{"id":23287,"date":"2016-07-30T11:59:33","date_gmt":"2016-07-30T18:59:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=23287"},"modified":"2016-07-30T11:59:33","modified_gmt":"2016-07-30T18:59:33","slug":"open-thread-7302016","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2016\/07\/30\/open-thread-7302016\/","title":{"rendered":"Open Thread – 7\/30\/2016"},"content":{"rendered":"

Please pardon my brevity.  Nameless seems to have reached out and touched me with a case of Republicosis, so I’m making intermittent trips to the throne room.<\/font><\/p>\n

Jig Zone Puzzle<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

Today’s took me 3:33 (average 4:45).  To do it, click here<\/a>.  How did you do?<\/font><\/p>\n

Short Takes<\/strong>:<\/font><\/p>\n

From Daily Kos<\/a>: …<\/font>According to the Pew Research Center<\/a>, The pool of self-identified independent voters is larger than either Republicans and Democrats; but despite not being card-carrying members, they still tend to lean towards one party or another. With leanings factored in, 87% of Americans identify either directly or indirectly towards either the Republican or Democrat parties. That leaves 13% of the voting population to divvy up among third party, which ties into the second issue: party size and influence.<\/p>\n

Second, the viability of a third party Presidential campaign is directly tied to the size and influence of the third party in question. A Presidential campaign timeline looks something like this (immensely simplified):<\/p>\n

Step 1: Announce your are running.
Step 2: Win your party.
Step 3: Win enough Electoral College votes to win the national election.<\/p>\n

If you are a Republican or Democrat, Step 3 is merely difficult\u2014you have a pretty sizeable base, and you are pretty much guaranteed that some subset of that party base is going to vote for you no matter what, so winning means adding to that base in the right parts of the country to get enough votes. For any third party, they have no base to start from, which means their entire strategy revolves around Democrat and Republican attrition. In other words, they have to do twice as much work as your average Republican or Democratic candidate. In today\u2019s political climate, a third party has zero chance of winning the election.<\/p>\n

How does a third party truly have a chance? By growing the base large enough so that your built-in support base is comparable to the others. Large enough that you can win significant numbers of governor seats and Congress seats. And this is something that neither the Green Party nor the Libertarian party has done, or will have done between now and November. Instead, they treat the Presidential race as an advertising campaign for their party, hoping to draw in a few more disenfranchised Republican or Democrat voters.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s put this in concrete terms for Gary Johnson, the only third party blipping on the national poll radar. The current projections at fivethirtyeight<\/a> as of this writing give Gary Johnson 0.6 electoral votes\u2014in other words, he\u2019ll be lucky to get a single Electoral College vote anywhere in the country. But it also gives him 7.7% of the popular vote. Right now, those same projections have a  1.4% gap between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, which means that the 7.7% of the population tilting at windmills to get a single Electoral College vote for Gary Johnson could very easily put Donald Trump in the White House<\/strong>… [emphasis added<\/em>]<\/p>\n

Every lefty that listens to Regressives and votes for a third party is casting a vote for Donald Trump, the true beneficiary of those third party votes.<\/font><\/p>\n

From Media Matters<\/a>: <\/font>Fox News ignored a speech by the father of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who was killed in 2004 in the Iraq war, instead opting to air commercials during the speech. Fox later went live to a song by pop singer Katy Perry after the speech.<\/p>\n

During the final night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, PA, Khizr Khan spoke about<\/a> the honor he felt to be present at the convention with his wife, \u201cas patriotic American Muslims with undivided loyalty to our country.\u201d Khan\u2019s speech was preceded by a video that showed Hillary Clinton calling Captain Khan \u201cthe best of America\u201d and explaining the circumstances of his death, for which he was posthumously awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart.<\/p>\n

It is so typical of the Republican Rectumite Reichsministry of Propaganda, Faux Noise, to hide the truth behind Benghazi bullshit!<\/font><\/p>\n

From Alternet<\/a>: <\/font>In an extraordinary ruling<\/a>, a federal appeals court overturned a lower court ruling and granted a broad injunction<\/a> against North Carolina Republicans\u2019 sweeping voter suppression law. Crucially, the appeals court found that the legislation, which created a strict voter ID requirement, ended same-day registration, out-of-precinct voting, and pre-registration, was \u201cpassed with racially discriminatory intent.\u201d And unlike recent rulings<\/a> against new voter ID law in Texas and Wisconsin, which only ameliorated the impact of those laws, this decision blocks North Carolina\u2019s entire voter ID measure.<\/p>\n

This ruling is an enormous victory for voting rights, and not just because voter ID will no longer be required at the polls. The finding of discriminatory intent is key because it could ultimately serve as future grounds for placing North Carolina back under the Department of Justice\u2019s \u201cpreclearance\u201d regime<\/a> for 10 years.<\/p>\n

That certainly is good news. DOJ preclearance is needed in all states, with Republican legislatures, so it should be required in all states.<\/font><\/p>\n

\"0730Cartoon\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Please pardon my brevity.  Nameless seems to have reached out and touched me with a case of Republicosis, so I’m making intermittent trips to the throne room. Jig Zone Puzzle: Today’s took me 3:33 (average 4:45).  To do it, click here.  How did you do? Short Takes: From Daily Kos: …According to the Pew Research […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23287","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-open-thread","category-personal","category-politics","category-35-id","category-3-id","category-5-id","post-seq-1","post-parity-odd","meta-position-corners","fix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23287","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23287"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23287\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23287"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23287"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23287"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}