< ))) republicans ))) And Sex Education

I have no idea what "we" were talking about with YOUR link that I could not access. I assumed you were referring to the federal budget deficit (which may soon be over 50% Obama's). And, yes, I know the definition of A S S U M E. If you were trying to reference another "deficit", maybe you should have specified what you were talking about.

 

He's just trying to divert attention away from that u/e chart he posted...the chart that proved BO owns the unemployment problem in this country. You know, I never did thank fog-of-war for posting that, did I?

 

I wonder if fog-of-war put ZEROiq in a time-out for posting while foggy was away? He has been a little silent today, hasn't he?

 

OMG! Show me where I said "employment rate".

Nope!. No "employment rate" there.

Nope!. No "employment rate" there.

Sorry, Teddy. You need to learn how to read in stead of inventing things you think I might say.

 

I think in addition to learning the difference between the deficit and the national debt you should also refrain from jumping into conversations when you have no idea what the people in that conversation are talking about. Just a thought.

 

Why do you worry so much about when, why, and how often people post? You continually comment on it as if it has some sort of meaning that only you are privy to. You mind letting the rest of in on it?

 

Oh' c'mon...ease up on him, won't you? He's been punished enough. Let him post. This place is way funnier when both of you guys are active.

 

And this is the same clown that accuses everyone else here of being slaves to the same master when his own parroting behavior is completely ignored by him. Poor wittle Davy!

 

Not everyone...just you (a parrot of the far left whacko fringe) and ZEROiq (your parrot, lapdog, lackey, pawn....whatever)

 

Ahhhhhhh! I got it! You have no idea what you are trying to talk about. Just quoting your mantra as directed.

 

You never fail to define the political Left as far Left but according to a PEW Research study, it is the Right that has headed for the fringe. This is completely evident by the moderates on the Right being primaried out of their jobs. The Right is so radical that mainstream America has less and less in common with them each election cycle.

The left’s gone left but the right’s gone nuts: Asymmetrical polarization in action

By David Roberts


It isn’t your imagination: Political polarization has risen sharply in recent years. The Pew Research Center confirmed it in a recent poll.
Interestingly, Pew’s survey shows no similar rise in polarization along racial, gender, or religious lines — only political affiliation. What seems to have happened is not a change in value systems but a sorting of those value systems into more ideologically cohesive political parties. Conservatives have become Republicans; liberals have become Democrats.
It’s not just self-identified partisans. Poll Watch notes that it’s happening to Independents as well: “Independents who say they lean — but are not committed to — either party have grown further apart from each other, particularly in their views on the role and effectiveness of government.”
This process — not any decline in “civility” or whatever — explains the passing of the supposed Golden Age of Bipartisanship. Cooperation across party lines used to be more possible because there were regional idiosyncrasies in the U.S., conservative Democrats in the South and liberal Republicans in the Northeast. Those idiosyncrasies are being ironed out and the parties are becoming more internally homogenous. What’s more, the process appears to be inexorable and irreversible. Polarization is the new normal.
This is well-understood by political types and even, I think, by the Average Joe and Jane. There’s just a lot more fighting now, a lot more heated tempers, petty sniping and point-scoring, hacks on TV yelling at each other. Americans are also sorting geographically, so personal exposure to other points of view is declining. Politics is becoming one of those things that you don’t mention in mixed company lest feelings get bruised.
What is much, much less well-understood is that the process of polarization is not symmetrical. The parties have not become equally ideologically homogenous or moved equally far toward their extremes. They do not behave in the same way or share the same attitude toward established social and political norms. Republicans have moved farther right than Democrats have left.
This is not just Some Blogger’s Opinion. Political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal have done fascinating work on political polarization in Congress using a measurement of partisanship over time called DW-NOMINATE scores. (Click that link if you want to nerd out on the algorithms; it’s mostly about voting records.) The graph below shows what they found, going up to 2004. (I wish I had it extending to 2012; the trends have gotten more pronounced recently.) The humps are the distribution of Congresscritters in each party. The vertical lines under the humps are the mean point of each party’s ideological distribution. Each graph is a Congress; read left to right, top to bottom:

Two things jump out. First, over the 32 years leading up to 2004, the mean Dem moved six points to the left and the mean Republican moved 22 points to the right. Much farther! And second, there is virtually no overlap left between the parties. The humps have almost entirely separated. In short, the chart shows asymmetrical polarization.
For kicks, here’s another way to view it, focused on the House of Representatives (the Senate graph looks much the same). It shows the mean of each party over time and its distance from center:


Starting in the mid-’70s, Southern (read: conservative) Democrats started bailing and going Republican — thanks in no small part to Nixon’s “southern strategy” — and the GOP started getting more and more conservative. It is now considerably more conservative than the Democratic Party is liberal.
Anyway, so that’s the nerdy political-science version. Here’s how William Galston and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution describe the consequences:

[T]hese developments have not produced two mirror-image political parties. We have, instead, asymmetrical polarization. Put simply: More than 70 percent of Republicans in the electorate identify themselves as conservative or very conservative, while only 40 percent of rank-and-file Democrats call themselves liberal or very liberal. It is far easier for congressional Republicans to forge and maintain a united front than it is for Democrats. George W. Bush pushed through his signature tax cuts and Iraq war authorization with substantial Democratic support, while unwavering Republican opposition nearly torpedoed Barack Obama’s health-reform legislation. When Democrats are in the majority, their greater ideological diversity combined with the unified opposition of Republicans induces the party to negotiate within its ranks, producing policies that not long ago would have attracted the support of a dozen Senate Republicans.​

Here’s the way I’d put it: Today, the national Democratic Party contains everything from the center-right to the far-left. Economically its proposals tend to be center to center-right. Socially, its proposals tend to be center to center-left. The national Republican Party, by contrast, has now been almost entirely absorbed by the far right. It rejects the basic social consensus among post-war democracies and seeks to return to a pre-New Deal form of governance. It is hostile to social and economic equality. It remains committed to fossil fuels and sprawl and opposed to all sustainable alternatives. And it has built an epistemological cocoon around itself within which loopy misinformation spreads unchecked. It has, in short, gone loony.
In April, Mann and longtime scholar of American governance Norman Ornstein, about the farthest thing from a leftie firebrand one can imagine, wrote an op-ed stating flatly, “Republicans are the problem.” They said:

However awkward it may be for the traditional press and nonpartisan analysts to acknowledge, one of the two major parties, the Republican Party, has become a resurgent outlier: ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; un-persuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.​

You’d think that such a striking perspective from two widely respected scholars of American governance would make a big splash. But the op-ed vanished virtually without a ripple.
Instead, pundits — and, to be fair, lots and lots of non-pundits — cling to the presumption of symmetry. Their minds rebel at asymmetry, especially extreme asymmetry. The notion that “partisans on both sides” are preventing a sensible middle course is deeply rooted to the point of catechism.
Maddeningly, when pundits actually lay out what that sensible middle course would look like, they end up describing Obama’s agenda. Benjy Sarlin at TPM put it best: “Pundits Urge President Obama To Back President Obama’s Proposals.”

http://grist.org/politics/asymmetrical-polarization-the-lefts-gone-left-but-the-rights-gone-nuts/

 

Post all the op-ed pieces you want, I'm defining you (and your shadow) as far left whackos.

 

Yes, the PEW Research Center is an Op-Ed.

 

David Roberts actually works & reports for PEW or he takes bits of info gleaned from PEW research & puts his on his own spin?

C'mon...let ZEROiq come back to the forum!

 

Gohmert is an idiot.

...and of course:

The idiot doesn't just say dumb things, he exclaims them. Worse, he believes his own bs. Worse, he gets elected.

The guy's a first-rate nut-job!

 

Whatsa matter, fog-of-war only letting you post little tidbits here & there? If I were you I'd demand that foggy allow you to posy freely!

 

I just noticed that this may be the most popular thread ZEROiq ever started...and all it took to get 90+ comments was for someone to change the subject (and for him to stop posting!).

 

"Terror babies".

 

Teach sex to your young-uns, little-one...or you just might get Terror Babies!

Runnnnnnnn, republicans! Runnnnnn!

 

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