TexasCHLforum.com

Liberty wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote: To put that in perspective, Johnson and Stein combined got 105,406 votes. In other words, democrats have come perilously close to flipping Arizona.

Trump got 49.5% of the vote, Clinton 45.4%, Johnson 3.9%, and Stein 1.2%. Combined, democrats, libertarians, and greens account for 50.5% of the vote, to the republicans' 49.5%.

...
Given:

1. Arpaio's reputation vis-a-vis illegal immigration, and given
2. the democrats' opposition to border enforcement, and given
3. the official libertarian platform of being for open borders, and given
4. the green party's similar platform,

Please don't confuse Libertarian's with leaning Democrat. although free trade used to be a conservative issue. Smaller government is the the heart of Libertarian platform, while open borders is a minor side issue which Liberterians are split on. There may be some somewhere, but I have never met a Libertarian who would vote for a Democrat, while many may vote for certain Republicans if they felt their backs were against the wall. If there were no Green Party or Libertarian Party, Trump probably would have one the popular majority.
Arpio got beat because he is facing criminal charges, facing possible prison time. The idea that Maricopa County Sherrif could serve his term from prison was a big concern there.

Oh, I'm not confused about that. Actually, I am somewhat sympathetic to the libertarian party. I call myself a "liberative conservatarian".......meaning I'm an independent with some libertarian leanings. Nonetheless, I can still see some libertarians as being motivated to "vote against" Arpaio, by voting for his opponent. Maybe not all libertarians (who tend not to behave monolithically anyway), but some - perhaps enough to tip the balance against his reelection. Greens would have probably chosen the opponent as well, unless they were running their own candidate . . . .which doesn't seem likely.

RHenriksen wrote:

Skiprr wrote:

Soccerdad1995 wrote:Putting aside the irony that they are in agreement with sheriff Joe Arpaio....

You mean ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio. Unfortunately, on Tuesday Sheriff Joe lost his bid for a seventh term in Maricopa County. He lost to Democrat Paul Penzone.

http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/loc ... /93534098/

That's an awful shame. Would be interested to read an (independent) analysis of why that election broke to the left.

Arizona has been flooded lately with immigrants of "uncertain status". The Aztlan movement is growing there in the south of the state. Hippies are taking over the north. Here's how the presidential vote broke out there: 1,021,154 votes for Trump, 936,250 votes for Clinton, 80,151 votes for Johnson, and 25,255 votes for Stein. That's a total of 2,784,174 votes cast. The Clinton votes equal 91.7% of the Trump vote, or a difference of 84,904 votes. To put that in perspective, Johnson and Stein combined got 105,406 votes. In other words, democrats have come perilously close to flipping Arizona.

Trump got 49.5% of the vote, Clinton 45.4%, Johnson 3.9%, and Stein 1.2%. Combined, democrats, libertarians, and greens account for 50.5% of the vote, to the republicans' 49.5%.

Given:

1. Arpaio's reputation vis-a-vis illegal immigration, and given
2. the democrats' opposition to border enforcement, and given
3. the official libertarian platform of being for open borders, and given
4. the green party's similar platform,
   
   and
5. assuming that the party percentages in Maricopa county are roughly similar to the rest of the state,
   
   then
6. it is a fairly safe bet all of the democrats, libertarians, and green party voters in Maricopa county had enough of a majority to oust Arpaio from office.

I created a spreadsheet showing how each of the states voted, stats taken from CNN (link is on the spreadsheet). Feel free to use it.

Papa_Tiger wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:

bblhd672 wrote:This weekend I made the comment to family members that President Trump could greatly improve the education system in America by abolishing the Department of Education and telling "the people" that education of the children is their local, county/parish, state responsibility.

Then while all the teacher's unions and education lobbyists are screaming and protesting, find another federal "Department of" to shut down and return the responsibility to the states. Continue until federal government is out of the people's everyday lives.

OK, now you're just making sense. Everyone (on the LEFT) knows that's just stupid.

But, but, but... without Federal oversight how will we know that all children are receiving the same quality education across the nation?

We DO know, thanks to federal oversight, that they are all receiving the same CRAPPY education!

Without federal oversight, it might improve considerably.

Corrected my own blooper above......

bblhd672 wrote:This weekend I made the comment to family members that President Trump could greatly improve the education system in America by abolishing the Department of Education and telling "the people" that education of the children is their local, county/parish, state responsibility.

Then while all the teacher's unions and education lobbyists are screaming and protesting, find another federal "Department of" to shut down and return the responsibility to the states. Continue until federal government is out of the people's everyday lives.

OK, now you're just making sense. Everyone (on the left) knows that's just stupid.

{....EDITED TO CORRECT THE WORD IN RED. I HAD TYPED "RIGHT" BY ACCIDENT..... }

karder wrote:This is typical of the left. They embrace rule of law when it protects their ideology and shun it when it doesn't. They cheered on Obama's pen and phone, but will scream to high heaven about separation of powers if Trump tries to circumvent Congress with executive actions. To the Liberal, immigration laws are the responsibility of the Federal Government when local authorities question the citizenship of a detainee, but they will turn around establish sanctuary cities at every opportunity and proudly defy federal law at the same time. With the Left, everything is about ideology and the ends justify the means. That is why Liberals often beat up on Conservatives successfully. To the Conservative the law is primary, to the Liberal the ideology is primary. The Liberal will use the law to block and deflect the Conservative but the Liberal cannot be blocked or deflected by the law he doesn't respect in the first place.

Karder, you've hit the nail square on its head here. Respect for the rule of law over ideology is exactly what separates the left from the right, and you're spot on that this is how liberals club conservatives into submission. But there is also another factor in play, and that is the degree of value placed on democratic processes by either side. The reason the left believes that ideology trumps the rule of law is that they fundamentally do not believe in the legitimacy of democratic government — by which I mean the processes of a democratic republic, not the democrat party.

Existing in a semi-permanent psychologically immature state, they require instant gratification, like a giant Baby Huey; and if they do not receive it, then the tantrum is mighty, and their giant diaper overflows with powerfully odoriferous "sentiment" — of which the rest of us have to either clean it up or learn to live with it. they are only able to break free of that psychological immaturity when their efforts fail, and they get hungry enough to realize that their degrees in women's studies and gender biases in ethno-musicology will not put the tofu on the table, and they must [GASP!] get a real job in the real world. That is exactly when they will come to realize that their years wasted in the protective cocoon of college, sculpting themselves into the perfect snowflake, have prepared them only for flipping burgers and asking if you want fries with that out in the real world. It is hard enough to know that you are graduating with an engineering degree and $100K in student load debt, but with the knowledge that your degree will get you a good job, and that eventually your debt will be paid off. But to take on that kind of debt, only to learn that your degree has prepared you only for a minimum wage job is a bitter pill to swallow. And so they refuse to swallow it. If you've spent your 4-6 years of college crafting yourself into a special kind of snowflake, then your natural inclination will be to blame the system, rather than your own fecklessness.

There is a word to describe the outcome: darwinism........as in social darwinism. Those who have deliberately made themselves unfit for survival, are now protesting a situation of their own making, and they expect for the rest of us to simply hand over our gains in the social, economic, and political marketplace so that they don't have to face the consequences of their poor decision-making. Tough love demands that we allow them to experience the fruits of their fecklessness. Without allowing them to experience it, we condemn them to a lifetime of fruitless dissatisfaction, always pursuing the gains made by others, instead of their own gains. It is therefore our social obligation to let them fail in life. Those of them who still possess an inner spark of humanity will realize the error of their ways, stop digging, and begin to pull themselves up out of the pit they've dug for themselves to improve upon their lives. They should be applauded, the same way we applaud someone who was anti-gun and becomes a 2nd Amendment supporter. We owe it to the ones who won't stop digging, to keep shoveling the dirt back into their holes, so that they keep occupied and leave the rest of us alone until the point where they come to realize the fruitlessness of their endeavors and begin to pull themselves up out of their holes. Eventually, the ones who never learn to stop digging will die off.

In the meantime, we have a most important duty ahead of us, and that is to recapture and restructure the education of our youth. The single biggest error we have made as a society (driven by liberals, of course) is to restructure primary and secondary education to prepare students for college, instead of preparing them for life. College is neither a legitimate nor a destined-to-be-successful end goal for a large number of students. Over the years, I have watched schools shed their vocational and athletic programs, to keep funding available for college prep programs. To what avail? I have nothing against getting a college education, and the opportunity should be there for those so inclined, but so should there be opportunities for someone to pursue a living in the trades. In the REAL world, when a high school graduate plumber can make $150K per year and a college graduate with a degree in underwater basket weaving makes $10/hour at Mickey D's, whose interest is being served by continually shunting children into the university systems? It isn't the children's interests; I can tell you that.

The education system has become just another self-justifying industry, with an overall really crappy product. It went from being justified by the success of its product — employed, responsible, productive adults — to being justified by producing hordes of graduates who are, just like the educators themselves, of no use to a functioning society. Socrates and his methods, not being convenient to the creation of a socialist utopia, have been abandoned by institutions of higher learning; critical thinking in the nation's universities is a dead art, and therefore we get armies of snowflakes, armed with nothing more than closed minds and a committed belief in the "lessons" of their own indoctrination, who threaten rebellion with the same degree of fecklessness with which they approached their own "educations".

Fortunately, they are ideologically opposed to having firearms in the hands of private citizens, so........... good luck with that.

bblhd672 wrote:Most likely these protests are organized and funded by the losing side of the election.

Most likely they are organized and funded by George Soros and his splinter groups which were doing the DNC's dirty work during the campaigns.

Oldgringo wrote:

The Annoyed Man wrote:All of this is the natural byproduct of people placing a higher value on their grievance identity than on their citizenship.......or on obtaining citizenship if they don't already have it. They are more interested in carving their own place in the world, than they are in being part of the greatest nation in world history.

Frankly, I'm not surprised, as there are also plenty of people on the social/political right who are beginning to feel the same way. And I think this emphasis on assigning a higher value to one's grievance identity rather than on citizenship is itself the natural byproduct of a leviathan fedgov't which has grown too large to either be responsive to the needs of the citizenry, or protective the rights of the citizenry.

...and/or an entrenched political party that will do/say anything for votes.

Most definitely that too.

RoyGBiv wrote:I'm feeling a little this way today...



And I'd like to find one of these protest rallys so I can stand along the route and post this sign....

Sign.jpg

I am stealing and facebooking that!

All of this is the natural byproduct of people placing a higher value on their grievance identity than on their citizenship.......or on obtaining citizenship if they don't already have it. They are more interested in carving their own place in the world, than they are in being part of the greatest nation in world history.

Frankly, I'm not surprised, as there are also plenty of people on the social/political right who are beginning to feel the same way. And I think this emphasis on assigning a higher value to one's grievance identity rather than on citizenship is itself the natural byproduct of a leviathan fedgov't which has grown too large to either be responsive to the needs of the citizenry, or protective the rights of the citizenry.