You have no ****ing idea what the stimulus bill did, how can you say it was lighting money on fire? I'm not telling you the stimulus was a good idea, I'm telling you that you would fail, miserably, any sort of quiz on "what was actually in the stimulus". That doesn't bother you?

That whole Wisconsin thread was full of you breathlessly relaying **** you heard about "union thugs" that ended up not being true. You fell for the cleanup cost story, if you want another one.

I don't give a **** if you're a right winger, this isn't about your political views. This is about how often you guys say factually incorrect **** on the internet, stuff that is trivially easy for you to check, stuff from sources you SHOULD KNOW are unreliable.

I would score as well if not better than you on such a test.


Also, the cleanup costs were a story I saw on your beloved interwebs (AP I think?) and not something I heard on the radio.

LOL prop bet?

How much, as a ballpark, of the ARRA was lighting money on fire?

We might want to nail down a better definition of wastefulness first. I'm sure there was very little money, if any, that was literally thrown into furnaces.

In fact, most of it likely went to the state budgets to cover the massive holes in their entitlement spending.

Some of it went to roads (herp derp stimulate road construction for 9 months then lay them back off), envirowackoism, and ******ed transportation projects like the several trains that Wisconsin has killed off.

Our own state (WI) created something like 8000 jobs with it. Jim Doyle (our then Governor) put out a report that said 75% of those jobs were in the public sector.

The money was spread all over the place. As far as I'm concerned, most of it was wasted.

Frankly, a better plan would have been to take that $800 billion and cut checks for $2500 to every man woman and child with a social security number and a verified mailing address. I don't care about the disenfranchised homeless people or wandering gypsies, because they didn't get any benefit from it anyway.

A family of 4 with a check for $10k burning a hole in their pocket would have done more stimulating than resurfacing four and a half inches of highway 74 in Sussex, Wisconsin with that same $10k.

Sorry, derailing thread by defending myself against FlyWf of all people.

Subject dropped. Feel free to PM me if you want to continue dick waving, brohan.

Not really, I'm just asking your opinion. Again, this isn't about like the actual merits of the stimulus, it's about whether you know what the stimulus did. Which you don't:

Do you know that's a question that can be definitively answered, right? What percentage of the stimulus went to state entitlement spending(? most entitlements are at the federal level) is a number you can calculate out to however many decimal places you could need.

just looking at the list about 1/3 of it was in tax cuts, kinda the equivalent of sending everyone a check. http://projects.nytimes.com/44th_president/stimulus


Considering a vote can go either way, should it not be more important to allow people to exercise their right to vote then it is to prevent those who may have lost that right? Why should law abiding citizens be penalized for the incompetence of the state? How can anyone honestly argue that most people without an id will go to get an id for the sole purpose of voting when we can't even get a majority of people to show up to vote as is, even when we declare election day a national holiday?

"A lot" compared to what? A couple hundred people coming to my backyard barbeque is a lot. A couple hundred people voting illegally over the span of 10 years (i.e. 20/yr) compared to the millions who voted legally each year is not a lot. It's a dog's fart in a hurricane.

I am pretty sure Election Day is NOT a national holiday in the USA.

I thought I was taking crazy pills, but yeah, it's definitely not a holiday lol.

I guess we can agree to disagree on this one. But a State has a duty to make sure only people who are eligible to vote, vote. Allowing indviduals extra votes deligitimizes the voting process just as much as turning people away from the polls. Tieing the states hands to prevent them from taking even minimal steps to insure the process is fair and accurate is wrong.

Putting a very small burden on the voting public (that does not have id's maybe 1%- .5% of the population) to show up at a designated place to 1) show they are eligible to vote 2) have their picture taken 3) obtain a free id is not going to cause "millions" to be prevented from voting. It is no more strenuos then the voting itself. In fact it can be done after the fact so no one is turned away from the polls.

I think it is amusing that when the Dems challenged the Indiana law they could really not show how it would prevent 1 person from voting or turn 1 person away from the polls and it was clear that it is a very tiny number of people that would be effected or placed with any sort of burden of coming back to show id/obtain id. But you spout off that it will be "millions", without any facts and act like it's gospel. I would think that if it was "millions" they could have presented a little better case in Indiana. You also spout the "couple 100" over 10 years as gospel when no one has any idea. The voting polls have very little if any security. Due to the feds requirements on how voting rolls are kept, it is clear that a large number of people are on the rolls who should not be and it would be easy to cast ballots in their name. Easier then showing up and obtaining a free id. I think that the Supreme Court got this issue right.

While it's not a holiday an employer does have to ensure you have time provided to go vote if your shift would prevent you from getting to the polls. I think some states have laws saying you can't be docked pay for going to vote also.

I think it's pretty amusing that you think the republicans would be spending tons of money on this and making it a national initiative through a special foundation, where they introduce legislation in 38 states, if they didn't think they could turn away largely democrat voters.

Or have you already blocked out all the non-voter-ID initiatives they did like closing polls on Sunday, ending early voting, closing precincts in poor districts, etc?

Oh forgot R's are evil and everything is part of some grand plot to steal elections.

Lol the second part is undeniably true to anyone with a brain who has read this thread. Saying it sarcastically doesn't make that any less so.

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/09/01-3

Are you going to deny this group exists, deny they are trying to disenfranchise voters, or just refuse to acknowledge this post?

The NY Times weighs in...

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/op....html?src=recg

BS - everyone knows the NY Times is just the librul equivalent of Breitbart. I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree and teach the controversy on this one.

OK, I agree with you this far.
And then you go and contradict yourself. If "allowing indviduals extra votes deligitimizes the voting process just as much as turning people away from the polls," then a measure that turns more people away from the polls is itself also bad. If it turns away more legit voters than it prevents illegit voters, then it's bad on balance.

This is two to three orders of magnitude more people than the number of people voting illegitimately.

Yes it is. Voting you show up, wait in line, and then vote. At the DMV, you show up, wait in a longer line, and then you have to have all manner of documentation. And if you forget your marriage certificate, you have to do it again.

But if you don't do it in the proscribed window, your vote still gets canceled.

Dude you granted me the "millions" number in your own post! If, as you said yourself, 0.5% of the population doesn't have ID, the population is 308 MILLION people. People of voting age is around 230 million. 0.5% of that is, guess what, 1.15 million people. Even if we assume a below-average 40% turnout for this crew, that's 460,000 people nationwide who'd be prevented from voting. That's four orders of magnitude larger than the number of people who've actually been prosecuted for vote fraud over the last 10 years (so effectively, it's more like 5 orders of magnitude larger), three orders of magnitude larger than most estimates of ineligible voters who've voted per election (but who weren't prosecuted), and still two orders of magnitude larger than the largest example of ineligible people voting, a scenario which, mind you, would not have been prevented by an ID law.

Based on your own estimates, the number of people who'd be prevented from voting due to ID laws is much larger than the number of people who vote ineligibly. You are advocating preventing 100 if not 1000 people from voting legally to stop one person from voting illegally.

Dude, read the reports. People are pouring over the voter records, scrutinizing every signature, and crossreferencing every registration. At the behest of the republicans trying to trump up fear of ineligible minorities voting en masse for democrats, they've invested a ton of time in this. The methodologies are laid out in the links you and Inso0 provided. Sure, there's some uncertainty, but in every case but the Colorado example, the number of ineligible people who voted is dwarfed by human error in record keeping, and best estimates of how many people who voted ineligibly is in the hundreds. You can try to say that "No one knows how much fraud is going on!" Sure. You know what that is? Guess what, it's a logical fallacy. It's called the argument from ignorance. But guess what, not everyone is ignorant here. Sure, there are some large error bars on the exact numbers of ineligible voters, but we can be quite confident that the order of magnitude is correct because of how counting people works. The order of magnitude of the level of ineligible voting is small compared to the order of magnitude of the numbers of people who'd be prevented from voting, even according to your sources and your estimates.

GOP plot to disenfranchise taco enthusiasts exposed.
Guy was eating at Taco Bell, clearly he couldn't afford a decent meal, how could he be expected to have a state issued ID?

You just wasted your 5k posts milestone on that?

Yeah, I don't keep track of that kind of stuff.

who makes a huzzah over 5k posts?

What are you talking about? That's on the short list for best post of the year. It's amazing.

As far as my posts go, I'd say it was up there.

Um, I have a salaried, non-union job, and my employer would, quite rightly, tell me to go pound sand if I told her I was going to take time off from billing time and earning her money to go vote. I'm quite sure there is such a law, but I don't think it's my employer's job to subsidize me exercising my right to vote, and most professionals I know feel the same way. Everyone I worked with during the last election cycle for whom voting was important figured out a way to get to the polls without quoting a statute to our CEO.