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PoliGAF 2012 Community Thread |OT2| This thread title is now under military control

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S

SoulPlaya

more money than God
So, CBS Evening News is covering what's going on in Syria right now. At the same time, MSNBC has spent like the last 15 minutes discussing Chik-Fil-A.

I hate 24/7 US News Channels so much.
 
A

Averon

Member
1343859604967.jpg


Oh Fox
 
A

Allard

Member
Tim-E said:
LOL oh my god
It's so sad that the people who watch that will think "OH MY GOD THATS A HUGE INCREASE"
Click to expand...

This isn't just a fox thing, I see it happen all the time for any financial related stuff on these 'business' channels (its fox business, not the normal fox). When a stock goes down or up for instance, they always try to make it dramatic up and down line to showcase the days fluctuation but the actual change might be just a sliver of a difference for actual stocks overhead unless they work with year to year numbers.
 
T

Tim-E

Member
Allard said:
This isn't just a fox thing, I see it happen all the time for any financial related stuff on these 'business' channels (its fox business, not the normal fox). When a stock goes down or up for instance, they always try to make it dramatic up and down line to showcase the days fluctuation but the actual change might be just a sliver of a difference for actual stocks overhead unless they work with year to year numbers.
Click to expand...

I know, it's just that it's such a simple way to deceive people that they can get away with because people aren't paying attention to the numbers, they just see a bar graph.
 
J

Jooney

Member
Broadcast this graph on national TV? It's all good.

Pull the same trick with your client? Get laughed out of the room.

The irony.
 
Guileless

Guileless

Temp Banned for Remedial Purposes
SoulPlaya said:
So, CBS Evening News is covering what's going on in Syria right now. At the same time, MSNBC has spent like the last 15 minutes discussing Chik-Fil-A.

I hate 24/7 US News Channels so much.
Click to expand...

I have been surprised at how much coverage the Memphis newspaper has devoted to the Egyptian election saga and the Syrian civil war.
 
R

reilo

learning some important life lessons from magical Negroes
Speaking of stupid people, this one is still my favorite:

@RickSantorum said:
Obama is wrong. Government cannot force you to pay for something that violates faith or beliefs. Govt has no right to do this.
Click to expand...
 
J

Jackson50

Member
mugbee said:
Do any here at poligaf watch washington journal?

It's fun to watch this guy squirm. he labels himself as a "reporter" but admits (after being questioned on his bias) that "opinion journalism is my trade"

the Weekly Standards Michael Warren

When questioned on why there are so many of the foreign policy advisers in romney's camp that were there from the bush era: "there arent that many foreign policy experts"
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There are plenty of experts. Only, his brand has been marginalized.
Cyan said:
Pretty much everybody uses misleading infographics all the time. See Edward Tufte.
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Yeah. Misleading graphs, whether intentional or not, are ubiquitous; truncating the Y axis is a popular tactic. This is especially common in the mass media. That doesn't excuse Fox, of course.
 
P

PhoenixDark

Banned
Virginia’s Virgil Goode: Could this Man Cost Mitt Romney the Presidency?

Virgil Goode glides through the doors of a McDonald's in Farmville, VA, at 11:52 am and instantly three construction workers in the back booth rise to their feet. ”I’ve been wanting to shake your hand a long time, sir,” says Jeremy Clay of nearby Evington, extending a hand to the former Congressman. His buddy Jeremy Rawlings of Lynchburg does the same, and asks which line to sign on Goode’s petition to get on the presidential ballot. “If Obama gets re-elected, we’re all doomed,” Rawlings says as he scrawls his name. Goode asks in his Virginia drawl how business is faring. Two postal workers who have joined the group shake their heads—“We’re on the line,” one says. Goode asks about their families as they take photos on their cell phones. Then he orders a vanilla ice cream cone and heads down Main Street to gather more names.

Goode is running for president on the Constitution Party ticket, and his candidacy has Republicans sweating: Goode is pulling fully 9% of Virginia’s vote, according to a mid-July Public Policy Polling survey, leaving Obama ahead of Romney 49% to 35%. In a tight election where Virginia’s 13 electoral college votes could make or break the Romney’s candidacy, even 2% for Goode could pull enough Republicans away to hand the historically red state to Obama in November.

Goode could easily maintain at least a few percentage points in Virginia through the fall. He remains a popular local figure who served in the Virginia State Senate for 24 years and then then represented VA’s 5th district in the U.S. House until 2009. His platform is simple—he can recite it under 15 seconds. “One: balance the budget now, not later. Two: Get Americans jobs by ending illegal immigration and making legal immigration harder. Lastly: Impose term limits.”
Click to expand...
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/0...ost-mitt-romney-the-presidency/#ixzz22LHlr5Ir

Interesting
 
F

Four_Chamber

Member
PhoenixDark said:
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2012/08/0...ost-mitt-romney-the-presidency/#ixzz22LHlr5Ir

Interesting
Click to expand...

I've been reading about this for a while. I don't think Obama will need Virginia but if Virginia goes to Obama, the path to the White House is gone for Romney. Goode, unlike other third party candidates, is popular enough where he can siphon off a good number of votes. I know he says he will draw votes from both candidates but what voters are going to be jumping on his anti-immigration platform... I doubt it will be folks who are voting for Obama.
 
C

cartoon_soldier

Member
Four_Chamber said:
I've been reading about this for a while. I don't think Obama will need Virginia but if Virginia goes to Obama, the path to the White House is gone for Romney. Goode, unlike other third party candidates, is popular enough where he can siphon off a good number of votes. I know he says he will draw votes from both candidates but what voters are going to be jumping on his anti-immigration platform... I doubt it will be folks who are voting for Obama.
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Goode in VA and Johnson in NM can act as big spoilers, though Gary Johnson will affect both parties.
 
J

jamesinclair

Banned
Well, suburban Atlanta voters have mandated that their city begin to circle the drain and collapse on itself.

These people need to visit Delhi, Sao Paulo etc to see what happens to cities that dont invest properly in transportation.

Heres a hint: Congestion isnt free, and Id bet large sums of money that the cost of congestion will outweigh the price of the failed tax many times over.


Distrustful of government and riven by differences, metro Atlanta voters on Tuesday rejected a $7.2 billion transportation plan that business leaders have called an essential bulwark against regional decline.

...

Shirley Tondee, a Brookhaven Republican, thinks the region must do something to solve constant transportation woes. But she voted against the T-SPLOST anyway. "I just don't trust that government is going to take the money and do what they say they're going to do," the retired sales representative said outside her precinct.

...

The metro Atlanta tax would have built a $6.14 billion list of 157 regional projects — relieving congestion at key Interstate highway chokepoints and opening 29 miles of new rail track to passengers, among others — as well as $1 billion worth of smaller local projects. The list was negotiated by 21 mayors and county commissioners from all 10 counties, and it contained about half transit and half roads.
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http://www.ajc.com/news/transportation-referendum/voters-reject-transportation-tax-1488552.html



The proposed one-cent sales tax hike to support $7.15 billion in spending on transit and roads was roundly defeated Tuesday, with 62 percent opposing. Though approved by Atlanta city voters, none of the 10 counties considering the measure gave it the thumbs up, according to unofficial results.

MARTA will most likely see fare hikes or service reductions in the next fiscal year, said Ashley Robbins, executive director of Citizens for Progressive Transit, which advocated for the spending package. The region’s transit agency, which receives no state support, has been spending down its reserves. Even with the $600 million earmarked for MARTA in the referendum, the agency was still facing a $2.3 billion shortfall over the next 10 years.

In addition, the region’s suburban express bus service, GRTA, which serves about 10,000 daily, will most likely be forced to close. And Clayton County, a largely urban county south of Atlanta that lost its transit service altogether two years ago, will have no means to restore service.

...

Georgia Governor Nathan Deal said he would focus existing resources toward plans to add an interchange at I-285 and Georgia 400. He said other projects would have to be delayed, and he indicated he was not eager to do anything to shore up MARTA.

“MARTA needs to be fixed, and before the taxpayers are going to spend any more money on MARTA, I think they’ve also sent a message that they’re not going to put more money into something they perceive is not functioning appropriately with the revenue that’s available,” he said.


The Georgia Department of Transportation, which ranks 49th nationally in per-capita transportation spending, is mired in debt. Roughly half of Georgia’s existing gas tax revenues must be put toward debt service, said Robbins. Without the revenues that would have come from the sales tax, the state may find itself returning federal funds, for lack of a 20 percent match.
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http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/08/0...s-about-to-get-worse/#more-128306#more-284238



What kind of job creator would invest in a state that wont provide the infrastructure needed bring the labor, raw materials and customers to the business?
 
P

pigeon

Banned
jamesinclair said:
Well, suburban Atlanta voters have mandated that their city begin to circle the drain and collapse on itself.

These people need to visit Louisiana and Mississippi to see what happens to cities that dont invest properly in transportation.
Click to expand...

Fixed. Resistance to infrastructure in Southern states is literally a two-hundred-year-old problem.
 
T

Tim-E

Member
Putting anything involving an increase in revenue to a vote is so incredibly stupid. The majority of people think that infrastructure is magically in perfect shape, so their dang blasted taxes aren't going to go up one penny if they have any say! All the people against it have to say is "Look, it's a TAX" and it will lose.
 
J

jamesinclair

Banned
pigeon said:
Fixed. Resistance to infrastructure in Southern states is literally a two-hundred-year-old problem.
Click to expand...

Those states dont have cities big enough to really show what happens when congestion kills your city.

Atlanta is one of two southern cities that can actually claim being home to large corporations (Miami being the other one). They actually have something to lose.

Actually, Miami is a fantastic example of what can go wrong.... Its a traffic nightmare, and they have the worst subway system in the country.
 
C

Chumly

Member
jamesinclair said:
Well, suburban Atlanta voters have mandated that their city begin to circle the drain and collapse on itself.

These people need to visit Delhi, Sao Paulo etc to see what happens to cities that dont invest properly in transportation.

Heres a hint: Congestion isnt free, and Id bet large sums of money that the cost of congestion will outweigh the price of the failed tax many times over.



http://www.ajc.com/news/transportation-referendum/voters-reject-transportation-tax-1488552.html





http://dc.streetsblog.org/2012/08/0...s-about-to-get-worse/#more-128306#more-284238



What kind of job creator would invest in a state that wont provide the infrastructure needed bring the labor, raw materials and customers to the business?
Click to expand...
People wonder why the south is stuck as a giant shithole
 
E

el retorno

Member
Tim-E said:
Putting anything involving an increase in revenue to a vote is so incredibly stupid. The majority of people think that infrastructure is magically in perfect shape, so their dang blasted taxes aren't going to go up one penny if they have any say! All the people against it have to say is "Look, it's a TAX" and it will lose.
Click to expand...

I was just talking to my dad about this with property taxes and other tax issues that are put on the ballot. Why are they put to a popular vote? There´s a reason why we have a representative system. They´re going to get shot down because not many people are going to personally vote for a tax increase on themselves.
 
T

thatbox

Banned
I was finishing the paper as I ate dinner just now, and EJ Dionne has written an explanation of my Romney three-dimensional checkers possibility:

Here are the two great campaign mysteries at midsummer: Why does Mitt Romney appear to be getting so much traction from ripping a few of President Obama’s words out of context? And why aren’t Romney and other Republicans moving to the political center as the election approaches?

Both mysteries point to an important fact about the 2012 campaign: For conservatives, this is a go-for-broke election. They and a Republican Party now under their control hope to eke out a narrow victory in November on the basis of a quite radical program that includes more tax cuts for the rich, deep reductions in domestic spending, big increases in military spending and a sharp rollback in government regulation.

In the process, the right hopes to redefine middle-of-the-road policies as “left wing,” thereby altering the balance in the American political debate.

What should alarm both liberals and moderates is that this is the rare election in which such a strategy has a chance of succeeding. Conservatives have their opening not because the country has moved far to the right but courtesy of economic discontent, partisan polarization and the right’s success in defining Obama as standing well to the left of where he actually does.

...

The words did, however, play to a stereotype of Obama as an advocate of big government who mistrusts business. The distortion resonated, said Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster, because key voter groups that Romney is trying to win suspect the four words reflect “secretly what he [Obama] believes.”

Moreover, Republicans want to recast the Obama campaign’s most effective line of attack — that Romney is a very wealthy out-of-touch financier who “pioneered” the outsourcing of jobs, kept a lot of money in foreign accounts and refuses to release additional tax returns — as being less about Romney than about the president’s supposed hostility to “success” and to business. Much is riding on the interpretation (or willful misinterpretation) of a short sentence in a long speech.

The go-for-broke strategy has a chance for another reason: In this election, the number of genuine, middle-of-the-road swing voters is very small. For both candidates, this puts a premium not only on high turnout among party base groups but also on very large victory margins within them. McInturff thinks we may be moving from an electoral model based on swing or undecided voters to a world of what he calls “committed versus elastic” voter groups.

...

Republicans want to play down the implications of what they would do in power and paint Obama as someone he isn’t. Normally, this strategy wouldn’t work. But this is a moment when abnormal levels of economic turmoil are feeding a profound mistrust of government. Conservatives are making a large bet that if ever there was a year when they could mainstream out-of-the-mainstream ideas, this is it.​

Essentially, this election, there may be more to gain from base-pandering than courting independents and undecideds, which is how we (may) have arrived at NAACP boos and anti-Palestinian bigotry.
 
S

Skiptastic

Member
el retorno de los sapos said:
I was just talking to my dad about this with property taxes and other tax issues that are put on the ballot. Why are they put to a popular vote? There´s a reason why we have a representative system. They´re going to get shot down because not many people are going to personally vote for a tax increase on themselves.
Click to expand...
Depends on the purpose of the taxes. Indiana did vote in a 1% property tax limit, but my city (which is pretty darn conservative) voted to authorize a raise in property taxes to support the school system.
 
D

Dram

Member
Heidi Wys, Adviser To Powerful Puerto Rico Lawmaker, Faces Calls To Resign After Anti-Obama Tweet

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/01/heidi-wys-obama-tweet-puerto-rico_n_1729377.html?utm_hp_ref=politics

An adviser to Puerto Rico's most powerful female lawmaker faced calls to resign on Wednesday after she sent a tweet to President Barack Obama urging him to buy the first lady a double-banana sundae and take her to Kenya.

Heidi Wys sent the tweet last week shortly after Obama tweeted that Michelle Obama's birthday was coming up.

"Who cares?" Wys wrote in response. "Take her to Burger King, buy her a sundae with double banana, take her to your homeland, Kenya!"

Wys is the main adviser to House of Representatives President Jenniffer Gonzalez and has earned $630,000 since 2008 for her services as an administrative consultant, according to records with the Comptroller's Office.

Several legislators are demanding that Wys step down or that Gonzalez ask for her resignation.

In response to a July 30 tweet by a Puerto Rico online newspaper, Wys urged reporters to follow an investigation to probe the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate.

Wys, who is white, also said in another tweet that she is not racist and that her favorite nieces are black, but added that she does not support Obama.

"I fight Obama with all the strength in my heart and passion as a descendant of germans!!" she wrote on July 30.

On June 18, she sent another tweet to Obama in response to a general invitation to have dinner with the President.

"Wah! Wah! I feel like vomiting! Dinner with a guy borned in Kenya and claims he was borned in Hawaii!" she wrote, with some misspellings.

Wys is a member of Puerto Rico's New Progressive Party, which supports statehood, but she said she does not identify herself as a Democrat or Republican.
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It's weird how Obama has this affect on people.
 
C

Clevinger

Member
"with all the strength in my heart and passion as a descendant of germans!!"

haha, what the fuck?

"Dinner with a guy borned in Kenya"

lol
 
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
Wys, who is white, also said in another tweet that she is not racist and that her favorite nieces are black, but added that she does not support Obama.
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I can't stop laughing. That's a hysterical twist on the "some of my best friends are black" trope. It's also a public slam on her other non-black nieces.
 
D

Dan

No longer boycotting the Wolfenstein franchise
el retorno de los sapos said:
I was just talking to my dad about this with property taxes and other tax issues that are put on the ballot. Why are they put to a popular vote? There´s a reason why we have a representative system. They´re going to get shot down because not many people are going to personally vote for a tax increase on themselves.
Click to expand...

I found this:
Results were still pending Tuesday night in the state's other 11 regions. The Transportation Investment Act of 2010, which set up the referendum, was touted to raise as much as $19 billion if approved district by district.

Leaders with the Metro Atlanta Chamber, which pushed to create the referendum in the Legislature and then poured millions into a campaign to pass the tax, did not immediately return telephone calls.
Click to expand...

I'm guessing one reason is that it was the only way it could even clear the legislature. Voting directly for higher taxes was probably unacceptable to a lot of politicians. The entire thing probably had no chance of being approved. Instead they managed to agree on a referendum, or really 12 different referendums by region (each made up of many counties). From what I see, three passed it, so they'll see the bump in sales tax and get various projects completed. The rest, which includes Atlanta, will just see congestion continue to get worse.

I also found this little bit:
Deeper insecurities were at play as well. A poll conducted by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last year found that 42 percent of respondents believed new mass transit brings crime.
Click to expand...
 
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