Sorry if this is inflammatory but these political threads were way better pro-Kehoskie. It gets tiring watching people knock over his ####### idiotic warmed-over talking points. At least DMN (wherever he is) and Ray and Good Face and whatnot provide some variation. Joe is just like a really poorly programmed Rush Limbaugh robot.

By the way, since it's Dec. 1, someone should find and submit a new OT: Politics thread before Jim has to ask. (I posted October's and November's; I'll let someone else have December.)

I’ve been posting on this site since pre-reg, but whatever. I mostly lurk and I didn’t know there was a rule against that. Also, I don’t remember claiming that the liberals here were all master orators with a cunning grasp of the facts, either. They just sometimes make posts that aren’t either goalpost-shifting or outright mistruths, which is not true of yourself, unfortunately.

The only reason so many posters find Joe K's reasoning skills lacking is because of Hurricane Sandy. If not for the storm's timing, Joe's willingness to consider additional information and sometimes adapt his arguments to account for it would be hailed by everyone.

The only reason so many posters find Joe K's reasoning skills lacking is because of Hurricane Sandy. If not for the storm's timing, Joe's willingness to consider additional information and sometimes adapt his arguments to account for it would be hailed by everyone.

That's not the only reason. We give out Cokes here all the time, but to the best of my knowledge Joe has never received or given out one, and as we know people like it when they are given things and so they are much more favorable to the givers.

The idea of an officially Jewish state is an inherently bad idea (just as bad as any other theocracy)

Perhaps if you remove the scare quotes from the "war on women", you might begin to understand one of the bigger reasons for Obama's easy victory.

As of 1945, Jews in general are done taking the advice of the Goyim. As far as most of us are concerned, you've long since forfeited the right to tell us what is, and is not, a good idea for us.

Back-to-back funny posts by lefties.

Whereas I can completely believe that one of the righties here couldn't bring himself to admit that maybe, just maybe, his recurring theory about House incumbency stats being skewed by "the relatively modern trend of strategic retirement" might have been in error after the data from the previous page:

If we have to keep on the 2012 election, let's actually analyze it. What could Romney have realistically could do to win in 2012 and didn't?

As of 1945, Jews in general are done taking the advice of the Goyim. As far as most of us are concerned, you've long since forfeited the right to tell us what is, and is not, a good idea for us.

I can't believe none of the lefties here can bring themselves to admit that maybe, just maybe, 2 percentage points of Obama's support might have shifted to Romney if not for Sandy and/or the "war on women."

As for Sandy, like a lot of the discussions here, I can't believe that turned into a recurring 30-day debate. On a site full of stats fiends, I can't believe none of the lefties here can bring themselves to admit that maybe, just maybe, 2 percentage points of Obama's support might have shifted to Romney if not for Sandy and/or the "war on women."

Not be Mitt Romney. In tough economic times,

Glad to hear the info on strategic retirements was "interesting" before you glided to nevertheless being correct. As for your re-re-rehashed questions, if you were legitimately interested, but you just couldn't trust the insidious cadre of lefties here, you might have thought to seek the information for yourself. Your interest + Google = the answers.

I get why you repeat your points; that italicized invocation of "40 years" is so strong and convincing, it's nothing short of a miracle that the House ever changed hands at all. But for the sake of argument, even if we assume that the House flipped (which I now doubt it did at all, let alone 3 times), Google can explain why.

Best of all, when you find all of the many, many sources and analyses supporting your position -- that the House's incumbency rate has NOT crept upwards -- you can totally rub our noses in it. I wonder why you haven't done this?

JoeK's convinced that the only reason Obama won was the weather and a pack of liberal lies, and his beloved right wing's simply a poor and innocent victim.

didn't obama have a majority of electoral votes just in states he won by 4+%? so, 2% seems a bit low to have made a difference.

I haven't been checking the updated state-by-state numbers, but in an essentially zero-sum game, if Obama won by 4 points, all that would have been required was for Romney to shift 2.0001 percentage points of support away from Obama's column to Romney's.

Go ahead and do that and get back to us with the results.

As for Sandy, like a lot of the discussions here, I can't believe that turned into a recurring 30-day debate. On a site full of stats fiends, I can't believe none of the lefties here can bring themselves to admit that maybe, just maybe, 2 percentage points of Obama's support might have shifted to Romney if not for Sandy and/or the "war on women."

Not be Mitt Romney. In tough economic times, running a candidate who has a car elevator was a bad idea, and running a candidate who has a car elevator paid for with p.e. dollars was even worse. Perhaps even dumber, when one of your biggest campaign cudgels is the unpopular Obamacare, you shouldn't run a candidate who implemented his own brand of Obamacare years before Obama.

You realize that if you assume uniform swing, Romney needed about 5 points?

Let's take the best possible candidate: How much better do you think Huckabee does against Obama? Romney did about 1-2 points worse than the fundamentals. How would Huck have done?

Even if they did, so what? It seems very unlikely to me that Sandy had a noticeable effect on the vote in swing states, though I suppose it's possible. As others have pointed out though, the forecasting models (at least the skewed ones) all had Obama as a solid favorite before Sandy hit. As for the "war on women," whether it affected the election results or not, it's not a one-time issue. Regardless of what you think of the way it was discussed, it represents a real difference between parties and is probably going to be a net-negative for the GOP for as long as they take the stances they do.

So I'm still not sure what point you're trying to make.

Is this another pedantic "gotcha"?

Are you conceding that Sandy and the "war on women" might have made a 2.0001-point difference, but claiming they couldn't possibly have made a 2.5001-point difference?

In the last two decades, the GOP has generally held onto its gains in the House despite increasingly unfavorable demographics. Some people might think this might be an argument FOR the advantages of incumbency, not against them.

I was not part of that "Sandy/women/Romney's path to victory" debate.

I'm asking you to do 5 minutes of research to back your claim. Apparently that is too much to ask.

Again, so what?

Funny, coming from a guy who would have voted for Romney if only he was Asian.

I do my best to avoid them, though I'm familiar with how they operate. This issue just seems particularly trivial to me.

Absolutely! Sadly, if he were an Asian-American, the GOP would spend all their time wondering if he was a Real American.

It is when we're debating a pure hypothetical.

If you think debating issues that might have made the difference between an Obama win and a Romney win is trivial, you've done a fine job of avoiding BBTF's political threads. Ha ha.

Each gain comes with its own incumbency. As the failure of wave elections to reduce the increasing trend towards incumbent advantage has shown, it's in the aggregate that this has mattered. Which party is in the lead in a given election cycle is not the pivotal point, or else the Democrats would currently have a 60-year majority, not the 40-year one that you can't seem to shake. Oh, if only there were some way to verify this.

Actual election results are a pure hypothetical. Okay then.

Well, you do have to wonder about highly educated, high-income Asian-Americans who generally vote for liberals, especially after the Dems' sordid history with Asians (e.g., FDR and the Japanese-Americans, LBJ and Vietnam, etc.). I guess, sometimes, the GOP just can't win.

A debate implies that both sides are interested in the subject. Uh, that's not true in this case.

Why would Romney need a 5-point swing? If he lost by 5 points, and we're assuming it essentially remains a zero-sum game, Romney would need half of Obama's margin of victory plus 1 vote in Florida, Virginia, Ohio, and Colorado.

And why would Asians care about what FDR and LBJ did generations ago when John McCain was using the term "gooks" in this century?

Highly educated Asians reject the GOP for the same reason all highly educated people do: the GOP is controlled by its base, and that base thinks the Earth is 6,000 years old, climate change is the product of a cabal of evil, scheming scientists, and that schools to the left of Bob Jones are wretched hives of scum and villainy. And since education and support for gay rights are closely tied, they probably also object to the booing of gay soldiers, candidates calling for the nullification of all extant gay marriages, and regular comparisons of gay people to those who engage in bestiality.

The "War on women" stuff is sort of impossible to know, ...

In the days after the election, liberal after liberal here said that the GOP would have to radically rebrand itself if it was to have any hope of ever winning the White House again. After about the fiftieth person said this, I opined that if the flawed Romney might have come within a hurricane and/or a spurious "war on women" from winning the election — as some exit polling and the biggest-ever gender gap suggest — then maybe the GOP isn't as dead as people think.

I didn't foresee a nearly 30-day debate of that idea, but I guess a lot of the open-minded liberals here object to anything that runs counter to their preferred narrative of the GOP being both hopelessly lost in the wilderness politically and doomed by demographics electorally.

It didn't get "blown up" because his commitment to scientific truth has been deep and long-standing.

As to your point about how close the GOP is to winning a presidential election: you, and other people on the board, are predicting that they'll have to moderate their policies. The gentle reader will notice that Joe himself is advocating changing policies: he talks about the "war on women" as something that if done differently, would have caused different electoral results. Most of the liberal commentators are suggesting immigration reform, Joe is suggesting moderating on womens' issues like birth control and abortions. This is a difference in tactics, not in strategy.

I didn't foresee a nearly 30-day debate of that idea, but I guess a lot of the open-minded liberals here object to anything that runs counter to their preferred narrative of the GOP being both hopelessly lost in the wilderness politically and doomed by demographics electorally.

Isn't it possible that the liberals aren't the only ones in this discussion who dismiss out of hand anything that doesn't confirm their worldview?

The entire "war on women" was comprised of (1) two idiot Senate candidates engaging in performance art over an issue that theretofore hadn't remotely been a part of the national debate in 2012 and wasn't possibly going to be something they could move in the Senate had they won, and (2) Georgetown not paying for Sandra Fluke's birth control.

(3) The actual GOP platform.

Isn't it possible that the liberals aren't the only ones in this discussion who dismiss out of hand anything that doesn't confirm their worldview?

Such as?

No exceptions for rape or incest on the anti-abortion plank, for one.

So wait, Joe, you think that Murdock/Akin were significant tailwinds on Romney? Like to what extent do you believe that senatorial candidates in Indiana and Missouri affected Virginia and Colorado?

Never gonna happen. Too many people can't pass up his trolling.

trolling — verb
the act of disagreeing with a liberal or with liberal ideology

Never gonna happen. Too many people can't pass up his trolling.

So the GOP, by being anti-abortion, has declared a "war on women," but when Obama and Democrats opposed the proposed ban on sex-selective abortion — the vast majority of fetuses aborted via sex-selective abortion being, of course, female — it's not a war on women.

I hate to answer a question with a question, but do you believe the "war on women" would have dogged Romney throughout the entire campaign at anything close to the same level if it had remained centered on Sandra Fluke's birth control needs rather than on Akin and Mourdock's "legitimate rape" stupidity?

To whatever extent the gender gap in 2012 — the biggest-ever such gap — was because of the "war on women," I have to believe it was because of "legitimate rape" and not because women sympathized with a 30-year-old law student at Georgetown who didn't want to pay $6 per month for birth control.

So the GOP, by being anti-abortion, has declared a "war on women," but when Obama and Democrats opposed the proposed ban on sex-selective abortion — the vast majority of fetuses aborted via sex-selective abortion being, of course, female — it's not a war on women.

So the GOP, by being anti-abortion, has declared a "war on women," but when Obama and Democrats opposed the proposed ban on sex-selective abortion — the vast majority of fetuses aborted via sex-selective abortion being, of course, female

If you can't see a difference between the two, then this is just another issue where you're not going to get why most people disagree with you WRT the GOP's abortion platform.

Women voted for Obama at a high rate because his administration had policies that were favored by women. To the extent that the "war on women" mattered, it mattered because of policies like equal pay law, contraceptives inclusion and legal abortion being favored in large numbers by women. Obama promoted policies that women liked. That's why they voted for him. I'm relatively certain that Todd Akin and Joe Mourdock's comments had very little impact except on their own chances to be elected.

I mean, if you want to put it in Republican-speak: Obama gave a bunch of handouts to women that they wanted. That's why they voted for him. Romney generally opposed those policies--excuse me: handouts.

Yes, why aren't the dames all riled up about this solution in search of a problem?

Obama gave a similar answer as Rubio re: the Earth's age during the 2008 campaign

Yes, why aren't the dames all riled up about this solution in search of a problem?

Solution in search of a problem? Per the last worldwide estimates I've seen, over 160,000,000 more females have been aborted than males. You want to see a "war on women," that's it.

Solution in search of a problem? Per the last worldwide estimates I've seen, over 160,000,000 more females have been aborted than males. You want to see a "war on women," that's it.

So after liberals spent months insisting there was a GOP "war on women," now you're saying there was a null impact, or that Sandra Fluke resonated more than "legitimate rape"? (And after screaming about the idea of Obama "handouts," you're now using it as shorthand and/or acknowledging the reality of the situation?)

Joe's not trolling. He's looking for a fight.

I never heard Romney claiming he would try to ban abortion even in cases of rape, incest, or life of mother.

The entire "war on women" was comprised of (1) two idiot Senate candidates engaging in performance art over an issue that theretofore hadn't remotely been a part of the national debate in 2012 and wasn't possibly going to be something they could move in the Senate had they won, and (2) Georgetown not paying for Sandra Fluke's birth control.

How can anybody be this ####### dense?

Sandra Fluke’s testimony was about how a friend - who had ####### tumors - was unable to get important medicine covered by insurance that she paid for because it had the side effect (in this case) of preventing pregnancy.

So what your solution then? Strict abstinence? Force all pregnant women to give birth? Force more women who are pregnant with a potential male to commit abortion? Let me ask you this. Do you actually care Joe, or have you latched onto another argument that you think you can concern troll with?

Because really, if you want to prevent unwanted abortions, the best practical way to do it is make sure women have a safe and alternate way to make sure that unwanted pregnancies does not happen. Like say, mandate to insurance companies that coverage of birth control.

But since I know you are just trying to concern troll on this, you'll just pick another random topic to prove your point. (Whatever it is, I'm not even sure you know what it is.)

Sandra Fluke’s testimony was about how a friend - who had ####### tumors - was unable to get important medicine covered by insurance that she paid for because it had the side effect (in this case) of preventing pregnancy. ...

Without insurance coverage, contraception, as you know, can cost a woman over $3,000 during law school. For a lot of students who, like me, are on public interest scholarships, that's practically an entire summer's salary. Forty percent of the female students at Georgetown Law reported to us that they've struggled financially as a result of this policy. — Sandra Fluke