.
From The Hill, “RNC co-chair: Wisconsin voters not so ‘sharp’“:
… “It’s not going to be an easy election, it’s a close election,” said Sharon Day, the co-chairwoman, while speaking at a GOP field office in Waukesha, Wis., according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Like I said, much closer than I can even understand why.
“I don’t want to say anything about your Wisconsin voters but, some of them might not be as sharp as a knife,” she added.
Day was born in Texas, and has lived in Florida for decades. The chairman of the RNC, Reince Priebus, has long lived in Wisconsin…
To be fair, if you’d only associated with Wisconsinites like Scott Walker and Reince Priebus, you might not have the best opinion of the state’s average IQ, either. And Ms. Day probably doesn’t have a good grasp of Midwestern Nice — the idiots and the Democrats smart people in both Texas and Florida are so much more demonstrative.
While we’re on that topic, Jon Chait at NYMag found another poster child for the modern Republican Party:
When you interview random people, you come across all sorts of interesting ideas that don’t necessarily get reflected in the national debate. The New York Times has a deep reported story about social and economic change in Iowa, and the interviews with Iowans found a voter who is really not going to vote for Bruce Braley:
Susie Mayou, a 55-year-old conservative, described herself as heartsick that Democrats had carried Iowa in six of the last seven presidential elections. “If Iowa gave power based on land ownership, the state would swing 180 degrees,” she said. “The city people push the agenda.”
The civil-rights agenda really went off the rails sometime around the 18th century when they started taking away political privileges from the large landowners….
***********
Apart from reminders that half of all our fellow citizens are below average, what’s on the agenda for the day?
sparrow
“City people” being the code word for ni-CLANG, presumably. Ugh, these people are vile.
JR in WV
Wow, just wow…
I wonder if she knows that people used to have to own land to be a voting citizen, and that perspective has been rejected? Prob not.
Amir Khalid
@JR in WV:
If she knew, she would most likely argue that that was the right way all along.
Anne Laurie
@sparrow:
Hispanic immigrants who came to work at the meatpacking plants, actually. (I read the article.) Still not enough African-Americans in Iowa to be “threatening”, apparently.
Chris
@Amir Khalid:
Yep. It’s commonly argued in the conservative blogosphere, phrased as “you should have skin in the game if you’re going to vote.”
piratedan
well she’s right, after all, they DID elect Walker and then refused to recall him despite the crap that he pulled once he was in office.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Chris: I’ve heard them say if you pay INCOME taxes then you can vote. Income taxes are the only real taxes, well and the DEATH TAX.
OzarkHillbilly
No taxation without representation. Hmmmm…. Where have I heard that before?
Waspuppet
At this point adopting an attitude of “No representation without taxation” would fix a few things.
I wonder what the Iowa woman would have to say when told that back in the glory days when only landowners voted, women couldn’t.
kdaug
Ummm – “she”?
I get that the lady wants to return to the good old days of 3/5ths and only landowners having the vote, but does she realize that would also exclude her?
How long ago do these people think the suffragette movement was? Or do they know at all?
bemused
I’d like to know if everyone in Susie’s world owns their own home or property. Maybe so but it would be unusual not to have a family member or friend that rents and has never owned property.
raven
How many times does Brokaw have to tell us that Ben Bradlee used “salty language”? No shit, a WWII Destoyer sailor and newspaper man, what a fucking shock.
danielx
Belated best birthday wishes to Mr Chuck Berry on his 87th birthday (10/18/26) ….and his many children are still out there playing his licks. A man responsible for reprehensible behavior on a grand scale.
BillinGlendaleCA
@raven: LMFAO.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: I had a boss who was once chided by a co-worker for her “salty” language. Her reply was “When it comes to that shit, I am Lot’s wife, for fuck’s sake.”
Amir Khalid
@raven:
Most journalists I knew in my working life used profanity to some extent. A newspaper’s editorial floor is no place for the prudish.
VidaLoca
I live in Wisconsin and I’ve had the opportunity to observe Walker and the people who support him first-hand. To believe or insinuate that that support is based in stupidity is self-serving intellectual bankruptcy. It does nothing to help explain why the right wing has had so much success in winning governorships, legislatures, and judicial elections across the Midwest. It does nothing to help explain why the Democrats (in spite of having, we believe, a superior political program and social agenda) continue to lose elections. Guess what: if you can’t figure out why you’re losing, you’re going to keep on losing.
If you really believe that the Democratic agenda is the greatest thing since sliced bread, then any Democrat with a pulse should be polling way ahead of Walker. Yet Walker and Burke have been tied at about 47%/47% since early spring. Why is that?
What’s been going on in Wisconsin, since 2010, is class warfare taken to a whole new level. The Wisconsin Republicans are very good at it, and the Wisconsin Democrats are not. Success breeds success; the former party goes on winning while the latter goes on losing: in many ways the Republicans are just filling up a power vacuum that the Democrats have left for them. Simply: the Republicans deliver value for their people — even their white, working-class people who “should” be voting for the Democrats — while the Democrats do not.
There’s no stupidity about it. It’s self-interest under a certain definition of that term. A white definition, specifically: if you want to understand Walker, begin there. But claiming that stupidity drives what Walker is about only makes the people who cling to that idea more stupid in the sense that they (meaning specifically, those of you who do so) are deliberately making a choice to give up on understanding reality because their conventional wisdom and preferred stereotypes are more comforting.
raven
@danielx: I was at a Berry show in Decatur Illinois in the early 70’s. He came out and said he wouldn’t play until the crowd collected more money for him. We passed our hats. . . and kept the money!!!
Amir Khalid
@bemused:
To whom she probably says, “If you would only make something of your life, then you could vote too.”
Mustang Bobby
Just curious, but how much land in Iowa is owned by Conagra and other such corporate entities? Oh, wait; corporations are people, my friend.
raven
@Amir Khalid: I’m plowing my way through the Reagan book and, a third of the way through, he is STILL on Watergate. After Carter read the transcripts from the Oval Office he said something to the effect that “there has not been enough influence of Christianity on our political system”. Chew on that shit for a while!
MattF
Since the topic is stupid people– can I take a swing at Theissen/WaPo? That quote from Theissen a couple of posts down is actually taken from a WaPo column. I’m hoping the column is only online, but… I’m actually kinda shocked at the level of fear-mongering here.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: Oh yea!
seaboogie
I think this covers a whole lot:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZ_VYpHILv8
bemused
@Amir Khalid:
Ha, no doubt.
Schlemazel
The land of Joe McCarthy, RInse Previous and Paul Ryan full of too many people with cognitive issues? Thats unpossible!
Bystander
Speaking of fearmongering, anybody wonder how long before Wolf and Moanin’ Joe apologize for their public pantswetting over Ebola?
BillinGlendaleCA
@Bystander: NEVER. SATSQ.
kbuttle
David Brooks is trolling DougJ something FIERCE today. Like, proper DougJ-quality trolling.
Schlemazel
@kdaug:
Perhaps she is from the Ann Coulter school of conservative “thought”. Little rotten Annie has suggested women shouldn’t be allowed to vote also – though I notice she doesn’t refuse her own right, even to the extent of getting caught voting illegally a couple elections back.
I’d bet this dear lady also is in favor of a “paper bag test” for voters. “Sorry sir, I know you own your own place but you are darker brown that this paper bag so you’ll just have to move along.”
bemused
Chait’s last line: “Also, when the serfs were bound to the land, there was nobody on welfare, I’ll tell you that.”
I’m guessing this would sound good to Susie too, although that would be landowners would have to feed them.
Mustang Bobby
Oh, crap, I just watched the “highlights” of the Florida governor’s debate between Charlie Crist and Rick Scott last night. Feh. I’d write-in Teddy the Wonder Lizard except that might be seen as a vote for Scott.
debbie
@raven:
That reminds me of when Ken Burns’ “World War II” came out and people got upset becaue one of the interviewees used the word “bastards” when describing how he felt the first time his plane was shot at by the Germans.
Chris
@Mustang Bobby:
Were there fans involved?
Mustang Bobby
@Chris: Not of the electric kind. But the whole thing sounded like a couple of kids fighting at recess.
I’m beginning to have second thoughts about dismissing the idea of Florida splitting into two states. I’m all for it if we become a part of The Conch Republic.
Steeplejack
@raven:
And Bradlee also would have laughed at the euphemism “salty language.”
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
On Thom Tillis and Eastwooding, note the date on this announcement that Kay Hagen wouldn’t be at last night’s “event”.
Sherparick
@sparrow: In this case, it not just blacks and brown, but all non-rich people as well as “hippies” who don’t give their betters proper deference. I am picking up Corey Robin’s “Reactionary Mind” as I have to figure these people out.
Bobby Thomson
Citation needed, Freeper.
Frankensteinbeck
@Bobby Thomson:
No, it’s true. ‘Value’ is not material self-interest. There is ‘value’ in the warm self-righteous glow of kicking the weak and claiming you’re better than them. People are great at lying to themselves and feeling this glow even when they’re being kicked. If you want to see how they’re getting value, look at all the states that denied Medicaid expansion.
Baud
Congrats to Newsmax for winning the 2014 Whistler for Best Dog Whistle headline.
raven
@debbie: You should have read the message boards on HBO’s “The Pacific”. No way Americans would do that!!!
raven
@Steeplejack: Well, he was a salt!
gene108
@Bobby Thomson:
From a certain point of view, Republicans deliver what people want them to deliver. It may not benefit them in any tangible respect, but some folks would rather have it so gays could not marry, abortions are illegal, etc. even if it means not having access to affordable healthcare.
Betty Cracker
@Bobby Thomson: I don’t think the commenter is a Freeper. He or she actually makes a valid point; races like the ones in Wisconsin and Florida shouldn’t even be close, and it’s not an insane, stupid or wingnut idea to believe that the Republicans do a better job of framing their message than we do.
I think the commenter is saying that while it may make us feel better to write half the country off as stupid, it’s not very persuasive to the voters we need to reach. There’s truth in that. I’m as guilty as anyone of immediately assuming Republicans are stupid — often with justification! But what does it accomplish?
The question is, do we want to continue to allow plutocrats to bamboozle half the country into voting against their own economic interests, or do we want to find a way to get more people on our side? We’ll never have more money to throw at the problem; Democrats’ strength is — or ought to be — the fact that their agenda benefits more voters.
raven
Bizzare. Valerie Plame on Joe with Nicolle Wallace.
Bobby Thomson
@Betty Cracker: No, the problem really is that most people are terribly stupid, and we have to trick them into voting for their own interests because they are so damn stupid.
Baud
Maybe if Democrats stop hating Democrats, some non-Democrats will stop hating Democrats too.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@VidaLoca: Well said. Thanks.
Politics is complicated. And change in politics is very, very difficult. It’s disconcerting in many ways to have to figure out ways to argue for 1/4 of a loaf when one sees the whole loaf just sitting there and it’s just so clear that nearly everyone would be better off if we just took the whole thing!!1 But one doesn’t win by only appealing to those who agree with you 100%. You’ve got to convince the people who are afraid of change, who are suspicious of the “other”, who are too often anti-intellectual, and who have always voted for people like themselves.
Walker advocates destructive policies. His policy reasoning is flawed. But he knows how to win over voters. He (and those like him) shouldn’t be underestimated.
Cheers,
Scott.
Mustang Bobby
@Betty Cracker: The Republicans also know that no one ever went broke or lost an election by exploiting the greed, fear, and paranoia of the American electorate. Even Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America” theme in 1984 had in it the subliminal message of “This country was on the road to wrack and ruin until Reagan came along: he saved us! If we don’t re-elect him, we’ll all be in the shitter.”
It’s also a lot easier to sell fear — witness the last couple of weeks with the Ebola opera — and “us vs. them.” Aaron Sorkin nailed it in “The American President”:
It’s a lot easier to make people afraid of the abstract idea of two men getting married than it is to show them that the deficit has been cut in half, your health insurance isn’t going to backrupt you, and those nice men in the fancy suits who will buy your land to frack under it are going to poison you.
You’re right; the Democrats’ agenda does benefit more voters. Their problem is they’re afraid to say it.
JPL
@raven: I just started streaming and they are fixated on the salty language. What a disservice to have those two hacks, praise someone who was concerned about reporting the truth.
VidaLoca
@Betty Cracker: Betty, thanks. That about nails it. The only thing I’d add is that in Wisconsin, like in Florida, the Democratic Party is really the dog’s breakfast.
@Bobby Thomson: It’s not just framing the message, it’s not even just bringing the hatred (although that’s a side benefit that they exploit). Walker is very good at delivering material economic benefits while he brings the hatred too. It’s a twofer!
Matt McIrvin
@Betty Cracker: There are interests other than pocketbook economic interests. There’s the feeling that someone who is in some sense like you, and understands your goals and values, is in control. In the extreme, this fuels racist dog-whistling and affinity-based con games. But really it’s everywhere.
Democrats do this too, for their base: liberals loved Obama in 2008, and love Elizabeth Warren now, in part because they sense that these people are like them in some way. But Republicans are better at it, for the majority of white Americans. They’re the true kings of identity politics, in most places where dominating the white vote will get you a win. They’re starting to lose their grip nationally mostly because that is no longer enough. But in some elections, it’s still enough.
Shalimar
@VidaLoca:
Wisconsin Republican politicians are fighting for the class they actually belong to and willing to lie their asses off to get the masses to support their agenda. Wisconsin Democratic politicians are part of the class Republicans are fighting for. If you’re relying on extremely rich people like Burke to lead your poorer classes into warfare, why would you expect them to be good at it?
VidaLoca
@Shalimar: I wouldn’t. She isn’t. And I think that goes to the 47/47 tie I mentioned above.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
People don’t own their homes in urban areas and their is a lot more of them than rural areas, that’s news to me. Not to mention one of those urban home owners likely will be paying more in taxes than the entire rural town this women lives in pays.
This sounds less about racism and more about trying to redefine voting so only the GOP base can vote.
skerry
@OzarkHillbilly: Did you see it on a Washington, DC license plate?
FlipYrWhig
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: I guarantee you she isn’t thinking about outright ownership, as in no longer paying off your home loan. She’s repeating something that she thought sounded good as an explanation for why the Good People Like Her are being overwhelmed by Those Lazy Moochers In The City. Yes, The City In Iowa, the dystopian hellhole straight out of Blade Runner, you know the one, where it’s dangerous at night and people don’t know their neighbors.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin:
True, there are other interests for the voters, but I think the Republican Party establishment is all about shoveling money to its true base, which is Goldman Sachs, Halliburton, the Koch Bros, etc. Everything they do is in service to that objective.
They’ve cleverly used God, Gays and Guns and Black Panthers to sew up the yahoo vote over the past 45 years. But do you really think Dick Cheney gives a shit about abortion or John Boehner gives a crap about gay marriage? I don’t. It’s a wedge they use, nothing more.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
This.
mai naem
My sister happened to be at my niece’s orthodontist in 2012 and he was complaining about the real estate taxes he had to pay on a bunch of property he had bought when the real estate market went down the tubes here. At the same time he bitched about how only people who paid taxes should be able to vote. This coming from a dentist – a post-graduate education not just some non high school cracker. He also made some comment to my sister about being on AHCCCS(AZ version of medicaid) and his dental assistant told him “no, they’re not those kind of people.” My sister was absolutely livid because there was this assumption that all non-white supposed furriners are on medicaid. She paid this a idiot a few thousand dollars for my niece’s prthodontic work. He also asked her around one christmas if “they were going home to their country” for the holidays. WTF? My niece is as a typical American teenager you can get and my sister has nothing obvious screaming that she’s not American. And BTW, property taxes in AZ are not that bad. My regular nothing special house has annual prop taxes of a little over $1000.
bemused
@mai naem:
Republicans make a lot of knee jerk assumptions. The farther right they are, the quicker they jump to conclusions.
Betty Cracker
@mai naem: I hope she reported that bastard to his professional association. She should also go to his business Facebook page and/or Google entry and leave feedback about him being a xenophobic prick. That’s outrageous.
Cervantes
That’s the definition of the median, not the average.
Suppose you take 0, 0, 0, 0, and 100, the average is 20 — and 80% of your values are below the average.
Belafon
@Mustang Bobby: It would be a vote for Scott, because you’d need to vote for Crist.
Cervantes
@raven:
As many times as it takes to avoid real analysis.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
I think the GOP is quite comfortable being about both pocketbook issues and identity-issues. The two blend together easily, since so many working-class and poor people are also members of some group that the bigots don’t like, whereas conversely, the upper class tends is disproportionately white, male, Christian or at least Christian-raised, as well as rich. Lot of blending and overlap, IMO, in the class and identity prejudices there.
Chris
@Betty Cracker:
Incidentally, any last minute thoughts on the Florida ballot? (Still haven’t filled mine out, faxing it this week).
Bobby Thomson
@VidaLoca:
You can’t just assert that without some data.
cmorenc
@bemused:
And “Susie” would most likely be perfectly fine with cutting out her renter friends or relatives from voting – it’s one thing to welcome them at gatherings of family or friends, but another to give them any sort of controlling access to family assets and land. Many people are perfectly comfortable with, and see no contradiction in, maintaining class distinctions within their layered circles of friends and family, even while still regarding them as within their realm of friends and family.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
That’s nice, but with a population of 300+ million, I think the distribution is somewhat closer to Gaussian than your hypothetical.
Botsplainer
@VidaLoca:
It’s the national obsession with the ideology of Calvinism, oth theistic and secular (ie Rand).
Those of the classes below must be punched down on. Through pain, they either elevate themselves or die, the results don’t matter.
bemused
@cmorenc:
They can be ruthless that way unless it is a very close relative, kid, parent, etc and then they would find a way to blame liberals.
SFAW
In MA “news”: WBUR’s (Boston NPR affiliate) latest tracking poll has Charlie Baker moving ahead of Martha “Campaigns – How Do They Work?” Coakley.
Let’s hope their polling methodology is as robust as Gallup’s.
Of course, if they’re right, the silver lining is that we won’t have to deal with a Coakley “campaign” ever again.
cmorenc
@mai naem:
Having a post-graduate education in a technical field like dentistry is no guarantee at all he took more than a nominal number of perspective-broadening humanities courses as an undergraduate, or that he took them any more seriously than needed to get grades good enough to get into dental school. As the late Dorothy Parker quipped about the horizons of another, much older profession than dentistry: “you can lead a horticulture but you can’t make her think.”
Kathleen
@Cervantes: How many times is NBC going to trot out Brokaw’s pompous, arrogant self?
SFAW
@Chris:
Fixed for Rethug accuracy.
Frankensteinbeck
@Botsplainer:
Even that is just the justification assholes use for hurting others while praising themselves. Listen to any domestic abuser. They sound just like FOX news.
SFAW
@cmorenc:
Well, Dr. Ben Carson, presumptive nominee and eventual Preznit, 2016, begs to differ. Or not.
Chris
@Botsplainer:
It took me quite a while to realize how big a deal that is. I always knew there were people with a weird, fucked-up poor-o-phobia, but it wasn’t until the teabagger movement that I realized just how mainstream it was.
American society hates the poor. Not “ignores,” not “is blind to their needs,” not even (at least not exclusively) “targets them as a means to an ends because so many of them aren’t white.” Being poor in and of itself is enough reason to be loathed and punished, and people will go out of their fucking way to see to it that they are.
Patrick
@Kathleen:
Who knows. I ALWAYS change the channel when he comes on. His opinion means nothing to me.
tobie
@cmorenc: Susie’s line about the right to vote and land ownership is extremely popular in right-wing circles. I heard the exact same argument this past weekend in Cecil County, Maryland, which is among the poorest counties in the state. (A local farmer who inherited his farm was claiming that everything in the country would be fine if the franchise were limited to landowners.) It’s clearly a line making the rounds in Tea Party circles. The meme must have started somewhere in the right-wing media. Newsmax? National Review? The Blaze? Rush Limbaugh’s radio show?
SFAW
@Kathleen:
I am still of the opinion that the William Hurt character in Broadcast News was modeled on Brokaw.
But, to answer your question: as many times as it takes for you latte-sipping, Chardonnay-spilling, Birkenstock-wearing hippies to realize how wonderful he is.
Mustang Bobby
@Belafon: Oh, I will. I nearly beat the crap — metaphorically of course — out of a colleague here in Florida because she blithely said she voted for Nader because it didn’t seem to matter who to vote for in the 2000 election.
Betty Cracker
@Chris: I’m voting the straight Dem ticket, and also yes on medical pot, no on the judicial vacancies amendment and yes on the land management trust.
I’m waiting for my trusted friend, Lawyer J. Noble Daggett, to review the court choices with me before I make up my mind on those. I’m voting in person on election day.
Rob in CT
@tobie:
The “meme” is a very old one (centuries… millenia), and never actually went away. There may be small variations on how it’s presented (property owners only or people who pay [income] tax only, etc), but it goes way, way back and is always there in the background. Along with it goes repeal of the 17th amendment. Same idea: skew power towards those who already have it.
Maybe we notice it more nowadays because the internet allows us to see/hear more non-mainstream views. Or maybe people noticed it in the past and we just don’t realize it. I’m sure there were plenty of letters to the editor written back in the 40s, 50s, 60s saying basically the same thing (also, too: Jim Crow).
raven
@Betty Cracker: That’s bold talk from a one-eyed fat man!
srv
So apparently the Chinese lurv Kenny G.
When a mall closes in China, they play his “Going Home” and the good shoppers do as they’re told.
So teh Kenny shows up at the Hong Kong protests. China thinks he’s a tool of the foreign conspirators, and the protesters wonder if he’s a tool of the Chinese gov’t telling them it’s over.
Central Planning
Just to be pedantic: no they aren’t. That’s not how averaging works (although there are cases where that might work out)
I suspect more than half are below average.
Betty Cracker
@raven: Fill your hand, you son of a bitch!
raven
All you people that whine and bitch about “The South” need to read this and then kiss my ass. This is the Michigan QB:
raven
@Betty Cracker: Shot or killed?
Cervantes
@SFAW: (FYI: You missed the point.)
SFAW
@Central Planning:
OK, explain it to those of us who might hold a different understanding of “how it works.”
I expect/suspect it all comes down to how one picks and chooses his/her terms. Because, in a normal/Gaussian distribution, half of the population (well, half on the population-minus-those-who-are-exactly-average) being examined will be below average.
Of course, that doesn’t work in Lake Wobegon, but it does just about everywhere else.
Cervantes
@Kathleen:
As many times as his ratings justify.
I know, it’s a terrifying thought. Let’s hope there’s some other explanation — involving blackmail, for instance.
Mustang Bobby
@raven: When I worked for a radio station in northern lower Michigan in 1979, there was talk about building a prisoner work camp nearby. The public hearing was packed to the ceiling with comments ranging from “We don’t want no N-clangs here,” to “Oh, hell, it’ll be just like deer season; easy to spot ’em against the snow.” Lovely.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
OK, so what was the point? Given that you were doing some seemingly-meaningless hypotheticals, I couldn’t parse it out. And if it was snark, I couldn’t see Cet obscur objet du snarkir.
SFAW
@Betty Cracker:
Do we have to call you “Duchess” now? Doesn’t seem to fit you, li’l missy.
raven
@Mustang Bobby: Ugh.
The Moar You Know
@VidaLoca: Holy shit. Epic. Your post should be required reading before anyone comments here. Four paragraphs of stone-cold hard truth. A tip of the hat to you.
schrodinger's cat
Diwali Greetings to all Balloon Juicers! Its been such a long time since I celebrated Diwali in India, it is much like Christmas here.
Elizabelle
@schrodinger’s cat:
Diwali Greetings back atcha.
Like the idea of this holiday. Get it mixed up with the one where paint (?) is involved. Will light a sparkler and have a sweet in your honor today.
Cervantes
@Elizabelle:
The painty one is Holi — named after the vanquishing of Holika, a she-demon.
schrodinger's cat
@Elizabelle: That’s Holi, a holiday for drunks and hooligans. Its fun though, a perfect holiday for BJers, you can curse to your heart’s content too.
ETA: Cervantes got there first.
TriassicSands
The idea of one person, one vote is not particularly popular among rural Republicans, who often believe that elections should be won by the party that controls the most area (or counties), rather than the party that gets the most votes. They look at maps showing the entire US with all the counties that voted Republican colored red and all the Democratic counties colored blue. The map is overwhelmingly red. Sure there are lots of Democratic voters in cities, but what matters is that entire states like Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas are dark red. Seattle and San Francisco both may have more Democratic voters than Wyoming has Republicans, but look at how BIG Wyoming is by comparison. The cities are tiny; the state is huge. Therefore, the federal government should reflect the size of Wyoming, rather than the number of voters in those cities. It’s idiotic, but I’ve seen Republicans lamenting the injustice of our system. One person, one vote? NO! One acre, one vote!!!
Needless to say, with the one acre, one vote system in place, Republicans would win every national election (and the vast majority of senate and house races) and we’d have the truly unjust system the Republicans so desperately desire. And all those people crammed into cities would, as the Baby Jesus intended, have virtually no influence at all.
delk
Palin Brawl Police Tapes
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/palin-brawl-police-audio
Cervantes
@TriassicSands:
And I’m pretty sure they’re not talking about how electoral votes are distributed, either.
kindness
I can’t stand The Hill. Especially the comments. The Hill is worse than Politico and I hate Politico. So, while I will occasionally go over and read the comments, like today, I quickly leave. I don’t even bother telling them what idiots they are. Why bother? Waste of good energy.
piratedan
@Bobby Thomson: could be a perception versus reality thing, everything I’ve read about Wisconsin indicates it’s going down the shitter economically thanks to Walker but some people WILL believe it is raining when you piss on ’em, especially so if other people are getting wetter than they are.
schrodinger's cat
@TriassicSands: Aren’t many of those cities more prosperous than most of those red and deep red areas? They are not conservative, these people, they are radical, they want to undo the progress of the last hundred years or more.
Central Planning
@SFAW:
I like using analogies.
I’ll a few, small numbers to make my point. When you expand it to 330M people, it might be different.
If you have IQs of 1,1,1,1, and 10, you get an average IQ of 3. The assertion that half (2.5) are less than average is clearly not true. 4 are less than average. And half are not more than average. That’s the point I was trying to make. Perhaps we should have used median intelligence. I think that, along with the mode of the US population could be very interesting.
Like I said, pedantic.
schrodinger's cat
@Central Planning: As the size of the population increases, its distribution approaches a normal distribution. Mean and median are the same for a normal distribution.
@Elizabelle: Thanks!
satby
@raven: I’ve come to discover that MI is a cesspool of bigoted TeaTarditry. They hate almost everyone equally though, black, brown, liberal, Arab, Mexican, Asian, African, etc. I assume the only reason it stays in the blue column on elections is the lingering union influence (though that’s almost gone) and that there’s just enough city folk and transplanted Chicago ex-pats to keep it that way. But it is the Mississippi of the north, no doubt.
Gin & Tonic
@Central Planning: But large populations are not distributed that way, essentially invalidating the point you’re trying to make.
NotMax
@SFAW
Enough with the Birkenstock bashing.
They may be expensive, but they are hands-down the most comfortable footwear I’ve ever worn, and I treat myself to a new pair when needed (which is roughly every 2 years, wearing them daily – YMMV) as budgetary concerns permit.
Cervantes
@schrodinger’s cat:
What’s the “its”? Not all variables are normally distributed.
The original statement, that “half of all our fellow citizens are below average,” is how one defines median, not average, regardless of the nature of the distribution.
Howlin Wolfe
@piratedan: That’s next door to us. Living in Minnesota, I take great exception to the fact that the GOPer challenging our Democratic governor wants to Walker-ize Minnesota. He’s holding it up as a model, as if that has brought great prosperity to Wisconsin. Fortunately he’s way behind in the polls. Minnesota has a strong economy with low unemployment, unlike Cheezeland.
srv
Betty Cracker
@delk: I fervently hope the Taiwanese animation team is on this.
chopper
@SFAW:
Indeed. Sorry Mr Mosby, but with a sample size of over 300 million and an unskewed distribution, the median and mean are pretty much one and the same.
Bubblegum Tate
@Chris:
That’s exactly it–I see it all over the place. I’ve also seen what is essentially a proposal to tie vote “weight” to tax receipts, i.e. “I pay more taxes than you, therefore I am funding the government more than you, therefore I should have a greater say than you in what the government does and who is in it.”
And then they post that false Ben Franklin quote about people “voting themselves money.”
chopper
@Central Planning:
it most certainly is different. It’s a Gaussian distribution. Since it has little skew the median and mean have the same basic value.
Aimai
@Betty Cracker: the. “Stupid” quote though came from a republican, not a democrat.
chopper
@Cervantes:
Given that AL first mentioned ‘average IQ’ I think it’s pretty clear that’s what she was referring to.
SiubhanDuinne
@srv:
I’ve been following this closely on CBC. Have many, many friends in Ottawa — some of whom work on Parliament Hill — and am sad beyond measure about this.
Cervantes
@chopper: If you think there’s anything the least bit clear about “average IQ,” then good luck to you.
Cervantes
@Gin & Tonic:
I think it was Gabriel Lippmann who said to Henri Poincaré that the normal distribution is used so frequently and with so little scrutiny because “the experimenters imagine it is a theorem in mathematics while the mathematicians assume it is an experimental fact.”
PurpleGirl
@schrodinger’s cat: Best wishes for a prosperous new year, may it be very sweet for you and yours.
I really should go to the Indian supermarket at 72nd St, off Roosevelt Ave. and get some sweets for dessert. I have the fixings for butter chicken and basmati rice. I also have tea lights and votive candles. I hope Lakshmi visits me this year.
raven
Terror attack in Canada?
NonyNony
@chopper:
It’s not just the size of the data set. If intelligence measurements fit a different distribution, you might not be able to make that claim. But unlike in other areas where empirical data gathering might have you picking data points from a non Gaussian distribution, IQ testing is normed to force it to fit a Gaussian distribution over the population and, IIRC, so that the median is always at 100 points.
Which means that “intelligence” is one of the things where you can confidently say “half the population is below average” without worrying about the distinction between median and mean. Because the test is constructed so that half the population will always be below average.
Seanly
@mai naem:
It’s always funny how people in the states with typically lower property taxes bitch the most about them. However, to be fair to the orthodontist (& I don’t know if AZ is this way), but property taxes in some states can be a lot higher for landlords. My wife & I still own a typical size house in SC. Due to the structuring of their property taxes & “homestead” breaks, our net property taxes went up 5-fold when we started renting it out.
Belafon
If I remember correctly, IQ, when computed, is already based on the idea of a mean and standard distribution. It’s built into the computation. Even though there’s no way to go below zero, though theoretically you could go well above 200, the distribution is forced to be “normal” anyway.
Or what NonyNony said.
Cervantes
@NonyNony: Except you’re forgetting the difference between intelligence and intelligence-test scores. One of the two, and only one of the two, “is normed to force it to fit a Gaussian distribution over the population.”
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
Well, shots fired anyhow.
chopper
@Cervantes:
It’s plainly clear to what she was referring. If you have that much trouble with such a simple concept you need to get off your pedantic high horse.
chopper
@Cervantes:
But AL was referring to IQ. That’s what you took issue with in the first place.
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: Head copper says more than one.
SFAW
@Central Planning:
GMAFB. AL was not talking about a population subset of 2, 4, 100, or even 1000.
Anyone can pick any subset (or sub-population) to massage data in any way they see fit, in order to “prove” a point. You can also flip a coin and get 10 tails in a row. OMFG! The laws of probability have been disproven!
As plenty of others have already said: for large populations, the mean and the median are the same, assuming a Gaussian distribution. This also assumes the variable/factor being analyzed has a random distribution, of course. And within the overall population, subsets can also exhibit Gaussian distributions. But the mean/median equivalence (more-or-less) will still hold. Because it’s … Gaussian.
SFAW
@NotMax:
You must be one of them hippies. Go back to Russia, ya damn commie!
Seanly
As discussed, there are apparently some people who want to return to feudal voting practises. Let’s also keep in mind that a big part of the Tea Party sentiment is that we should repeal the 17th Amendment and let state legislatures pick Senators.
And that allows a tangent into the whole idiotic nullification argument. Or ideas about gaming the electoral system. It’s all about Calvin-balling the federal government and elections so that they always get their way.
I know that there are many intelligent conservatives, but so many of their ideas are idiotic.
SFAW
@Seanly:
Objection, Your Honor! Assumes facts not in evidence!
ETA: One assumes that “there are many” and “their ideas” refer to different groups. Because if they don’t, then you got yerself a slight bit o’ logical inconsistency.
SiubhanDuinne
@raven: Yeah, I’m streaming CBC coverage.
Gin & Tonic
@Seanly: To be fair to at least one of the “skin in the game” lines of argument, that’s not “feudal”, it’s the way shareholder voting works in business. The more shares you own, the more your vote counts. This is considered normal.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
Especially funny because the company is notorious for union-bashing rhetoric and (illegal) union-busting tactics.
scav
@Cervantes: ohoo, likie “the experimenters imagine it is a theorem in mathematics while the mathematicians assume it is an experimental fact.” Mere reality will bend to our experimental, descriptive and simplifying assumptions!
I’m not sure the Feuds tended to make a big deal of voting, all in all. Maybe a bit at the local scale, for certain topics, among peers, but that was pretty much a top-down experience. In theory, didn’t everyone basically have land en feof(?) to some higher lord? Sturdy independent yeoman rolled out later I thought. The Greeks that dabbled certainly had voting requirements, so they’re really going back to the roots.
Xenos
@Gin & Tonic: if voting was done as one acre of land being worth one share, per corporate rules, corporations would put together one hell of a squeeze-out and throw all the crackers off their land. Would serve them right, too!
Xenos
@scav: electors got to choose the Holy Roman Emperor, and as we all know, that turned out just fine for everyone.
Bubblegum Tate
@OzarkHillbilly:
Speaking of this and of weird-ass wingnut views about voting and “skin the game” and such, I’ve seen wingnuts forward the notion that because their Congressional district is represented by a Democrat, they are not, in fact, represented in government and therefore are suffering “taxation without representation.”
It’s a unique spin, you’ve gotta give ’em that much.
scav
@Xenos: ah yes, the ceos on the board electing a different ceo position. For that matter, a lot of very early kings were elective from within the Royal line (to err perhaps on the early side of feudal). But, again, I’m sure of the HRE thing from later, but how far back into really feudal periods did that span? Charlemagne, my only other firmish anchor for the beast, certainly took a different path at the beginning.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
Seriously? I had no idea. Thanks for cluing me in.
Another Holocene Human
@JR in WV: My ancestors left Germany to get away from that shit. It’s personal.
Guess you have to be English to be in love with that kind of thing, or have an Anglicized mind because mayou is not an English name as far as I know.
(It sounds French and historically in the Midwest being French had a certain cachet, which is sort of comical, because it was a liability in other regions.)
Another Holocene Human
@Anne Laurie: Live by the cheap, abused labor, die by the cheap, abused labor.
They could have kept up strict livestock and packing regulations and the union labor and union wages in the plants, but nooooooo.
Obviously the next step is to start arguing for the merits of slavery/serfdom/aristocracy.
The Moar You Know
@NotMax: Most comfortable shoes I’ve ever worn as well, but my wife – who is both gorgeous and stylish – put a flat-out blanket ban on them when we got married. She had no qualms about the seven-piece drumkit, or the recording studio, but no Birkies. I concede her point. They are hideous, maybe one step above Crocs…and maybe not.
Also, FWIW, as I found out the hard way, they are awful for long-distance hiking. Only shoe that’s ever given me a blister larger than a quarter.
If you like the airflow and don’t want to look like a hippie, the New Balance Minimus shoes are awesome.
Another Holocene Human
@Chris:
Didn’t MHP go ballistic over this notion on live TV a couple of years back?
I know conservatives are stupid. But come on. Who has more fucking skin in the game than the poor and the working poor?!? JESUS FUCK.
Rich people start “bipartisan” think tanks and “third way” parties because very little in their life is effected when the parties in power change.
VOR
@Howlin Wolfe: yep, the claim is that Wisconsin is a big success and Minnesota is the struggling state. It is completely 180 degrees off from reality. Of course, I also see letters to the editor about how great Kansas is doing, of course all based on anecdotes. Minnesota really dodged a bullet when Dayton won in 2010.
Another Holocene Human
Confession: I quit looking at conservative blogs/sources not long after early 2009 because I couldn’t take the hypocrisy, for example arguing one way when GWB was president and then another way when Dems were in charge, and I really, really couldn’t take the racism. Michelle Malkin was by far and away the earliest leading the charge of vileness, and pretty soon people were spreading her DERP everywhere and it wasn’t getting called out. Just … done.
Another Holocene Human
@VidaLoca: I’m sorry, but this is no explanation. When Walker cut Medicare (Badgercare) in WI, a lot of poor whites started investigating moving to MN. It was not a cut-back with a whites-only carveout. So where is the value?
Resentment?
Racism?
To be honest, I think GOP failure IS a vicious cycle. As the economy in WI staggered compared to IL and MN and even OH/MI in relative terms, PEOPLE FUCKING LEAVE. They leave the state. You’ve got this bulge of white flight/white ressentiment voters, Silent Gen/Boomer/Gen X. Anybody younger is pulling up stakes. The older ones (New Deal/Wagner act voters) are dying off fast, that’s how the D party lost their reliable edge. Also, I am convinced there has been cheating by the Rs in WI elections, at least in Waukesha. Not the local elections (it’s solid GOP) although who knows, right? but the statewide.
Angry rustbelt regions vote GOP out of spite and fear. See: upstate NY, MI, etc. Also in rural farm regions you have the church network turning out the GOP vote. It’s true that younger people are rejecting the religious stuff, but it just seems to me, maybe I’m crazy, that there are more youth in states like WV, GA, FL, AZ. Some people go to college in WI but the hostility towards the college students is palpable. Of course this is just my feeling and I could be wrong-o bongo about this.
The Moar You Know
@Another Holocene Human: You answered it yourself (as did VidaLoca). Spite and fear. Mostly spite. And from my family, I can tell you that when the GOP talks about drowning government in a bathtub, they hear “drowning the parts of the government that give money to non-whites”. God, never underestimate spite as a payoff. I once watched a guy spend a decade and millions of dollars to drag a former employer through court for no better reason than to make his life miserable. He counted it money well spent. And he was the one who lost!
It’s like my firefighter in-law who is voting for Kaisch – as is his entire union chapter – and they all religiously believe nothing can happen to them. But the moochers will be punished.
Another Holocene Human
@raven: Maybe true believers make bad administrators?
Look at Benedict the Worst. Oh, it’s easy just to call him a homophobe and an asshat. What, less than a month after getting into office the ex-Hitlerjugend is giving a talk about how Germany is locked in a battle between Christiandom and Islam? All the facepalms.
But I reluctantly watched that Frontline special on the guy and it’s clear that he stepped down because he was a fucking shit manager, just couldn’t handle shit at all, and when his attempts at cleaning up the Vatican Bank came to nought he threw in the towel.
For years he’d been head of the Inquisition, Chief moralizing dickhead in charge, if you will. He didn’t realize being Pope meant being CEO of a severely embattled financial organization under pressure (finally) from the ECB.
I wonder if Carter had a similarly naive outlook and that is why he has been more successful in the non-profit world than as President.
Another Holocene Human
@bemused: Exactly, if they have a close friend who is going through stuff, they don’t feel compassion, they label them as a moocher and blame liberals for giving them the means to mooch.
That doesn’t mean I was exactly pleased when some friends of mine who “know about wine” went on food stamps while living on student loans but somehow could afford iPhones and the contracts (this is when the contracts were over $100/mo). Presumably student loans paid it, I mean their funeral, right? They were embarrassed Republicans (“libertarians”), another friend is ‘reluctant D’ (not down with the theocratic agenda of Rs, whole family is GOP) and she was fucking livid about the food stamp thing. I can’t … eh … get super exercised about that. You know what pisses me off? When working people have no choice but to go onto public assistance because they can’t pay their bills. That pisses me off. Not some entitled douchebags living off Sally Mae and the kindness of strangers.
Another Holocene Human
@raven: Michigan has always been that way – Autobiography of Malcolm X, anyone? – and this hardly excuses Southern culture for one thing and for another thing, it hardly excuses Southern culture because Michigan was shaped in the 20th century by Southern transplants.
There’s some truth to the song “it has to be carefully taught”. Xenophobia might be atavistic, but the particular grudge that white Southerners have against blacks, as seen in the sharp contrast in regional voting patterns by whites, is something that has been passed down intergenerationally. And when Southerners migrated to other regions of the country, they took these attitudes with them.
Sure, xenophobia and hate can arise without ETA:
slaveslavery culture. See the Boston busing riots or West Virginia. But what’s the game here with the denialism of American slave state culture? As Democrats, we’d have our heads in the sand to ignore it. For example you have the migration north to OK and then west to Orange County, CA. Their politics did not spring from Zeus’ loins, okay?Another Holocene Human
@satby:
Quite literally. My great-grandfather moved his factory from Mississippi to Michigan after tangling with the Klan and his workers moved with him.
This is one of these cases where culture isn’t a bullshit argument for something else. It’s real. But circumstances are real too and the loss of the factory jobs and union strength is having very real negative consequences politically.
Another Holocene Human
@The Moar You Know:
So the firefighters here in Florida … some, if not all of them have endorsed AG Pam Bondi who is worse than Rick Scott, if that’s possible. (They support Crist for governor). The IAFF has been losing cases with PERC they should have won due to it being stuffed with JEB! appointees so they’ve gone to court and won, and of course Scott tried to get rid of the “liberal” Florida Supreme Court (rule of law, who needs that shit? gets in the way of the grift). But Bondi, as the enforcer and tool of GOP misrule in this state, how could she possibly be seen as a positive by any union who might also have to resort to the courts for relief?
Is she their ‘good buddy’?
I don’t get it. Except white privilege. I get that. Otherwise, no. Don’t understand.
schrodinger's cat
@PurpleGirl: Do you ever go to the Patel brothers in Jackson Heights?
NotMax
@The Moar You Know
As the only style I’ve ever worn are the basic sandals, which look like most any other pair of sandals, ugly doesn’t factor in.
Central Planning
Clearly I was wrong. I suppose that’s why it took me two times to pass statistics in college, and why I only got a C the second time around.
Thanks for the other information!
Chris
@Another Holocene Human:
Younger people rejecting religious things aren’t necessarily going left wing, though, they can just as easily be getting tuned out and apathetic. And there isn’t an equivalent to the church networks for areligious voters to get them to turn out for the Dems like religious voters do for the GOP.