Red Mosquito

Bill Scher is neither a particularly objective nor a particularly credible voice. In any case, I would readily distinguish between two positions: that it's not particularly strategic to vote third party, and that third party voters are responsible for the 2000 election. The former is generally true, the latter is patently false.

Mickey wrote:Bill Scher is neither a particularly objective nor a particularly credible voice. In any case, I would readily distinguish between two positions: that it's not particularly strategic to vote third party, and that third party voters are responsible for the 2000 election. The former is generally true, the latter is patently false.

Lots of people disagree, for example:

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/polisci/facu ... eform9.pdf

"Responsible" is not the same thing as "spoil," but yes, I'm quite aware that there are people with a vested interest in blaming disaffected voters for 2000 and not, say, a relatively spurious Supreme Court decision.

Mickey wrote:"Responsible" is not the same thing as "spoil," but yes, I'm quite aware that there are people with a vested interest in blaming disaffected voters for 2000 and not, say, a relatively spurious Supreme Court decision.

It's almost like something lead to a situation where Harris and the Supreme Court had to be involved. Wonder what that was....

"It's not the corrupt Supreme Court's fault that they had to be called upon to make a decision"

I mean I guess I just believe very adamantly that in a complex causal chain like this there's really no "right" answer and it's absurd to adjudicate as if there were, which means that the question of where you assign blame is a political question. So you can choose to blame a handful of disaffected voters that the Democratic Party did a bad job of capturing--or even better, non-voters!--or you can blame people significantly higher up on the ladder of relative power. Maybe, for example as Scher does, you could blame Nader himself for running as a spoiler candidate. Or Gore, for getting squeamish about the Lewinsky scandal and not letting Clinton stump for him even though he remained popular. Or you could blame the Supreme Court's laughably undemocratic decision, the legions of paid protesters who took part in the Brooks Brothers riot to shift public perception, the wealthy right-wing donors who funded these people, Bush, Harris, etc. etc.. If it were me, I would personally navigate this conundrum by assigning the principle blame to the party/parties most well-positioned to have chosen a different outcome and who made an unambiguously unethical choice not to do so, and avoid blaming the least powerful, least well-equipped people, even though their actions might have helped create that outcome, but your choice!

Weird, who could have seen this coming??

Mickey wrote:

Weird, who could have seen this coming??

I'm surprised. Wouldn't the Secretary of the Senate be a Republican?

B wrote:

Mickey wrote:

Weird, who could have seen this coming??

I'm surprised. Wouldn't the Secretary of the Senate be a Republican?

This isn't (at least as far as I understand it) a political block, like "we will not release this information!" It's a technical block, as in the Secretary of the Senate saying "we do not respond to such requests because they are against Senate policy." So now you have to imagine, did Joe Biden, 36-year senator, not know the Senate policies? Or was this from the get-go a purposeful obfuscation, tying the complaint up in legal knots so that the average voter loses interest?

But perhaps I'm wrong here, that's possible. I know fuck all about the Senate procedures and have no interest in learning them in any intimate way. It doesn't change my larger point, that this was a calculated strategy to protect Biden and not a good faith reckoning with Reade's allegation. It was always going to end in the political equivalent of dumping a million filling boxes on the prosecutor's desk during discovery. Which is fine insofar as Biden is a politician trying to control a narrative, but it is not fine insofar as a lot of liberal dopes (like the women's march) spent Friday night talking about Biden's transparency.

She is a registered Republican appointed by McConnell, but I don't think that's what's happening here because "we can't produce any documents" is a win for Biden.

Doesn’t matter

when Elizabeth Warren stands up and vanquishes him it will be all over

any minute now....

It's tough, because on the one hand it's nice to see the Democrats stand together in solidarity the way the Republicans tend to, but on the other hand the issue they chose to stand together on tells you everything you need to know!

You guyssssss

What's the metric for something being a toss up here?

Mickey wrote:What's the metric for something being a toss up here?

Post Chipotle shit brown, apparently.

what's up with that stripe through the middle of NE?

like a pageant sash

very stylish

96583UP wrote:what's up with that stripe through the middle of NE?

like a pageant sash

very stylish

Omaha area awards their electoral point separately.