formed one?) They need to ridthemselves of those backward thinking losers and come join the 21st century. While I don't agree with fiscal conservatives I can at least have somewhat of a discussion with them..........I will NEVER vote for a republican as long as they are aligned to the hardcore evangelical christians.
If 2012 election shows anything it is that Hispanics are rapidly changing the political landscape in the south so it will be a very interesting 10-15 years as the youth(18-35 year olds age) and new generation of voters come along, will my generation be more liberal or libertarian? The Hispanics population in the South will be very noticeable by then forcing parties, the GOP especially, to adapt whether they like it or not.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
for all the GOP optimism about running on 'family values' to appeal to hispanics, don't forget that catholics are very attuned to economic social issues. latin american catholicism is a major drive for the revolutionary ideal there.
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That's a really good point. You can run on family values but then you have to drop the protestant ideological support for free market policy...
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On November 10 2012 11:34 Derez wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2012 11:21 sam!zdat wrote:
I don't really understand this affair-scandal phenomenon. Why do people care? Sex sells newspapers and makes people watch cable news. Show nested quote +On November 10 2012 11:30 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 11:27 Adreme wrote:On November 10 2012 11:22 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 11:21 sam!zdat wrote:
I don't really understand this affair-scandal phenomenon. Why do people care? Because the FBI was investigating him. That's bigger news than the affair itself. The FBI was clearly doing it to determine if the affair made him a security risk since having an affair is something you want to keep secret you open yourself up to blackmail. Scouring the emails of a CIA director without the President knowing? That's news. They were checking if a computer he used was compromised, That's all we know right now, and that seems way too trivial to involve the president in.
The story is too complex right now but if I had to guess the FBI at someone's direciton in the White House (deputy chief of staff or something) collected collateral against Patraeus in case he didn't play ball in the Benghazi thing. Patraeus strikes me as someone who just got sick of all the crap and having eternally pending collateral against him and resigned explaining the affair to free himself.
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Apparently it was due to the FBI investigating:
The affair was discovered during an FBI investigation, according to officials briefed on the developments. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the matter.
Petraeus carried on the affair with his biographer and reserve Army officer Paula Broadwell, according to several U.S. officials with knowledge of the situation. They spoke anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the investigation that led to the resignation publicly.
The FBI discovered the relationship by monitoring Petraeus' emails, after being alerted Broadwell may have had access to his personal email account, two of the officials said.
Source
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On November 10 2012 13:00 oneofthem wrote:
for all the GOP optimism about running on 'family values' to appeal to hispanics, don't forget that catholics are very attuned to economic social issues. latin american catholicism is a major drive for the revolutionary ideal there.
I actually read an interesting piece somewhere about how it's really not as simple as "The Hispanics are religious therefore they'll vote with other religious constituencies." The legacy of religion as a heavy power in Mexican government, for example, is NOT a good one. I can't find it now though...
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I think the hispanic community, more than any, respects the "american dream" and that is why republicans have historically appealed to them.
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Except social mobility, a.k.a the "american dream", is more served by the policies of the Democrats than the Republicans.
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What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party?
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On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party?
Their religious zeal is just a symptom of their thinking, it is not what shapes it. You can come to your own conclusions about what being deeply religious says about a person's character, beliefs, and willingness to follow dogma. The religion is just used as a tool to exploit their fetish for "freedom" and to get votes. Sadly for us, the concept of "freedom" has been defined for them by corporate overlords to be the equivalent of laissaez faire capitalism and fucking over the poor and middle class. They will willing support these things because it is draped in a flag and touting a buzzword that summons forth a sense of zeal within them. Why does touting some make-believe concept of "freedom" work so well? I'd probably just attribute it mostly to the Cold War mentality of "FREEDOM GOOD, COMMIES BAD!"
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On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party?
Because that is called your opinion.
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On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party?
Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.).
Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right.
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On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party?
There is actually an interesting history of how this ideology has come about, other than the American story of individualism and skepticism of government, see Gospel of Wealth, and a belief in the non-profit sector to provide for the poor rather than the government during the late 19th century. Basically, it's the same argument made today, giving more government aid is supposed to have the opposite affect, while cutting funding and letting non-profits and community organizations handle the problem is thought to be most efficient and effective. I included an excerpt that explains a bit below. This ideology lost out during the depression and nonprofits came roaring back during the Reagan years.
Defining the Nonprofit Sector: The United States
L. Salamon
+ Show Spoiler +In the field of care for the poor, for example, a new doctrine of"scientific charity" emerged. According to this view, the root causes of poverty and distress lay in the bad habits and sloth of the poor. Because public agencies tend to provide aid too indiscriminately and unconditionally, they actually encourage pauperism. Private charity, by contrast, can deal with the root causes of pauperism by restricting assistance to the truly deserving and coupling it with the personalized moral suasion needed to induce the poor to overcome their vices (Bremner, 1980:32-3 202-3; Katz, 1986:64-84). In the face of widespread economic dislocation resulting from rapid urbanization and industrialization in the latter nineteenth and early twentieth century, therefore, charity advocates, armed with this doctrine, became ardent opponents of the extension of government poor relief In the depths of the 1873 depression, for example, charity leader Louisa Lee Schuyler advised New York State officials to reduce the levels of public assistance outside of almshouses lest they encourage an inflow of paupers and recommended that responsibility for coping with the needs of the poor be thrown instead "entirely on existing private charity" (Schuyler, 1873). Similar arguments were used to terminate "outdoor" poor relief not only in New York City, but in Brooklyn, Buffalo, Indianapolis, Philadelphia, and Chicago as wen (Bremner; 1980:-200).
Contributing to this new faith in the virtues of voluntarism and private charity, and to the concept of an inherent conflict between the nonprofit sector and the state that accompanied it, was a massive growth of personal fortunes and the propagation of anew"gospel of wealth" about what to do with the resulting riches. As articulated most forcefully by steelmaker-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, this gospel married Social Darwinism with Christian concepts of charity to make it a religious (and social) obligation of those whose natural superiority enabled them to amass great wealth to contribute this wealth to improve society (Carnegie, 1889). These developments made it possible to imagine that private charity might truly serve as a substitute for public action in providing for public needs, and a superior substitute at that.
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On November 11 2012 00:57 BluePanther wrote:Show nested quote +On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party? Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.). Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right.
Way to reinforce his point.
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On November 11 2012 01:16 Tarot wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2012 00:57 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party? Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.). Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right. Way to reinforce his point.
He called conservatives the "least well intentioned" and "ruthless" party. I never once saw someone I'd peg as a Democrat walk through the doors of that shelter to help out a homeless person. They talk a big game, but social conservatives are the ones who actually step up and deliver.
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On November 11 2012 01:26 BluePanther wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2012 01:16 Tarot wrote:On November 11 2012 00:57 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party? Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.). Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right. Way to reinforce his point. He called conservatives the "least well intentioned" and "ruthless" party. I never once saw someone I'd peg as a Democrat walk through the doors of that shelter to help out a homeless person. They talk a big game, but social conservatives are the ones who actually step up and deliver.
You had a point before your edit.
Now you're back again to supporting what he said. He didnt say that Christians weren't charitable, but rather they associate themselves with the party who wants to be the least charitable.
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CBS now reveals that the Romney campaign was "shellshocked" by the loss. Seems they genuinely believed all that campaign spin about Romney's momentum in the final weeks. They truly believed the bullshit they were spouting. Which just makes this even more funny.
And to add to my previous posts about Republican anti-intellectualism, here's an absolutely epic blasting from New York magazine: http://nymag.com/news/frank-rich/gop-denial-2012-11/
As GOP politicians and pundits pile on Romney in defeat, they often argue that he was done in by not being severely conservative enough; if only he’d let Ryan be Ryan, voters would have been won over by right-wing orthodoxy offering a clear-cut alternative to Obama’s alleged socialism. In truth, Romney was a perfect embodiment of the current GOP. As much as the Republican Party is a radical party, and a nearly all-white party, it has also become the Fantasyland Party. It’s an isolated and gated community impervious to any intrusions of reality from the “real America” it solipsistically claims to represent. This year’s instantly famous declaration by the Romney pollster Neil Newhouse that “we’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers” crystallized the mantra of the entire GOP. The Republican faithful at strata both low and high, from Rush’s dittoheads to the think-tank-affiliated intellectuals, have long since stopped acknowledging any empirical evidence that disputes their insular worldview, no matter how grounded that evidence might be in (God forbid) science or any other verifiable reality, like, say, Census reports or elementary mathematics. No wonder Romney shunned the word Harvard, which awarded him two degrees, even more assiduously than he did Mormon.
At the policy level, this is the GOP that denies climate change, that rejects Keynesian economics, and that identifies voter fraud where there is none. At the loony-tunes level, this is the GOP that has given us the birthers, websites purporting that Obama was lying about Osama bin Laden’s death, and not one but two (failed) senatorial candidates who redefined rape in defiance of medical science and simple common sense.
[...]
The GOP’s wholesale retreat from reality perhaps found its ultimate expression in a Peggy Noonan blog at Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal that may achieve “Dewey Defeats Truman” immortality. Writing on Election Eve, she informed the faithful that “Romney’s slipping into the presidency” and will win. “All the vibrations are right,” she explained, citing such numerical evidence as crowd sizes in Pennsylvania and Ohio (both of which Romney would lose the next day) and yard signs. [...] Noonan’s revealing summation of her thought process was this: “Is it possible this whole thing is playing out before our eyes and we’re not really noticing because we’re too busy looking at data on paper instead of what’s in front of us? Maybe that’s the real distortion of the polls this year: They left us discounting the world around us.” Thus is the post-fact worldview of today’s GOP boiled down to its essence. It assumes that any “data on paper” must be distorted, and yet doesn’t look at what is in front of its very own eyes either. Otherwise, Noonan might have wondered if the neighborhood in Florida with Romney signs, not Obama ones, was not representative of either Florida or the country but was instead a white enclave.
This article is simply great.
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On November 11 2012 01:26 BluePanther wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2012 01:16 Tarot wrote:On November 11 2012 00:57 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party? Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.). Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right. Way to reinforce his point. He called conservatives the "least well intentioned" and "ruthless" party. I never once saw someone I'd peg as a Democrat walk through the doors of that shelter to help out a homeless person. They talk a big game, but social conservatives are the ones who actually step up and deliver.
When I was in the US, I regularly helped out at a local church that was giving out food to poor families. From the people whose political views I knew, there were exactly as many democrats as republicans.
Personal anecdotes are a rather bad way to come to any conclusions about people. For all we know, you didn't meet any democrats at the homeless shelter because there simply weren't any in the region.
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On November 11 2012 01:46 Tarot wrote:Show nested quote +On November 11 2012 01:26 BluePanther wrote:On November 11 2012 01:16 Tarot wrote:On November 11 2012 00:57 BluePanther wrote:On November 10 2012 19:49 leveller wrote:
What's the most weird is that christianity is all about being charitable, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, tend to the poor, love your ENEMY (not just your neighbour) etc. So why do they align themselves with the most ruthless and least well intentioned party? Social conservatives are actually big donors for being charitable. I once worked at a homeless shelter that was funded by a local church. Not even the government would help those people, but the social conservatives were willing to fund a shelter to help people out. Local church members took turns volunteering by bringing food and cooking it for the guests, coming in to keep them company, and assisting with various rather thankless tasks (doing their laundry, etc.). Say what you want about social conservatives in politics, but they do some things very right. Way to reinforce his point. He called conservatives the "least well intentioned" and "ruthless" party. I never once saw someone I'd peg as a Democrat walk through the doors of that shelter to help out a homeless person. They talk a big game, but social conservatives are the ones who actually step up and deliver. You had a point before your edit. Now you're back again to supporting what he said. He didnt say that Christians weren't charitable, but rather they associate themselves with the party who wants to be the least charitable.
That's just not true. The USA has a very robust private charity sector that is extremely efficient. The only thing lacking is more funding. A Government charity system not only lacks the capabilities of these private charities, it also duplicates a lot of what is already provided. However, the Government can't just give money to the private charities since many of them are affiliated with churches.
The idea that America complements our charities rather than duplicate them with inefficient government bureaucracies is the stance of Republicans.
Republicans actually support charity far more than Democrats. Democrats just want to tax rich people more so they can just throw money at a problem that cannot be solved with only money. Republicans want people to give excess income to private charities in their own communities; they just lack the authority to enforce it.
As a Republican, I've always thought that 1/3 of your income taxes should be required to be given to a 501(c)(3) of your choice. Doesn't matter what it is. Up to you. If you see homelessness as a problem, you can give to a shelter. If you see animal abuse as a problem, you can give it to an animal shelter, etc. It would be more effective than a government agency if the people in the community donated money to the cause THEY felt needed to be addressed.
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On November 10 2012 13:02 sam!zdat wrote:
That's a really good point. You can run on family values but then you have to drop the protestant ideological support for free market policy...
It's almost hard to blame Republicans for thinking they can simply appeal to the religious and "family values" sensibilities of Hispanic voters. They've been wildly successful doing the exact same thing with white religious voters for 30 years. They've even had some more limited success with religious voters, regardless of other demographic considerations, on specific issues (see California's Prop 8).
It has been interesting to see the debate within the party evolving over the past few days. Most observers seem to realize something needs to change. Some have realized the party has a policy problem with minority voters, but I'm more interested in the people (Krauthammer) who insist the party simply has a messaging problem.
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EPT
