I like how there's a button that lets you exclude Rasmussen polls. Clicking it makes me feel better about the future.
Everyone knows Rasmussen leans Republican, but does that mean that the polls are less reflective of the real voting public? Could it be that people really are just more conservative than the other polling agencies find?
I find lots of cracking up materials these days!
I'm still partial to FiveThirtyEight as a reasonable aggregate of polls. A pool of polls for the proles. Maybe I'm still hanging on to 2008, when Nate Silver was really coming into the spotlight. He was really good back then.
1 - The thing about Rasmussen is that he's reweighing his samples to reflect partisan identification (rather than, say, demographic information like age, gender, or race). This is wrong for two reasons. The first is that partisan identification is highly fluid -- if John Kerry is doing badly, some percentage of independents will say they're Republicans and some percentage of Democrats will say they're independents. The second is that Rasmussen's targets for the reweighing are ludicrous; although he updates his targets every month, I believe he was most recently projecting a R+4 electorate, which would be by a large margin the most Republican electorate in a generation (2004 was dead even; 2008 was D+7).
Rasmussen isn't failing at polling. The Republicans are failing to exist in sufficient numbers.
Hence their opposition to abortion and birth control.
Should the Republican Party become irrelevant, down to say 25% of the population...then the Democratic Party will have to split into:
A social issue/identity politics economic moderate to neo-liberal wing or party and a economically radical wing also liberal on social issues. There is no space anymore for a Christian Socialist Party in America.
That is the real division in American politics today, one you can see on every leftblog comment board, those whose desire for economic justice and redistribution is not bribed off with identity symbolics.
This will happen before 2016, probably in the 2014 midterms. It will get ugly, and I hope the easier path of three parties, bringing Republicans back into relevance is the one taken. Otherwise, the Democratic Party of UMC Diversity will just have to be destroyed.
The neo-liberal corporatist wing will of course use its tools of obfuscation to defend itself, calling the socialists sexist, racist, homophobic (just as we saw in 2008 and since).
The socialist wing will have to run against Obama and his legacy, especially after the Grand Bargain Betrayal, and will thereby open itself up to such false charges.
But without Obama I hope the various identity bases of the Democratic Party can be split on class lines. Yeah, populism with a particularly vicious anti-intellectual message is probably the only way to discredit the Rainbow Technocrats.
Huh. So Rasmussen is just an older, institutional version of the Unskewed crowd? I always assumed it was about biasing question phrasing, sampling methods, and so forth.
This will happen before 2016, probably in the 2014 midterms.
The GOP has the elephant. Democrats, the donkey. Obviously, this new party bob describes will have the squirrel.
But not in a way we could understand.
I'm not very good at understanding.
You know the squirrel with the absurdly large testicles? I'm in a bar with a framed picture of that.
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Does anyone around these parts use the word "yolo"? Suddenly, I'm surrounded by people using it, and I'd never heard it before this past week.
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17 -- so you moved in with V-Wafe. Now we know.
Davis, CA is pretty much the county seat of I-don't-give-a-fuck.
The Urban Dictionary entry is pretty great.
Oops. That was supposed to be varco yolo.
The county also has an attractive website, which reveals among other things that Davis is not actually the county seat.
Football game today in Davis, nonetheless. No chance it'll be on at an airport TV in Houston, though.
There is no space anymore for a Christian Socialist Party in America.
Well, I'm glad we sorted that one out!
(I didn't know Bob read Stiftung Leo Strauss.)
9- The unskewed guy was inspired by Rasmussen.
a Christian Socialist Party in America
Fred Clark for President! (I suspect he would quote General Sherman at anybody who suggested it.)
Davis, CA is pretty much the county seat of I-don't-give-a-fuck.
And yet, I've never heard "yolo" from the person I know who spent eight years in Davis.
I just learned "yolo" myself. I'd heard it, but figured it was something from Spanish. Yo lo ....
Like the band whose name is an injunction to dance: "Yolo; Tango!"
35 was me. Not sure why the website forgot me.
Also, there is a very loud brass band outside my current lodgings. The hell? A pre-Columbus Day parade or something?
Pittsburgh has its Columbus Day parade today.
On further inspection it appears to be a collection of mostly older guys in bright red jumpsuits gathered in a nearby parking lot. At least one of the jumpsuits is a Santa Claus costume. There's also a juggler in a bright red-and-white-striped outfit.
Probably unrelatedly, there are children all over the nearby square shaking jars of coins, apparently asking for money, but none of them are saying what they're fundraising for.
40: That Drake song is truly terrible.
It's over 70 degrees out right now and those jumpsuits must be miserably hot. Some of them look more like pajamas.
Interesting that 1* is sort of the same sentiment, but with an opposite connotation from yolo.
Ohhh 47 is probably right. Also, the event in 47 is awesome, and very worth checking out.
Must be! Looks like nothing's scheduled to start until later today, but I guess it's a band warming up.
47: Man, I've always wanted to go to that. Brass Messengers! Rude Mechanicals!
And speaking of activists!
http://www.warehouseworker.org/news/2012/10/walmart-warehouse-strikers-to-return-to-work-with-full-back-pay/
Smearcase and I are going to it later today or tomorrow. I am excited.
It actually does look kind of awesome. Having a nasty cold is probably going to limit the amount of time I can spend checking it out. Though it sounds like I might be able to hear everything happening at one of the venues without leaving home.
but I guess it's a band warming up.
Nobody is really sure the band is getting warmer and, if it is, that the warming is caused by humans.
A recent controversial study linked band warming to tuba-erculosis.
37: Also, there is a very loud brass band outside my current lodgings.
But I trust that the poem annotation project proceeds apace?
The Last Psychiatrist on Lil Wayne, Violence, and Revolution
To get people to be more afraid of fighting, even in self-defense, than the physical pain of an assault takes a lot of years of training, good thing we jump on it early.First off: associate getting hit with guilt. Even if it's not your fault, it is still felt like it's your fault, and this can be verified by every woman in a domestic relationship, which is why they stay.
The only people who learn that getting hit isn't synonymous with guilt are those who get hit inconsistently, randomly-- having older brothers, abusive parents, constant fights with other kids in the neighborhood, etc.
You'll observe a certain characteristic true of all bullying: the victim never fights back at all. He takes his beating, as if to show that he can take it, his strength is in not being broken.