TrickstaPriest

I am not a fan of the NRA, but I think this is a mistake.

If Reagan hadn't gotten rid of the Fairness Doctrine for broadcast journalism, we wouldn't have this problem.  We should have not only kept it, but expanded it to include cable/satellite broadcasts in addition to traditional broadcasting.
 
Ronald Reagan, Father of Fake News.
 
Fox News doesn't do retractions because they aren't 'wrong' about things, they're intentionally lying.

I've learned that that allegation has since been walked back: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/newspolitics/trump-tears-into-lawrence-odonnell-media-over-totally-false-russia-report-all-apologize/ar-AAGvvK8?li=AAggFp5

There might be other reasons for his deference to Putin.  Like the recent revelation that Russian oligarchs cosigned Deutsche Bank's loans to him.

Several factors come to mind:
1-  Very relaxed culture.
2-  Tropical environment is easy on the body.
3-  Population is mostly Asian and they've retained enough of their cultures of origin to not balloon up to American sizes as a whole.
 
Though a quick review of the list on Wikipedia says Minnesota - a godforsaken icy wasteland -  is in 2nd place so there goes my theory.
 
 

Simply having ridings distorts the popular vote.  With a multi-party structure, Canada is a bit different, but even with two parties, and 435 seats in Congress, 218 seats are a majority.  If we assume each riding has equal population, and Party A wins 218 seats with 51% of the popular vote in each riding, that accounts for 25.6% of the popular vote.  They will control Congress even if they do not get a single vote in the other 217 ridings.
 
The Senate needs 51% of 51 seats, so 26.01% of the popular vote, although the Senate is further distorted as the lower-population states need a lot less voters to elect their candidate.
 
One issue that comes up a lot in Canada is that so much of the population is in two provinces (Ontario and Quebec) that you don't often need to count the votes in the other provinces to figure out who will form the government.  They make up over 60% of the population.  That puts a lot of political power in those two provinces.  But if we had equal seats for each province and territory, about 10% of the population could theoretically elect the majority (7 provinces and territories of 13).
 
"Fair" is a really challenging concept to pin down.
 
Some countries do count popular vote.  A party that wins 5% of the popular vote in Canada would be considered a fringe element, and would not likely win a single riding.  But in a proportional representation structure, they would get 5% of the seats, and select which of their candidates would occupy them.  Those countries tend to never have one party in a majority, and coalitions need to cooperate to form a government.  We have minority governments in Canada on occasion, also requiring two or more parties to cooperate.  This can result in a party with very few seats gaining a lot of political clout when they hold the balance of power.

Good post, but a casual fact check doesn't support this one stat. More Filipinos did die in WW2 than in the US Civil War, but not even close to twice as many. There were 57,000 Filipino military casualties and 900,000 civilian casualties in WW II. There were 620,000 military and 50,000 civilian casualties in the American Civil War. 957k is not twice 670K. To me, though, the fact that the ratios of civilian and military deaths are flipped in each war is the most disturbing part.  WW II was truly horrifying in that respect.
 
Edit: I'd never thought of Guam's famous bat guano as an economic resource before this, though it does make sense. Thanks.

Yes, but what you write is usually worth reading more than once.

On other matters, te latest ep of the public radio program On The Media interviewed historian Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire, on the history of US overseas impeialism from  guano mining in the Caribbean to today's "pointillist empire" of far-flung military bases. Fascinating stuff.
 
Of particular interest to me: The debate around the turn of the 20th century about the US' sudden new colonial empire gained through the Spanish American War (among other things). Notably, until the Afghanistan campaign the war to subjugate the Philippines was the longest in US history; and twice as many Filipinos -- American nationals, though not American citizens -- died in WW2 as Americans of any sort died in the Civil War.
 
Also, the nature of the debate the US had about that empire. People did implicitly recognize the US had reached an existential choice:
* It could expand overseas;
* It could be a democratic republic;
* It could be white-dominant.
 
Pick two of three. All three were not possible.
 
The debate was between people willing to abandon democracy by having colonies of people who were not citizens, and people who wanted to abandon imperial expansion. As Immerwahr points out, nobody suggested abandoning white supremacy by extending citizenship to conquered peoples. Indeed, much of the anti-imperial rhetoric was explicitly racist.
 
EDIT: The outcome of the debate was... mixed. Alaska and Hawaii became states; The Philippines and most of the territory seized in WW2 were eventually let go, sort of, but still hosting military bases; and Puerto Rico, Guam and a few other places are still under US sovereignty without their inhabitants being full citizens. Perhaps this should be resolved.
 
Dean Shomshak

And then won the popular vote by a respectable margin, which kiboshes the "Une3lectable Hillary" trope.
 
NOVA actually did an episode on this, looking at the election as an exercise in statistical analysis. General forecast was that she had something like a 3/4 chance of winning, IIRC. 75% is not 100% As one statistician put it, would you get on a plane that was 75% likely not to crash?
 
While there's a danger in politics of re-fighting the last election, there's also a danger of drawing the wrong lessons. I hear some Democratic grandees think the lesson is, "Don't nominate a woman." Oy. Others say the lesson is to throw minorities under the bus to pander to the white working class. Not sure that's much better.
 
The lesson I draw is how deeply the electoral college distorts elections. Consider that in 5 presidential elections since 2000, Republicans won the popular vote only once (W's second term), but received three terms in office. The reasons are not complex, though the causes behind them may be: The electorate has polarized between liberal/urban and rural/conservative, and the parties likewise. Most states are predictable based on the urban/rural percentage.
 
I am not sure what Dems need to do to beat the Party of Trump in 2020. Clearly it isn't enough to win the popular vote overall: The point spread matters too, and the locations won. I am open to suggestions. But they do need to win: Given the former Republicans I have heard who are aghast at how Trump has changed the party and abused the office, I am confident that my own distaste for the man and his party is not mere partisanship.
 
Dean Shomshak

I have the same fear, but we can’t act as though it is. Maybe I’ve seen too many Captain America movies, but we have to keep trying to fix it, even if the results are imperfect. 

My fear is that it already IS too late.

On the way to work last night, there was a woman standing in the middle of my lane on a busy street waving a blue plastic cooler around. I'd take her over Trump.

Well, she's never been particularly good at taking orders from Putin.

While I had no vote in the last American presidential election, if I had I would not have had serious reservations over voting for Hillary Clinton. I do believe her relationship to the truth is highly flexible, but that applies to many (most?) politicians. But I had no doubt that she was competent to perform the duties of the office, based on her past experience and demonstrable effectiveness. Hillary's biggest drawback was being seen, justifiably, as the ultimate political insider, the candidate chosen through "machine politics" as pinecone puts it, at a time when the American public was fed up with the dysfunctional, elitist politics-as-usual crowd dominating the federal scene. The "machine" should have recognized that, and they paid for their arrogance.
 
Trump's appeal in that political climate was the perception that he was a political outsider (he never was, of course), and his populist rhetoric, which is the easiest platform to get elected on and hardest to govern from. I was convinced as soon as Trump started spouting off in debates that he was dangerously incompetent for the office of POTUS, so Hillary seemed an acceptable if not ideal alternative. But none of us could have foreseen the magnitude of disaster President Trump would become.
 
As Abraham Lincoln said, "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power."

Well I disagree on some level, but I don't understand this at all. Just like all armies seem to try fighting the last war over, all "politicos" seem to want to re fight the last election. Trump is a total dumpster fire of a pres, but if you're trying to use that to say Hillary, or one just like her, is a good choice, You run the real risk of being over run by other forces yet again. Without Hillary Trump could not have won...that's on the machine politics that dominate both modern parties.

Honestly, I can easily envision French Revolution level out rage...
or American voter level apathy.
I don't know which I dread more.

Edit: Old Man's post gave me enough information to find out what was meant by the OP. I had to dig for the result, though, as it's apparently no longer fresh enough to appear near the top of the page for either Google or various news sites, and I've been mostly away from news sites for the majority of the day. Amazon's new office building in Hyderabad is still trending near the top, though. It shows what's a priority in the minds of news organizations.

And an AP article a couple days ago says Evangelical leaders are entirely satisfied with Trump's performance and predict Evangelicals will vote for him in even higher percentages in 2020.
 
Comparing himself to God and Jesus? Pfft. What's a little blasphemy, so long as he appoints anti-abortion, anti-LGBT+ judges?
 
Dean Shomshak

Well, now I'm sad
 
*Sigh* 
 
 

The "two" sides loathing each other is a relatively recent phenomenon. Up until the last couple of decades, congressmen and senators of each party socialized with each other after hours. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neil would have drinks together after hours even though they were diametrically opposed on many policies.. Bob Dole was famous for loathing the small-government conservatives within his own party but getting along with Democrats quite well. George W. Bush tried to appoint a life-long Democrat to the Supreme Court and seemed genuinely puzzled why people within his own party were objecting to his choice. Bush Sr., in his day, won the Iowa caucuses as a pro-choice Republican.
 
Even today, I have the distinct impression that most politicians aren't sincere in their beliefs: they say whatever message they want to display to the cameras and their constituents but that message doesn't necessarily have much to do with anything other than their assumed persona.
 
I'm not sure that there's two definable sides, much less that it's a long-term situation.

I see the opposite, actually. There’s better writing everywhere, on TV, in theaters, and in print. And there’s a lot of it. The problem is finding it since there is that much more content available now.  DC/Marvel properties alone have more hours of shows than I could ever watch. And I’m immortal. 

Most print stuff is going the way of the dodo, just like brick and mortar stores.  Pretty soon we'll buy everything from Amazon...meanwhile the actual Amazon is also going the way of the dodo.
 
A Golden Age 2.0?!?!  Wow, you guys have a lot more faith that humanity as we know it will last more than another 30-40 years than I do...but that's probably better discussed in a different thread.

So do I, but $4 for a book that takes maybe five minutes to read and then becomes a storage problem is... not ideal.  Manga has had a better physical model for a while now--fewer colors, longer format.  I see lots of people hanging out in the manga aisle at B&N* reading.  That doesn't happen with American comics for several reasons: expense, and the impossibility of following stories, are the two biggest ones that I see.
 
 
* Speaking of endangered business models.

Large corporate owners don't know how to preserve a business, let alone grow one.  That would require them to know something about an actual business.   Since all they know how to do is count zeros, that's all they do.  If an enterprise is not profitable enough to tickle their egos and bank balances, they shut things down.