Looks like some of the shit made it through the strainer. Per the attached article:
$25M for the Kennedy Center for the Arts (down from $35M in the original house bill)
$75M each for the national endowment for the arts and national endowment for humanities [down from the original ask of $300M (!) each]
$175M in a $2T bill (0.009%) is not worth vetoing it but is irritating none the less.
Throw in the WSJ and it’s pretty balanced. Still a slight liberal bias though. Good conservative rags are hard to come by these days. You can scan the Washington Times, but they don’t have much to work with. I like the WSJ mostly for financial news, but it’s expensive. If there’s another decent conservative paper I’d like to look at it.
The idea of a true democracy is a farce. This country was designed as a constitutional republic. Dumb people make dumb choices. People are not equal; some have bigger muscles, prettier faces, or bigger brains.
How is it a farce?
All of your other sentences are all true statements, but I don’t believe I understand what your central message is. Could you maybe flesh this out some more?
This country was designed as a constitutional republic: Afloat.
Dumb people make dumb choices: Afloat.
People are not equal; some have bigger muscles, prettier faces, or bigger brains; Ran aground.
You need to parse the meaning of “people” here. All persons are deemed to be equal before the law. While this desire is imperfectly administered, it doesn’t change the fact that it should be the goal.
Do you have a link?
If the purpose of the propaganda is to make people cynical and to conclude that both parties are equally dishonest how does that make the so-called independents the more savvy group?
Interesting read. Seems flawed in that it assumes there are only 3 boxes to put people in. Seems to me like there should be a scale of 1 to 10 for instance. Even then, what about people who hold beliefs that are considered both left and right. For example, very pro gun but also doesn’t think it’s the govt.'s job to tell people who they can marry. Would those views ‘cancel’ each other out and make somebody a 5 on the scale?
Found this political quiz that will categorize you into one of 9 categories at the end:
Wish it had more and more nuanced questions.
The categories were people who identify as independent or those who affiliate with a party. These are the same categories used in the post I was responding to.
Right…that makes 3 choices (or boxes as I called them) to choose from. I think that oversimplifies the reality and guarantees a lot of the nuance that the article points out in its ‘6 Facts About Independents’.
Rather than asking people ‘what are you?’, it would be better to pose a series of questions and then assign them a category based on what they answer. People may find that they only think that are an independent when in fact they are some shade of blue or red (which perhaps is the the point the article is trying to make).
I thought “Independent” meant unaffiliated with either party, without reference to individual political stances.
The three choice model is useful in this regard however. If the categories are “I’m going to vote Republican”, “I’m going to vote Democrat”, and “I’m not sure who I will vote for”. At that point, that middle group and all the nuances becomes very important for both sides.
Sure it does. But in order to glean data and understand how these persons will vote, they were asked a variety of questions to see what their stance on those issues is. At that point, the data gathers can draw some conclusions of whether those persons will vote left or right irregardless of which box they check on their affiliation.
Those people are the card carrying Libertarians. Freedom from government in every respect.
A few years back I stop answering “survey” questions altogether. I felt the questions were sometimes being phrased to solicit a preferred response or encourage me to think in a certain manner. Also I got tired of “this will just take a few minutes” and 30 minutes on they are still going through their list.
Seems about right to me. The independent group is a great big giant “tent” with widely divergent political philosophies.
That’s correct. This survey had nothing to do with voting in any particular election. It only concerned itself with the characteristics of the people self-identifying as “independent”.
Similarly, many people that self-identify as “conservative”, are fiscally conservative but fairly liberal on social issues.
@Hawespiper I know what you are looking for. That data is widely available, and right now…you’re not going to like it.
A group of people
who in the end have two viable options in most elections…democrat or republican.
Is this from the same data takers who said the 2016 Presidential election was “sure” to go a certain way?
and what the hell does this mean?
Don’t kill the messenger. The pollsters had it right as far as the national numbers went.
Where the pollsters went wrong, was that there was not enough attention paid at the individual state level. That’s how the electoral anomaly occurred. The pollsters will be a lot more sensitive to that issue going forward.
social issues – I fixed it (stupid phone)
Of course. The point is, however, is that it’s not a monolithic group all voting the same way. You can identify trends within a group, but some will vote one way and some the other way.
