The 2016 Presidential Election

This just cracks me up.

Jill Stein, liberals seek voting hack investigation

I just need to say...6 more days until the Obamas go away.

Regardless of how you feel about them, anyone for 8 years is just enough.

May Barak and Michelle do a George and Laura and GO. A. WAY.

(Sadly, I think Barry's going to hang around and offer "advice" for a long time to come. Ugh.)

Trump is currently in my old home town of Melbourne, Florida. (Well, actually I lived beach-side, a mile across the river).
I'm sure lots of my friends are there, or wish they were.

And the earliest Melbourne settlers were freed slaves who moved there when the area was called Crane Creek and was considered nearly inhospitable due to hordes of mosquitoes (Ponce de Leon called the region the mosquito coast). Then white folks started moving into the area when they realized that if former slaves could make a living growing growing citrus there, so could they. Hence the name Melbourne and it's Australian roots.
Of course it wasn't too long until the black population was segregated into certain areas and Jim Crow eliminated the black economic and political growth.

I love the South.

I like all of what you said and I feel the same way except that I've been a registered Republican most my adult life - since 1982 - but not anymore, as of 5 months ago.
I did register as a Democrat when I turned 18. I was from the South which was largely Democrat in the mid 1970's. The Republicans started breaking through in the South after the Democrats embraced the Civil Rights movement during the 1960's, effectively ending 100 years of Democratic domination.


Polarization = identity politics. I don't get it. If somebody tells me, for example, where they stand on gun control, then I can pretty well figure where they stand on abortion, climate change, immigration, gay marriage, the environment, and so on. Yeah, that's a generalization, but it holds true more often than not. What does firearm registration have to do with two folks that are in love who want to get married? Nothing really, without some convoluted rationalization regarding abstract (and often arbitrary) values & principles. It makes no sense to me.

As far as the news: Once the news became a for profit enterprise (it used to cost the three major networks to host the news - they lost money on their news divisions and on Cronkite and Huntley and Brinkley - it was done as a public service and for the prestige) -now it's entertainment competing for ratings and the advertising dollar, thus tailoring content for it's audience. Echo chambers.


My own personal journey really took a turn about 10 years ago - it started with cow farts, of all things.
I was adamantly opposed to the claim of anthropogenic climate change. Someone mentioned cow flatulence, and I immediately countered with the old Plains Bison argument. I looked up stuff to bolster my argument but everything I found countered my belief. It seems there are at least double the amount of cattle now as there were bison on the American plains (as best estimates can figure) and modern feed is different than what buffalo naturally consumed.
This piqued my curiosity so I went to the library and started reading up on guys like Perraudin and Fourier, and later guys like Foote, Tyndall and Arrhenius. I learned that the climate science was nothing new, it had been challenged for more than 200 years, and that the science - despite economic and political opposition, kept pointing in the same direction. I studied the difference between the basic scientific findings and the advanced scientific prediction. I recalled my high school Calculus on derivatives - it's not just change, but the rate of change.
Then I read up on things like the Cato Institute, the Heartland institute, the Heritage foundation and the Koch brothers. And the history of manufactured uncertainty used as a tactic by the tobacco and lead industries.

It was during this process that I had to recognize my predilection to only acknowledge the facts that conformed to my beliefs despite new information that contradicted those beliefs.
I decided to approach some issues a different way; to be able to say "I don't know, let's see where the science takes me." And at the same time attempt to differentiate valid academic findings from the pejorative.
To let go of my credulity.

I'm sure that I am wrong about a lot of stuff; but I look and listen to things much differently now. I hope the trend continues.

And no, I am not a Republican.

I am a conservative, small "c."

You misunderstood me, and I wasn't very clear.

The history of the Southern Democratic party was a party of racism, segregation, Jim Crow, Dred Scott. I stated Democrats held the South for 100 years, so of course those Southern Democrats were racists.

The Democratic Party in the South was in turmoil starting with Truman's(D) civil rights platform. They formed the short-lived 'Dixiecrats'. By the early 1960's the Democratic Party couldn't have been more divided between North and South. Kennedy (D) called for the Civil Rights Act and Johnson (D) made sure the bill came before the Senate. It was a Southern bloc of Democratic Senators and one Republican Senator that resisted the bill.
It was a compromise bill that passed in the Senate in 1964.

And your numbers are misleading. Yes, only 68% of Democrats in the Senate and 61% in the House voted for the bill - but if you partition those votes according to party and region you get another story.
94% of Northern Democrats voted for the original version (compared to 85% of Northern Republicans) and 98% of Northern Democrats voted for the Senate version (compared to 84% of Northern Republicans).
It was the Southern Democrats who opposed the bill - 93% of Southern Democrats (and 100% of Southern Republicans!)voted against the original House version, and 95% of Southern Democrats (and 100% of Southern Republicans!) voted against the Senate version.


Again, I believe you're foisting a straw man. I lived in the South during this time.  I watched it happen.
In 1968 Nixon did hatch a race-bating strategy of 'Southern realignment', but it was more complex than that. It wasn't all about race (but race did play a role).
The gradual realignment of the South had been going on at a glacial pace for 40 years before the Civil Rights Act in '64. By 1962 Republicans were routinely winning Southern states in Presidential elections and most Southern Democrats were voting like Republicans on non-racial issues.
In 1972 Nixon walloped McGovern in the South because McGovern was to the left of the average Southern voter on just about every issue. Yet four years later Carter was able to carry almost every Southern State. The South was indeed considered a swing region during these times and up to the early 1990's.  The gradual realignment did take place, however.   Since 2004 the South is composed of red states, except for Florida.

Minimum wages; abortion.  Oh boy.

We'll just have to agree to disagree on minimum wage. I know too many folks here in California who work 2 jobs to make ends meet. In my experience, which is just a sample size of one, these folks tend to be mostly Mexican. I do agree the potential impact of minimum wage increases is not so cut and dry. We shall see.

Abortion?
You say the insidious might tell you eugenics.
I say there is a cure for poverty and it's a rudimentary one. It works everywhere and for the same reasons. "The cure for poverty is the empowerment of women. If you allow women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, if you take them off the animal cycle of reproduction which nature and some religious doctrine condemns them and then if you throw in a handful of seeds and perhaps some credit, the floor of everything in that village - not just poverty, education, and health and optimism - will increase." (C. Hitchens)
Anyone against the only thing that cures poverty is then in favor of an entrenchment that leads to an enormous increase in the amount of poverty, ignorance, filth and disease in the world.

While I do believe the concept of an 'unborn child' is a real one, there may be circumstances where it may be undesirable to carry a fetus to full term. Under many circumstances I'd advocate the termination of a pregnancy if birth control fails. Nature itself is the great abortifacient. Nature knows that some fetuses aren't going to make it and flushes them out. In terms of survival, we wouldn't be here if it weren't for this brutal fact.
Forcing women to have unwanted children, or to carry a fetus to full term and put it up for adoption, may add to the amount of suffering in the world, not subtract from it. One needs only to look at current birth rates, adoption rates and foster children and 'group home' children numbers to realize that the system doesn't need any added stress.

I will end with my view that it cannot be only the responsibility of the woman to decide upon abortion, that it's a social, ethical and moral question.  Not a religious one.