Coffee Shop

[Valin]

I have been deeply moved over the last couple of days by the outpouring of advise we Republicans have received over what we should do to bring the party back from the brink of total destruction....ie become more like Democrats. To those people I say...Thank you very much for your input. Rest assured I will give it all the consideration it so richly deserves.

[Valin]

I dunno, I someone made a point that the number of Republican votes have been declining by millions each Presidential election.

 

There is a case to be made that people are tuning out.

 

 

What that means is *we have our work cut out for us.

 

* the grassroots

[tapper47]

Thank you Sr Woodchuck.

 

I'll pass it around.

[Rokke]

@Valin, what does the grassroots know? You would be better off asking Bill Krystal and Peggy Noonen who is next in line for a run at the White House and jump on that train before it leaves the station. Is Bob Dole dead yet?

[Valin]

@Valin, what does the grassroots know? You would be better off asking Bill Krystal and Peggy Noonen who is next in line for a run at the White House and jump on that train before it leaves the station. Is Bob Dole dead yet?

 

The GOP’s Entrepreneur Problem

Ramesh Ponnuru

11/10/12

 

Bill Kristol writes,

 

A revivified and rejuvenated conservatism won’t come from the top down. It will happen organically and spontaneously. The best thing “leaders” of the party and the movement can do is to stop thwarting policy heterodoxy and political entrepreneurship.

 

After all, for a party that claims to value entrepreneurship, Republican politicians at the national level these days show very little of it. The Romney campaign was the opposite of entrepreneurial. Congressional leaders discourage entrepreneurial efforts by backbenchers. And for a movement that claims to understand the dangers of Hayek’s “fatal conceit,” conservative leaders tend to embrace centralization, trying to enforce pledges upon and punish deviationism by the rank and file.

 

(Snip)

 

I agree with Kristol’s main point here but think he underestimates the problem. I’m not sure congressional leaders really do “discourage entrepreneurial efforts by backbenchers”; my impression is that there aren’t many to discourage. The backbenchers don’t generate new ideas, and the leadership doesn’t embrace any idea for which the followership hasn’t already reached a consensus. So nobody moves. (The great exception: Paul Ryan, an entrepreneur who was effectively a member of the leadership, got the party to come out for some new policies.)

 

(Snip)

[Rokke]

@Valin, The absolute best thing that could happen to the GOP would be if anyone associated with the GOP who lives within 500 miles of Washington D.C. took a 30 year sabbatical to Myanmar. They could all cluster together in a bamboo hut and stroke each other's egos hard enough to create enough static electricity to power the entire Myanmar electical grid (two fans and a tea kettle) until the last one dies a quiet and self-satisfied death. At least there they have the remote potential to be productive.

[SrWoodchuck]

@Valin, what does the grassroots know? You would be better off asking Bill Krystal and Peggy Noonen who is next in line for a run at the White House and jump on that train before it leaves the station. Is Bob Dole dead yet?

Bob Dole is a stiff.....but it's from repping Viagra....

[Geee]

@Valin, what does the grassroots know? You would be better off asking Bill Krystal and Peggy Noonen who is next in line for a run at the White House and jump on that train before it leaves the station. Is Bob Dole dead yet?

Bob Dole is a stiff.....but it's from repping Viagra....

 

[SrWoodchuck]

I didn't vote for that! Uh, yes, you did!

 

H/T:TheFeralIrishman

[Pepper]

Chicago has some catching up to do

 

Come on Rahm, you don't want to be an also ran

[Pepper]

See what we have to face, morons on parade

 

The hard truth for liberals and progressives is that the Right’s imposing propaganda machinery can make pretty much make anything into anything, whatever serves the Right’s ideological and political needs, while the Left has nothing to compare to this right-wing capability.

 

For instance, the Right’s propaganda has convinced many Americans of a bogus historical narrative which has the Framers enacting the Constitution as a states’-rights document designed to have a weak central government – when the reality was nearly the opposite.

[Pepper]

Report: Hillary Turns Down Request To Testify On Benghazi

[SrWoodchuck]

NYC Bureaucrats Stealing Free Gasoline Meant For Emergency Workers

 

It was a fueling station, not only for first responders and NYC vehicles, but also, it seems, for the personal vehicles of any city employee.

And the gas was free!

“It’s a great break for us,” FDNY administrator Maria Mercado said.

The gas is delivered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in huge tanker trucks. Drivers roll up and an attendant immediately fills up the tank without ever taking a dime.

H/T:waznmentobe

[Valin]

Massive Voter Fraud in St. Lucie County, FL – 141% Turnout

Dr. Richard Swier

11/10/12

 

Click on the link below for the official St Lucie County, FL 2012 election results. Only one precinct had less than 113% turnout. The unofficial vote count is 175,554 registered voters 247,713 vote cards cast (141.10% ). The National SEAL Museum, a St. Lucie county polling place, had 158.85% voter turn out, the highest in the county.

 

When asked about the 141% Supervisor of Elections Gertrude Walker stated, “They may have had something like that in Palm Beach County, but we’ve never seen that here.”

 

(Snip)

 

H/T Townhall

[Valin]

Report: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. nearing plea deal, jail time [VIDEO]

 

 

[Pepper]

http://geocommons.com/maps/210024

[Valin]

On the Commemoration of Veteran’s Day…

[Valin]

http://geocommons.com/maps/210024

 

?

[Geee]

Report: Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. nearing plea deal, jail time [VIDEO]

 

And they couldn't have done this before the elections? -Well I guess it wouldn't have mattered. The pleas deal makes him resign his seat, but if it was left up to the voters they would have voted him in from jail.

[pollyannaish]

@Pepper are those racist tweets from both parties? What are the parameters?

[Pepper]

@Pepper are those racist tweets from both parties? What are the parameters?

 

Whatever the collector perceived as racist. It's not party, just originator, I take it.

If you had a static IP it gets sort of intrusive, you can drill to the street level.

 

e.g.

32.3226347 lat

-86.231386 long

11/7/2012 0:30 time

[pollyannaish]

Got it. Thanks@Pepper.

 

I find it interesting that in my state the tweets are coming from the blue part of the state with the exception of a single tweet from Pullman--a university town.

[Pepper]

@pollyannaish and it is not as if blacks don't use the n word, so the only thing it shows is that somebody someplace said something offensive to someone else

[pollyannaish]

@pollyannaish and it is not as if blacks don't use the n word, so the only thing it shows is that somebody someplace said something offensive to someone else

 

In that case, shouldn't the entire world be covered?

[Pepper]

@pollyannaish

 

here's more background

 

http://www.floatingsheep.org/2012/11/mapping-racist-tweets-in-response-to.html

 

 

During the day after the 2012 presidential election we took note of a spike in hate speech on Twitter referring to President Obama's re-election, as chronicled by Jezebel (thanks to Chris Van Dyke for bringing this our attention). It is a useful reminder that technology reflects the society in which it is based, both the good and the bad. Information space is not divorced from everyday life and racism extends into the geoweb and helps shapes its contours; and in turn, data from the geoweb can be used to reflect the geographies of racist practice back onto the places from which they emerged.

 

Using DOLLY we collected all the geocoded tweets from the last week (beginning November 1) with racist terms that also reference the election in order to understand how these everyday acts of explicit racism are spatially distributed. Given the nature of these search terms, we've buried the details at the bottom of this post in a footnote [1].

 

Given our interest in the geography of information we wanted to see how this type of hate speech overlaid on physical space. To do this we aggregated the 395 hate tweets to the state level and then normalized them by comparing them to the total number of geocoded tweets coming out of that state in the same time period [2]. We used a location quotient inspired measure (LQ) that indicates each state's share of election hate speech tweet relative to its total number of tweets.[3] A score of 1.0 indicates that a state has relatively the same number of hate speech tweets as its total number of tweets. Scores above 1.0 indicate that hate speech is more prevalent than all tweets, suggesting that the state's "twitterspace" contains more racists post-election tweets than the norm.

 

So, are these tweets relatively evenly distributed? Or do some states have higher specializations in racist tweets? The answer is shown in the map below (also available here

in an interactive version) in which the location of individual tweets (indicated by red dots)

[4]

are overlaid on color coded states. Yellow shading indicates states that have a relatively lower amount of post-election hate tweets (compared to their overall tweeting patterns) and all states shaded in green have a higher amount. T

he darker the green color the higher the location quotient measure for hate tweets.