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December 05, 2014 10:49 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 31 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

"Ambition can creep as well as soar."

–Edmund Burke

Comments

31 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread

  1. What a crock.

    I just heard the line of defense the Republican sound machine is floating this morning about Chris Christie…."he's authentic…people like that. They want some real person running for president, not a plastic candidate…?…I guess that (plastic)means someone nice…?

    1. If the Presidential election were a reality TV show, Christie could be the lovable curmudgeon. That's what the GOP is spinning.

      His people are  spinning  Bridgegate as "Christie is completely cleared of any involvement".  Not true. The grand jury hasn't made its findings public yet, and there is plenty of room to make the obvious connections from Christie's office to the bridge closure-for-political-revenge scandal.

      Reality reality, not reality TV, shows  Christie as an old school corrupt politician, with a hot temper and contempt for regular people. He also seems inept at governing, as seen by his handling of Sandy cleanup funds.

      Maybe some Republican voters want a reality TV star as their Governor and Presidential candidate. I prefer to think that most people are smarter than that, and will see that Chris Christie fails the true "character" test.

       

      1. The talking head I mentioned earlier was saying he had attended a party at Christies' house and was going on about how friendly and welcoming Christie was, with no sign of bitterness or acrimony for anyone, Repubs or Dems….Just a regular, middle of the road guy who loves everybody.

        …I think I'm gonna barf….

    1. Any Dem who supports this honestly isn't worth having in office.  Such Dems may as well be part of the GOTP majority. I always believe in supporting less sucky Dems over Rs, all of whom suck more, but I have to concede that a Dem who supports this is just as sucky as an R. There's a floor and this would definitely be beneath that floor.

      If Bennet supports this I will go against the always vote for the Dem because any R will be worse advice I always give people and not vote for him. I won't  worry that not voting for him might get an R elected because it honestly won't make a bit of difference. There's a limit.

        1. FU, I have supported the ACLU over the years.  I have attended fundraisers for them and donated time for them on cases I agreed with.

          Have you?

      1. V, An interesting take on Bloomberg:

        On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you.

        I wish this caution were only theoretical. It isn’t. Whatever your view on the refusal of a New York City grand jury to indict the police officer whose chokehold apparently led to the death of Eric Garner, it’s useful to remember the crime that Garner is alleged to have committed: He was selling individual cigarettes, or loosies, in violation of New York law.

        . . . 

         It’s not just cigarette tax laws that can lead to the death of those the police seek to arrest. It’s every law. Libertarians argue that we have far too many laws, and the Garner case offers evidence that they’re right. I often tell my students that there will never be a perfect technology of law enforcement, and therefore it is unavoidable that there will be situations where police err on the side of too much violence rather than too little. Better training won’t lead to perfection. But fewer laws would mean fewer opportunities for official violence to get out of hand.

        The legal scholar Douglas Husak, in his excellent 2009 book “Overcriminalization: The Limits of the Criminal Law,” points out that federal law alone includes more than 3,000 crimes, fewer than half of which found in the Federal Criminal Code. The rest are scattered through other statutes. A citizen who wants to abide by the law has no quick and easy way to find out what the law actually is — a violation of the traditional principle that the state cannot punish without fair notice.

         

        http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-12-04/law-puts-us-all-in-same-danger-as-eric-garner

        Perhaps the solution is to grant citizens the right to be free from Government punishment.  That would change the analysis for whether the activity can be criminalized.  Using the "rational relationship" test anything the legislature says should be a crime is good to go.  If there was a competing right not to be punished, the test would be " strict scrutiny" which is a balancing test and many minor crimes would not be sustained.  

        When the society's laws makes everyone a criminal, and by scarcity of resources not all crimes are prosecuted, it basically is a police state where any citizen can be imprisoned at the whim of the government.

  2. About Yesterday's "Great" Jobs Report Numbers

     

    Friday's turbocharged jobs headline came thanks to seasonal adjustments and other wizardry at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which reported that U.S. job growth hit 321,000 even as the unemployment rate held steady at 5.8 percent.

    A few figures to consider: That big headline number translated into just 4,000 more working Americans. There were, at the same time, another 115,000 on the unemployment line. That disparity can be explained through an expanding labor force, which grew 119,000, though the participation rate among that group remained at 62.8 percent, which is just off the year's worst level and around a 36-year low.

    But wait, there's more: The jobs that were created skewed heavily toward lower quality. Full-time jobs declined by 150,000, while part-time positions increased by 77,000.

    http://www.cnbc.com/id/102243878

    1. Well, AC, let's bow to the immutable wisdom of the market, which went up sharply upon release of those great job numbers.   I'm about $1,000 richer this morning as a result.  In fact, my IRA is about 150 percent higher than it was when Obama took office, even though I have retired and made no new contributions since the end of 2008laugh

      1. Funny, we haven't heard AC and friends so much as mention the stock market for years.  How are they going to criticize that? So what if the market is doing great if the middle class is still losing ground? Can't use that. That's for lefties.

        1. Wall Street's pretty much figured out that the only things Republicans are good for is tax cuts on non-salary earnings, carried interest, capital gains, and corporate profits. Beyond that their policies are the makings of an economic apocalypse. 

          That doesn't mean that Republican pols aren't still useful idiots, but just in a much more limited sense . . .!

  3. I watch very little television anymore, and that which i do is usually on DVR so that I skip the commercials. But, I just saw this and it’s great for a giggle.

    My apologies if it’s old hat for you.

  4. Micahel Bennet loses another one.

    DSCC pulled the plug on Mary back in November.

    Now the final results are in.

    Landrieu lost by 12%.

    Republicans picked up 8 Senate seats, 1 more than I thought would happen about a year ago.

    Republicans pick up 2 more seats in Congress and now have 246 with one more still to be decided. Picking up a total of 12 more seats in Congress is what I found surprising.  I would have been happy breaking even a year ago.  Since 2008 the Dems have lost 75 seats in Congress.

     

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