Lurker > red sox 777

LOL MWC literally accusing someone else of bias

MWC always accuses just about everyone else of bias, so that's not surprising!

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So I just clicked through "The Life of Julia." I noticed that after plenty of events earlier, there were no listings between age 42, when Julia starts a small business, and age 65. I suppose the implication to draw here is that Julia's life as a business owner would be better under Romney!

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It's a position shared by MWC with most of Boston and New York. At least with regards to baseball.

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Yes, but if you believe there is no value in anything other than championships, then the MVP should not be a regular season award!

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Ah, but win shares deals with the number of regular season wins, not championships. Not that we could actually have any kind of decent measurement for championship win shares because the sample size is way too small, but in theory...!

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Hmm.....Value = contribution to probability of winning championship for team compared with having a random replacement player instead

Most Valuable Player = the player in the league with the greatest value

If we use these definitions, it seems stupid for the MVP to be based only on the regular season.

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Nationalistic arguments? Which nationalistic arguments have I presented?

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That's possible, no one really knows why stocks move. But stocks in the same industry usually do move in lockstep with each other in the short run- the exceptions (such as Blockbuster and Netflix) are rare.

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Also, Wells Fargo would be more cool if they actually moved their headquarters to Fargo, North Dakota.

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I was referring to the 6% drop in Nintendo today following this Sony news, not its general malaise- which doesn't have much to do with Sony, yeah.

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I'd say there's also a nonnegligible group of people who support gay marriage (as in they want it to be available on an abstract level, or would prefer to live in a society that allowed it- perhaps because they are gay themselves) but feel they are obligated not to vote for it because the act of voting for it would be sinful.

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Darn you Sony, why did you have to drag Nintendo stock down with you? Of course I suppose Nintendo will bounce back when the market realizes that Sony and Nintendo aren't linked at the hip, but at least in the short run......!

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You're missing the real central theme to the Conservative movement for the past 12 years. "Motivate the crazy evangelicals by playing to whatever Biblical lunacy will get them to crawl out from under their rock and vote". Karl Rove figured this out, and for the most part, it's worked. However, the plan hits a really big snag when you start trying to play to two kinds of crazy evangelical at once

This is covered under "the ends justify the means." Combine this with the principle that inaction can never be affirmatively bad, and you get a framework of thought that allows a great deal of doublethink. Against Obama, Romney's Mormonism will be a non-issue.

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Before you do that, you should consider that the People's Bank of China has done more money creation/quantitative easing than any other central bank in the world since 2006. China actually has major inflation right now. Because the Chinese economy is very bubble-like, so the government has its hands full trying to keep it inflated.

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Listen. This is all meaningless. There is no way a non-Christian will ever be president, and, despite Republicans assuring us otherwise, Obama is very very much a standard Christian and Mitt is a Mormon.

You're missing the two central themes of the American conservative movement for the past 30 years. They are:

1. Inaction is never equal to action.
2. The ends justify the means.

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OK, if you're allowed to call liberals Communist, am I allowed to call conservatives Fascist? Because it's an equally implausible and silly jump in logic.

Also, if people actually read the bible, and got the message, I'd be happy to follow the basic morality of it for my life. As in, I'd be happy to treat others as I wish to be treated, to help the poor, sick, hungry and homeless, and to love my enemies as my neighbors. Those are all pretty awesome things to live by.

The only good (in terms of morality) part of the bible is the Gospels. The Old Testament is a bunch of old stories of varying accuracy that apply to living in a time vastly, vastly different from the one we live in now, and Paul was a big ol' jerk, and Revelation is The Old Testament without any judgment calls, morality-wise.

Considering people were insulting Christians and the Bible quite openly here, I see nothing wrong with jokingly calling them Communists. And the Soviet Union imposed atheism on its citizens, which is the central connection. Conservatism needn't even have anything to do with it.

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That's a huge loss. That's a third of what the company is worth on the stock exchange right now. I hope there were a lot of one-time losses in there, because otherwise, that would suggest they were on the verge of bankruptcy.

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You may be right, but I will say that presidential elections draw out voters like nothing else. More people voted across the South in the 1860 Presidential election (when Lincoln, whom they wanted to vote against at all costs, wasn't even on the ballot in their state) than in the secession referendums that followed that decided whether their state would leave the union, and which were highly debated.

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The Supreme Court didn't mean that the right is never subject to any limitations, however. In general, none of the rights have been held to be subject to zero limitations. I mean, it'd be one thing if they said that Illinois cannot have any regulations on guns whatsoever because its government leaders are all crooks, but we won't decide for Indiana until someone brings a case against the state in the courts. Here, they're being consistent across the states, the ruling just doesn't go as far as you were hoping for, I guess.

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Hmm, no president has had any sons since the elder Bush.

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That looks right.

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And yet, the decision they made essentially implies that they will, they're just going to make EVERY single jurisdiction take it to court first for some incredibly stupid reason.

Looked at the history, and it seems the DC case applied to all federal territories. The Court then applied it to all the states 2 years later when overturning Chicago's gun law. Neither case abolishes all gun regulations anywhere however.

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Doesn't really work that way though. When they overturned the DC gun ban, they didn't overturn every single firearms regulation in the country, which is what it SHOULD have done.

Because they didn't decide to overturn every firearms regulation in the country. And they won't overturn all the post-1937 Commerce Clause cases, because while the Court actually gives it some teeth now, it is nowhere near as conservative as the 1930s court. But if it did (say, if the 4 liberal judges retired during President Romney's administration and he replaced them with copies of Clarence Thomas), it'd be interesting to see the chaos that would unfold.

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Also, the reason it has lasted 2000 years is because it is both true and effective. By contrast your liberals' Communist wonderland the Soviet Union only lasted 74 years.

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We broke free of the clutches of the Catholic Church hundreds of years ago.

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I kind of wonder what would happen if the Supreme Court said for their healthcare ruling: "All our Commerce Clause jurisprudence since 1937 was wrong. Half of the statutes Congress has passed since then are all unconstitutional. Good luck."

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There's a decent argument that the Civil Rights Act was unconstitutional (not because water fountains aren't mentioned). Congress based its power to enact the CRA under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to regulate interstate commerce. As you can see, the connection between interstate commerce and civil rights seems quite tenuous. Congress does not have the power to enact the CRA under the 14th Amendment because that only applies to state action and the CRA targets private individuals.

Of course, there's no way the Supreme Court would reverse itself on the CRA (which upheld 9-0 back in the 60s) at this point. Thomas would probably vote to strike it down, maybe Scalia. 7-2 would be the closest it would get. Thomas is extremely consistent on applying the Constitution as he sees it, regardless of how good or bad the law whose constitutionality is in question is.

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Maybe Obama thinks that no one actually believed he was against gay marriage, so he'd open support it in an attempt to try to get his base to turn out and vote.

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And I hope this analysis helped some of the liberals better understand what many evangelicals think about as they decide how to vote. Of course, it may be easier to dispense with the analysis and just do the thing that is obviously not a sin (don't vote, or vote for the candidate against gay marriage).

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I am trying to analyze the issue. It's obviously a moral question not a legal question (because we're talking about sin, not about legality).

Being gay is obviously not sinful, because there is no choice. Getting a same sex marriage obviously is sinful, because you are going against the direct command of God. Officiating a same sex marriage is sinful for the same reason. Now, the state approves marriages and lends its authority to them. So, the state could be seen as an accessory. Presumably a voter would similarly be responsible, at one further degree down the line.

What complicates things is that you are not voting for an issue, you are voting for a candidate, who has views on many different issues. Another thing that complicates things is that you are not voting to create gay marriages, you are voting not to prohibit them. This may seem like a meaningless distinction, but if you believe there is a huge difference between action and inaction, this is key.

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Well, it's a hard question. If you're personally performing the wedding ceremony, that's pretty obviously a sin. And naively believing a politician is not a sin. Voting for a politician who supports gay marriage but doesn't make it a central issue of his campaign strikes me as pretty benign, because the other issues may make him a better candidate so that the ends justify the means, but this requires thought and different people will likely conclude different things. By contrast, voting for a candidate who supports abortion strikes me as much more likely to be sinful because it is like you are an accessory to murder. It would require a lot more to justify, if that is even possible.

On the other hand, there is probably a lot more personal hatred and fear towards gays in this country now than towards abortions, so gay marriage may draw out conservative voters to the polls even more than abortion. And that might also make sense given that not voting against the candidate who supports gay marriage is probably not a sin. The Catholic Church says sins of omission are just as bad, but the prevailing trend in modern American conservative thought is to make a huge distinction between action and inaction.

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red sox you're a republican right?

Independent.

I have faith in Romney's unelectability

It's true that Romney's not an appealing candidate. But as long as the campaign focuses on Obama, Romney will probably win. If Obama can shift the focus onto Romney, Romney will probably lose. But I don't see that happening because Obama is the president now, so the focus will be on him more than anyone.

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Right, and even if people suspected that Obama was hiding his true views, it's no sin to mistakenly give too much trust to a politician. Is it a sin to affirmatively vote for a politician who wants to legalize gay marriage? That's a harder question.

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lol @ Romney having even a slight chance of beating Obama in any situation. Obama could go on the news tomorrow and literally kill a baby with his bare hands, and he would still win the election.

Why? Why would you have so much faith in Obama's reelection?

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My church is evangelical, and people don't vote as myopically as people think. Lots of evangelicals voted for Obama in 2008 because of the economy, or because they wanted to end the Iraq war, or because they didn't trust Sarah Palin with the office of the presidency. So one, there is the rallying effect of increasing turnout, and two, you may also convince some people to change sides.

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Why not? Iowa was razor thin in 2000 and 2004, and Obama only got 54% in 2008.

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One important thing is demographic change. If Romney takes the same states Bush took in 2000, he'd get 285 electoral votes now compared to Bush's 271. Romney is getting 2-3 small states free compared to 2000, basically.

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Obama's best shot is probably to double down on Ohio. But even if he wins Ohio, Romney can still win the election by taking 2 out of 3 of: Iowa, New Hampshire, and New Mexico. Obama's probably lost in Florida already because the demographic shift that's taken place there since the 2000 election. It's not a state of retired New Yorkers anymore. Similarly, don't think Nevada or Colorado will be in play- the dynamics of 2008 are gone, and even better, there are significant Mormon populations in both states.

Meanwhile, even if those plans don't work, Romney has other potential leads in Oregon, Minnesota/Wisconsin, and maybe even Massachusetts/Maine. MA did elect him as governor, after all.

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Also, why on earth would Obama use the word "evolve" to describe himself? It's like rubbing salt in a wound. He should be using a word like "conversion" instead that carries a different connotation.

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Actually, yes, that's exactly people's response. When things are bad, they pick on people weaker than themselves. That's why you see all the calls from lower middle class (not really middle class anymore) people to treat the poor badly. Because they can't win a fight with the rich, so they'll pick a fight with the poor instead.

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There are quite a few people who don't vote along party lines so closely. They may have voted for Obama in 2008 for economic reasons, or to stop the war in Iraq. But same sex marriage could be a nonnegotiable issue to them.

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Yeah, but the political climate was against gay marriage almost everywhere in 2008. I think Proposition 8 might not pass in California again now.....maybe. Either way, at least the perception is that the country is more open to it now.

Also, despite winning it in 2008, Obama was already lost in North Carolina no matter what this time. It's not really a swing state, it's just that Bush and the Republicans were so incredibly unpopular in 2008 that it became one.

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Lots of evangelicals in Iowa. And yeah, Democrats are sorely mistaken if the believe the polls that supposedly show 50% of Americans support gay marriage. If that were really the case, the record on state ballots wouldn't be 31 to 0 or whatever it is.

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Yeah, this won't help him. I mean that he didn't support it in 2008 and now does. His views pretty obviously evolve according to the political climate. I suppose appearing to be a flip-flopper won't hurt against Mitt Romney though.

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See, this is what I don't get. Despite what many of my fart-sniffing liberal brethren would have you believe, being conservative does not inherently make you an illogical person or a cruel person. I fail to see how a person deemed logical and competent enough to be a Supreme Court Justice could be confronted with the issue of equal rights for homosexuals and say "No, they're not to be protected."

Is the court REALLY that concerned about its "legacy" on one particular issue so much that it turns a blind eye to other pressing issues that might muddy up that stance if examined thoroughly? That strikes me as incredibly egotistical.

Well, I don't think the majority on the court sees protecting gay marriage as a very important end either. It's a matter of values, not of logic. You're right that judges often rule according to what they think is just and then try to fit the doctrine to the decision- Scalia in particular does this a lot in my opinion, though he's very very good at making his logic technically consistent between cases. Judges are not, of course, supposed to do that. They are supposed to be impartial meaning they rule according to the law and ignore their personal feelings. In any case, I obviously don't know how the court would rule and this is all speculation.

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What is the point of the Supreme Court then, if not to overturn unjust laws? "Overturning democratically created laws" is kind of their entire job.

To overturn illegal laws. Well, also, the legacy of this court is states' rights, which usually means overturning federal laws that unconstitutionally infringe on states' powers- I dunno if you'd consider those laws unjust but I would certainly consider them harmful to freedom. But I agree that it's kind of disingenuous when courts (not just this court, this has been a favorite claim of courts in general going back through our entire history) claim that they are not competent to rule on an issue but Congress or a state legislature is. Knowing Congress.......it's hard to get more incompetent than Congress.

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Because the Supreme Court has not made it one yet, yeah. The 14th Amendment doesn't list which classes are protected, just gives a general "equal protection of the laws" statement, so it's up to courts to interpret. And I don't think the current court would do it; there's been a longstanding 5-4 conservative majority. Moreover, the legacy of the current court more than anything else is the revival of states' rights, so I don't see them making a ruling that overturns the democratically created laws of 44 states, the overwhelming will of the American people, by judicial fiat.

I think the 9th Circuit in the Prop 8 case recognized this and was trying to avoid the US Supreme Court making a blanket ruling that states may always ban gay marriages. So it limited its ruling to the specific California law, hoping to avoid a general ruling that applied to all states.

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What if it wasn't "poor people" but instead "women" though, since that's a state of being more like sexual orientation than your income level is. Let's say there was some hypothetical statistic that proved women cause more traffic accidents than men. Under current jurisprudence, could lawyers successfully argue that women should not be allowed to have driver's licenses?

No, because gender is a protected class with intermediate scrutiny. There actually was a similar case where Oklahoma set the drinking age for low alcohol content beer at 21 for men and 18 for women, on the grounds that more young men than young women were arrested for drunk driving. Justification wasn't good enough.

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Is procreation something the courts would recognize as inherently necessary? I don't see how it is.

It doesn't have to be, just something the state would want. There is also somewhat of a debate also about whether plain morality can be a justification- the Court has indicated (but not firmly) that it is not.

Wouldn't there have to be some evidence that they were actively trying to make sure all couples were able to have kids? I mean, you can't say you're encouraging the procreation of children when there are plenty of people who are unable to have children naturally.

Under strict scrutiny, this would kill the law. Under rational basis, the law could be the height of stupidity- it'll be upheld unless there's no conceivable reason someone could favor it.

Makes me wonder if a state could ban contraceptives under the pretenses of "encouraging procreation."

I'm looking at you, Utah!

States have tried this in the past, the Court struck it down applying strict scrutiny (for the right to privacy under due process, not equal protection). The current Court in 2003 actually struck down sodomy laws for adults, under the same right to privacy doctrine. But I think the difference between the due process/privacy line of cases and the equal protection line of cases is that the former involves private actions and the latter involves public actions. No one should be able to control what you do in your own home.......but marriage is an inherently public, legal, institution. At least the current Supreme Court seems to see this distinction as very important.

Also, what gay person is going to, because of this law, settle down and have a few kids for economic benefits? That line of argument wouldn't stand a chance against an actual lawyer.

Under rational basis, the argument doesn't have to be good, just remotely plausible. Courts will defer to the wisdom of legislatures and the political process rather than ruling by judicial fiat.

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Conversely, the state can pass higher taxes for people who earn more, as they already do.

The Supreme Court has never recognized homosexuality as one of the classes that get strict (or intermediate) scrutiny for equal protection, and until/unless it does, North Carolina can win a court case just by saying that the purpose of its marriage law is to encourage procreation of children by conferring economic benefits on couples, thus encouraging the procreation of children.

The Supreme Court will probably consider this issue in the next few years however- perhaps when the California Prop 8 is appealed up to it. Lower federal courts recently struck it down. Interestingly enough, they claimed they were not necessarily recognizing homosexuality as a protected class that gets stricter scrutiny, but said the CA law did not even pass rational basis (the lowest standard). And it didn't pass rational basis because the CA law still allowed civil unions and made marriage and civil unions legally identical in every way except for name- so, the logic, went, if CA was really trying to do something like promote having children, the law was not going to help achieve that. By being more discriminatory and also attacking gay civil unions, North Carolina can get around that argument.

My feeling is that the 9th Circuit would have preferred going further and declaring homosexuality a protected class under strict scrutiny, and handing down a ruling that didn't depend on the specifics of the CA law, but didn't want to get overruled by the conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. This way, the US Supreme Court has a way out where it can consistently sustain the 9th Circuit's ruling striking down Prop 8 without ruling that gay marriage must be legal everywhere in the country.

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