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[mainiac]

Maybe he just meant the "popular vote doesn't actually matter" angle.  But he probably meant the Nader one, yeah.

No I mean the "everyone and their dog said there was no difference between the candidates before hand then grew amnesia about what they said afterwards" angle.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions.  But if you have an opinion and then the perfect test of your opinion comes along and you are proven to be completely wrong but you dont change your beliefs in the least then at the very least you should be open game for mockery.

[RedKing]

Granted, the candidates in that time and space were part of the reason people felt that way.

2000 Al Gore wasn't the bearded eco-crusader of today.
2000 George Bush wasn't the incompetent chucklehead we all came to know. He was the "compassionate conservative".

Both were perceived, with some validity, as pro-business centrists. The core difference was in the crowd they brought in (or would have brought in) with them. In retrospect, Bush himself wasn't a monster -- he was just surrounded by them.

EDIT: And I don't see how you can call it the perfect test, unless you have a pocket universe somewhere where Gore won, 9/11 still happened, and the American response was utterly different. From my observation, Democrats tend to be so gun-shy about being called weak on defense that they wind up being even more likely to enter a conflict to prove their critics wrong. Gore could very well have started bombing Afghanistan on 9/12. Now, I will say that I don't see us going into Iraq under Gore, but that goes back to the people around Bush rather than Bush himself.

[mainiac]

Granted, the candidates in that time and space were part of the reason people felt that way.

...which is my point...  Candidates dont present themselves as radicals but they get into the business for a reason.  If they win office they do what they can.  And then like clockwork they leave office and people say "wow, suddenly politician X has principles, I wish they had those in office!"  The difference is the constraints of the office.  Al Gore was one of the most diehard environmentalists at the upper levels of the US government.  He was trying to fight global warming even when he was vice president.  It's just that Al Gore, private citizen, fights for the cause a different way then Al Gore, VP.  Bush the GM of the Texas Rangers or governor of Texas couldn't use the bully pulpit to fabricate a case for war.  Bush the president had that ability.

A really good but esoteric example right now is with Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Janet Yellen.  Janet Yellen was seen as the firebreathing radical choice versus Larry Summers for who was going to drag the Fed to the left after Ben Bernanke.  But since Janet Yellen became chairwoman of the Fed not only has Larry Summers started getting seen as a left wing critic of Janet, but Ben Bernanke has been publicly dissing people on the right in a way that Janet Yellen never has.  It's not that leaving office for a year caused Ben Bernanke to shift all the way to the left of Janet Yellen, it's that the day he left office he was a man freed from decades of censorship to say whatever the hell he wants.  A year after Janet Yellen leaves office she will be saying things well to the left of what Ben says now.

Then we get this shit where people say that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are exactly the same and Bernie Sanders offers the only real choice.  Bullshit.  Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are almost exactly the same the only difference is that Bernie brands himself to a small, liberal constituency while Clinton brands herself nationally.  It's actually pretty damn ironic, people insist that two radically different candidates (Clinton+Bush) are the same while two barely different ones are radically different!

[Aqizzar]

Then we get this shit where people say that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are exactly the same and Bernie Sanders offers the only real choice.  Bullshit.  Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are almost exactly the same the only difference is that Bernie brands himself to a small, liberal constituency while Clinton brands herself nationally.  It's actually pretty damn ironic, people insist that two radically different candidates (Clinton+Bush) are the same while two barely different ones are radically different!

I wouldn't say Clinton and Sanders are closely matched, but I agree they're a lot closer together than Clinton and Bush are, and that Hillary is just smart enough not to say so because Sanders is kind of polarizing.  Everything else about Bernanke and Yellen I'm right with you on, nothing frees up a person's ability to speak their mind like not having to work with people who don't agree with them.

I keep complaining about a Clinton vs Bush election just because I'm sick of seeing the same people orbiting around election after election.  The idea of being able to reuse campaign graphics from 1992 does not speak well of America's ability to produce popular leaders.

[nenjin]

Scalia and the other opposing conservatives of the court are none too happy with today's ruling.

[smjjames]

Chris Christie is announcing his candidacy on Tuesday.

[RedKing]

Scalia and the other opposing conservatives of the court are none too happy with today's ruling.

Every time Antonin Scalia scowls, a baby angel gets its wings.


In other news, Univision (the leading Spanish-language cable channel in the US, and owned by NBCUniversal) has severed all business connections with Donald Trump and dropped the Miss USA pageant from its programming schedule. Trump has said he intends to sue for breach of contract. No word yet on whether Telemundo (the #2 Spanish-language cable channel, *also* owned by NBCUniversal) will follow suit.

If Hispanics turn out in large numbers to vote for Hillary, you can expect some future pundits to point back to this moment and blame The Donald for losing Republicans the Hispanic vote (despite there being a thousand other incidents over the last 30 years or so that also contribute to that).

[mainiac]

I wouldn't say Clinton and Sanders are closely matched

Well there are the privacy/war on terror issues where mainstream democrats for the past 7 years have been acting like Edgar Hoover's ghost has their children hostage.

[Lord Shonus]

In other, possibly even more important SCOTUS news, the court ruled 5-4 that housing policies can be found discriminatory regardless of any intent to discriminate, exponentially decreasing the difficulty of fighting against such things.

EDIT: Is there a site that outlines every current candidate's policy proposals? I'm trying to dig through some of them, but there's no website standardization, and the rhetoric is a bit excessive.

[Frumple]

Then we get this shit where people say that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are exactly the same and Bernie Sanders offers the only real choice.  Bullshit.

Just to clarify, if that's what you read out of what I posted a bit earlier, you got me entirely wrong. Point I was making was that jeb doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning a campaign against hillary, and so you could vote whoever without risking Mr. Fucked-Florida-Sideways becoming POTUS. Definitely don't think hillary and jeb run terribly similar platforms, at least in the particulars.

[smjjames]

EDIT: Is there a site that outlines every current candidate's policy proposals? I'm trying to dig through some of them, but there's no website standardization, and the rhetoric is a bit excessive.

The big ones probably won't have a definitive list until things get underway in September. The huge number of candidates doesn't help either.

Whats one of those political analyst site things that compare them and their policies? I can't remember the name right now. It's not politico, at least I'm pretty sure that's not what I'm thinking of.

[FearfulJesuit]

Scalia and the other opposing conservatives of the court are none too happy with today's ruling.

What's strange- and really damning for Scalia here- is that Roberts and the Court's liberals are basically arguing from an orginalist position- the ambiguity in the clause in question is irrelevant, because the rest of the law makes it very clear what the original intent of its writers was, and it wasn't to give states more power over exchanges (the New Yorker has a good rundown). I'd actually probably subscribe to a generally original-intent point of view if I were in the legal profession, but Scalia makes an inconsistent mockery of the philosophy.

[SalmonGod]

Granted, the candidates in that time and space were part of the reason people felt that way.

...which is my point...  Candidates dont present themselves as radicals but they get into the business for a reason.  If they win office they do what they can.  And then like clockwork they leave office and people say "wow, suddenly politician X has principles, I wish they had those in office!"  The difference is the constraints of the office.  Al Gore was one of the most diehard environmentalists at the upper levels of the US government.  He was trying to fight global warming even when he was vice president.  It's just that Al Gore, private citizen, fights for the cause a different way then Al Gore, VP.  Bush the GM of the Texas Rangers or governor of Texas couldn't use the bully pulpit to fabricate a case for war.  Bush the president had that ability.

A really good but esoteric example right now is with Ben Bernanke, Larry Summers and Janet Yellen.  Janet Yellen was seen as the firebreathing radical choice versus Larry Summers for who was going to drag the Fed to the left after Ben Bernanke.  But since Janet Yellen became chairwoman of the Fed not only has Larry Summers started getting seen as a left wing critic of Janet, but Ben Bernanke has been publicly dissing people on the right in a way that Janet Yellen never has.  It's not that leaving office for a year caused Ben Bernanke to shift all the way to the left of Janet Yellen, it's that the day he left office he was a man freed from decades of censorship to say whatever the hell he wants.  A year after Janet Yellen leaves office she will be saying things well to the left of what Ben says now.

Then we get this shit where people say that Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush are exactly the same and Bernie Sanders offers the only real choice.  Bullshit.  Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are almost exactly the same the only difference is that Bernie brands himself to a small, liberal constituency while Clinton brands herself nationally.  It's actually pretty damn ironic, people insist that two radically different candidates (Clinton+Bush) are the same while two barely different ones are radically different!

But what do you really expect?  It's a shitload of work to stay so up to date on politics that you know all the players well enough to describe the type of person that they are outside of how they present themselves in an official capacity, like you just did.  This is one of the fundamental issues I see with voting, and pressuring people to vote on everything.  They're going to respond by looking at how the candidates present their campaign, and conclude that they're wasting their time.  And if they can't or won't take the time to dig any deeper than that, then in my opinion they really are wasting their time.

As for Sanders vs Hillary... looking again through their respective records on ontheissues.org as a quick reference to check your claim, and it does look to me like Hillary has been slowly moving into alignment with me on most things over the last 20 years.  But like Sanders is still tougher on all my highest priority issues and always has been.  As examples:  Hillary admits that the war in Iraq was a mistake.  Sanders recognized it from the beginning.  Hillary's changed her mind somewhat over time on other war on terror issues (surveillance and such).  Sanders has been on my side of those issues from the beginning.  It's also not only his rhetoric that's tougher on business and wealth inequality, but his voting record also.  There's definitely more to this than branding.  Even if I accept the claim that they're two very similar candidates right now, comparison of history proves Sanders to be more trustworthy to me.  If something like 9/11 happens again that sweeps the nation up into an emotional frenzy that has 95% of the political world agreeing on some horrifically stupid course of action, I have every reason to believe that Sanders will be more likely to oppose the stupidity than Hillary will, because that's exactly what happened in the past.

[Jervill]

In other, possibly even more important SCOTUS news, the court ruled 5-4 that housing policies can be found discriminatory regardless of any intent to discriminate, exponentially decreasing the difficulty of fighting against such things.

Hopefully that makes it easier to tone down with the de facto segregation many areas face. (St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, for example)

[misko27]

Scalia and the other opposing conservatives of the court are none too happy with today's ruling.

Pure applesauce.