June 21, 2012

Nate Silver;

Of FiveThirtyEight.com has Obama at

64.4% to WIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is up 3.5% in just one week. He has Obama at nearly 300 Electoral College votes!!!!!!!!!!

Here is more great news;

On Wednesday morning, Bloomberg released a poll that showed President Obama 13 points ahead of Mitt Romney among likely voters.

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

This is also in response to another OP;

Yougov poll: Obama 44% Romney 44%

Yougov poll; The Economist/YouGov poll is a partnership between The Economist and YouGov, a leading online pollster, to research American public opinion. Our weekly poll, based on a sample of 1,000 adult Americans, looks at standard measures of public opinion. It also uses the speed of internet-polling to ask topical questions each week.

Some data will be published in the print edition of The Economist. But the full range of questions and answers will be published every Thursday at www.economist.com/yougovpoll.

This is from the actual polling company's website and thanks to Jenmito for the research.

For those of us who are Political Newbs, Nate Silver is a Master at polling data. He is not a pollster per se but takes the previously published polls and puts a QUANTITATIVE value to them based upon prior results. He is the go to person for anything political, except of course, Rachael.

June 12, 2012

Nate Silver for President;

Well, at least for his great analyses. Here is his latest;

http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/12/a-guide-to-forecast-model-updates/#more-31160

Obama; 291.3 Electoral votes

Romney 246.7 Electoral votes


!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

He gives President Obama a 60.9% chance of winning.

April 16, 2012

Just had a call from Rasmussen;

All of the questions were on the economy. However, they included 2 'push questions.'

1) Will the increased cost of gasoline make you curtail your summer vacation plans this year?

2) Will the increased cost of gasoline cause you to have less money to pay your bills this year?


NOW I know how Rasmussen gets their Republican leaning poll numbers.

On the other hand, I gave the economy pretty good marks for all questions. I said NO to both of the above questions. PLUS, I said I was a small business owner, Republican, children living at home and I made a LOT of money. I'll be an outlier but...

April 11, 2012

Naked woman questioned at Denver International Airport

http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/11/11144264-naked-woman-questioned-at-denver-international-airport?lite

Sorry, NO PICTURES!

April 8, 2012

PORN

This topic has been in the forefront of the news lately. The big news that I've read and seen on this board is Mr. Chomsky's interview where he came down on the side against it. The Religious Right has always been against it, but not for the same reason. They go with what they say is in the Bible, something about don't do adultery.

What is porn? I recall Supreme Court's Stewart's response to his interpretation to the explanation of porn, "I know it when I see it." The definition in Wiki; porn is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purposes of sexual arousal and erotic satisfaction. WTF is wrong with this?

Well, when I was growing up, the pictures in National Geographic would get a 'rise' out of me. In my early teen years, Victoria Secret catalogs did me well. I 'discovered' the 'girlie' mags a few years later and am now in my 50s and still enjoy naked women, alone or in any number of sexual poses/acts. Does this make me bad? NO! Does this make me a supporter of the sex trade and/or the selling of women? NO!

The Religious Right has used the concept of nudity as a weapon for so many years. Religion uses sex as a way to control people (what other human force is as powerful?). They believe that all nudity, whether it be pictures, video, 'up close and personal' and even the written word where the reader supplies their own concept of nudity is a sin.

What are the consequences of eliminating porn? We'll go back to pre-1960s when Playboy was such a big thing. Where the showing of a woman's bra at the movies would have earned it a condemned rating from the Catholic Church. Pornography would go underground. Go back even further and you have women of the 19th century who dared not show any part of her body. They wore so many layers of clothing that they had showed NO sign they were women other than longer hair than the men. the women of Victorian England, if they showed an ankle, were considered to be naked.

I enjoy looking at naked women. I enjoy looking at the human sexual act. If prostitution were legal in the US then these men and women would be free to make any sort of video on human sexuality without anyone calling them out for sex slaves and/or underage girls.

America is so obsessed with sex, but in the bad way. Conservatives HAVE sex but they think anything other than the Missionary position for and only for procreation is an affront to their god.

Come out of the dark ages my fellow DU'ers. Let porn, in whatever form you deem it to be, have a place in our culture. There will always be people exploited but if we legalize victim-less crimes, prostitution, etc... then porn will lose it's stigmatization and become what it really is; a healthy libido enhancer.

March 5, 2012

Firefox issues;

This just started happening yesterday; when I go to certain, and just a few, websites, the pages load but not all the way. For instance the website that's loaded from the DU link;

http://www.democraticunderground.com/101617777

http://politicalhumor.about.com/od/politicalcartoons/ig/Political-Cartoons/

I only get a partial listing of the items and none of the images show. There are links to individual cartoons within the site but these do not get loaded.

I can view all of DU's website with no problem. I have reinstalled Firefox and got the latest Adobe plug-ins.

I will try and get help on the Firefox forums but I thought I'd try here first.

Thanks in advance.

February 13, 2012

Onion covers Obama's "Furious Profanity-Filled Rant" at the State of the Union Speech.

http://www.theonion.com/articles/obamas-state-of-the-union,27162/

This is a repost of an OP that I was in the middle of replying to when an error message came up that said the thread was locked.

An instant poll of Americans gave this response to the State of the Union speech;

30% Sitting in Silent Shame in Front of their TV

28% Writing Apology Letter

23% Laughing Nervously

19% Mumbling "What the..."

December 23, 2011

I think Matt is wrong;

At least on one account; Obama's balls AND nut sack are HUGE.

Just for him to run was a show of the testosterone levels he has. To let the country slowly slide to the right IS a terrible thing but

with lame duck status and another momentum from his 2012 reelection will enable him to take back the initiative to right 'read LEFT'

the country for the next generation. The country has had its glimpse into what a true Conservative road the country will have to go

down. If the economy had truly tanked with Obama at the helm then the Republicans would have won next year. However, that would

have truly brought about the Great Depression II. THAT would have assured a Democrat in the White House in 2016, but at WHAT

cost? Maybe there is a Democrat in the wings of the caliber of FDR. Maybe that person WOULD be able to bring about a revival of

ANOTHER New Deal.


But think, maybe it would HAVE taken another World War to alleviate a mess total destruction a limited, 'hopefully', with 'only' 500

million dead and most of the world's large cities destroyed beyond human habitation. But with thousands of warheads going off,

Nuclear Winter would kill off most of humanity, along with maybe 90% of Earth's species. The total dead would be 10 times greater in

the above scenario of limited war.


This bull shit Incremental crap I keep hearing lately IS a good thing. Let me explain; Darwin's main point in the explanation of what

we now call Evolution IS incremental. He used the illustration of doves, ONE of his passions, to make his case in the Origin of Species

by Natural Selection. He envisioned the need for a species to adapt to LOCAL and slowly changing conditions for the species to be

able to NOT go extinct. The dove's case is not considered Incremental in this case. But it is NOT Natural Selection. Humans cause

breeds to occur only when they want certain attributes. They will make certain that offspring will carry on phenotypes, the actual

traits, and cause short term Evolution. This is known as WHEN the conditions changed, those individuals who were able to adapt to

these new conditions were able to flourish and be able to produce more offspring. This takes many many generations to be able to

make any difference in a general population. This is called EVOLUTION.


But Darwin did not go far enough. His early and mid 19th century thinking was limited to a shallow, but ever growing, pool of

knowledge that only enabled him to limit his theory to INCREMENTAL stages of Evolution.


Fast forward to the mid and late 20th century. I am sure most of the of the members of DU are aware of the name and reputation of

Stephen J. Gould. If not, he was among the premiere Evolutionary Biologists of his time. He died not long ago after decades of great

pain and anguish from a disease that usually killed shortly after the first diagnosis. He was the central figure that overturned the

Kansas School Board's decision to teach Creationism in the high school Biology classes. Gould WAS a Darwinist in the classical sense.

However, he went a bit further with at least one theory, that of a notion of Punctuated Equilibrium. Punctuated Equilibrium states

that;

"{Punctuated Equilibrium) is a theory in evolutionary biology which proposes that most species will exhibit little net evolutionary

change for most of their geological history, remaining in an extended state called stasis. When significant evolutionary change occurs,

the theory proposes that it is generally restricted to rare and geologically rapid events of branching speciation called cladogenesis.

Cladogenesis is the process by which a species splits into two distinct species, rather than one species gradually transforming into

another." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium


Ok, enough talk on Evolution. My point for this lecture is that Incremental can be thought of in both Evolutionary AND political theory.

Think of early US political parties. Both ancestral branches of the modern parties started out with both different names and different

ideologies. They EVOLVED by both Incremental AND Punctuated Equilibrea. Incremental-wise the political landscape changed with the

times, usually over decades if not a generation or two. I grant you this is not anything like the hundreds of generations that natural

selection requires but this is a human endeavor we discuss where the general population of the US thinks 2 years is a long time,

especially with the advent of mass media. A case in point is the gradual acceptance of the civil rights of the many different 'classes'

of Americans; women, African Americans, gays... All these movements took decades, or longer, for these groups to get their, mostly,

acceptance into the American mainstream.


As for Dr. Gould's idea of Punctuated Equilibrium, take for example the McCarthy era of TERROR. That political oddity took only a few

short years to coalesce. BUT LBJ's call for the Great Society brought about the sudden need to change the political landscape

literally overnight; change or go extinct, at least as a political party or movement. Another case would be Lincoln and 'his' Civil War.'

Granted, the Abolitionist movement had been going on for decades, but it was only held by a small minority that blacks were human

and they were whole and not the 3/5 that the original Constitution called for. It became generally political only after his election,

causing the almost immediate shift in political thought we see in hind sight. Prior to that there was a shifting of political movement

and much 'saber rattling' but it took the galvanization of a split of Americans to actually make the final 'Punctuation.'


Now to the matter at hand; Obama's political needs. Since his 2008 election, he has been attacked, openly, by his political

opponents. They have the power of hate, a POWERFUL force. They have a loud voice in the media-Fox, The Wall Street Journal and

others. The Tea Party, even if it was not truly a populist movement in a traditional sense, was a force that gave the Republicans

such a showing in the 2010 elections. That election has caused such a turmoil in the political landscape that Obama has HAD to give

in and BECOME an Incrementalist. This, I truly believe, has saved the Democratic Party AND the nation.


I DO NOT AGREE with MANY of his decisions. I HATE his decision to sign away our constitutional rights, among others. But, and I

hope this will come to pass, he will lead to the overthrowing of several (MANY?) of these hateful bills and statements.


The 2012 election will prove to be the turning point, mentioned above; IF he is elected. He will have the will of the people. They will

be skeptical at first because of his need in the last 3 years of being portrayed as an ANGRY BLACK MAN. He may or may not have

both houses go Democratic, but this is my main point, it will give him, the Democratic Party, America AND the world a starting place in

history that our children's children can look back on and say 'this is the time when the world truly began its Golden Age.