2012 republican presidential nominee III: can romney get santorum out of his hair?

i totally dont think iowans are all hillbillies, u need hills for that

i don't think iowans are hillbillies. I think they are predominantly small town or rural dwellers, without big cities. They also have a high percentage of college grads. Prob ag colleges, but those are diplomas, too.

wait, the Democrats caucused? did they just bow toward Washington?

The smug Iowan Obamaniac in that video might wanna listen to the first 2 minutes of this clip of the late (mostly) liberal talkshow host Lynn Samuels in 2008:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw0zr9hn01E

hey smug Iowan check out this youtube

it's 2012 & Matt's supporting his party by trolling Dr. Morbius on ilx political threads. come lord Quetzalcoatl incinerate us all in fire

http://www.statelibraryofiowa.org/datacenter/quickfacts

Btw I have no idea where the guy got the 4/5 in cities thing. All seems like smug pandering but I had a guilty lol.

"wait the democrats caucused" is kind of the "I have no idea what went on beyond headlines" statement here.

Wtf is an "ag college?" one of the two state universities has ag programs (both science and business) but they're not the largest parts of the school. According to j.'s stats there, there a about 90k people working on farms versus 1.5mil working elsewhere in the economy. 1 in 16 people working on a farm is kind of high, I guess?

it's 2012 & Matt's supporting his party by trolling Dr. Morbius on ilx political threads. come lord Quetzalcoatl incinerate us all in fire

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, January 5, 2012 4:39 AM (53 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I'm really kind of hurt that you think this is my reason above all the other far superior reasons to aggravate Morbs.

really feel like we need a moratorium on the term 'trolling' at this point, just a cooling out period

I'm not gonna watch that YouTube but Iowa State is an ag school for sure. Mrs. Aero worked on glycine max aka the noble soybean in their lab, they do a lot of research on g. max & corn & parasites etc @ Iowa State. "Farms" kinda doesn't really begin to describe just how much of Iowa's economy is agricultural - co-ops, grain elevators, transport, pesticides etc., whatever you classify anhydrous as they gotta buy shitloads of it to keep farming, etc

i mean that was a straight up zing by matt there, solid hit

there are three state universities.

the one with ag programs folded the ag college into one with all life sciences (and some other sciences—many of which used to be grouped with the liberal arts), and even still, there are more engineering students than there are ag and life sciences students, and more liberal arts and sciences students than there are engineering students:

http://www.iastate.edu/about/docs/facts/FactsFY12.pdf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Iowa_products_2006.jpg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/9/91/Iowa_products_2006.jpg

that doesn't entirely disprove what aero said but it's interesting how little of the gsp is directly ag

where is the hillbilly sector, something is wrong

laginfinityn yr right it's just a zing I'm just protective of Morbs because I agree w/him more than w/ppl who zing him generally

xp the thing is that chart is pretty deceptive - "construction" and "real estate," for example, are going to figure largely into the money changing hands in the country's #2 pork producing state. "ag" in w/"forestry" and "fishing" there probably means "crops," which takes up a lot of land but generates less money than pork, and than the manufacturing of products (and the delivery of services) to the pork producers. it was the Iowa State lab that sequenced the entire g. max genome iirc (nb I may not rc)

also "finance and insurance" I would imagine are doing huge business with farmers who've been losing their asses for years

actually I think the pork itself would be included in that ag % but that manufacturing % is probably fairly related to crops/ag.

there was a piece somewhere today questioning just how often you can cry wolf before ppl stop paying attention to you.

it did not take into account whether or not the wolf was actually threatening -- if there's a wolf, we shouldn't ignore it no matter how many times it's been called out.

morbius is annoying as fuck on all political threads, because he will not compromise with reality/what's possible. nevertheless, he is invaluable at (incessantly) reminding us what exactly we've already conceded.

(the nicknames do get old, tho)

Posting this here, because I'm not reading the other thread:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2012/01/04/duverger-kushner-bonhoeffer/

Duverger, Kushner, Bonhoeffer
By Fred Clark, January 4, 2012 5:15 pm

A brief reminder: Duverger’s law.

That’s how it works. Candidate A vs. Candidate B. Party A vs. Party B.

Moral purity and moral perfection will not be on the ballot.

Those seeking moral purity and moral perfection pleasure themselves by imagining that theirs is a superior ethical responsibility. But this is delusional — an embrace of irresponsibility. It’s the claim that one is not responsible for any outcome, consequence or action in this world apart from maintaining, above all, one’s own impotent but unsullied moral purity.

You voted for Candidate A? Then you are responsible for every evil act and poor decision made by Candidate A. I refused to vote for Candidate A, or for any candidate because they’re all corrupt and all the same. And therefore I am not responsible for anything at all in this world. You are tainted. I am pure.

I do not accept that irresponsibility is a virtue.

As Tony Kushner said:

Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this.

Or as Dietrich Bonhoeffer said:

Responsible action must decide not simply between right and wrong, good and evil, but between right and right, wrong and wrong.

That is all.

also "finance and insurance" I would imagine are doing huge business with farmers who've been losing their asses for years

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Thursday, 5 January 2012 05:47 (8 hours ago) Permalink

des moines is a huge town for insurance

"hey smug Iowan check out this youtube"

This was a solid zing? hey icey, maybe u too authentic for the internets

it was funny! i lold nbd

it wasnt a crippling blow or anything

I can tell, since I walked to the subway.

So really, why don't libs argue for Obama to use the bully pulpit? (My answer wd be that he's not an advocate for lib positions.)

i feel like libs argue all the time for obama to use the bully pulpit, like 90% amateur political analysis regardless the orientation boils down to we should yell more abt this

if only!! it is actually "obama should yell more about this"

or "knock heads" or whatever

when PEOPLE actually yell about things, i.e. Occupy, it opens the window for people like Obama to act

yeah otm, i meant obama and other politicians

i guess YOU should yell more abt this wouldve been clearer

I don't hear "obama/Dem pols should yell more about this" nearly as much as variants of "Republicans exist, so there's nothing Dems can do"

well that line of reasoning def has a disproportionate popularity amongst professional pundits, i think amateur pundits have a lot more faith in the bully pulpit

the truth is somewhat more complicated *pats self on back*

I'm not gonna watch that YouTube but Iowa State is an ag school for sure. Mrs. Aero worked on glycine max aka the noble soybean in their lab, they do a lot of research on g. max & corn & parasites etc @ Iowa State.

Oh, very true. I think of those as agriculture-related but not farming per se, if that makes sense. Farmers are the "live in the boondocks, wear overalls, vote for social conservatives" dudes that carry the stereotype, imo -- when you hear the generalizations about Iowa and farms and "they pick corn, not candidates, lol," I doubt many people are thinking of research scientists sequencing genomes, people in an urban/suburban area selling crop insurance, or the corporate offices of large ag companies.

fwiw, I went to Iowa State and the one year I was in the dorms, the dudes who were in ag business were kind of picked on as hicks.

On a semi-related note, I'm annoyed by the lack of understanding of the role and usefulness of unions. From what my card-carrying union friends have been saying, democrats are losing support from that sector more from the shortcomings of union leadership than from a real change in the voter base.

Also, I laughed pretty hard at the fact I completely forgot a state university. Sorry UNI! To my credit, though, most UNI grads forget about UNI.

i graduated with a kid who got a full ride to UNI and iirc he didn't go

From what my card-carrying union friends have been saying, democrats are losing support from that sector more from the shortcomings of union leadership than from a real change in the voter base.

Speaking as a (quite happily so) card-carrying union member myself, it can definitely come down to that. There was a LOT of frustration bubbling up in recent years given that our bunch was caught in endless negotiations that went nowhere combined with rather poorly handled PR mailouts and announcements that just ticked a lot of people off. Affiliating with the Teamsters smoothed a lot of that out and we recently approved a handy five-year contract.

Another issue, though, can be boiled down to the question of turf wars. This hopefully has also changed with the Teamsters affiliation but we'll see. Basically, anybody who found themselves in a position to be promoted out of the union to a different status via a new work assignment or a work reclassification often found that the union was essentially working against their interests because that means they would lose a member -- a couple of friends dealt with that for the longest time, to their increasing frustration. So if things like that are more commonplace than expected, I couldn't blame people's annoyance at all.

Affiliating with the Teamsters smoothed a lot of that out

haha I'll bet

We have some odd affiliations on campus here. When the grad students union came into being almost fifteen years back it was as an affiliate of the UAW.

oh look Bono likes Santorum

lol catholics

kinda wanna poll the awkward moments in this story

Santorum "has a kind of Tourette's disease," Bono told New York Times columnist David Brooks in 2006.

These three are winners from that Mitt story:

“The line? The DMZ? Is that it? No, I know what it is: It’s the emergency exit! Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah. Ahh.”

“Ha, ha. Uh. I think landslides are terrific....I just didn’t, uh, see that in last night’s figures. I’m not sure about you. Ha, ha, ha, ha.”

“What a, uh, big night we had last night, or what a big morning we had, uh, last morning, this morning, in, uh, Iowa,”

I think that's about as much about Bono dropping names and at least as much about Bono's committment to Catholic 'caritas' as it is about liking Santorum.

"Hair Force One"

tbf it must kinda suck for mitt to continually be reminded that nobody likes him

well he still has a decent shot at becoming president of america, so

he doesn't have a prayer imho

let's hope fundies agree with that statement