U.S. Senate
See Full Big Line
(D) J. Hickenlooper*
(R) Somebody
80%
20%
Governor
See Full Big Line
(D) Joe Neguse
(D) Phil Weiser
(D) Jena Griswold
60%
60%
40%↓
Att. General
See Full Big Line
(D) M. Dougherty
(D) Alexis King
(D) Brian Mason
40%
40%
30%
Sec. of State
See Full Big Line
(D) George Stern
(D) A. Gonzalez
(R) Sheri Davis
40%
40%
30%
State Treasurer
See Full Big Line
(D) Brianna Titone
(R) Kevin Grantham
(D) Jerry DiTullio
60%
30%
20%
CO-01 (Denver)
See Full Big Line
(D) Diana DeGette*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-02 (Boulder-ish)
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(D) Joe Neguse*
(R) Somebody
90%
2%
CO-03 (West & Southern CO)
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(R) Jeff Hurd*
(D) Somebody
80%
40%
CO-04 (Northeast-ish Colorado)
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(R) Lauren Boebert*
(D) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-05 (Colorado Springs)
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(R) Jeff Crank*
(D) Somebody
80%
20%
CO-06 (Aurora)
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(D) Jason Crow*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-07 (Jefferson County)
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(D) B. Pettersen*
(R) Somebody
90%
10%
CO-08 (Northern Colo.)
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(R) Gabe Evans*
(D) Yadira Caraveo
(D) Joe Salazar
50%
40%
40%
State Senate Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
80%
20%
State House Majority
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DEMOCRATS
REPUBLICANS
95%
5%
April 17, 2009 03:29 PM UTC
110 Comments
A third-party movement would be a dream come true! The raving radical right would marginalize itself into irrelevance, while the moderate ‘Pubs and conservative Dems would form a new, more centrist, party, shifting the two-party nexus to the left. America would become a saner country than it ever has been before (with the possible exception of the summer of 1787 in Philadelphia), and we could all get on with the business of dealing with the nuts-and-bolts of political decision-making, pursuing an ever-more just, robust, and sustainable social institutional framework within which to exercise our liberties in a context of mutual cooperation and accommodation.
leaving raving radical left to marginalize itself into irrelevance as the party of hope for more spending and tax.
Problem is no leadership, unless the CATO Inst. decided to make a move with 3-4 national Dems and Repubs.
Not likely. Maybe a blue dog here or there, but then, those folks are Dems about as much as Lieberman is.
those Dems attracted by such a third-party would be doing the rest of us a favor by leaving. I would love to see all “Libertarians” form their own society, much as the Confederacy tried to do: It would fail, as did the United States under the Articles of Confederation, as would have the Confederacy which wanted to return to that dysfunctional model, as do all states that remain more fractious than united, more covetous of their fetishized “liberties” than of the necessary mutually-imposed limitations on those liberties in order to maintain political integrity. World history abounds with examples (eg, the ancient Hebrews, the early-modern Polish, numerous Latin American states).
Societies are at their best when their people understand that their collective and individual welfare depends on devising the best balance between individual liberty (and local autonomy), on the one hand, and governmentally facilitated collectivism, on the other. People can then get on with the non-ideological, nuts-and-bolts challenge of devising and refining the best such balance, falling into neither of the absurd but hugely popular fallacies that either one or the other (absolute reliance on government coercion, or absolute reliance on individual liberty) is the one ideologically worshipped answer to what is in reality a very practical question.
Libertad, the beauty of your posts and of your contribution to political discourse is that you are always willing to provide the contrast between blind irrational ideological certainty and thoughtful empirically-based pragmatic analysis. The former thinks that there is a simple absolute truth that solves all problems and answers all needs. The latter recognizes that refining the rules of our collective endeavor is really an on-going challenge requiring recognition of real-world subtleties and complexities.
My fondest wish is that the latter group becomes the mainstream rather than the fringe, and that we get on with the busines of using our minds, collectively, to continue to refine our laws and institutions for mutual benefit, just as our founding fathers fervantly hoped we would do.
and the complex and twisting nature of your novels makes me think your a failed lawyer.
I prefer to explore the complexities and subtleties of life with the full force of the human mind. Sometimes, it takes more than “Ug! Me think liberty good. Bad people, look different, come here, get in way. Bad people, in government, do what me no like, make me live in society. I just want to take. Just want rights. No want obligations. Others no matter; they enemy. Everyone enemy. Everyone wrong. Me right.”
But I do appreciate the reassurance that I’m doing something right. I would start to worry if you stopped wimpering about what I write.
I was LOL so bad I nearly crapped my pants.
with a desparate attempt to score some kind of “point” with a comment that has no point, and no substance, whatsoever. See? It doesn’t take many words to nail you down. No subtlety, no complexity, no need for lots of words.
but I thought your comment was dead-nuts. And the quote about the hammer of libertarianiism is a gem. Nice work.
and dukeco1 you’re pretty much down on your knees fully deep throating Harvey.
“Dead-nuts”? What’s that, some east coasty term or a urban dictionary term for some post teabagging outcome?
you are. I am delighted to have provoked you to an insipid personal attack. If, in the unlikely event you should ever post anything that makes sense, I would be happy to pay you a similar complement.
And to answer your question in the spirit it was asked, the latter, I think.
I learned that a strict translation from Spanish to English is “If Allah is willing”, similar to espero que si (I hope so) and a by product of muslim cultural influence in Spain.
I always knew you were a turrorist though Steve – this just confirms my suspicion 🙂
A Jew descended from some mixture of the Viking Rus and Slavs, living in a land originally inhabited by ancient Northeast Asian migrants but politically formed by an empire founded by the people of an island on the North-Western fringe of Europe, using an Arab phrase incorporated into the Spanish language to express that something would be very much to my liking!
It’s a small, and very highly cross-fertilized, world after all.
The 1st attempt was to shrug off thousands to deferred comapnesation … making it look like a pay cut that a pro sports player would take to meet a team cap.
It’s not like he needs that income to pay for food on the table or medical expenses. At that income level it is about luxury and ego.
He should have set the example, and it would have made it much harder for the union to argue their points. Remember when Hickenlooper took office? He, and all managers took a 10% hit, IIRC.
Statements like these and the facts at hand make for easy peasy pickin’s by any opposition to the RTD tax increase.
.
He’s not just a magnet for bad press,
he’s going to destroy worker morale. If he hasn’t already.
Can the board members be recalled ?
.
Ok, so you got 1,500 people to tea-bag yesterday. Compare that with the expected 10,000 for… (Daily Camera)
In Los Angeles last year for immigration reform rallies.
Guess when non-white people take to the streets, it’s not as big a “news story” as when the rich do it.
It matters just as much. And it was covered. But there’s two things you have to think about here. 1) There were only so many people protesting because the vast vast majority of them were illegal aliens. Therefore, their opinion on U.S. law matters about **zero** to me. And 2) it wasn’t a spontaneous uprising and it certainly didn’t happen all across the nation on the same day.
I want some of what you’re smoking.
There were not a majority of illegal aliens. Mainly because that would be impossible to prove one way or another. Were non-citizens protesting? Yes. Do we know their percentage? No.
I could just as easily say that a “VAST” majority of teabaggers were non-citizens. Could you check it? Nope.
Reductum ad absurdem. Check.
Second, those protests were planned, just like the teabaggings. Santelli’s screed against the mortgage crisis was over 2 months ago. 2 months to plan a protest that can’t get over 10,000 people in ANY major American city, while you have funding from major lobbying organizations AND 24-hour coverage on Fox News?
Teabaggings weren’t spontaneous, and at their best they were grasstops, not grassroots.
I know what you meant, but tons of legal immigrants and people who know them are very concerned about the immigration issue. It’s not just citizens vs. illegals.
You don’t think that there are few legally resident and U.S. citizen hispanics in L.A. who might have an opinion on immigration policy?
But, of course, if you see a group of hispanics gathered together, it’s certainly reasonable to assume that they’re here illegally, right? And, since you PREsume that they’re here illegally, you JUDGE that their opinion on American law is irrelevant.
…wasn’t spontaneous at all. In fact, just today I got a tea party robo-call from a call center in Texas.
I don’t know what alternative reality you live in, but here in real World, spontaneous demonstrations don’t involve robo-calls, call centers or FauxNews sponsorship.
Its easy to show up when you don’t have a job and your lifestyle is subsidized by tax payers.
aren’t eligible for “lfe-style subsidies.” Most of them work their asses off.
The greatest injury you’ve done and continue to do, and others like you have done and continue to do, with posts and public utterances such as these, is to associate “liberty” with (1) xenophobic hatred of “the other,” (2) a complete dirth of compassion for those born into more difficult circumstances with fewer opportunities, (3) an utter lack of recognition of the irrefutable reality of human interdependence, (4) a commitment to the war of all-against-all rather than to the noble ideal of “e pluribus unum,” and, in general, (5) a long littany of odious, repugnant, and shameful attitudes.
Freedom is not, as so many of you who use the word so lavishly seem to believe, the opposite of good will, or humanity, or a commitment to mutual cooperation and accomodation, or a commitment to forging better and better functioning communities both large and small. Freedom comes with responsibility, and responsibility comes with obligations, and obligations can be imposed by a free people, on themselves collectively, by constitutional democratic processes.
Since they aren’t subsidized, then you have no problem refusing to block non documented aliens’ access to public services such as education, welfare, healthcare, drivers licenses; and you support a program to get illegals documented or out?
We could fund it via the get doc’d dividends we’d see with the complete filing of tax returns.
I’m not going to get drawn into a discussion that begins with the concept of a “they,” and how I am going to distinguish their rights from “ours.” That kind of thinking does not have an admirable track record, and it’s not the way I approach the challenge of life on Earth.
Illegals come here for jobs, remember? (It’s certainly not for the weather, eh?)
They have jobs and they pay taxes. In fact, since they are subject to withholding, but don’t file tax returns, they pay more taxes. And then, since they’re illegal, they collect few, if any, of the benefits they might otherwise receive if they were citizens.
The 420s, eh, not so much. More a party than a protest for most, I suspect.
….but often through their American citizen children. Then they qualify for WIC and other assistance. So the answer to whether the group at large sucks off the welfare teat is a definite maybe, it all depends.
Interviews with the immigration protest, IIRC, indicate that some were self-identified as being here “without papers,” and many – I would guess most – were legal family members and supporters. Once again, the answer is in the details.
going around (or “a round”) with you again on the general issue:
Economic analyses overwhelmingly support two propositions:
(1) that undocumented immigrants provide a net economic benefit to the nation, and
(2) that undocumented immigrants, collectively, pay in more in comined local, state, and federal taxes than they consume in combined local, state, and federal services.
See Steve’s complete explanation of why anti-illegal-immigrant ideology is just wrong-headed for the rest of the story.
Lets all go the undocuemnted route!!! Think of the net economic benefits to the nation!!!
1) “Analyses” is the plural of “analysis,” which I used because I was referring to them collectively, not to one individually (which is why the verb agrees with a plural subject, genius). Nice zinger.
2) Typically, your brilliant retort is nothing more than the brief and substanceless declaration that the economic conclusions I posted, well known in immigration law, must be false, because they don’t comport with your assumptions. Boy, that’s some dazzling argumentation.
Lets all go the undocuemnted route!!! Think of the net economic benefits to the nation based on Harvey’s theories or propositions.
Source Harvey, source … what are these exclusive economic analyses that you slap together to present two propositions.
And no, it doesn’t refer to the overcooked noodle between your legs.
Let me explain it for you: We have an immigration policy which, like all policies, is not necessarily rational, but rather is the product of the ways in which popular ideologies, human characteristics, and local interests play out through the strategic maneuvering of the political process. Undocumented migrants (the proper term, since immigrants, by definition in our laws, are legally here) are not people who would otherwise be here legally, but rather are people who would otherwise not be here at all. Your inchoate and poorly formulated “argument” (such a stretch of the word!) is based on the following assumptions:
1) Legal residents produce more economic benefit than illegal residents (an imperical question, and not necessarily true for any a priori reason),
2) The impact on the U.S. economy of an undocumented worker who would not otherwise be here is identical to the impact on the U.S. economy of a currently legal resident “becoming” an undocumented worker. That, too, is an imperical question, but almost certainly a false assumption, and
3) The assertion that an economic benefit to the nation from undocumented migrants implies that it must refer to a greater economic benefit than that produced by legal residents, which, of course, does not need to be the case for the assertion that there is some net benefit to the U.S. economy from illegal migrants to be true.
I posted the source below, in response to Parsing.
you’re just going to keep hurting yourself.
Two comments:
Add costs of taking the jobs that used to be done by minority Americans; their reduced incomes, the costs of choosing drug sales over work, the costs in making things bilingual, the costs of free hospitalization, education, etc. No way in hell does it add up as net contributors. It cannot. Jose and Josephina with their three children cost the taxpayers $21,000 a year just for education. That’s about all of the income for one parent.
Low skill labor is a commodity. More of it, wages go down. Always been that way. Always will unless a union artificially creates a “scarcity.”
If there has been advantage to middle class Americans, it is they can now afford nannies, gardeners, and go out to dinner more because of the immigrants in the kitchen. We have permitted an underclass to develop in this country as ordinary folks find themselves using cheap labor. Americans should mow their own damned yards, just like we used to.
1) the jobs that undocumented workers take are almost all jobs that would otherwise be done by those who were recently immigrants. There was recent reporting on this (no, no link. It was on a TV magazine show, maybe 60 minutes).
2) The secndary cite for the economic analyses is “Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy,” 6th edition, West Publishing: 2008. Take it up with the authors. But, your analysis is too convenient: Many workers come without families and send money home. Many have automatic deductions from pay checks but can’t fill out returns. None can collect on their FICA contributions. All pay sales taxes.
3) You are advocating being a club of the wealthy protecting our wealth against intrusions from those with less, exactly what you complain that the capitalist class does. Even if it did diminish our wealth (which it doesn’t), there are moral reasons for opposing that position.
4) More aggregate wealth is created by allowing labor to migrate to where there is greater demand for labor.
Your analysis is too parochial, too convenient, too focused on your own interests, and too selective in what is included in it.
But I’ll still shake your hand.
Once, ironically I noted as we talked, with our neighbor’s yard service truck emblazoned “Costa Rica Yard Services.”
Yes, I care most about my family, then friends, then community, and on outward to eventually all others. I care more for economic opportunity of black Americans a half mile away from here than someone in Mexico who wants to earn more.
The hand shaking stubbornness was figurative, of course!
you see that I acknowledge that there are certainly negatives to permissive or open immigration, including increased competition for the lowest paying jobs, and increased strains on state and local resources. But, as with all things, it is necessary to weigh all of the pros and cons, and I remain steadfast that, when you do that, this is not even a close call, especially since after weighing all of the pros and cons from the perspective of current members of the American club, and coming to the conlusion that permissive immigration yields a net benefit to them, you are left with the huge “bonus” of it being the moral, globally humane, and globally just policy. Of course, that “bonus” should be enough all by itself.
One of my most fundamental positions, relevant to many issues, is that our old tribalistic instincts do not serve humanity well. Just as the Colonies came to the wise conclusion that they had to unite to survive, because they were in reality interdependent, that is the goal to which humanity should be constantly striving on a global scale. Of course, no one can snap there fingers and erase all of the formidable obstacles to achieving that goal, but we can each do what we can do where and how and when we can do it. The question here is: What contributes more to the long-term goal of global cooperation? Making our borders stronger and higher and more impermeable, in order to (by a mistaken analysis) preserve wealth differentials that favor us, or being a more open and welcoming society, and thus benefiting both ourselves and others seeking opportunity in the process?
It’s not a tough call.
Like that on guns, too.
But we are creatures of a million years of breeding and to pronounce tribalism must go is like, well, saying all guns must disappear.
So what’s your answer to my black “neighbors” trying to compete with illegal immigrants for yard work?
Trust me, this is good for us?
Tough luck? Lower your prices?
my policy preferences, taken together, leave everyone better off than they are now, but taken one at a time, leave more better off than worse off in each case. Few isolated policy changes can’t be shot down by pointing to someone who loses, by which logic we would forever be stuck in the stone age. Of course, a complete progressive package strives to make sure that when there is a net gain resulting from some policy, that there is a distribution of benefits such that there are no losers. That can’t always be accomplished in a single step.
What I say is that, as a general rule, I care about all human beings equally, with a basic and natural division between those with whom I have a personal relationship and those I don’t, and a progression among the members of the former group depending on the level of intimacy of the relationship. What I say is, beyond that, I have no use for the divisions except as a means to an end, the end of human welfare. Current historical reality isn’t something to surrender to, but rather something to understand deeply and precisely in order to improve upon it dramatically over time.
The same argument has been made every time some member of some political or cultural entity has argued in favor of some amalgamation of such entities. Before 1960, almost no European would admit to the possibility of the existance of something like the EU within their great-grandchildren’s lifetime, though it occurred within some of their own. The vast majority of the American colonists, almost up to the drafting of the constitution itself, couldn’t conceive of being a truly unified political entity. My West Germanan friends, a mere handful of years before the coming down of the wall and the reunification of Germany, were certain that the division was permanent. History is far more littered with the certainty that current tribal divisions were natural and permanent than with the belief to the contrary, but that same history is laden with evidence to the contrary.
My allegiance will always be to humanity. And, though I make few predictions, I make this one with great confidence: The long-term future of the world will certainly see one of three eventualities. Either humanity will become to some practical and effective degree politically unified, or humanity will cease to exist. Or, conceivably, humanity will simply ossilate between gradual convergence accompanied by economic progress on the one hand, and regression to more primitive, economically rudimentary, and politically disintegrated stages on the other, without ever either achieving either political unity or complete self-destruction.
The one future you don’t see as a possibility, because it is not a possibility, is continued prosperty in a context of continued global political decentralization. The reason why that is simply not possible is because the externalities produced by our prosperity are global in nature, and only some form of political unification can deal with such externalities, the continued production of which will inevitably undermine our ability to continue to produce wealth on a scale even close to that which we enjoy today.
…they need to find work!
🙂
The one’s who are economically better off and less desparate who your policies favor, or the one’s who are economically worse off and more desparate who my policies favor, while simultaneously favoring the production of greater global wealth?
Parsing, you are so deeply embedded in the convenient myth that all moral obligation stops at the border that you don’t recognize the internal inconsistency in what you’re saying. So, you argue that the plight of those at the lower end of the American wage range encountering increased competition makes the answer to this question inevitable, ignoring those whom you would artificially wall-off from that fair competition and leave to languish in destitution instead.
Even granting the (erroneous) depiction of the choice as zero-sum, involving the question of whether to increase or decrease the fairness of the distribution of wealth and opportunity in the world, I would vote for increasing it, while you would vote for decreasing it. Your justification is that, while vastly increasing global injustice and polarization of rich and poor, you marginally decrease it within one small enclave that already enjoys an enormous advantage on a global scale.
My moral compass doesn’t stop at political borders.
I say that semi-snark.
Apparently you have as much care for some stranger in Bangladesh as the girls under your own roof. I can’t. Pardon my million years of biology.
Borders are artificial only in the sense that they are man made. Many are natural. I have no problem with wanting those of another nation with vastly economic, educational, and cultural standards to stay on the other side of a border.
If we just eliminated the border with Mexico, would you find that good? Would you be as happy when Americans and American corporations run roughshod over the Mexicans with our great capital and wealth?
Just wait until some of those Mexican lawyers come over to make more money!
No stranger is as important to me as the little girl under my own roof. I made that distinction. But the distinctions between strangers of the same color or different, between those who live five or five hundred or five thousand miles away, are indeed arbitrary, if historically reified.
Your millions of years of biology have nothing to do with it. “Virginians” learned to be “Americans,” “Baverians” to be “Germans,” “Bengalis” to be (eastern) “Indians,” and even Sioux to be (western) “Indians.” Political and cultural identities are not biologically inherited, but historically produced and circumstantially modified, drawn around all those who recognize a shared fate and spend enough time acting on that recognition. “Humans” increasingly face a shared fate, and, even, increasingly (if still barely) act upon the recognition of it. There is absolutely no biological obstacle whatsoever to recognizing global humanity as a single polity.
The question of how to dismantle, or transcend, borders is another issue. But the most logical preliminary steps involve making them more permeable, allowing more people, capital, and materials to pass through them more easily, by means of accords that try to hammer out the details.
I know you hate that idea. I know you have a deep-seated ideological aversion to it. But you are absolutely wrong. It is far more important to fight for the terms that you find most acceptible than to fight against the inevitable and the globally beneficial.
at our moral, social, and political core is not far removed from the campfire.
Democrats try to make room so that everyone can stay warm. Republicans, not so much.
It has been that way since before there were Democrats and Republicans.
who has a different view of what “everyone” means (hint: It doesn’t mean “everyone”).
This is why I do not feel a complete allegiance to the American labor movement: It is too caught up in the convenient notion that it is morally unjustifiable for capitalists to protect their disproportionate wealth from incursions by labor, but that it is completely morally justifiable for them to protect their disproportionate wealth from incursions by foreign labor. I just don’t believe you can have it both ways: You have to say, at that point, that you are fighting out of pure group self-interest, willing to oppose those that are screwing you and those that you are screwing with equal impunity.
so who were those 300k people marching on their behalf? … Oh yesh, non working Dems, Repubs, and Indies who mistakenly think social justice starts with a big government program to shelter, feed and protect those who criminally fail to stop by the INS to get a permit.
With so many illegals taking American jobs, one must conclude that the wages available vs those demanded by unemployed Americans is at an imbalance.
The official state police estimate of the Denver Tea Party alone was 7,000. There were at least 600 events across the nation. Keep in mind it wasn’t a Saturday or a holiday. Most of these people took time off of work to be there (myself included). And it was a very well behaved group–not in any way breaking the law or being remotely unruly.
The CU students who participate in the 4/20 demonstration, on the other hand, are breaking the law. If they want to carry signs and chant things, fine. Breaking the law en mass doesn’t make it any less wrong. The same goes for illegal aliens. Just because there’s 15 million or more of them doesn’t mean their actions were any less illegal. The law is there for a reason. You can protest them (which I support wholeheartedly). But as they stand, you have to abide by them.
It’s a pretty good one.
This country has a long history of civil disobedience. Laws are made by men, not Gods, and are therefore fallible.
Sometimes, to prove a law is unjust we must break it.
If you have a disagreement with them on whether or not the law should be in place or not, that’s one thing, But I hardly see 10,000 students protesting a stupid law as sheep. Far from it.
Seeing as you’re a CU Republican, you probably remember the student who had several handguns in his dorm room. He was in violation of a statewide ban on handguns on college campuses (though he had a CCW permit) yet the CU Republicans lined up to defend him. Were you condemning his act of civil disobedience as well? Somehow I doubt it.
And no, I wouldn’t have been there to support him. I do support concealed carry on campuses though. Very strongly in fact.
And by your reasoning, someone could protest, say, statutory rape by having sex with 3 year olds. That’s sick and disgusting and if 10,000 people got together to do it all in one place, I would have them all locked up. I actually believe marijuana should be legalized, regulated, and taxed at point of sale. But getting together and making a mockery of my university and my hometown is not the way to go about it.
is talking about statutory rape or bestiality or murder or anything like that. Those issues aren’t even on the same political planet as CCW permits and marijuana legalization.
Civil disobedience only is applicable if, in the process breaking the law, you’re not harming anyone.
We obviously have differing opinions on how to go about legalizing marijuana, but it’s nice to know we agree on the overall outcome.
I think it’s just something that people do there. If the town really had a problem with it, they’d make more of a fuss about it. It’s basically condoned by the University, otherwise they’d take a hardline stance on it. The Boulder PD barely even tries to stop it.
…when we can agree on something. I also agree that laws should only be broken in demonstration–if at all–if it does not harm anybody else. But I would argue that it does do harm. Harm to the reputation of the school to which I’ll receive my degree, harm to the reputation of the city in which I was born, raised, and educated. Not to mention it does have negative side affects to those who breath in that smoke. Not nearly so severe as regular cigarettes, but it comes to the same.
That’s my philosophy on laws in general–something should only be illegal if it has the potential to cause harm (physical, psychological, or economic) to anyone not taking part in it. For example, smoking marijuana. As long it isn’t done in public or in the presence of someone who has no choice over whether or not to be there (specifically minors), it’s fine with me.
and I think 4/20 helps it’s reputation. Definitely is better than many of the dumb things C.U. chooses to do like give tenure to a scam artist like Churchill.
…that you think Churchill is a scam artist. Compared to having hired him in the first place I have no problem whatsoever with the 4/20 demonstration. He and Bill Ayers both made fools of themselves just last month and it was scary how many people supported both of them.
I should also mention that, regardless of whether or not they should hold demonstrations like this, Hitler’s birthday is probably not the best thing to associate with when trying to make a political statement. I hope we can all agree on that.
it’s a coincidence.
There are only 365 days of the year, and I bet there are probably thousands of horrible monstrous people who were born on each of those days.
On a related side-note though: Godwin’s!
h/t xkcd.
Maybe there’s an exception for fascist military planners.
I now have stuck in my head the mental image of stoners sitting around going, “Sieg Heil, duuuuude!”
A scary “coincidence,” especially when you consider that William Pierce, the American nazi who wrote violence-inspiring novel The Turner Diaries, got his doctorate in physics at C.U. in Boulder, as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W…
Hmmm…I’m starting to see the connection…
… since all 86 comments that are here as of this writing are all “new” for me and I don’t want to go through them all to see if this has been covered.
Anyway, here’s the story behind “4:20” in cannabis culture… Undoubtedly it’s why they selected 4/20 as the date to associate with their protest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4:20
I would say tolerating organized civil disobedience does little harm to the reputation of an institute of higher learning.
On the other hand, the lack of public/state financial support for our colleges and universities does real harm. In addition to the lack of funding impacts on students and infrastructure and current faculty and staff, it is a real turn-off to potential faculty hires. The top faculty will go where they are wanted and where they will be supported.
See this is why it’s so often useless to talk to most Republicans. They simply throw everything they have at everything they disagree with, regardless of any sense of scale, context, or decency.
Fucking hippie, get a job. (And student doesn’t count!)
…making a comparison between the degree to which each was wrong. Only that his reasoning for making one permissible was so broad that it left the other open to the same interpretation. Please don’t twist my words.
P.S. I have a job, and I’m not a hippie. And being a full time student would be more than enough, though I don’t let that hold me back from earning my own money. I appreciate your concern though.
If you claim to be an exception, great, let’s believe you, but don’t pretend these people have anything useful they’d otherwise be doing.
…”these people” do have other ‘useful’ things they could be doing. In fact, there were so many families in every direction you could hardly move among the crowd. These people surely weren’t unemployed and living off the government’s dollar while holding signs that say “You pay your mortgage, I’ll pay mine.”
I say they were all either welfare queens or government employees. If you can claim most at the previous events were illegal aliens, I can claim this.
and on top of that, they pulled their kids out of school for this. Most kids do not get to just leave school to go to some hippie Nazi protest and listen to Paulbots bitch about hemp and taxes and Hitler.
I guess that’s how Republican parents ensure they get Republican kids: keep them out of school whenever possible.
P.S. The only right-winger I know is my brother, who’s currently unemployed and used to work for a company that manufactured government forms.
P.P.S. How’s that state university working out for you, hippie?
…the people in the immigration demonstrations were largely Hispanic, making it very likely they or their family members were among the group that would be negatively impacted by strict enforcement of immigration laws. At the Tea Parties however, which in no way was a gathering of hippies, Nazis, or anything else of that kind, people were protesting big government and the spending of money that doesn’t exist on things like the expansion of unemployment benefits. That makes it highly UNlikely that they would be the ones benefiting from that expansion.
As for Republican parents, they should keep their kids out of school as much as possible. All levels of education, particularly universities, are incubators for liberal ideas and indoctrination. You’re clearly a hateful person so I wont reply to you after this, but I had to set you straight on your take on Wednesdays protests which were nothing like you described.
I think Republicans should keep their kids out of school as well. Knowledge is power, and the more you folks talk, the more convinced I am that it is virtually a moral imperative for humanity that you have as little power as possible.
Keep your kids out of school, teach them that the sun revoles around the earth and that man shares no ancestry with other apes. Don’t polute their pristine minds with science, math, literature, philosophy, comparative religious studies, economics, the humanities, or any other of those horrible liberal falsehoods.
Teach them at home, what little you know, and let them suffer the consequences of your folly.
have you ever wondered why there is such a strong correlation between working with knowledge and analysis on the one hand, and being liberal on the other? It’s really a remarkable coincidence, isn’t it?
But I always wonder what’s up with the strong correlation between being a liberal and being a pretentious douchebag who likes to hear himself talk. Now THAT is a remarkable coincidence.
I know when I’m out-witted….
But, just to follow our line of reasoning, have you ever noticed the strong correlation between ignorance, anger, and conservativism? Be proud, my friend, you belong to a venerated tradition that simply jumps out of the history books at every turn of the page….
I inadvertently left “humorless” off the list. My bad.
Next time you’ll have to let me know when you say something “funny.”
Here, let me try:
“[It] is … very shallow…, the heart of a conservative.” -Yokel quoting GKC.
the worst thing they can do to you is to stop saying stupid things?
And the people who resent government intervention the most are precisely the ones who are getting it. See for example every red state.
Ya hippie.
and most of the pictures of hippies and Nazis that I’ve seen were largely pictures of caucasian types of people. (Just to make the point that your efforts at higher education do not seem to be helping you in forming sound arguments.)
By the way, some of the people I saw in pictures of the tea-bagging looked like building and road construction workers. These are exactly the sorts of people who will benefit directly from the stimulus dollars.
BR, your language makes you sound hateful. In contrast, my sense of sxp151’s language is sarcastic (perhaps ironic, I always get confused on these details). You’ve been around here at least a few weeks, you should be able to detect this.
….most of them were retired, I presume from the photos, despising their Social Security, Medicare, and FDIC protected savings.
I wrote the local paper:
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I feel like I ought to be offended, but that’s pretty darned funny.
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May I add that now I realize that I’ve misused two words in this diary already today.
If you were thinking, well,
maybe those words have meanings other than the ones in the dictionary,
the answer is “no.”
A little off my game today.
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Sunny and warm, a great day to sit on the grass at Folsom Field or the quadrangle or wherever they hold this event.
Teabagging optional.
from the S.F. Chronicle
from the HuffPo
is in the very best of hands!
but here in SE Denver/unincorporated ArapCO, the snow has been falling all morning.
Careful driving out there folks.
And it looks like the snow shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Sunday’s gathering. We’ll play it by ear, rather than cancel it altogether.
I’m on work-from-home today, rapidly approaching or passing 2′ already.
I think RSB might be a witch. Let’s see if he floats!
Very small rocks!
http://www.denverpost.com/brea…
Brandon Shaffer moves up to Senate President and John Morse is the new Majority Leader.
What happened?
Was what was expected. Posted here, several days ago.
If you want to reply to a comment, click on reply, rather than posting a new thread. It makes the flow of conversation much easier to read, and it lets the person you’re responding to know that you’re talking to them.
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a person could be forgiven for thinking that Rush would put the interests of his party ahead of the interests of good, representative governance.
Today’s 2 major parties are the same in this respect: they are not bound together, or unified, by a common vision of how we should govern ourselves;
they are all about the naked grasp for power, tressed up to allow members to rationalize the moral compromises they must make in order to belong.
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can not just be wished away, how would you go about resolving this problem you have identified? I’m looking for a nuts-and-bolts, here’s-how-you-do-it, answer.
Not knowing what your answer is, I can bet, in anticipation, that my response will be, No, you didn’t take reality into account, but rather assumed that it can be wished away.
Humans are what humans are. I don’t mean to oversimplify what that is, or to suggest that there is not a large degree of malleability tethered to that underlying essential and immutable nature. But one place to look for the underpinnings is to the rest of life, and how it evolved: Those genes which were best at replicating themselves are the ones that persisted into the future. Humans are a product of that process as well, and much of what we are can be best understood by understanding how that process, that lathe of heaven upon which we were rotated and carved over the millenia, made us what we are.
The institutions you see and bemoan are far more subtle and sophisticated than you recognize, because they are the product of a secondary lathe of heaven, the one which involves the reproduction and natural selection of memes, and they reflect the ways in which humans imperfectly align the interests of self-interested individuals in order to serve the interests of self-interested individuals. Not just those “in power,” but to a limited extent, and with great injustices of distributions of gains, their constituents as well.
The mistake many people make is in presuming that if they could just erase all that is and replace it with what they think would work better, the world would be a better place for it. In fact, whenever people have had some success in doing that, they have, they have created only suffering and destitution. The most successful political revolution in World History wasn’t a revolution at all, it was a war of secession which incorporated some very subtle and marginal modifications into the existing scheme of things, to great effect.
We must work with the material on the ground, understand it (by far the most difficult and important step of all), refine it, develop it, cultivate it to better serve the needs of social justice, economic robustness, and sustainability.
Politics can not be wished away. But it can be wisely navigated.
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Sure, its a mess.
But since my party is in power right now, deal with it.
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That’s not even close to what I was saying, and I’d prefer it if you spoke for yourself, and let me speak for myself.
I am a social analyst, whatever party is in power. I look at how the systems that encompass us operate, and consider how to work with that systemic material to advance the goals and values that many people share (eg, prosperity, fairness, sustainability). The (subtle) realities of “human nature” and the relative sophistication of institutions that evolve over centuries (or millenia, really) recommend first understanding how our social systems work, second understanding how to tweak them in beneficial ways, and third devising implementable strategies that accomplish that task. To the extent that “it’s a mess,” it’s inherently a mess, and so it being a mess is a parameter rather than a variable.
And your suggestion that “my party” is more important to me than accomplishing the goals I listed above is the assumption of an ideologue assuming all others are ideologues as well: My party is a vehicle to those ends, not an end in itself. Since my understanding of the social systems through which we operate recognizes the need to use our agent of collective action (government) in ways which facilitate collective action for mutual benefit, I belong to the party that shares that realization.
…not very Christian, is it? (or is it?)
Boulder Republican,
Can you give me your source (I know you said state police, but I can’t find it) for 7,000 at the tea party?
I was not there, but I’ve seen a lot of clips, utube footage and stills. While it looks like there were certainly more that 2 grand there, 7,000 really seems like a stretch.
would trust any crowd estimates coming from the police (or city parks staff). After all, both the police and parks folks should be suspect since their motivations are directly tied to their need to continue sucking at the public teat. [/snark]
Why hasn’t a private outfit with demonstrable ‘unbiasedness’ taken on the responsibilities of estimating crowd numbers?
And, why were all those T-back Parties held on public property?
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and I’ll give you an unbiased estimate:
213,455
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I plot your rubric scarab,
I steal your satellite
I want your wife to be my
Baby tonight, My baby tonight.
I choose to steal what you choose to show
And you know I will not apologize
You’re mine for the taking
I’m making a career of evil
Maybe I’ll be your surgeon
I’d like to pick your brain
Capture you inject you
Leave you kneeling in the rain
I choose to steal what you choose to show
And you know I will not apologize
You’re mine for the taking
I’m making a career of evil
I’d like your blue eyed horseshoe,
I’d like your emerald horny toad
I’d like to do it to your daughter on a dirt road
And then I’d spend your ransom money,
But still I’d keep your sheep
I’d peel the mask you’re wearing,
And then rob you of your sleep
Rob you of your sleep
I choose to steal what you choose to show
And you know I will not apologize
You’re mine for the taking
I’m making a career of evil
…gawd, I luv her