President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

The "winning the overall House vote" argument is getting tiresome when it comes to trying to criticize gerrymandering.

 

It is what it is.

 

I'm not arguing gerrymandering is irrelevant, but there are other factors at play in each district.

 

It's funny to think of you envying the cleverness of Ann Coulter and others who referred to President Obama as "B. Hussein" ...

 

On health care and Raul Labrador (“Nobody dies because they don’t have access to health care.”):

“My experience as a practicing physician differs from what Rep. Labrador asserts,” David Pate, CEO of St. Luke’s Health System, told the Statesman in an email. “I remember well two patients off the top of my head.”

Pate said one woman delayed attention for a mass in her breast due to lack of health insurance. Her cancer progressed so much, Pate said, that it had metastasized widely. She died soon after coming into the emergency room.

“Had she come in when the mass first appeared, it is possible it would have been treatable and perhaps curable,” Pate said.

His second example was similar — a 19-year-old man with a heart murmur whose parents were uninsured and did not get him regular checkups.

“Finally, he got to the point where he was so short of breath that he could not lie down. He came into the emergency room and I saw him, and at that time, his heart had grown so enlarged that it filled most of his chest, leaving little room for his lungs,” Pate said.

That patient also died from what the CEO said was a treatable heart defect.

“In both of these cases, the patients died because they were uninsured and waited to get health care until their conditions were so far advanced that we could only provide comfort care until they passed away. A terrible shame,” Pate said.

J. Robert Polk, a former chief quality officer and chief medical officer at Saint Alphonsus, said Labrador’s comments “show a profound ignorance of health care and a severe lack of competency in understanding how health care works.”

“Does he believe that all anyone needs is an emergency room visit when they are in dire straights from a health issue? Emergency room visits when you are up against the wall with a health issue can save your life, but as we know, sometimes the illness is too far along and in the best of medical hands, death is at the door, or at least a hospitalization,” Polk said.

Idaho voters, health care experts astounded, angered by Labrador town hall comment

 

Le Pen is already conceding the French election. That de-escalated quickly.

 

Except for the fact that deep-blue California doesn't allow the state legislature to draw district lines.
And except for these issues, seen here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/o...-gerrymander-of-2012.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

We can quantify this effect using three different methods. First, Democrats would have had to win the popular vote by 7 percentage points to take control of the House the way that districts are now (assuming that votes shifted by a similar percentage across all districts). That’s an 8-point increase over what they would have had to do in 2010, and a margin that happens in only about one-third of Congressional elections.

Second, if we replace the eight partisan gerrymanders with the mock delegations from my simulations, this would lead to a seat count of 215 Democrats, 220 Republicans, give or take a few.

Third, gerrymandering is a major form of disenfranchisement. In the seven states where Republicans redrew the districts, 16.7 million votes were cast for Republicans and 16.4 million votes were cast for Democrats. This elected 73 Republicans and 34 Democrats. Given the average percentage of the vote it takes to elect representatives elsewhere in the country, that combination would normally require only 14.7 million Democratic votes. Or put another way, 1.7 million votes (16.4 minus 14.7) were effectively packed into Democratic districts and wasted.

 

A sentiment that would apply to many of your posts, Holmes.

 

Tough day for the Trumpists.

 

Polls lose again:

 

Uncomfortable truths are often irritating

 

You probably feel about it in much the way that Democrats did when it was used on Obama. I think that it is being used in more of a "Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander" or "Turnabout is fair play" way, though.

It's never been clever.