Either way, each of the top four Republican candidates, if actually to serve as President, would be automatically labelled the worst President in all of history. Surely even many who detest Nixon, Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc. could agree with this appraisal.
And here it is already January of the Election Year itself. The GOP is revelling in its choice among four gross incompetents.
Do I need to go to the Pit to comment on what a horror that makes the present-day GOP appear?
Septimus, I was intrigued by your “reason for editing.” So, a “travesty” is specifically based on some falsehood or distorted representation. Interesting – I’ve been using it too broadly as well!
I suppose the misuse goes back to the cliche of a defense lawyer (or the accused, on the witness stand) decrying the trial as a “travesty of a sham” (hilariously parodied in Woody Allen’s film Bananas). The real meaning works there – but it’s easy to see why people would assume it to mean a clusterf#*&@k more generally.
Rand Paul relegated to kiddy table debate. Takes his ball and goes home instead.
You’re right, I don’t. But I know how hard it is these days to get people to even answer the phone, let alone answer a bunch of questions once you’ve got them talking.
And nonresponse bias is a real issue in the survey biz these days. It didn’t matter much back when nonresponse rates were in the single digits, because however the nonresponders might differ from the responders, there weren’t very many of them, so that difference couldn’t mess with your data more than a little bit. Nowadays, though, it’s become a whole 'nother ballgame.
And just because that’s how people are, any break in the conversation is where you lose people. If the woman answering the phone says “Well, that’s my husband, but he doesn’t talk to pollsters, I’ll do it instead”, and you respond by saying that it has to be him anyway, she might say she’ll go get him, but chances are excellent that that’s the last time the pollster talks to someone at that number.
Finally, Marist is a well-regarded professional polling outfit. I don’t follow that side of the biz that closely, but if that’s how they’re doing it, they’ve almost surely presented papers at statistical conferences analyzing the effects of that approach on their samples. I trust the fact that they’re a player in a self-correcting system, and not some outfit like Rasmussen that doesn’t share their methodology with anyone.
Oh, definitely. I’ve said a number of times that this crew is making Bush look good by comparison. And of course Bush disproved my long-held belief that I’d never live to see a worse President than Nixon.
I suppose it depends on how fully and graphically you want to express your horror. 
Me, I’m anti-Rubio for one simple reason: the so-called ‘liberal’ media is clearly prepared to paper over just what a disaster he and his policies would be, and is ready to fully maintain the pretense that, sure, he’s a Republican and conservative, but in a reasonable sort of way. While at the same time making a big deal about every trivial failing of Hillary’s.
I have believed for fifteen years that that’s exactly how Bush got close enough to beating Gore that Jeb’s purging of the Florida voting rolls, some misleading ballots, and the Supreme Court could finish the job. I don’t think it could happen again, but it’s still the thing I most fear in 2016.
I don’t think the MSM could convince themselves to sustain the same pretense for Cruz, and definitely not for Trump.
He has the kernel of a good idea there. Many jobs can now be done from home now, but employers are resistant. Write a family leave bill that requires employers to let those seeking leave work from home, or they have to pay them paid leave.
A good side effect of the law is that employers would get more used to the idea of people working from home, which cuts down on emissions too.
Anyway, Kasich is now up to 14% in NH in two polls and has now moved into 3rd in the RCP average there. Christie’s getting all the coverage for having a shot, but Kasich’s path is the same as Christie’s and he’s now got a substantial lead over Christie.
I think he’s got a good argument, actually. He’s polling seventh nationally, seventh in Iowa, and seventh in NH. And seven people were invited to the main event, but he wasn’t one of them.
Kasich is polling ninth nationally and in Iowa, which means that Paul’s a couple places ahead of him in those polls, yet Kasich is at the big table and he isn’t, presumably on the basis of his strength in NH alone.
It’s a funny place to draw the line, and if I were Paul, I’d be pissed too.
The two polls that have Kasich at 14% are Monmouth and ARG. Monmouth also has Cruz at 14%, tied for second in NH with Kasich.
I’ve been skeptical of ARG since at least the 2012 cycle, but their polling in NH gives a good example of their being an outlier. One thing I’ve been looking at is the sums of two groups of candidates: the four establishment candidates plus Paul on the one hand, and Trump, Cruz, and Carson on the other.
Going back to the beginning of December, the Trump+Cruz+Carson sum in the RCP polls has remained fairly steady, with eight polls by 7 different pollsters getting a sum for those three between 43% and 49%. With two exceptions: (1) the online YouGov poll, which tends to get higher results for Trump, got a 51% sum, modestly above the high end for the other pollsters, and (2) ARG, which in two polls during that period got 37% and 36% for that sum, way below what everyone else has been getting.
Maybe they’re right, but everyone else would have to be wrong. But ARG really didn’t cover itself with glory in the 2012 cycle, so I’m betting against them here.
At least FoxNews is giving up the pretext of being fair and balanced.
Can I just say how much I love love LOVE that Trump is doing so well in the GOP primary? Thanks to him, meandering losers like Jeb! and Rubio are floundering like the sad imbeciles they are.
I’m seriously considering voting for Trump in the CA primary, assuming he makes it that far. Mind you, I would never vote for him in the general election, but I want to fuck with the GOP as much as I can.
If he gets the Republican nomination, he basically hands the election to the Dem candidate. Yay for us.
You’re not alone in that view. Quite a few Democrats in Virginia just might vote in the open primary there accordingly.
And he sent Scott Walker back to Wisconsin. (Sorry, Wisconsin, but you guys kept electing him…)
There should be no such compromise. Paid maternity leave should be guaranteed with no ifs and buts-that’s the least the plutocrats can concede unless of course they want to end up dead in mass graves thirty or fifty years down the line.
That’s just proof those polls are garbage.
Paid paternity leave is only useful if you want to encourage people to have babies. In theory, a person can spend more time on paid leave over a long period of time than actually working.
Or, alternatively, to recognize that people have babies. The idea is that raising children is a net good to society, as is working outside the home, and it’s not a zero-sum game to support one or the other.
That isn’t the main reason I support it, but yes I do want an above-replacement birth-rate of say 2.1-2.4.
People also don’t have babies. If we’re going to have a society that exalts reproductive choice and alternative families, then I see no reason to give special benefits to those who go the traditional route.
I am one of those people without babies. It’s not a matter of “giving special benefits to those who go the traditional route”; it’s acknowledging that producing babies is (a) work that (b) benefits society and (c) isn’t otherwise remunerated. Your view seems antagonistic. Society is a complex organization. We need people to produce babies. We also need people to do a lot of other things, but most of those slot into the current economic system because the payoff for producing product is less than <25 years.
Babies are a net economic gain, but a serious environmental loss. Having a baby increases your carbon footprint more than just about anything else you could possibly do.
Although I’m quite used to the fact that as much as some people on one side of the aisle squawk about climate change, they’ll never give up anything they cherish to fight it. Climate change is only useful as a way to implement policies they favored before climate change was a thing. You need babies for Social Security. Social Security> climate change.
Do you also advocate not educating those children?