CO-04 (Special Election)
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(R) Greg Lopez
(R) Trisha Calvarese
90%
10%
President (To Win Colorado)
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(D) Joe Biden*
(R) Donald Trump
80%
20%↓
CO-01 (Denver)
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(D) Diana DeGette*
90%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
90%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(D) Adam Frisch
(R) Jeff Hurd
(R) Ron Hanks
40%
30%
20%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert
(R) Deborah Flora
(R) J. Sonnenberg
30%↑
15%↑
10%↓
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Dave Williams
(R) Jeff Crank
50%↓
50%↑
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
90%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) Brittany Pettersen
85%↑
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(D) Yadira Caraveo
(R) Gabe Evans
(R) Janak Joshi
60%↑
35%↓
30%↑
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
July 24, 2015 06:47 AM UTC
29 Comments
There are very few "bad guys." Most "criminals" are just regular people who committed a small crime.
By the time your "good guy with a gun" finishes his "F" in "WTF is going on?" at least 2 people are dead. Your "good guy with a gun" solution sucks.
If it's inside a woman's body it's a fetus. If it's outside a woman's body it's a baby.
Capitalism does not solve everything.
Capitalism is not chaos managed by currency.
Compassion fatigue kills.
Hatred and fear is killing us.
/EndRant… for now.
Rant on, O feathered one.
I like most of this, with qualifications:
It isn't "compassion fatigue" killing us. Compassion knits us together – it's a healing, uniting force. It's not having effective social structures to channel compassion into reality that's killing us..We can drive by so many beggars, can't give to all of them, so we rationalize by saying that they're all "takers" or drunks, or not worthy of help.
Utah – the fricking Mormons, of all people – manage their compassion by duh! giving homeless people homes. It seems to work. For more than just Utah homeless people.
You could make a case for "hatred and fear killing us", literally, in the body and soul. It's pretty well established scientifically that negative emotions weaken the immune system. But I think you're talking more about cynically ginned-up paranoia and state-sponsored discrimination, even scaled all the way up to state-sponsored terrorism. So again, you have state solutions for managing at least fear and the need for security – the police, the military, etc. The "gun rights" movement wants to put all of that management into private hands- everyone must secure their own little turf.
The hatred – The state can't manage that. Arts and culture and religion /spirituality manage that.
/rant
You did a good job defining compassion fatigue. Seeing people who need help as something they are not is exactly why compassion fatigue is dangerous. If we keep pushing our public safety professionals to do more with less we will create more incidents like Sandra Bland, Jennifer Lobato and Walter Scott. Then again I may just be projecting my own issues on the rest of the country…or both. I'll go with both.
Radical religions promote hate. Large, influential groups are promoting fear. Be afraid of Muslims. Be afraid of cops. Be afraid of homosexuals. Be afraid of the mentally ill. "Be afraid of <insert group here> because they are going to <do something here>" is what I hear from many influential people and it's sad and tiring.
In other news, our 'Land of the Free' justice system is about to put a homeless woman away for life … we've lost our damned minds.
For real….
…and in Virginia, this:
In Iraq, I raided insurgents. In Virginia, the police raided me.
Which accounts for Trump.
So the other day, we got a Q poll saying HRC was now trailing Bush, Walker and Rubio (making us the only place in the Universe were Rubio is making any impact right now) in Colorado.
But in that same Q poll, it was shown that 51% think the federal government should take action to reduce the income gap, 53% think higher taxes on the rich will lessen the tax burden on the Middle Class, 62% believe climate change is man made, 62% side with Pope Francis on climate change, 57% agree with the SCOTUS ruling on gay marriage and 61% would oppose a Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage.
So how does a sample that thinks the FEDERAL GOVERNMENT should tackle the income gap and tax the rich, is pro-gay marriage and believes in man made climate change show a plurality of support for candidates that are anti-tax, anti-gay marriage and are climate change deniers? Are people lying about who they're supporting, or what they care about?
Hilary Hate runs deep and wide. Fear runs deeper and wider. So folks vote against their own interest time and time again.
My red neck farming cousins hate the Dems, yet the Dems are the ones who push through the farm bill year after year. To pay my cousins not to grow stuff. One of them was complaining about prices going down after food stamp funding was cut. Not that he wanted any shiftless people getting food stamps, but "they" needed to keep his prices up. Who "they" are who are supposed to support farm production prices is unclear to me.
His feelings seem to be–give him money, but don't feed the needy. And he loathes Hilary.
If there room to be vaguely positive but bored to tears by Hillary? She certainly doesn't deserve hate, but she isn't exactly inspiring either.
Hence, Bernie Sanders. The polls are severely undercutting him. And it's worthless at this point – he has tremendous upside with no limits… Clinton's been campaigning since 1992….. 100% recognition, high unfavorability numbers, does not bode well for Clinton – Bernie can defeat Clinton and unify the Democratic Party plus independents plus liberal/moderate Republicans…..
The recent Quinnipiac poll should have been titled, "Presidential preferences of white Colorado voters." They way oversampled white voters (79%) and way undersampled Hispanic, black, and other minority voters. (11, 4, and 6% respectively). These proportions in CO per 2013 estimate based on 2010 census are : 69% "only" white, 21% Hispanic, 4.4% African-American, and the rest Asian, Native American, mixed race, and two or more races.
It also oversampled Republican (29%) and Independent (36%) and "other" (10%) voters. Dems were only 26% of the sample. From the Sample and M(ethodology detail.
It doesn't say what ages were sampled, but millenials are still not GOP sheep, in spite of the best efforts of the Koch Bros and Lockwood's Generation Opportunity. So I wouldn't panic because of the Q poll findings. If a PPP poll comes out saying the same thing, I might be more concerned.
Census population is not a reliable predictor of voter turnout.
Hispanic and black voters are virtually guaranteed to be underrepresented relative to their percentage of the Census population in the 2016 Presidential election, and whites are virtually guaranteed to be over represented relative to their percentage of the Census population in the 2016 Presidential election. This is a simple empirical fact.
If the percentages by race, ethnicity and political party differ materially from those in the 2012 Presidential election, adjusted for trend lines of voting age population by group since then, then there is a problem with the poll. But, polls should reflect the likely composition of a Presidential year electorate and should ignore non-voter preferences if it is going to be an accurate forecasting tool.
Probably why Quinnipiac has been such an outlier in in the last several cycles. Their methodology sucks. They skew right harder than Fox. Which is not to say this is not bad for HRC. It's just not as bad as any Quinnipiac poll says it is. I will say I'm not enthused by her and don't kid myself that she's ever going to be widely viewed as trustworthy. Not the first word I'd use to describe her. If she really was completely arrogant and sloppy with e-mails that never should have been on her own personal server in the first place, I just wish it would blow up right now before it's too late for a plan B.
I'm sure the GOP would love to see it stay drip, drip, drip and then bombshell down the road. Her constant protestations about the stuff she has provide is getting it irritating. Every time she says that it just makes her sound arrogant and entitled. The whole point is we shouldn't be asked to just take her word for anything no matter how much she chooses to provide. To have any meaning the choice shouldn't be hers. She needs to just hand over her server and let us decide.
I have no sympathy for her privacy concerns since it was her decision to mix the official with the private on the same server in a private account and when she did that for "convenience", she traded the right to keep any of it private for that convenience. Whatever's on that server may either be public or classified, but she has no right to carve out a special area for personal that she is the sole judge of and we have to take her word for. She didn't have to mix the personal and the official. it was her own bad choice. It's not the public's fault if she chose to make her daughter's wedding plans on it mixed in with the official State Department business.
Between the Donald reality TV show, Bush the Third and a Dem candidate nobody likes or trusts much, the best I'm hoping for is that some Dem takes the White House and Dems get the Senate back so we can flip all those 5/4 bad Supemes decisions to 5/4 good ones and prevent the worst legislation from passing.
I kinda think Joe Biden would make an excellent president.
I agree but that's never gonna happen.
A well established fact in political science research is that a large share of voters, certainly at least a third and probably closer to half, do not have coherent and consistent political views and do not decide who to vote for in candidate elections based upon "the issues" that candidates claim to stand for. Many "non-issues" voters decide who to vote for in a "referendum on the incumbent" manner (with incumbent usually meaning the party holding the Presidency). And, many "non-issues" voters decide who to vote for based upon the perceived personality and character of the candidates.
Most partisan voters do care about "the issues", but since "the issues" and those voters partisan preferences almost always coincide in any particular candidate race, it is impossible to distinguish people who vote based upon their research on "the issue" in such a race from those who simply blindly vote from members of their own political party. If anything, blind partisan voting is more common, since older voters tend to continue to vote for the same political party even as the issues associated with that party drift somewhat over time.
So true about lack of issue voting among such a large share of voters. Before electing Reagan for the first time by a landslide the same public that voted him in rejected his policies by significant majorities in all polls. They simply had no clue those were Reagan policies that they didn't like. They liked the paint job. President more than any other office, tends to be an irrational popularity contest. There are rare exceptions like Nixon being elected though not likeable, but not many.
In an ISIS camp today…
ISIS Newb: "Sir I just had a great idea! I know how to make the Americans fear us! We should ambush them in public places and kill them when they least expect it! We could attack them at schools, movie theaters and churches!"
ISIS Leader: "That won't work. They're already doing that to themselves. Come back when you have something better."
As long as the shooters are white and Christian, it's an incident, not a problem.
And speaking of white American guys w/ guns shooting people, Governor Piyush Jindal — a man whose polling numbers are worse than Barack Obama's in Louisiana and who is polling at 0.5% nationally in the GOP presidential nomination race (with a 3% MOE) — was wringing his hands in dismay over the "senseless" evil wrought by this latest shooter.
It's not inexplicable at all. It's what you find at the intersection of a nation with inadequate mental health care and loose gun safety laws.
The right wing likes to rant about personal safety and tougher prosecutions of existing criminal laws instead of gun control measures. To that end, George Brauchler is spending a fortune prosecuting the Holmes case. You mean the prospect of a death sentence for Holmes didn't deter this latest shooter?
As for personal responsibility, that won't get us anywhere since the shooter is as dead as his victims.
I'm sure our friends in the ammosexual community will tell us that all those folks in the theater should have been packing and theyc ould have taken this guy out quicker.
Re The Big Line For U.S. President. There is no way that Jeb Bush isn't in the top three GOP contenders, and really, it is hard to imagine that he is not the front runner. There may not be a 50-50 chance of a Clinton-Bush race, but a Clinton-Bush race is clearly more likely than any other possible combination of general election Presidential candidates, and realistically, Bush probably stands a stronger chance in a general election against Clinton than almost anyone else in the field if he is the GOP nominee.
Agreed, Jebby should be in the top three. After all, it's his turn (sort of) at the nod. Trump will ultimately go the way of Bachman, Cain, Perry, etc. last election cycle. Flirtation but nothing more.
No matter how much the base kicks and screams and what early polls say they do seem to get the establishment guy whose turn it is. McCain. Mittens. That alone should put Bush in the top three. This far out how many times were McCain and Mittens supposed to be dead as door nails? And who did they get?
I sometimes lose track, who's turn is it this next Presidential election? Medvedev, or Putin? . . .
Except that he just came out in favor of ending Medicare and Social Security. That might not win him votes.
There's that. In Florida, no less.