Damn people, no offence meant, but your political system is messed up. 18 month elections, billions of dollars spent, it beggars belief.
Can’t say I see any.
Yes. And all to end up with Hillary, whom only a masochist or zealot could love, as almost surely the only sensible option.
But 18 months? It’s still 21 months to Inauguration and, for several months already Hillary has been castigated for making us wait so long.
Of course the 21 months does include 2 months to litigate vote recounts. I hope that will be enough. Back in 2000 when the vote was close in a large state, I think there was widespread hope that Hari Selden himself would appear in a hologram and guide us through such a unique Crisis.
I can tell you from current experience in the UK is that six weeks campaigning feels like too long and zero tv advertising is still too much advertising.
I can also tell you the more money you take out of the campaign, the more politicians concentrate on issues.
Nor at anyone else’s.
Are you suggesting that the New York Times made the number up? I’ll acknowledge that the Times has a long and illustrious history of making things up*, but I haven’t seen anyone challenging the $2.5 billion figure.
*To offer a few examples:
[ul]
[li]In February 2008, they put up a cover article implying that John McCain had slept with a staffer and used his influence to benefit her. One year and one lawsuit later, they admitted it wasn’t true.[/li][li]In July 2011, after Anders Breivik murdered 92 people in Norway, the headline was “As Horrors Emerge, Norway Charges Christian Extremist”. Later they admitted that Breivik was not a Christian.[/li][li]And just a few days ago, the Times published [url="http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2015/04/12/nyt-editorial-board-forced-to-correct-big-lie-about-nra-convention-and-we-have-proof-of-how-false-the-claim-really-was/"a blatant lie about the NRA convention in Nashville.[/li][/ul]
The “Brevik was a Christian Extremist” thing wasn’t made up by the New York Times. The article said that the Norwegian police identified Brevik as a Christian extremist and his website as a fundamentalist Christian website, and in their press conference, the Norwegian police did just that.
The last one isn’t a lie, either, let alone a blatant one. It was a minor correction to a story.
I don’t particularly want to get involved in this thread - as I think it’s one more bit of whimsy, really - but I want to take exception to this particular bit of uninformed drollery.
Sidwell Friends is a private Quaker school, yes. Just like many many others. My middle class and single mother almost put me there. I was accepted but ended up going first to Sandy Spring Friends School - another Quaker school just outside of Washington DC - and later a different private school.
Was it costly? This would have been about 8 years or so before Chelsea went there but it was less than $10K per year. That’s expensive, sure. But it was possible. It’s not like sending a kid to one of those prestigious prep or finishing schools in Connecticut.
For the record - and as a brag - my fourteen year old got an acceptance letter to one of those last and they wanted $60,000 per year and were glad to arrange a loan for me. I elected to reply in the negative.
Anyway, please carry on. But disregard that bit of hate for Sidwell Friends.
Sidwell Friends’ tuition today is $36K. Median household income in the US, today, is $52K (and I think that’s before taxes).
They give out a lot of financial aid, though. And the question isn’t so much what it is now, but what it was when Chelsea was going there.
At least we know how much it costs to buy a Presidency. Think twice about throwing her a couple of bones, she might accidentally slip on them on the way to dive into her money pit filled with special interest donations.
Nice bit of rhetorical judo, there. You have only the New York Times for your source, apparently. Nothing wrong with that, perzackly, long as you’re upfront about it and don’t try to load too much weight on top of it. Might have been a good time to throttle down your distaste for the Times, though.
I mean, when you jump right into telling us all the reasons we should not trust the source right after invoking that source…a bit clumsy, don’t you think?
“The* New York Times* says the gostak distims the doshes, and the * New York Times* is a lying sack of shit, therefore the gostak distims the doshes!” I’m sure you see the problem there.
Awkward. Yes, “awkward” is the word. The polite one, at any rate.
Lot of us would like to fix that, Dave. Would like to strike the problem at the root, a radical solution, in the truest sense. The foundation of that commitment is a belief in democratic equality, a level “playing field”. You disdain “special interest” money? No prob, Bob, lot of us here on the left have been pulling on that end of the rope for a long damn time. Could use your help if you’ve nothing better to do, and don’t mind the company.
Think restricting money is not the answer? Have you a better one? We are all ears, except when we are talking.
And my kid’s daycare is $26,400 for full time. That’s for a not-that-great daycare in a strip mall off the highway. Kids are expensive.
I’ve given this a little thought. Unfortunately, I don’t have any answers. Perhaps there aren’t any. I’ll still register my disdain about it, though.
Back in the late 1970s, everybody who wasn’t a Yankee fan absolutely *hated *George Steinbrenner, because he way buying up all the top-level free agents and putting them in Yankee uniforms. Reggie, Catfish, those guys. Seemed to work, too: they won back-to-back world championships in 1977 and 1978.
What links it to this thread is that Steinbrenner was, at the time, totally opposed to free agency. (This was back when it was still new, after all.) He made it clear that while he didn’t like the new rules, as long as they were the rules, he was going to play by them and win by them.
I don’t see that Hillary’s in a vastly different situation from Steinbrenner nearly 40 years ago. She’d like to undo Citizens United, but it’s the rules for the 2016 election. And no Democratic causes will be furthered if she takes a principled stand and refuses to raise the sort of money needed to play this game in this environment. Certainly a principled loss won’t put her or anyone else in an improved position to help undo Citizens United.
So I expect her to do her damnedest to raise a metric shitload of money and win this election. Scalia and Kennedy both turn 80 in 2016, so if Hillary serves two terms, the odds that she will choose the replacement to one or both of them are excellent. So she could easily create a Supreme Court majority that would at least limit if not overturn Citizens United.
If she become President, maybe she will, maybe she won’t, create that sort of majority. I think the odds are pretty good, though not certain. What we know for damned sure is that the GOP nominee will do no such thing.
The best hope you have of bring sanity to this is if two old guys die?
Even then it’s no guarantee. But it appears to be the best path open to us outside of outright rebellion and summary execution of elected officials.
I think I get the OP’s drift here. It is hypocrisy on Hillary’s part, but not Republicans, because they would never aspire to be a champion for everyday Americans. Or something.