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March 07, 2014 09:52 PM UTC

Weekend Open Thread

  • 58 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

"A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom."

–Bob Dylan

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58 thoughts on “Weekend Open Thread”

  1. At the risk of being banished forever, I liked it better when all the diaries were not written by the same two sources all the time. I liked it when readers could prop a post or they could be "front paged". Why are so few people writing for Pols now?

    1. I think some of it is due to this site losing an semblance of balance and becoming mostly a liberal echo chamber. It eliminates diaries being posted here to persuade or discuss issues. Instead we're more like the Maddow Show, long winded sanctimonious posts about the latest worst outrage ever. 

      No need for anyone else to write a diary.

      1. When did this site ever have "balance"? I have been here for several years and I have never seen that. It has always been a left-leaning site, reveling in rebutting and putting down the endless stream of nut case righties who visit.

        If you think this site is one sided…write a fucking diary and speak your piece. I'm getting a little annoyed at this constant belly-aching about this site by people WHO CONTINUE TO POST HERE!  (Yes…I'm shouting).

        If you are that disgusted with this site..go away and never come back…deal?

        2. If "balance" means accepting Right Wing lies, distortions, and blatant hypocrisy without contestation, in the name of "fairness", then yeah…I suppose we're out of balance.  

          You could always go try your "both sides are equally bad; come, let us reason together" bullshit on a Right Wing blog….see how you fare. Then tell us both sides are equally bad. 

          Are you really still pretending the GOP in Hawai'i has any relevance to, or even remotely corresponds to the GOP on a national level? Seriously?    

          1. P.S.  I think Maddow is brilliant, witty, and quite nice to look at.  But I've always preferred smart women to tarted-up Russian pop singers. 

          2. I disagree with calling anything and everything someone says on the right a lie or distortion. There are differences of philosophy and opinion. You don't have to agree with them, but don't dismiss anything you disagree with as a lie. That may be comforting to you, but it's not legit.

            as to Rachael Maddow, do you really enjoy the 8 minute build up to immense indignation to each nights worst thing ever? She's the definition of TL;DR

            1. I won't argue with you about RM , as those things are a matter of personal preference (degustibus non est disputandum), but your insinuation that all of us call "anything and everything someone says on the right a lie or a distortion" is simply untrue.

              You may be able to name specific posters who do so, but to project that claim to everyone who posts here, indeed to the forum itself, is completely unfair and smacks of the kind of rhetoric I would expect from AC or Moderatus. 

              In fact, the mere presence of AC and Moderatus belies your claim. A true echo chamber would ban such input, as do many of the rightie forums.

               

              1. If such folks quit posting lies (Obama is a coward for not nuking Putin; Udall is a murderer for supporting the ACA; local jurisdictions suppoting local control re: oil and gas will shut the industry dow, etc. ad naueseum) then I will quit calling them that.  Those–and similar–things are not just differences in opinion, they are demonstrably false.  

            2. Tell you what, Dave… name ONE Right-Wing "philosophy or opinion" you've accused us of calling a lie or a distortion that you'd like to defend.  I'm waiting. 

              As to RM, I'm sure she's not as impressive to everyone. I have no doubt there's a marked difference in tastes at work. I've seen your videos. 

            3. How about some examples of people here calling anything someone on the right says a lie which is not, in fact, a lie by objective standards. It's not our fault righties tell so many whoppers.

          1. I'm sorry…whose complaints are we addressing here, Dave?

            I believe it was yours.

            What would you have us do to change your perception that this site is "becoming mostly a liberal echo-chamber"? Should we not challenge right wing lunacy? Should we encourage lies and misinformation? Tell us EXACTLY what you mean. Your insinuations and criticisms are, in my mind, baseless and unfair.

            Lay out for us, please, just how we should behave to dissuade you from your insults.

        4. This site may never have had "balance" per se, but it did formerly have a consistent bunch of rationally responding people from the right. It also had a conservative co-founder (who didn't post much) and we used to have one right-leaning and one left-leaning front page poster elected every 6 months or a year.

          Depending on the post, Elliot does rise to the challenge, and I tend to give him space as a result. But the rest of the right-wing posters these days are generally an embarassment.

          1. Elliot's not a troll and that's a nice change from A Coward and Neeby. He seems to imagine himself more clever than his arguments suggest, and likes to employ slick rhetorical devices that might hit the mark in a text book but come across as bordering on fallacious, in the world of reality.  Moddy fluctuates between being a troll and being a routine right-wing talking point regurgitator, the latter I suppose being acceptable.  

             

    2. Hell, it's hard enough just to get a comment to post on this POS platform . . . 

      . . . but who needs diaries anymore anyway when we've got smiley faces?!?

      yes

    3. Nancy, write a diary. You have interesting FB posts – post a diary! I have topic suggestions for you, even. Message me on FB if you want them.

      I don't always agree with you, but that isn't really the point. There aren't many women posting here, as far as I can tell from poster's aliases. Plenty of commenters, few diarists. Maybe it's what women do – comment on other's work, not post their own?

      Progressive Cowgirl moved out of state, and probably won't be posting here anytime soon.  I post the occasional diary on my election-law obsessions. So Pols needs some female voices. Howzabout it, Nancy?

       

       

  3. Other diaries can still be promoted, I think guest FPE went away though.  Maybe they're in some cyber-hole with comment spell check and the preview button?  

     

  4. Writing is hard…difficult…as one who struggles with the English Language, punctuation, capitalization, spelling and unique Ideas…I have come to realize that photos are my "words"…"A picture is worth a thousand words" to be exact…Anyway, I have been visiting here for a while and have found valuable insights to the politics on the East slope…I live on the Western Slope, and I am fairly isolated from the mainstream of politics…by choice, until now…CD3, and Scotty Tipton…this jerk has voted against the best interests of his voters, and yet he still carries this district…amazing and disturbing….

  5. The kids are alright, as opposed to being, um, bat-shit crazy:

    Survey: Millennials lean Democratic • WASHING-TON» Young adults like to think of themselves as independent, but when it comes to politics, they’re more likely than not to lean to the left.

    Half of American adults ages 18 to 33 are self-described political independents, according to a survey out Friday. At the same time, half of these so-called millennials are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party, the highest share for any age group over the past decade.

    Young adults also tend to be single and churchless, turning away from their predecessors’ proclivity for religion and marriage, according the Pew Research Center survey. Only about 1 in 4 is married.

    1. The critical question is what happens as they get older. Will they become more conservative and we stay evenly divided in many elections. Or do they remain liberal and as time goes on, the electorate becomes more liberal.

      1. I'm betting on the latter, Dave. The lure of becoming one of the "one-percenters" isn't real enough to bind these young people to the Republican party. That seems to be the only carrot being offered by the GOP.

        1. Especially if social mobility continues to stagnate and fewer and fewer of today's young low to middle income young people ever graduate to a better economic position. I also doubt that the growing numbers rejecting the old constrictive social values and approving of change such as equal rights for gays, including marriage, are ever going back to the views of the religious right.

      2. I think a large factor is the "tenor of the times".
        When I was young, it was impossible to see the Communists as anything but monstrously evil. Soviet occupation of Central Europe, Korea, Greece, etc.
        Then, the Vietnam War made us see that it was more complicated and maybe both sides were good and bad simultaneously.
        This ebb and flow has continued.
         

      3. Kind of depends on what happens in their lives.  Do they get a job?  Marry?  Have kids? Find religion?  If they do, they will likely become conservative.  If they don't find a good job and live in the basement of the parents home, the will become an editor of a fine leftist blog.

        1. Or, they could end up spending their time posting stupid cartoons, spewing right wing talking points, and sucking up to plutocrats, in the desparate hopes that somehow, someday, it might make them important. 

        2. Uhhh, no.  You're talking about a specific type of person: white and increasingly southern, that do those things. Democrats and Independents also get married, have kids, and jobs, and many are religious.  There is a reason the CPAC 'outreach' workshop looks like this:

          Big tent?  Maybe, but its increasingly empty and its dwindling inhabitants look more and more similar, and less and less like America in the 21st Century.  So good luck.  Don't change, go ahead and 'repeal' Obamacare another 4 dozen times, stage fauxablusters that cost the taxpayers millions, cut off mike's of ranking members at committee hearings, run eggmendments, hate on gays, run from immigration reform, love on shirtless dictators, deny science, fight against the growing ranks of low-income workers, protect plutocratic polluters, and demand we spend billions more on tax cuts for the wealthy and obsolete military pork while gutting regulations, food stamps and unemployment benefits.  

          That party of privilege and willful ignorance is coming to an end.  

          1. What I find particularly awesome re: this photo is how clueless CPAC's own organizer and event coordinators are about their own base.

            "Let's put it in the big room!  Shuld we add another row of chairs?  Of course!!"

            Even the most jr level event coordinator knows its better to have an over flow crowd and have to set up additional chairs (that can even be stacked at the ready) than to have this visual go viral.  Incompetence: they name is conservative.  And did you catch Hucakabee crushing on Vlad, describing his shirtless glory…  hope he got his cold shower afterwards…

              2. Actually, that photo is an extraordinarily accurate representation of GOP minority outreach:

                "LOOK! There's a black guy! See? How can you say we're not diverse? We have an actual black guy, and we let him speak, and everything!! It's you who are the racists, for saying that our one black guy is not enough.  Ha! Checkmate, Libs!" 

      4. @David — Will they become more conservative as the grow older? Maybe — I started off as a moderate-to-liberal Democrat.  I don't consider myself a knee-jerk liberal, nor have I drifted rightward to any significant degree.

        My takeaway from the survey is that at least Millennials are coming from a starting point that is promising for supporting Democratic ideals and agendas now, and into the future… 

        …As opposed to embracing the mental framework of anti-freedom, anti-science, clueless, no-hope positions advocated by the GOTP, from which it is unlikely they would be able to rise above later in life.

         

        1. My children are in the demographic.  They lean left on many issues, but pragmatism is a defining characteristic.  I can't see either of them going the way of what currently pases for the "conservative" party.  These apples didn't fall very far from the tree.  I first registered as an independent when we had to be 21 to vote.  There are a lot of us out there, and we don't change as we age. 

          1. The potential causes for the drift in one direction or the other are very complex.  But since there are distinct personality trait differences between "conservatives" and "liberals" (fear vs openness, pessimism vs. optimism, etc.), that would beg the question  "Has our outlook on life changed, thus changing our political tendencies?

            I also think that we get our political bent from our parents, either agreeing, or rebelling.  But in later life, those that rebelled may "come home" thus looking like a political shift due to age, when in fact it was always their core beliefs from the beginning.

    1. This is why it's important to vote to put one party or the other in the majority, not just to vote for individuals. No GOTP majority House or Senate is going to pass anything like Warren's plan. In our system, it really is all about the two major teams. We want to vote for the best possible choice on the team closest to us on policy and we need to remember that, even if we aren't crazy about who is on offer on our team, that person is still preferable to anyone who will increase the head count for the other team. 

      It wasn't always that way but it is now since we no longer have two parties that include various kinds of pols on a left right scale as we used to. There was a time when you might want to vote for a center left R as opposed to a hard right D but those days are gone. The R party is all strictly conservative with gradations extending only in one direction, further right, from that point. Ds still have a few liberals and a few conservatives in their predominantly centrist mix so they are the only remaining party with any significant left/right diversity.

       

      For Indies the team/party that comes closest may change with time and circumstance but at any given time in today's political landscape, in any given election, even indies should pick one and refuse to vote for anyone on the other if they want to see policies they like get anywhere.  

       

      The only way to have a chance for policies closer to  Warren's ideal policies (there will always have to be compromise) is to give her more Dems and fewer Rs to work with. Voting for some nice individual Republican is voting to help block the Warren policies, and I suspect many other policies, you like. 

       

    1. Yeah, Rand Paul would be a pretty decent choice to drive a stake into the heart of the GOP.  But to really make it permanent, you'd need Ted Cruz.  That guy has maniacal dreams that would make A. Hitler proud (yeah, I know Godwin and all that).

      Rick Santorum was just a warm up act for the real crazies in 2016.

    3. So after all the post 2012 soul searching about the need for change and retooling and outreach and blah blah blah they come up with Rand Paul?  Maybe they aren't as stupid as they sound. Maybe they know enough to never give the kiss of death CPAC clown car straw poll victory to anyone who might actually be able to win.

    4. Apparently Mittens did win it in 2012, followed by the Colorado GOP's picky Rick "Sweatervest" Google "Santorum."  Rand's –at least he's not a sell-out like Jr.– batshit daddy came in 3rd.  

      1. I should have said maybe now they know enough. But was only being snarky. The idea that the CPAC crowd has a learning curve on any subject is absurd on its face.

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