I would really & truly be willing to trade Bush The Younger for Tricky Dick, if I could talk Death into the bargan.
Reflecting, he may have been a paranoid bastard, but nobody ever called him “stupid”.
Nixon needed to go, but he was in fact a more able man the Bush The Younger.
Where did you get this factoid?
A simple majority of Senators is all that’s required to approve a presidential Supreme Court appointee. Clarence Thomas made it with only 51 or 52 Senators voting “aye”.
Fllibuster. You need 60 Senators to stop one. Are you sure you’re a lawyer? 
Have you met most of the people in this country? I think we should be glad that only a simple majority of voters are complete gibbering idiots. At least we’ve still got the First and Fourth amendments on the books, even if they’re only in theory.
True, but it changes nothing. The existence of a massive plurality of social-religious conservative American voters is a problem we have to deal with. To succeed, we have to fight them aggressively on every front while simultaneously trying to educate and convert as many as possible.
It’s not horrendous. If your demonstrations are correct – I haven’t worked through the math yet – they show merely that IRV is suboptimal for eliminating strategic voting. However, it does solve the third-party “spoiler” problem. I might be persuaded to accept the Condorcet or approval voting model as an alternative. The important thing is that we change the system so that minor-party challengers can run without “stealing votes” from the major ones.
I guess its only a problem if you really care about social issues. I truly believe that the core of the republican party has no interest at all in abortion, gay rights or even guns. I am pretty certain they are just there to take care of business, so they are happy to sponge up all the electorate who are only there to vote for one particular social issue. They don’t appreciate voters who appreciate complexity.
In other words, the stupids have it. By definition half the country is stupid and television can make much more than half vote stupid if there is money to pay for it.
The democrats cannot win unless they agree to embrace the stupid. They try this with their market protectionist bullshit but no one is really buying. They need a new angle.
I won’t, and I understand Bricker’s point about addressing your arguments to the people as they are instead of trying to force the people to become “enlightened” so that they agree with your superior self.
[Heading off to Google online copy of the King James Bible to find chapter and verse on that “forehead or right hand” and “no man can buy or sell without the mark” prophecy…]
Maybe Bush will bring about the end of the world, and maybe he won’t. But the Red Sox winning the World Series has got to be a sign of the Apocalypse. 
They do love playing the victim though.
In what way?
On abortion, gay marriage, creationism, sexual morality, SOCS, etc. On anything where they conflict with the values and wisdom of rationalism and secular humanism.
They are wrong also because, although they claim to be righteous, they honor and serve the Lord God of Israel. I am not an absolute atheist. I do not rule out the possibility that there might be a real God in the universe who is benignly interested in human affairs. But I do absolutely rule out the possibility that that God has anything in common with the God of Abraham. That God, whether he exists or not, is an evil abomination, and deserves no worship or obedience.
The effect of Watergate on the everyday lives of Americans was close to nil. That’s why I laughed when President Ford, in his first speech to the American people, referred to Watergate as “our long national nightmare.” I thought: Jerry, you need to get outside the Beltway more often. If people were at all passionate about Watergate, it was because the Congressional hearings kept bumping the afternoon soaps.
This is priceless!
And true.
I would bet that few if any of these issues are the primary reasons people voted for Bush.
By the way, I’m also very impressed that you know the “right” answer to all those complex issues.
I don’t think they voted for him for economic reasons. Conservative social values are the things that define the red-state voters, regardless of social class.
It helps to be rational and skeptical. When conservatives talk about economic issues and national-security issues, even I have to admit that sometimes they have some really good points. But when they talk about matters of morals, values, and culture, they are never right, always wrong.
The exit polls I saw at cnn.com showed that most Bush voters felt “values” were the most important issue. What else would that refer to?