Althea
Althea told me...
Matt tends to post while drunk. His default position is typically Right Wing talking points, but every so often he illustrates a moment of clarity.
Democrats and Rural Voters
- Thread starter Mina
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Yeah, they were idiots who folded to public pressure and the lies of the Bush administration. Those of us who protested were vilified, but now we know, we were right.
Industrial production in this country is near an all-time high. We're down less than 3% from the all-time high for that, right now, and higher than at any point in US history before 2006:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/IPMAN
What changed is that automation made manufacturing less labor intense. In other words, it's not the immigrants who took those jobs, nor the poor folks in other countries. It was the robots. It's now possible to create vastly more stuff with a whole lot fewer people.
Yet, even so, there are still quite a few manufacturing jobs in the US -- about 12.7 milion:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MANEMP
That's down a lot from the late 1970's peak of 19.5 million. Consider, though, that back then, median personal income, adjusted for inflation, was just $24,193. Today it's $35,805. So, even after accounting for inflation, a typical person today is earning almost 50% more than back when we were more of a manufacturing economy. And it's not just that the typical person has a much bigger paycheck. These days, people are more likely to be covered by health insurance than back then, and we also work a whole lot fewer hours, on average, than Americans did back then. Back in '79, the average annual hours worked per worker, in the US, was 1,834. Now it's 1,767:
https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?DataSetCode=ANHRS#
Think of what that really means. If your company gave you eight extra vacation days per year, that still wouldn't be enough to drop your annual hours as much as the average American's annual hours dropped between 1979 and the present.
Meanwhile, as people moved from more dangerous manufacturing jobs to less dangerous office jobs, occupational injuries and illnesses plummeted:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/nearly-50-years-of-occupational-safety-and-health-data.htm
So, relative to when we were more of a manufacturing-based economy, we work fewer hours for more money with better benefits, with less risk to our health. Are we sure it was such a good thing to have millions more people standing around in factories pressing out plastic dog-shit by hand? I think the evidence shows that the move towards automation and outsourcing freed people up for higher-paying, safer jobs, with fewer hours and better benefits.
Good point. And there was never really a reckoning about that. While the mainstream/corporate media occasionally offered up some weak mea-culpla-type editorials about their errors in hyping the Iraq invasion (which is more than you can say for the conservative media), it didn't hurt the careers of those responsible. It was a classic case of it being better to be wrong with the right people than right with the wrong people. As far as corporate media outlets were concerned, the VERY SERIOUS PEOPLE thought invading Iraq made sense, so those who agreed were serious people, and those who didn't weren't, and the mere fact the latter group wound up being demonstrably correct doesn't matter. The NYT continues to use the same "experts" who were certain Iraq had massive arsenals of WMDs and that invading would be quick and cheap and do good things for the region. Their self-proclaimed expertise took no hit from having been dead wrong about all the most important questions of the era within their supposed field of expertise.
"So-called" is right -- it's amazing how many people just take it for granted the NYT is liberal biased.
The NYT is corporate media -- a money-making enterprise owned by a publicly traded corporation. Its biases can tilt left or right from issue to issue, depending on what the path to enhancing shareholder value looks like.
They're the same outlet that called for the Whitewater witch-hunt, and the same outlet that hyped the Iraq invasion, and which ran exhaustive coverage of the trivial story about Hillary Clinton using personal email for work -- treating it as if it were the biggest story in the world for months on end, leading up to the 2016 election. They're the outlet that dwelled on the Benghazi attack for YEARS, trying to turn it into a Democratic scandal, while they only briefly mentioned the multiple deadly attacks on our foreign outposts in Karachi, in the Bush years. They're the outlet that made Tara Reade's accusations against Biden a major election issue, with many articles over the course of months, while they barely even mentioned Kristin Anderson's accusations against Trump, which were virtually identical. They're the outlet that ran dozens of stories in the lead-up to the 2020 election about Hunter Biden's business dealings, while barely even mentioning the shady dealings of Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump, at the same time, despite the latter pair actually being government officials, rather than private citizens.
I'm not claiming the NYT is conservative-biased either. Sometimes they come down on the liberal side, especially when it comes to endorsements. But when it comes time to decide which kinds of stories to focus on, they have a strong bias in favor of covering the stories the right wants covered.
I followed the Collins race closely, and although I usually scoff at stories of stolen elections, that one is a real head-scratcher. It's not like Collins was just briefly behind in the polls so that election day might be seen as a return to form. She was behind substantially throughout the election season. Mainers really didn't like her, and they did like Gideon. Then, somehow, with no hint of strength having ever shown up in polls, Collins dominated on election day -- outperforming the polls by about 15 points.
And that's not because it was a sparsely-polled race that was under the radar, so that we were making too much of a single old poll by some obscure polling outfit, as sometimes happens. It was one of the most closely watched races, with at least eight different polling outfits polling just in the last couple months of the election, including both local newspapers and national pollsters. They ALL were showing a lead for Gideon. Yet then Collins shows up on election day and somehow took a huge number of ballots that also went to Biden. It's REALLY fishy.
He said “religion” instead of “Bibles,” but yes, he did, speaking to a largely west coast audience. If you read the whole thread it’s clear that I understood HRC made the deplorable comment. The point of it being that the liberals take a very elitist attitude towards rural and small town America. Thanks for further confirming that point, but the old “racism” shtick is getting a bit old.
Further, not only does the left take an elitist, “we know what you need better than you do” attitude toward rural and small town America, but they demand (by their policies) that we capitulate to their way of thinking, change the way we live, compromise our morals and values concerning certain public policy … just accept what they want and vote the way they want because they know better than the knuckled draggers who live in the flyover states.
The OP has been verified in the responses of those on the left in this very thread, as if those of us in rural areas needed to see such verification. Just look at the responses…rural is equated with uneducated throughout, they’re “voting against their own best interests,” called “stupid voters” and “morons,” then the obligatory “klan meeting” comment. Some things stay pretty much the same.
I make no excuses for my neighbors and fellow conservative, rural voters who have the same dim view of urban citizens … they’re just as perceptively wrong and misguided as the elitist liberals.
Althea
Althea told me...
The only takeaway I have is that people purposely lied on the polling questions.
I have never seen anything like that before.
Althea
Althea told me...
More nonsense. You lied about the black guy because that's what conservatives do. You're way off base with your opinion of Dem. policies, but I expect that from those who dwell in the Fox sewer.
What Obama ACTUALLY said, vs your racist rhetoric, is that voters in rural Pa. and other states who have seen their economies disappear, 'cling to (the issues of) guns and religion' when they vote, as they have seemingly no other reasons to vote. They believe that they have been forgotten by politicians.
At no point did he demean voters, or consider them 'lesser'. He was telling the truth about single issue voters, and saw that as a problem.
Althea
Althea told me...
I should have said 'manufacturing jobs'. As your links show, the number of people employed in manufacturing is down. Way down. Some is automation.
I don't know what 'industrial' manufacturing is?
We used to manufacture clothing and electronics here. Are there any numbers that suss out the industries?
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1) Bush said he needed the resolution to put diplomatic pressure on Iraq, but that he was still trying to avoid war.
2) the overwhelming majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives voted against the resolution, so if the decision had been left strictly to Democrats the resolution wouldn't have passed Congress and there never would have been an Iraq war
I don’t try to reason with certain posters, anymore, it’s just an exercise in futility.
These rightwing posters are obviously uncomfortable with the fact that back in 2003 they were cheerleaders the war, while virtually every liberal poster, to a man and woman, thought invading Iraq was a dumb and dangerous idea.
Monad Portal
Was it me?
Lol, no you’re always wrong, sorry!
The alt right posters forget that much of the supply chain problems involve us producing near capacity. One of the causes is how good the economy is.
Unfortunately, there is a chance the economy is overheating. We are in completely uncharted territory with the economy, in both good and bad way, so do not fully know the dangers.
I keep coming back to the statement, "Reality has a well known liberal bias."
Yep. That's the weird thing. Polls sometimes miss. But if generally they miss by one-to-four points or so. In 2020, Trump outperformed by 2.7 points, relative to the polling average. In 2016, he outperformed by 1.1 points. In 2012, Obama out-performed by 3.2. In 2008, McCain outperformed by 0.3.
Out-performing by 15 points is extraordinary, in any race where there's plenty of recent polling to work with. And it's not like there was some October Surprise, where Gideon was found in bed with a donkey and the polls just didn't have time to register that. So, it remains a mystery what happened. Maybe Mainers are just unusually dishonest to pollsters. But I'm still open to the idea that Maine's Republican Machine did something shifty.
Presumably someone has that data, but unfortunately I don't know where to find it.