Note to Davey: moving the goalposts so that anything short of brownshirts firing on Democrats as they break towards a polling station doesn't constitute vote supression isn't even an argument. I don't know that you can do better, but, do better.

Note to Jack: I ain't moving the goalposts. You are. This entire "early voting" fad is about ten years old. Vote suppression means that you prevent people from voting, not that you apply the same rules that have been applied for centuries. You can't find a single person who will be unable to vote if early voting lasts 10 days instead of 12. Ergo, no vote suppression.

justice thomas will not leave the bench before his death

That's what they said about Barristan Selmy.

In all seriousness, are there cases of Supreme Court Judges outstaying their welcome due to senility or infirmity? I seem to recall a West Wing episode with a prestigious judge being forced into retirement and it being a sticky constitutional wicket. That show is my second most important source of information on American politics next to BTF threads so I'm sure it's not steering me wrong, but I thought I'd check.

lassus

ok, you are conflating two separate responses that were intended from different directions

i already answered your first question. yes.

as to the second i was speaking to the energy company's perspective as to why 'they' find north dakota, both dakotas really, so appealing. it's where the energy is (duh) but without the hassles associated with offshore drilling (discussed above), drilling in a foreign country (leaders with their hands out) or trying to find new sources.

here you are going to old places with a new approach. and it works. hooray

Don't recall if I posted my election predictions or not, but if not - I'm re-posting them... I use a very, very complex model that involves a pirated copy of Nate's system, a secret sauce weighted poll trendline aggregaters, significant stealing of insight from Cook, Sabato, and others, a mystic who lives a lonely existence in a cabin the Rockies --- and then chuck all that out the window and go with my gut....

Obama 303 EVs (bleeding IN, NC, NE-2, and FL from his 2008) Romney 235. I feel pretty sure I'm going to be wrong about Florida, though. The popular vote will be Obama 50, Romney 49.

The Dems will pick up 5 House seats -- but we'll see about 25 House seats change hands. GOP cleans up in NC, offset by Dem delegation increases in IL... NY and PA are significant Dem House disappointments, but the Dems offset with pickups in FL and CA. Chandler (KY-6) and Hochul (NY-27) survive -- Matheson (UT-4), Bass (NH-2) and Kissell (NC-8) do not....

The Dems hold the Senate, going +1 - depending on how you count King - when it's all said and done... Flake over Carmona in AZ (open R hold), Rehberg unseats Tester (R pickup), Heller over Berkely (R hold), Fischer over Kerrey (open D, R pickup), Warren over Brown (D pickup), Donnelly over Mourdock (D pickup), Kaine over Allen (open D hold), King over Dill/Summers (open R, I pickup - will caucus D), Murphy over McMahon (Open D hold), Baldwin over Thompson (open D hold), Nelson over Mack (D hold), Heitkamp slips past Berg (open D hold). Sherrod Brown (OH), Debbie Stabenow (MI), etc win easily.

The GOP has a much better night on the gubernatorial side -- +2, with pickups in MT and NC.

On 9/11 and Iraq, I doubt if McCain's initial reaction would have been much different than Bush's. But then neither would Gore's. The possible difference between McCain and Bush is that McCain would have had much better trained instincts when it came to resisting the rosy scenarios laid out by the chickenhawk civilians regarding cakewalks and such. He'd have had the standing to ask the sort of hard questions that a Bush might have been afraid to ask. The ideal president in a situation like that would have been an Eisenhower, and the absolute worst would have been either G. W. Bush or LBJ. We plunged into Iraq feet first due to a combination of credulous reception of faulty intelligence and the pre-dispositions of the crew that Bush had assembled around him. It's possible that the "good" McCain might have had a much less ideological set of advisers, and much more inclination to ask hard questions from the various intelligence sources. But cudda shudda wudda, and we'll never know.

Apparently you missed the decade of the 2000s. McCain was more hawkish than Bush. Before 9/11, during, and after. Maybe McCain doesn't permit waterboarding, but that's the only difference between him and Bush in terms of the WOT.

McCain's hawkishness seemed to be a kind of double-downing strategy to win the party base. Does a McCain who is in office already be so hawkish after 9/11? I doubt McCain would play the game the neocons wanted him or any administration to play.

Ludicrous. There were essentially two Republicans in both the '92 and '96 elections.

No, there weren't.

Polls after the election showed that in 1992, Perot's supporters would have gone 38% R, 38% D, 24% not voted.

In 1996, if we assume that 75% of Perot's vote would switch to Dole (and that's a WAY WAY over estimate) the only changes in the electoral vote would be Florida (62.5% required flip), Tennessee (43% required), Missouri (62.5% required), Ohio (60% required), and Arizona (30% required flip). That's a total of 76 electoral votes, so Clinton would still not lose the election.

On 9/11 and Iraq, I doubt if McCain's initial reaction would have been much different than Bush's. But then neither would Gore's.

A few years ago I was reading an anthology of counter-factual history. It was mostly just some light-hearted fun with historians doing some harmless speculation in their fields. But the last chapter was an imagined transcript of the Gore administration's reaction to 9/11 written by David Frum (I think). It was bizarre because it was a vicious take-down that had nothing in common with the entire rest of the book.

Regarding Rubio and the Latino/Hispanic vote, seriously? Folks hispanics are not a huge block, they are from many countries of origin. They do have some stuff in common though. One of the things many of them have in common is their annoyance with how Cubans are treated vis-a-vis haw the rest of them are treated.

Nominating Rubio - even ignoring all the various things the GOP does that annoy them - is not some magical "Now Hispanics vote for the GOP candidate" silver bullet. Even assuming the GOP would be willing to nominate Rubio (which I sort of doubt, but they nominated a Mormon so I guess it is possible).

I think there's a weak argument to be made that Perot cost Bush the election in 92. He certainly hurt him. 1996 was going to be a blowout either way. All Perot cost anyone was the majority mark for Clinton.

In all seriousness, are there cases of Supreme Court Judges outstaying their welcome due to senility or infirmity?

A number of them. The two most famous examples are Holmes and Douglas, but Rehnquist arguably falls into that category too.

the whole 'corporations are willing to kill people to make moneny' is so old i am surprised you went there

Me too. I assumed it was a given in any serious discussion of the issues.

A Mourdock loss isn't going to be seen as resulting from anything other than a slip of the tongue. No one rethinks their core beliefs after losing a close race. They rethink tactics.

Outside the Tea Party Mourdock's nomination has been criticized since the day it happened. Democrats were openly salivating at the opportunity to face this clown versus having to face Lugar. I'm sure you'll be correct about some folks, but presumably the GOP has at least a few grownups who recognize the need for discipline.

McCain's hawkishness seemed to be a kind of double-downing strategy to win the party base.

The one constant in John McCain's otherwise highly unstable ideology over his career is his hawkishness. The man likes to bomb things. I have little doubt that had 9/11 happened under his watch, he would have cast his lot with the Iraq War crowd. The only question would be whether he'd have escalated things with Pakistan too much in the aftermath of the Afghan War to pivot to Iraq.

The one thing that might have been different, on the foreign policy front, is that McCain's hawkishness was much more all-of-the-above than Bush's and Cheney's. They were entirely focused on Saddam and other dictators, to the exclusion of Al Qaeda. McCain would have been going hard after terrorists from day 1 along with escalating tensions with Saddam. There's a not unreasonable chance 9/11 doesn't happen in a McCain administration.

The problem with these counterfactuals, though, is that they leave out the hard part. McCain had zero chance to beat Bush in 2000 because the entire party establishment was aligned against him. A McCain administration could only have occured after McCain made peace with the party establishment, and it's impossible to know how that process would have played out. I assume that his feints leftward on economic policy in 2000 were entirely negotiable, but who really knows. And maybe the weird unstable McCain loses to Gore. Who knows.

In all seriousness, are there cases of Supreme Court Judges outstaying their welcome due to senility or infirmity? I seem to recall a West Wing episode with a prestigious judge being forced into retirement and it being a sticky constitutional wicket. That show is my second most important source of information on American politics next to BTF threads so I'm sure it's not steering me wrong, but I thought I'd check.

Absolutely. Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thurgood Marshall at the end of their tenure often fell asleep; they were just too physically old for the job. William O Douglas had a stroke and was senile his last year on the bench; it was so bad that there was agreement among his colleagues not to let him make real decisions. Rehnquist wasn't physically fit for the job at the end, either.

I think there's a weak argument to be made that Perot cost Bush the election in 92.

If you look at the end result the argument is very weak. If you look at the campaign and how it played out I think it is pretty strong as far as how candidate and campaign effects go (meaning ignoring economic and demographic type effects). But I think we had that discussion a while back on these threads.

if you frack in north dakota and there is a water problem any impact on the population is minimal because there is hardly anyone there... it's not like contaminating an aquifier in pennsylvania

The area in North Dakota where they're doing most of the drilling is in the northwest corner, very close to a town of about 20,000 people called Williston. There is a huge reservoir there which was created by damming the Missouri River, which flows into the Mississippi. There may not be a ton of people in the part of the country where they're drilling (my dad grew up just over the border on the Montana side), but there's a non-negligible portion of the country that relies on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.

Nominating Rubio - even ignoring all the various things the GOP does that annoy them - is not some magical "Now Hispanics vote for the GOP candidate" silver bullet. Even assuming the GOP would be willing to nominate Rubio (which I sort of doubt, but they nominated a Mormon so I guess it is possible).

Good point. I recall that Rubio polled no better among Latinos than a generic candidate. A person with similar skin color to yours selling you the same snake oil as that guy over there only goes so far.

I'm sure you'll be correct about some folks, but presumably the GOP has at least a few grownups who recognize the need for discipline.

So stipulated.

I think of 538 as an experiment. We're trying to find out if we have enough data to accurately predict election results based solely on the poll data

As I said in (I think) last month's thread, I think it's extremely likely that Nate will have a failure on the level of Long Term Capital Management.

Same basic scenario, some very clever people built a very sophisticated model from an inadequate data source. It mostly worked very well, but ...

if you frack in north dakota and there is a water problem any impact on the population is minimal because there is hardly anyone there

There are plenty of people there, including my wife's family.

I typically am not in favor of technologies whose primary purpose is to enable the narcissistic and banal suburban lifestyle, with its SUVs and waste. Fracking is no exception to that general principle. With its externalities and insatiable demand, the market for oil and fossil fuels isn't much different than the market for cocaine and meth. If you follow the fracking debate, you'll find the western Canadian lead politicians -- and the oil companies -- speaking in the same cadence as Central and South American leaders speak about drugs, which is to say justifying the producers' production, regardless of consequences, because it merely fills Americans' demand.

Both of you read the question wrong. It was not "What would the country look like if McCain had won instead of Obama in 2008?" It was "What would the country look like if McCain had won instead of Bush in 2000?"

I think McCain would have led some airstrikes himself just like the President did in "Independence Day". I am not sure he would have gone into Iraq. He certainly wouldn't have had Cheney as VP with Rumsfeld as Defense. They were the biggest cheerleaders for the war.

Is there a reason we can't have, say, a 20 year term limit for Supreme Court Justices? The Justice for life thing has always struck me as pretty dumb.

a right/conservative economic policy with a moderate/left social policy would probably have beaten Obama

Versus the moderate economic policy moderate/left social policy you get from Obama? All you're saying is the Republicans have lost on social policy.

I think the Tea Party / libertarians might provide the creative destruction the Republicans need to throw the religious right out of the party. Lose enough seats and they'll be open to the candidates who wants to legalize pot, penalize carbon, tax the hell out of both and end the income tax.

jack

i know that folks like you exist but even my lefty wife doesn't hold that view

and please do not attack the mrs. i really hate that cr8p

and not that this sways folks but maybe even you will be amused to know that my house has been turned upside down as the wife agreed to be the base of operations for get out the dem vote for our area of wisconsin. she did that in 2004 as well

the wallbanger household is a house divided. but it shall not fall. not after 56 plus years. ha, ha

Monmouth has the national race at 48-48.

shooty

when it was derived folks only lived to 60 or so

shooty

the racetrack is doing election odds now?

The Justice for life thing has always struck me as pretty dumb.

It's not just Supreme Court justices. It's all article III judges.

Of course Christie would practically have to challenge the entire Democratic field to produce Trump-certified birth certificates in order to win over the Tea Party wackos, but if those folks can swallow Romney's past positions on mandates and abortion, who knows what else they might overlook? It really depends on just how much Christie would really want the nomination, and how much he's willing to talk the talk and walk the walk, and that much isn't known at this point. But if he ever does decide he wants to step up to a higher level, he couldn't have a better role model of shameless reinvention than Romney himself.

Christie seems like the perfect test case for telling the far-right to #### off and running as himself without the pandering. I don't think it's a coincidence that both of the recent Republican primaries have resulted in the most moderate of the mainstream candidates getting the nomination so it would be interesting to see what might happen if a strong candidate refused to get drawn to the right. Probably a tougher task in 2016 than it would have been against the clowns that ran in 2012 but I wonder if Christie might refuse to play their game and go for it as just himself.

when it was derived folks only lived to 60 or so

Which is why we should change it now. 20 years is a generation. That's plenty of time for a justice to make a mark and then GTFO.

the racetrack is doing election odds now?

A racetrack would probably do as good a job as anyone, no?

presumably the GOP has at least a few grownups who recognize the need for discipline

Just because they're "grownups" doesn't mean they'll be allowed to drive the car, instead of being locked in the trunk.

It's probably easier at this point for the party's money men to try and create more stupid, uninformed, reactionary voters than to recruit and assemble a coalition of supporters who aren't stupid, uninformed, and reactionary. It's not like the money men really care either way, as long as their bank accounts don't take a hit.

My whole ####### point is that those are not significant digits, they're noise.

I've been railing against false precision of baseball stats for literally decades so I can relate.

I actually had a professional argument on the topic. I got agreement from the scientists that the results were (at best) significant to 2 decimal places, but management insisted on displaying them to 5. Oh well.

Which is why we should change it now. 20 years is a generation. That's plenty of time for a justice to make a mark and then GTFO.

I read a proposal that it would be 18 years, but staggered so every president would nominate 2 SC judges every term. There should be a term limit.

Christie seems like the perfect test case for telling the far-right to #### off and running as himself without the pandering.

Huntsman was already the test case for that, and he didn't make it past New Hampshire.

PPP's final prediction, FWIW

Obama 303 Romney 191 Florida and North Carolina as tossups.

I read a proposal that it would be 18 years, but staggered so every president would nominate 2 SC judges every term. There should be a term limit.

That seems very reasonable.

American Research Group

49-49 national.

Sam Wang has it at 99.9 percent now? No hedging there! Normally I hate the #### out of Princeton #####, but I'll go with it.

In terms of weight, Helmut Kohl is still alive. He is 82 and was very active. He did hit the wall around the age 70. But he was very vigorous despite his weight.

Huntsman was already the test case for that, and he didn't make it past New Hampshire.

Meh. Huntsman was a boring milquetoast nobody. I don't think I could tell him apart from Tim Pawlenty if you put them both in front of me.

Christie does have a lot of charisma. Even I can admit that.

The Justice for life thing has always struck me as pretty dumb.

No one thought about it then. The average life span was less than 40 when the Constitution was adopted. It's almost 80 now. Most of the that is based on better child health, but the average age of the members of the Constitutional Convention was 42 (and that was skewed quite a bit by 81-year old Ben Franklin). I bet you would have been laughed out of Philadelphia if you would have told them that most of the Supreme Court would regularly end up being in its 60s and 70s and would stay on the court for decades.

Huntsman was already the test case for that, and he didn't make it past New Hampshire.

What #2040 said. Even if Christie sounds like an #######, Huntsman sounded like a moron, and Americans prefer the former.


No one thought about it then. The average life span was less than 40 when the Constitution was adopted.

Why do you hate guns, Craig?

I read a proposal that it would be 18 years, but staggered so every president would nominate 2 SC judges every term. There should be a term limit.

That seems very reasonable.

Of course, you run into the confirmation problem - if the Senate can block nominees, then they might have incentive to block a president from appointing anyone for 4 years, in the hopes that their party wins the next election and gets to make additional nominations.

If you time limit it, then what happens - you can't force the senate to approve someone, and you can't force the president to appoint someone he doesn't want just to appease the senate.

Alexander Hamilton, in The Federalist #78:

If, then, the courts of justice are to be considered as the bulwarks of a limited Constitution against legislative encroachments, this consideration will afford a strong argument for the permanent tenure of judicial offices, since nothing will contribute so much as this to that independent spirit in the judges which must be essential to the faithful performance of so arduous a duty.

I doubt that shorter life expectancies of the 18th century were a factor in this thinking. Shorter expectancy does not mean shorter span; half the SC Justices that George Washington appointed lived past 65, two of them into their 80s. Benjamin Franklin was a living reminder to the Constitutional Convention of how old people could get once they'd outlived the usual diseases and the risks of violence in their youth.

and please do not attack the mrs. i really hate that cr8p

and not that this sways folks but maybe even you will be amused to know that my house has been turned upside down as the wife agreed to be the base of operations for get out the dem vote for our area of wisconsin. she did that in 2004 as well

I thoroughly applaud Mrs. Wallbanger's brave efforts towards thwarting the demon Republican machine. May she live forever!

As for 'people like me' recognizing that the typical corporate charter requires them to act with depraved indifference towards human life in the pursuit of maximum profits, I don't see how that's even up for debate.

Christie seems like the perfect test case for telling the far-right to #### off and running as himself without the pandering.

I think he could do it. What that wing of the party wants more than anyone is a daddy figure who yells at them, but also likes to piss off liberals. Christie is perfect for that.

jack

sigh. that's ridiculous. but no need to respond. you won't change your perspective nor will i

No one thought about it then. The average life span was less than 40 when the Constitution was adopted. It's almost 80 now. Most of the that is based on better child health, but the average age of the members of the Constitutional Convention was 42 (and that was skewed quite a bit by 81-year old Ben Franklin). I bet you would have been laughed out of Philadelphia if you would have told them that most of the Supreme Court would regularly end up being in its 60s and 70s and would stay on the court for decades.

Take a look at the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and how long they lived.

http://www.usconstitution.net/declarsigndata.html

Plenty of them lived into their 60's and 70's. By my quick count 16 lived past 75, including Sam and John Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, John Carroll, and Stephen Hopkins among the well known.

Low life expectancy was largely an artifact of something like 50% of children dying before age 5. If you reached 20, you could reasonably expect to make it into your 50's, and a good number reached old age.

Hamilton, in Federalist #78, goes on to say:

it will readily be conceived from the variety of controversies which grow out of the folly and wickedness of mankind, that the records of those precedents must unavoidably swell to a very considerable bulk, and must demand long and laborious study to acquire a competent knowledge of them. Hence it is, that there can be but few men in the society who will have sufficient skill in the laws to qualify them for the stations of judges. [… A] temporary duration in office, which would naturally discourage such characters from quitting a lucrative line of practice to accept a seat on the bench, would have a tendency to throw the administration of justice into hands less able, and less well qualified, to conduct it with utility and dignity.

Hamilton, at least, was thinking that the ideal Justice would have a lot of experience and would continue to serve for a long time.

Harvey - BTW, my position wasn't that corporations take the position of human life over money OH LET THEM DIE IN SCORES. No.

My position was that many corporations take the position of "We have to #### up your water/back/family to make a lot of money, but it's for a good cause" and ignoring whatever consequences exist beyond that until repeatedly hit in the face by the baseball bat of the government. Surely you can't deny this, can you? I mean... look back, and around.

And if it's not clear, this is what I think will happen when they frack into northern New York's exemplary aquifer.

Apparently you missed the decade of the 2000s. McCain was more hawkish than Bush. Before 9/11, during, and after. Maybe McCain doesn't permit waterboarding, but that's the only difference between him and Bush in terms of the WOT.

McCain's hawkishness seemed to be a kind of double-downing strategy to win the party base. Does a McCain who is in office already be so hawkish after 9/11? I doubt McCain would play the game the neocons wanted him or any administration to play.

My hypothesis would rest on the fact that as a real military man, McCain wouldn't have been as likely to be a sock puppet to anyone---especially to a pack of chickenhawk civilians---as Bush was to his neocon veep and Secretary of Defense**, etc. Not because he disagreed with their overall worldview, but because he (hopefully) might have demanded more real intelligence before starting a war than Bush did. I don't think you can necessarily infer how a President McCain might have acted in those circumstances from what Senator McCain said and did in 2002-2003, if for no other reason than that the consequences would have been so much greater. But again, this is all hypothetical.

**Did any of that motley crew ever see a day of military combat in their lives?

Low life expectancy was largely an artifact of something like 50% of children dying before age 5. If you reached 20, you could reasonably expect to make it into your 50's, and a good number reached old age.

Exactly. This is why the relevant measure today for things like Social Security is not "life expectancy", but "life expectancy of those who reach the age of 65".

There are plenty of people there [North Dakota], including my wife's family.

I have nothing against the state, but 683,932 people is not "plenty" for a state. In fact, it's 48th on the list, below Alaska.

Hamilton and other certainly thought of reasons to not limit terms, but the age and health care changes since then weren't considered as a possible reason to limit terms. I'm sure none of the founders would be surprised to have one or two Supreme Court Justices aging well, but I don't think they considered the political playbook of regularly nominating people in their 40s or 50s who could LIKELY be a justice for 30 or 40 years, if they want to be.

Corporations don't go around gratuitously killing people for sport, but to think that they care more about the diffuse victims of their acts more than making the quarterly and yearly numbers is Bat-Ins.(*)

And they only care about the victims of their acts if somebody is watching and it becomes bad PR -- i.e., a threat to the quarterly and yearly numbers.

(*) We've seen this principle at work in situations that were the subject of vigorous discussion on these very boards. Did Graham Spanier and Joe Paterno care more about the victims of Jerry Sandusky, or the Penn State University Football Corporation? And those were quasi-educators operating only a quasi-for-profit enterprise.

Obligatory information on North Dakota from the Onion.

BTW... Here's some election night things to watch for at different closing time...

7 PM Eastern - (GA, IN, KY, SC, VT, VA)

GA's only real interesting result will be the fate of John Barrow (GA-12), a very conservative Dem who got redrawn into a killer district... if he hangs on, it's good news for team D. Ditto KY, where Ben Chandler (KY-6) is terminally endangered. Both states ought to be called relatively early, though - if GA stays on the board for a while before the eventual Romney call - more good news for team blue. IN and VA will give us our first tea leaves for the Senate - if Kaine and Donnelly both win, you can probably put Senate control to bed early. Virginia is the only state that figures to be interesting for President - an Obama win puts Romney in really bad shape and makes Ohio an absolute necessity. Neither VT or SC figure to have much of interest to tell us.

7:30 PM Easter - (NC, OH, and WV)
NC is probably not in play - but definite tea leaves if it stays on the boards as "too close to call", rather than "too early to call". Expect a Dem house delegation slaughter in NC -- the Dems ought to lose 2, maybe even 3 seats -- if they don't, it's shaping up to a very good D night. OH, is, of course - probably the Presidential enchilada... Together with VA, it's entirely possible we'll know the Pres outcome before polls close anywhere west of the Mississippi. OH will probably also bleed a Dem house seat. WV really shouldn't yield any surprises of any kind - both Tomblin and Manchin should win - good news for Team R if Tomblin ends up losing the Gov's mansion.

8 PM Eastern - (AL, CT, DE, FL, IL, ME, MD, MA, MS, MO, NH, NJ, OK, PA, RI, TN, DC)
AL, DE, MD, MS, OK, DC, and RI don't really have much to tell us -- the Dems have an open seat (OK-2) that they'll probably lose, but other than that - all 6 states will probably go as expected up and down the ballot. CT and MA might well put a capstone on the Senate - John Tierney (D) is in a fair bit of trouble in MA-6. The Dems ought to have their best night congressionally in IL - +2 likely, with at outside shot at +4 - thanks to an absolutely brutal Dem redistricting. Given the hometown guy at the top of the ticket, though, not much to be read into that nationally. The Dems could also snag a seat or two in FL. A McCaskill loss in MO, coupled with VA and IN results above, would tell us that the GOP was able to get beyond its Angle/McDonnell problem this cycle and should make Dems very nervous. Interestingly, the Dems have a chance to snag a deep red house seat (though pinkened a bit in redistricting) in TN-4 from a GOPer taped pressuring a mistress to get an abortion, with another mistress just coming forward last week. If PA matters, it's going to be a long night for Team blue... if, however, they end up surprising with some suburban Philly congressional wins -- and Critz (PA-12) survives -- things might be looking up in the House. NJ should mainly be interesting for storm impact purposes - plus, seeing whether Menendez is actually in trouble or not.

8:30 Eastern - (AR)
This is probably another D house loss, but not an unexpected one...

9 PM Eastern - (AZ, CO, KS, LA, MI, MN, NE, NM, NY, SD, TX, WI, WY)
This could be an interesting batch - if team blue is having a good night by this point - watch AZ (Carmona/Flake AZ-SEN open R) and NE (Fischer/Kerrey NE-SEN open D)... CO and WI only matter if none of the earlier swing states -- OH, FL, VA, NC, etc aren't yet called. It's good news for Team Red if we care, good news for Team Blue if we don't, but there's also the Baldwin/Thompson Senate matchup. The Dems also have a couple of CO seats targeted, but would consider themselves fortunate to snag one of them. Better hunting in MI and MN. KS, LA, WY, and SD don't figure to have any surprises. The Dems might be able to snag a seat in TX and also have a few targets in NY. NM has an open D SEN seat, but it looks like it will stay blue.

10 PM Eastern - (IA, MT, NV, UT)
Assuming IA is moot from a Presidential perspective, Dems will be eagerly monitoring MT, where they will likely lose the governors mansion, but still have some hope that Tester can hang on in the Senate and NV, where Berkely ought to lose - but per John Ralson, still has a shot thanks to a good Dem ground game. The Dems also have hopes that Christie Vilsack can pick up a now nearly dead even seat, to offset what looks like a lost cause for Jim Matheson in UT.

11 PM Eastern - (CA, HI, ID, ND, OR, WA)
We could get our Presidential call as soon as polls close - but it likely depends on the pace of vote counting out east. The Dems ought to add a seat or two to the House from CA, but will be most interested in the Heitkamp/Berg race in ND. The GOP got a good candidate in HI in Linda Lingle, but she looks to come up well short. ID, OR, and WA - aside from a possible Inslee loss in WA-GOV.

1 AM Eastern - (AK)
Nothing to see here...

lassus

companies do not ignore consequences. they make calculated decisions based on the data available.

and it's not like there are not market restraints in place either in terms of government oversight, public interest group oversight and the ever present concern of bad press.

for every company that made a bad choice(s) there have been many, many, many companies that have provided goods/services to everyone's betterment that did not negatively impact in a tangible way the ecosystem around them.

i resist generalizing but i find the liberal outlook very negative and depressing. everything is scary. so many bad things lurking around.

just not constructed that way. very foreign to me.

Did anyone else think Krugman's article about Sandy vs. Katrina today was terrible? As a teacher of first year composition, I would have given it a B- (great writing, poor marshalling of evidence and use of sources).

He doesn't actually give any specifics about what was so great about the federal response this time out.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/05/opinion/krugman-sandy-versus-katrina.html?smid=FB-nytimes&WT;.mc_id=OP-E-FB-SM-LIN-SVK-110512-NYT-NA&WT;.mc_ev=click

Hey, GAllup is finally back and predictably shows a big move toward Obama.

O +3 RV
R +1 LV

Christie seems like the perfect test case for telling the far-right to #### off and running as himself without the pandering.

I think he could do it. What that wing of the party wants more than anyone is a daddy figure who yells at them, but also likes to piss off liberals. Christie is perfect for that.

If anyone can do it, Christie can. He's also a very effective 'sound-bite' politician. His ability to attack those debbil-libs might well make up for his disinclination to adopt a 'no-exceptions' abortion position. A lot depends on how a Romney loss gets spun. If the party decides it wasn't conservative enough (hard to imagine, but that was hard to imagine after 2008) that makes a Christie run that much harder.

I would have loved to see some trenchant criticisms of the Dems such that they had to change positions rather than the wild nonsense about Barack X. Another lost opportunity.

i resist generalizing but i find the liberal outlook very negative and depressing. everything is scary. so many bad things lurking around.

Everything is not scary. ####### up my drinking - and (NY's) dairy-farming - water is scary enough not to take lightly, however, yes.

If you time limit it, then what happens - you can't force the senate to approve someone, and you can't force the president to appoint someone he doesn't want just to appease the senate.

The proposals to limit terms to 18 years (as Swoboda mentioned) usually require a vote within X months or the nominee is automatically confirmed. That eliminates gamesmanship.

I'm not really talking about moving hard to the left or at the top of the ticket. I think Romney isn't a bad nominee and fits right in with the old R party. I'm talking about the morons who keep winning primaries and then running awful general campaigns. It's cost the Rs the Senate twice in a row (maybe, anyway) and I'd think the adults in the room - no matter how far to the right - would want to fix that.

This is similar to the people who are saying that if Nate is right, he's a genius, and if he's wrong, it's someone else's fault. But in this case, you're assigning only blame rather than credit. The Tea Party has had a few implosions, but it's been a huge net positive on Republican and conservative politics. There's no way the Beltway GOP would have orchestrated the major GOP gains in 2010 without the Tea Party.

***

Donnelly has run a pretty much pitch perfect Indiana campaign, while Mourdock - even before his debate blunder - had not.

Quick reminder: Donnelly co-sponsored the same "forcible rape" bill as some of these Republicans whom Zonk describes as misogynist mouth-breathers. But that doesn't seem to bother him (or the other Dems) very much, if at all.

***

With the exception of his position on the new healthcare bills, Harveys' 1947 is essentially Obama's 2nd term agenda. Except Obama wouldn't dare to regulate guns.

Someone alert the Secret Service; it appears Shipman hacked into Obama's Blackberry.

If #1947 is Obama's second-term agenda, he's done a fine job of hiding it. For the past six months, Obama's second-term agenda has been, "Mitt Romney is really, really scary! And also, Mitt Romney is really, really scary!"

companies do not ignore consequences. they make calculated decisions based on the data available.

A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

I have nothing against the state, but 683,932 people is not "plenty" for a state. In fact, it's 48th on the list, below Alaska.

What happens in ND does not necessarily stay in ND. It's like saying there's no problem with the Keystone pipeline because there's not a ton of people in those parts of Nebraska, and hey, who cares if the thing completely ruins the Ogallala Aquifer!

i resist generalizing but i find the liberal outlook very negative and depressing. everything is scary. so many bad things lurking around.

Then you either misunderstand the liberal outlook, or take the very leftmost elements on the spectrum as representative. They're not. It's no more reasonable than if I claimed that Mourdock spoke for the vast majority of Republicans.

The centrist liberal outlook, based in the lessons of history, is that unfettered business does enormous harm. It recognizes that significant restraints must be put on business in order to prevent that harm. That's not regulation for regulations sake though. It's a recognition of human nature. When you remove accountability, people do terrible, reckless things. Good regulations address real and significant problems. Those are the regulations I tend to readily support. I do think classic liberals had a better sense of the harm unfettered government is capable of. Contemporary liberals seem to have eliminated that issue from the debate. There doesn't seem to be any active weighing of the consequences of adding this or that regulation in the sense of how increasing government power negatively affect us, and that's something that really should change.

Liberalism, at its best, involves an active effort to balance rights and find the best accommodations between the public and the private. It has a real utilitarian bent, imo, once the fundamental principles are observed.

edit: it's certainly possible my view is colored by my experience. Of the dozen businesses with which I've been involved, the code was never, ever 'what's right?', it was 'what can we get away with?', and, 'how can this come back and bite us in the ass?'

edit2: full disclosure--I did know a carpenter for a construction firm who refused to play with the spacing of corner and closet studs in order to cheat a few bucks out of the client. He looked at the foreman and simply said, 'that's not what they paid for.'

The proposals to limit terms to 18 years (as Swoboda mentioned) usually require a vote within X months or the nominee is automatically confirmed. That eliminates gamesmanship.

There are plenty of arguments against life tenure, but I tend to think putting a limit like this on terms is a bad one. Maybe a mandatory retirement age. But I'd rather not have someone on the bench with three or four years remaining suddenly start to think about what he needs to decide strategically to set him or herself up financially for the post SCOTUS portion of their life.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.

But that doesn't seem to bother him (or the other Dems) very much, if at all.

Another typical lie from Joek. It bothers lots of Democrats. Joe Manchin bothers lots of Democrats. I didn't donate to Tester this year because of his stance on the Dream Act, but I still want him to win. See, Democrats don't require ideological purity. We'll support the lesser of two evils if that's what it comes to. Doesn't mean we agree with every position that politician takes.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.

Why are ignoring the difference between "out to kill" and "out to make an obscene amount of money, and if some people have to die in the process, them's the breaks"?

Polls after the election showed that in 1992, Perot's supporters would have gone 38% R, 38% D, 24% not voted.

The Dems already held 267 seats in the House heading into the 1992 election, and Clinton received well under 50 percent of the popular vote. How does this refute my claim that a winning candidate from the minority party should be expected to make big House gains?

In 1992, the Dems were defending 267 House seats and their candidate received 43 percent of the popular vote. In 2012, the Dems hold just 191 seats, their candidate is projected to win over 50 percent of the vote, and a lot of House seats are held by Republicans not only in D-leaning districts, but in newly redistricted D-leaning districts. If the Dems gain only five seats — or even lose seats, as yesterday's Politico article suggested — the Dems will have substantially underperformed. There will have been a reverse-coattail effect, which won't say much for Obama's popularity, especially after the historic 2010 losses.

The problem is that there's no way to grade Nate

Of course there is. You grade him pretty much the same you grade Zips. Look at the standard error of his 50 state projections in the presidential race. (You can do the same for all of his other projections, but I think the presidential race is what his rep hangs on)

thanks to patent law and sarbanes oxley the unfettered business environment that should exist does not

note i am not criticizing environmental policy.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.

Already answered. "Out to kill" is not what I wrote. I wrote that the negative consequences are hedged against the money made. The greater the money, the greater the hedge. There's a LOT of money to be be made in fracking, and the hedge is going to be enormous.

If you think those previous three sentences are untrue, I obviously can't convince you either.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.

Tobacco industry?

Did anyone else think Krugman's article about Sandy vs. Katrina today was terrible?

Yes. What was the question?

Krugman is a partisan hack, but at least when he talks about economics he's talking about his field. When he talks about politics he's like Linus Pauling pushing Vitamin C.

companies do not ignore consequences. they make calculated decisions based on the data available.

and it's not like there are not market restraints in place either in terms of government oversight, public interest group oversight and the ever present concern of bad press.

for every company that made a bad choice(s) there have been many, many, many companies that have provided goods/services to everyone's betterment that did not negatively impact in a tangible way the ecosystem around them.

i resist generalizing but i find the liberal outlook very negative and depressing. everything is scary. so many bad things lurking around.

Since you're not against all regulation, this doesn't really apply to you, but I doubt if too many of us here other than You Know Nieporent would want to go back to the days of totally unregulated consumer products and unregulated workplaces. Those products and conditions weren't exactly sorting themselves out on their own before the government stepped in.

The only real question is to define the line between negligence and nannyism. I doubt if we're ever going to come to any agreement on that, but as long as there are businesses out there that act as if workers and consumers are nothing more than replaceable numbers on a spreadsheet, and short term profit the only legitimate goal, then the vast majority of honest businesses are going to be paying some of the collateral price. The way to avoid nannyism is for businesses and corporations to do a better job of policing themselves.

What happens in ND does not necessarily stay in ND. It's like saying there's no problem with the Keystone pipeline because there's not a ton of people in those parts of Nebraska, and hey, who cares if the thing completely ruins the Ogallala Aquifer!

Exactly. Most aquifers don't obey state lines, nor do rivers. As noted, Williston is located right on Lake Sakawea and the Little Missouri River runs through much of the oil fields. I am not against fraking (I think the payoff makes the risk worth it) but to say it will just effect those in North Dakota does not make sense.

shredder

you are just begging for a fight.

and i am not going climb into the ring because this thread has been doing just fine and our perspectives are so divergent there is nothing gained via exchange.

and for the record i have plenty of blood on my hands between my years in the service and then raising and taking livestock to slaughter. and the use of pesticides and herbicides that killed insects. birds. small animals.

so feel free like my one granddaughter branding me 'murderer'

live it up

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.

Tobacco industry?

Perish the thought.

lassus

i am referencing other more inflammatory posts

i have worked in and around govt regulation for years. there needs to be a balance

Krugman is a partisan hack, but at least when he talks about economics he's talking about his field. When he talks about politics he's like Linus Pauling pushing Vitamin C.

Partisan? Yes, very. Hack? I have a hard time swallowing that one. Krugman's an intellectual leader on the left, and he's been very shrill in denouncing what he views as poor policy from this White House.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer should only be partisan hacks like Paul Krugman.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion

I think bad perceptions come more from when non-customers get harmed. Those non-customers often includes people who live near factories or other areas where work is occurring.

so feel free like my one granddaughter branding me 'murderer'

I don't think that shredder was being as combative as you're making him out to be. Your statement was a misrepresentation of the argument. In a competitive marketplace, many corporations don't have the luxury of acting ethically, hence the need to impose ethical considerations on industries as a whole in order to ensure a minimum standard, and penalize those who fail to meet it. It's not individual 'evil' bad actors that are the problem.

Corporations as entities are amoral. Not immoral, not evil. They are run by flawed people trying to make money, with all the pluses and minuses that implies.

Liberals acknowledge this by wanting government to put in regulations. Conservatives acknowledge this by asserting the free market (and other societal and economic forces) will take care of it. Libertarians don't see the problem in this, because that is how they think people act (or should act) also.

What happens in ND does not necessarily stay in ND. It's like saying there's no problem with the Keystone pipeline because there's not a ton of people in those parts of Nebraska, and hey, who cares if the thing completely ruins the Ogallala Aquifer!

I live in the country and routinely get a chuckle at people who conserve water in systems that are effectively closed and there's no water shortage, ever, but I agree with the above. There's a lot more at stake than the water of a few people in an isolated area.

Btw, it's a lot more than water pollution. Silicosis is a problem. There are others:

Since 2008 the dangers of fracking have only become more apparent. Last year, the Environmental Protection Agency for the first time linked the practice directly to groundwater pollution at a site in Wyoming where energy companies had fracked as shallowly as 1,200 feet down (water wells in the area are nearly as deep). Earlier that year, public health researchers in Colorado found that a drilling project planned in a Rocky Mountain town would likely harm residents’ health, with air pollution from fracking operations a chief concern. Intensive drilling and fracking have pushed smog levels in some rural western valleys beyond those in Los Angeles. Drilling has spoiled water wells across the country, though it’s often unclear whether fracking itself, just one part of the drilling process, is to blame. All this has led New York down the arduous road of trying to develop regulations to prevent it from happening there.

Granted it's from that commie rag, The Nation, but still...

In 1992, the Dems were defending 267 House seats and their candidate received 43 percent of the popular vote. In 2012, the Dems hold just 191 seats, their candidate is projected to win over 50 percent of the vote

If we're talking about popular vote and House seats isn't there a different base line between 1992 and 2012?

It seems pretty clear that both Obama and Romney are going to get higher percentages of the popular vote than both Clinton and Bush in 1992. Clinton's share of the popular vote as a whole isn't really relevant in a discussion of congressional seats is it? Clinton gets 43% of the vote and Bush gets 38%, but they're getting 100% of the seats.

Apologies if I've misunderstood something. As always I'm at best an ill-informed observer here, I just feel like I'm missing something.

Krugman is a partisan hack, but at least when he talks about economics he's talking about his field. When he talks about politics he's like Linus Pauling pushing Vitamin C.

Partisan? Yes, very. Hack? I have a hard time swallowing that one. Krugman's an intellectual leader on the left, and he's been very shrill in denouncing what he views as poor policy from this White House.

There's one thing above all about Krugman that arouses the right wing into the furies: He's onto their game, and he doesn't mince words. Their reaction to him is no different than their reaction to any well known person who calls out their voodoo economics BS for what it is. Why, the nerve of him---he doesn't treat St. Ryan's proposals as serious!

lassus
i am referencing other more inflammatory posts
i have worked in and around govt regulation for years. there needs to be a balance

Understood, Harvey. I just don't think the balance you think exists actually does, at all. And if it does, it comes too late for the people on the business end of the damage. "Well, we'll just have to see" isn't good enough when it comes to something like water.

I don't think companies are out to immediately kill their customers. If a fast-food place loses a few diners to food poisoning, they will rethink their kitchen practices pretty quickly. (It happens from time to time; I won't name the rethinkers, since they mostly have cleaned up their acts.)

As several have noted, the problem is more about long-term issues. Even when long-term problems are known or foreseeable, the profit incentive can override safety concerns. The classic example is leaded gasoline. Standard Oil spokesmen would literally wash their hands in the stuff to show how safe it was. And it won't kill you in such a transient exposure: most of us older than a certain age spilled leaded gas on themselves often enough, helping fuel Grandpa's BITGOD vehicles. The problem is how to get anyone – corporations, governments, consumers – thinking beyond the transient.

EDIT: warning, more commie-rag stuff behind that link :)

lassus

i am all for trying something and finding out versus not trying at all

that's been a basic life philosphy. tempered by common sense

not trying is very strange to me

and as a farmer and businessman i have worked with a slew of state and federal regulation

the notion that the public or your ecosystem is defenseless is loony

i am all for trying something and finding out versus not trying at all

You're speaking in the general-- very specific to fracking, the dangers have been undersold and under-represented by those who stand to benefit from it. Which is precisely what we'd expect them to do, and precisely why we need to do independent research on the potential long-term consequences of the practice, then base regulations on that carefully-considered research.

and as a farmer and businessman i have worked with a slew of state and federal regulation
the notion that the public or your ecosystem is defenseless is loony

Harveys, due respect, I don't care how successful you've been as a farmer and businessman, I seriously doubt you have anything close to the money involved that the fracking people do. That money writes the legislation and influence on those regulations.

i am far more suspicious of financial instruments than i am fracking

there needs to be a balance

There does indeed.

Partisan? Yes, very. Hack? I have a hard time swallowing that one. Krugman's an intellectual leader on the left, and he's been very shrill in denouncing what he views as poor policy from this White House.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer should only be partisan hacks like Paul Krugman.

Well said. Krugman is certainly on the left, but has been very vocal in criticizing the administration. You can carry on all you want about his conclusions, but he works from facts. If he thought the facts supported a reduced tax rate for the wealthy being good for the middle class, he'd say so. Krauthammer, on the other hand, simply works from a parallel reality.

if folks are convinced that companies are out to kill their customers there is nothing i can write that will dissuade folks of that notion.


Tobacco industry?

Hey! That was only thousands of execs over decades in pursuit of trillions of dollars with only a small handful of whistleblowers. If that's the best you can come up with... 443,000 deaths a year, and they played games to make cigarettes more addictive. If that's not institutionalized depraved indifference, the term has no meaning.

The problem is that there's no way to grade Nate


Of course there is. You grade him pretty much the same you grade Zips. Look at the standard error of his 50 state projections in the presidential race. (You can do the same for all of his other projections, but I think the presidential race is what his rep hangs on)

I'd also grade Nate against other pollsters and aggregators. If he's adjusting the data incorrectly, that's obviously a huge flaw in his work, and it should show up when compared with the predictions of other outfits who are making different adjustments. He's not just averaging polls, or weighting them according to reliability, and dividing. If he gets a lot of things right, but is still off by more than, say, PPP, or Princeton, that's a problem with his methods.

If Romney wins I'll be very interested in where he (and others) went wrong. He's not declaring Obama a certainty, of course, but if Romney wins the EC we can be sure Nate's model missed something very, very big. What it missed is the question. I wonder if he has a sense already of, 'if I miss, it'll be because I undercounted x, or overcounted y...' Very probably so. He should well know where the soft spots are in the data he's working. I imagine he's nervous about his cell phone user adjustments, and obviously turnout and its suppression are tough calls.

lassus

wasn't making that claim. just that i am very aware of the actual impact of regulation in a real and tangible way

man, you guys read all kinds of stuff into posts. i am getting worn out explaining the same thing 4 different ways.

there have been govt warnings on cigarettes since the mid 60's. i made a lot of money invested in tobacco companies

i have no issue with tobacco companies

####### up my drinking

Fully agreed that anything that ##### up my drinking is terrifying.