On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
Where does it say anything about restrictions? Without even the word 'rare' in it (as in the past) it basically says abortion for any reason the the woman chooses.
On September 08 2012 03:30 xDaunt wrote: Booing God isn't extreme?
I think so. But I'll grant the entire thing was poorly handled. Based on both national conventions, I'm not entirely sure either party is particular interested in using the convention actually decide things so much as confirm what has already transpired. So a lot of the old Robert's rules are more trappings then actual procedure. I don't know, maybe actual policy is amended in conventions, but both sides seemed pretty poorly equipped to handle an actual vote beyond the reading of the delegation numbers.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Roe v Wade is barely good law anymore. There are a whole bunch of later cases that have come since that have refined what the right to an abortion is.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Granted, I'll stipulate that even the Democrats wouldn't think that aborting a baby a week before it's due is ok. However, the statement in the platform would include "Partial Birth" abortions which are not outlawed by Roe v Wade.
Look, the point is both parties are extreme on some things. To say the the Democrats aren't extreme on ANYTHING as the original poster did is flat out false. It's also true that most of the country and and most politicians fall somewhere in between on a large majority of issues.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
For the record, I'm fine with how we currently stand with abortion legally. I'm just tired of the RNC being labeled extreme by the media while the DNC gets a pass. Noonan was right, abortion is being used as a wedge issue and frankly if Noonan is the "conservative" columnist that people want to go after then the country is never moving back to the center.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
For the record, I'm fine with how we currently stand with abortion legally. I'm just tired of the RNC being labeled extreme by the media while the DNC gets a pass. Noonan was right, abortion is being used as a wedge issue and frankly if Noonan is the "conservative" columnist that people want to go after then the country is never moving back to the center.
I'm the wrong person to talk to about moving back to the center. =) Considering how conservative we are compared to the rest of the developed world, it's about time we move past America's center and join the rest.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Granted, I'll stipulate that even the Democrats wouldn't think that aborting a baby a week before it's due is ok. However, the statement in the platform would include "Partial Birth" abortions which are not outlawed by Roe v Wade.
Look, the point is both parties are extreme on some things. To say the the Democrats aren't extreme on ANYTHING as the original poster did is flat out false. It's also true that most of the country and and most politicians fall somewhere in between on a large majority of issues.
As a Canadian, I can surely tell you that your Democratic party is not extreme on ANY issues. They would be closer to our Conservative party here than our liberal party (in between at best). They may seem extreme to you because their policies are so far off from the republicans, however the republican platform is so polarized that moderate policies like those of the Democratic party in the US seem to be on the opposite poll. There is nothing extreme about healthcare reform, the right for a woman to choose, equality for all (including homosexuals), tax benefits for the average person and heavier burden on those who have more. These are all very moderate normal things.
The republicans are indeed extreme. They would likely get a grand total of about 4 votes here in Canada. Tax cuts for the rich (even during economic hardship for the middle class), deregulating the market to allow corporations free reign even if it risks citizens wellfare, recognizing corporations as people, denying equal rights arbitrarily to different demographics within society because of religion, not separating church and state, denying women certain healthcare also because of religous reasons, refusing to work with the other party, etc... are all EXtREME policies.
The rest of the world sees it the way I do for the most part, only in the US can anyone even begin to imagine the Democratic platform as extreme.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
For the record, I'm fine with how we currently stand with abortion legally. I'm just tired of the RNC being labeled extreme by the media while the DNC gets a pass. Noonan was right, abortion is being used as a wedge issue and frankly if Noonan is the "conservative" columnist that people want to go after then the country is never moving back to the center.
The big joke (and what really makes the democrat rhetoric a big lie) is that republicans can't really do much to obstruct the right to an abortion anyway.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
For the record, I'm fine with how we currently stand with abortion legally. I'm just tired of the RNC being labeled extreme by the media while the DNC gets a pass. Noonan was right, abortion is being used as a wedge issue and frankly if Noonan is the "conservative" columnist that people want to go after then the country is never moving back to the center.
I'm the wrong person to talk to about moving back to the center. =) Considering how conservative we are compared to the rest of the developed world, it's about time we move past America's center and join the rest.
And you're perfectly entitled to that opinion. However, this is a thread about the US General Election and the center in the US is what we should be basing terms like "extreme" on as that is the scale that the election will be decided on.
On September 07 2012 23:09 xDaunt wrote: I agree with Peggy Noonan's take on the convention.
On Obama:
Barack Obama is deeply overexposed and often boring. He never seems to be saying what he's thinking. His speech Thursday was weirdly anticlimactic. There's too much buildup, the crowd was tired, it all felt flat. He was somber, and his message was essentially banal: We've done better than you think. Who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?
There were many straw men. There were phrases like "the shadow of a shuttered steel mill," which he considers writerly. But they sound empty and practiced now, like something you've heard in a commercial or an advertising campaign.
It was stale and empty. He's out of juice.
On the tone of the convention and the delegates:
Beneath the funny hats, the sweet-faced delegates, the handsome speakers and the babies waving flags there was something disquieting. All three days were marked by a kind of soft, distracted extremism. It was unshowy and unobnoxious but also unsettling.
There was the relentless emphasis on Government as Community, as the thing that gives us spirit and makes us whole. But government isn't what you love if you're American, America is what you love. Government is what you have, need and hire. Its most essential duties—especially when it is bankrupt—involve defending rights and safety, not imposing views and values. We already have values. Democrats and Republicans don't see all this the same way, and that's fine—that's what national politics is, the working out of this dispute in one direction or another every few years. But the Democrats convened in Charlotte seemed more extreme on the point, more accepting of the idea of government as the center of national life, than ever, at least to me.
The fight over including a single mention of God in the platform—that was extreme. The original removal of the single mention by the platform committee—extreme. The huge "No!" vote on restoring the mention of God, and including the administration's own stand on Jerusalem—that wasn't liberal, it was extreme. Comparing the Republicans to Nazis—extreme. The almost complete absence of a call to help education by facing down the powers that throw our least defended children under the school bus—this was extreme, not mainstream.
On Fluke (just because I don't think this woman can ever get enough scorn):
The sheer strangeness of all the talk about abortion, abortion, contraception, contraception. I am old enough to know a wedge issue when I see one, but I've never seen a great party build its entire public persona around one. Big speeches from the heads of Planned Parenthood and NARAL, HHS Secretary and abortion enthusiast Kathleen Sebelius and, of course, Sandra Fluke.
"Republicans shut me out of a hearing on contraception," Ms. Fluke said. But why would anyone have included a Georgetown law student who never worked her way onto the national stage until she was plucked, by the left, as a personable victim? What a fabulously confident and ingenuous-seeming political narcissist Ms. Fluke is. She really does think—and her party apparently thinks—that in a spending crisis with trillions in debt and many in need, in a nation in existential doubt as to its standing and purpose, in a time when parents struggle to buy the good sneakers for the kids so they're not embarrassed at school . . . that in that nation the great issue of the day, and the appropriate focus of our concern, is making other people pay for her birth-control pills. That's not a stand, it's a non sequitur. She is not, as Rush Limbaugh oafishly, bullyingly said, a slut. She is a ninny, a narcissist and a fool.
And she was one of the great faces of the party in Charlotte. That is extreme. Childish, too.
Here's the most important part that dovetails with the "poisoning the well" conversation that we have had on and off in this thread:
Something else, and it had to do with tone. I remember the Republicans in Tampa bashing the president, hard, but not the entire Democratic Party. In Charlotte they bashed Mitt Romney, but they bashed the Republican Party harder. If this doesn't strike you as somewhat unsettling, then you must want another four years of all war all the time between the parties. I don't think the American people want that. Because, actually, they're not extreme.
And finally, on Slick Willy:
Bill Clinton is The Master. That is stipulated. Almost everyone in the media was over the moon about his speech. It was a shrewd and superb moment of political generosity, his hauling into town to make the case, but it was a hack speech. It was the speech of a highly gifted apparatchik. All great partisan speeches include some hard and uncomfortable truths, but Mr. Clinton offered none. He knows better than so much of what he said. In real life he makes insightful statements on the debt, the deficit and the real threat they pose. He knows more about the need for and impediments to public-school reform than half the reformers do. He knows exactly why both parties can't reach agreement in Washington, and what each has done wrong along the way. But Wednesday night he stuck to fluid fictions and clever cases. It was smaller than Bill Clinton is.
Still, he gave the president one great political gift: He put Medicaid on the table. He put it right there next to the pepper shaker and said Look at that! People talk Medicare and Social Security, but, as Mr. Clinton noted, more than half of Medicaid is spent on nursing-home care for seniors and on those with disabilities such as Down syndrome and autism. Will it be cut? .... Romney-Ryan take note: this will arrive as an issue.
Ultimately, she predicts a dead-cat bounce for Obama just like the one that Romney got. Most of the article is above, but you can read the rest here.
The fact that she considers anything in the Democratic party "extreme" or "extremism" questions the validity of anything she writes. There is nothing extreme about the Democratic party or anything they're doing or saying.
Except for the platform's stance on abortion:
The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman's right to make decisions regarding her pregnancy, including a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay
Which means government funded abortion with no restrictions. A departure from previous DNC platforms that stated that abortion should be, "Legal, safe, and rare".
Now let's look at the polling. 20% say abortion should be illegal under any circumstance, 25% legal under any circumstance and 52% legal under only certain circumstances (Source).
By definition, among the American electorate, BOTH parties platform stance on abortion is extreme.
Am I missing something? Where does it say 'no restrictions'?
I thought the Roe v Wade decision set these ground rules:
First trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor. Second trimester - decision to abort is between mother and doctor, but states may intervene in the interest of the mother's health.
Once the fetus is capable of surviving the outside world (dunno when this is), the state can choose to regulate abortion.
So it's not without restrictions...
Indeed. As the DNC stated, they "unequivocally support Roe v. Wade."
The Court later rejected Roe's trimester framework, while affirming Roe's central holding that a person has a right to abortion until viability.[1] The Roe decision defined "viable" as being "potentially able to live outside the mother's womb, albeit with artificial aid", adding that viability "is usually placed at about seven months (28 weeks) but may occur earlier, even at 24 weeks."[2]
As for partial-birth abortion there was a debate about that earlier... I suppose you can say the abortion stance is more extreme now but not without valid reason.
For the record, I'm fine with how we currently stand with abortion legally. I'm just tired of the RNC being labeled extreme by the media while the DNC gets a pass. Noonan was right, abortion is being used as a wedge issue and frankly if Noonan is the "conservative" columnist that people want to go after then the country is never moving back to the center.
I'm the wrong person to talk to about moving back to the center. =) Considering how conservative we are compared to the rest of the developed world, it's about time we move past America's center and join the rest.
And you're perfectly entitled to that opinion. However, this is a thread about the US General Election and the center in the US is what we should be basing terms like "extreme" on as that is the scale that the election will be decided on.
Oh I have no doubt what I usually advocate (and what the DNC sometimes advocates) is "extreme" based on American principles; however, I obviously don't think this extremity is bad compared to the conservative extremes based on a global frame of thought. :d
Who let this woman speak at the DNC? This is just painful...
I'm pretty sure that she thought that if she yelled loud enough and waved her arms around haphazard hard enough, she could be as rousing as Bill Clinton.
I'm watching an interview of Romney right now, and he just mentioned the Woodward book leak. Looks like we are going to be seeing some ads with some excerpts. Romney also mentioned that he is going to be running ads to address the auto bailout issue.
With over $200 million in the bank, I don't really have any doubt that Romney will be able to get out whatever messages he wants to.
On September 08 2012 07:15 xDaunt wrote: I'm watching an interview of Romney right now, and he just mentioned the Woodward book leak. Looks like we are going to be seeing some ads with some excerpts. Romney also mentioned that he is going to be running ads to address the auto bailout issue.
With over $200 million in the bank, I don't really have any doubt that Romney will be able to get out whatever messages he wants to.
The problem is that he doesn't seem to know what those messages are.
On September 08 2012 07:15 xDaunt wrote: I'm watching an interview of Romney right now, and he just mentioned the Woodward book leak. Looks like we are going to be seeing some ads with some excerpts. Romney also mentioned that he is going to be running ads to address the auto bailout issue.
With over $200 million in the bank, I don't really have any doubt that Romney will be able to get out whatever messages he wants to.
The problem is that he doesn't seem to know what those messages are.
The issue is one of detail, not one of not having a message. Detail doesn't matter in a 30 second ad.
On September 07 2012 13:37 sunprince wrote: Am I the only one getting sick and tired of listening to Dems harp on the wage gap myth?
I know they need the woman vote and the support of feminist groups to win the election and all, but do they really think women are gonna run to the GOP if the Dems stop buying into failboat statistics on a single issue?
do you have compelling research suggesting that it is indeed a myth?
The “pay gap” is probably the most widely-cited example of supposed disadvantages faced by women today. It is also totally misleading, as it is only a snapshot of average yearly full-time incomes that does not account for overtime (about 90% male), type of work, or other non-discriminatory, voluntary factors.
This was further supported in the book “Why Men Earn More" by Warren Farrell, who examined 25 career/life choices men and women make (hours, commute times, etc.) that lead to men earning more and women having more balanced lives, and that showed how men in surveys prioritize money while women prioritize flexibility, shorter hours, shorter commutes, less physical risk and other factors conducive to their choice to be primary parents, an option men still largely don’t have. That is why never-married childless women outearn their male counterparts, and female corporate directors now outearn their male counterparts.
Farrell also lists dozens of careers, including fields of science, where women outearn men. Women simply have more options than men to be primary parents, and many of them exercise that option rather than work long, stressful hours. That is why 57% of female graduates of Stanford and Harvard left the workforce within 15 years of entry into the workforce. This is an option few men have (try being a single male and telling women on the first date that you want to stay home).
TL;DR: The 77 cents to a dollar wage gap myth is based on the unadjusted wage gap, which means it does not take into account factors like hours worked, occupation, education, or experience.
However, at the same time, the legislation proposed doesn't FORCE unjust equal pay by the same criteria. It gives women the ability to confront employers in a reasonable time frame. Saying the law is unnecessary is really just saying the law is redundant. The cost of implementation is relatively nothing. This would be the equivalent of killing a fly with a fly swatter.
In practice, the act encourages employers to overpay women to reduce the likelihood of a potentially costly lawsuit.
The main issue, though, is that the Dems are deliberately perpetuating a feminist myth, which further plays into the false (not to mention misogynistic) narrative of women as victims rather than equals.
I'd think companies would attempt to pay women fairly before they would pay them in excess...
Alright, I just read these links, and none of them prove that the disparity between the pay between men and women is unjustifiable or a result of overcompensating out of 'fear of being accused of discrimination' -- which is a big leap.
Link 1 and 2 In the case of software engineering and computer sciences, women are so rare that they are actually needed to add diversity to the overall culture of the workplace (as the article states, the ratio of men to women is 20 to 1). I've worked in studios compromised 100% of sweaty, stinky guys in front of computers, and trust me, adding a girl seems to class up the joint and genuinely offer a perspective on problems that was otherwise lacking.
To me, that's no different than a Chinese manufacturer paying extra for a bilingual White guy to manage his plant, even if he's doing the same job as other managers. Because they're rare, and now they are a commodity, they can leverage that for better wages.
A qualified female director that can hang with the boys is hard to find. Does that mean that sometimes a woman might get promoted ahead of a man, despite not being qualified? Sure. But then again, I've met plenty of male bosses and teachers and friends that have also been promoted for stupid reasons. It has nothing to do with the Lily Ledbetter Act, and more to due with nepotism and bad management.
Link 3 The article speculates that part of the reason that 21-30 women might be making more money than men is because young women are migrating to larger urban areas in greater numbers. To be clear, they are not comparing men and women in similar jobs, they just notice a trend that women in this age group, overall, are out earning men.
But let's pretend they are. In some industries, the difference in pay for similar jobs in large urban centers compared to smaller towns is dramatic, because the cost of living is higher and the businesses are larger. An editor at Harper Collins in New York would make much more than an editor based in Portland.
Link 4 This article also states that women are graduating college and earning advanced degrees at a higher rate than men. So of course they're earning more.
Anyway, based on these links, I'm not sure what you're trying to argue anymore. You've successfully confused the issue with non-sensical references.
My response was poorly worded and insufficiently detailed. What I meant was to answer your suggestion that companies do not attempt to pay women fairly (which can only be argued using the unadjusted wage gap) by supplying links that suggest they already do (using the same unadjusted wage gap). If the unadjusted wage gap is used as proof that men are unfairly paid more, then the fact that the unadjusted wage gap actually applies in the other direction in some situations
My actual point is that (a) companies already do pay women equally, (b) using the unadjusted wage gap to argue otherwise is pretty broken, and (c) it's interesting that when the unadjusted wage gap favors women then people come up with all sorts of explanations why it's not discrimination, while when it favors men they do the opposite (and your arguments are the perfect example of the former).
On September 07 2012 15:26 oneofthem wrote: now, here's a rather intricate logical problem that i don't expect you to sense. the idea is that, even without changing the actual facts on the ground, one can take different attitudes towards them. feminists who see the structure behind the actions will protest against the structure, because they are alienated from those choices and do not regard that as their own.
The problem is that feminists blame the structure without providing any empirical evidence that the structure is responsible. I've shown empirical studies suggesting that social factors are not the reason.
On September 07 2012 15:26 oneofthem wrote: this is to say, for those who DO NOT WANT TO take on these trad. gender roles, they can be legitimately seen as external.
If you don't want to take them on, then you simply don't take them. I have very little sympathy for someone who makes educational and career choices that they "didn't really want".
Let's just assume for a moment that you really are morally superior to those wretched villains who dare to be underprivileged and have to make sacrifices in order to survive and support their loved ones.
You're strawmanning. I've made the argument (backed by sources) that women choose their educational and career choices, meaning that they weren't forced into those by circumstances beyond their control. You're basically arguing that women do not consent to work fewer hours, which is a pretty bold claim that isn't going to be accepted without evidence. The empirical studies show that plenty of women choose to be stay at home mothers or to work fewer hours so that they can spend more hours at home, not that they are forced into it.
On September 07 2012 15:46 HunterX11 wrote:Even so, shouldn't you--as a better person--feel pity for your inferiors, rather than scorning them?
I have no scorn for those who are underprivileged (nor do I pity them, since that would be condescending). I do, however, have scorn for people who choose to work shorter hours yet demand equal pay to those who work longer hours. That's what it boils down to, when feminists perpetuate the 77% "wage gap" myth when women work 78% as many hours as men. That's not even going into the fact that dangerous (e.g. higher paying) jobs are overwhelmingly filled by men (along with the fact that the overwhelming majority of work-related deaths are male), that college women (who now outnumber men by 50%) choose non-STEM majors, that women are more likely to take career breaks, and that in spite of all that young single women make 8% more than comparable men.
Just for the record, there IS a wage gap, it's about 5-7%, and it's a well studied phenomenon. There's a ton of econometric papers out there on it, and I think some might even be public access. Just do a google scholar search.
It's not as big as 23%, as *most* of it can be explained by issues of field of employment, experience in labour force, education, child-rearing breaks, etc. However, 5-7% remains unexplainable econometrically. This is the wage gap.
Additionally, if I recall correctly, there is also an unexplainable penalty for women who have children. Can't remember how much of a gap it is, though. But mother's, controlling for time off in labour force, education, etc. do make a bit less than women without children.
The Department of Labor study concludes that any unexplained gap is well within the margin for statistical error and is probably due to the factors they didn't control for. If you have compelling proof that this is not the case, then feel free to show your sources.
I'm pretty sure that she thought that if she yelled loud enough and waved her arms around haphazard hard enough, she could be as rousing as Bill Clinton.
Pretty comic. Should be trying her hand at various dance TV shows, not trying to re-elect Obama. Maybe will meet with more success, who knows? + Show Spoiler +
vs
May not be able to compete with Barack's pastor though for enthusiam and gesturing.
EPT
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