Random Politics & Religion #00

Not when they are covered in BBQ sauce !

Please, we all know echidna is the master race.

*insertMcFeelyimage*

They, in fact, do! Recent studies suggest that dogs, at least, don't process death the way we do (they don't understand the "gone for good" concept), but they mourn the absence of companions, be they human or other animal.

Because serious screwing is illegal.

That's most certainly a lie. They feel slightly sticky.

Only in 27 states. And most of the Middle East.

But it's open and acceptable in France though.

I think you've got that backward. Sex for fun is illegal in the more Catholic states and most of the Middle East.

Srs sx is srs.

Or, as the internet has asked before:

Bleh

Sounds like a random number.

Random number would be 53 states.

In Republican news:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/05/the-gop-is-dying-off-literally-118035.html?ml=po#.VVteBJOLVQI

TLDR GOP is dead long live the GOP

It turns out that one of the Grand Old Party’s biggest—and least discussed—challenges going into 2016 is lying in plain sight, written right into the party’s own nickname. The Republican Party voter is old—and getting older, and as the adage goes, there are two certainties in life: Death and taxes. Right now, both are enemies of the GOP and they might want to worry more about the former than the latter.

There’s been much written about how millennials are becoming a reliable voting bloc for Democrats, but there’s been much less attention paid to one of the biggest get-out-the-vote challenges for the Republican Party heading into the next presidential election: Hundreds of thousands of their traditional core supporters won’t be able to turn out to vote at all.

The party’s core is dying off by the day.

Since the average Republican is significantly older than the average Democrat, far more Republicans than Democrats have died since the 2012 elections. To make matters worse, the GOP is attracting fewer first-time voters. Unless the party is able to make inroads with new voters, or discover a fountain of youth, the GOP’s slow demographic slide will continue election to election. Actuarial tables make that part clear, but just how much of a problem for the GOP is this?

Since it appears that no political data geek keeps track of voters who die between elections, I took it upon myself to do some basic math. And that quick back-of-the-napkin math shows that the trend could have a real effect in certain states, and make a battleground states like Florida and Ohio even harder for the Republican Party to capture.

By combining presidential election exit polls with mortality rates per age group from the U.S. Census Bureau, I calculated that, of the 61 million who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, about 2.75 million will be dead by the 2016 election. President Barack Obama’s voters, of course, will have died too—about 2.3 million of the 66 million who voted for the president won’t make it to 2016 either. That leaves a big gap in between, a difference of roughly 453,000 in favor of the Democrats.

Scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and University of Washington walk across the glacier on the Glacial Ice Sheet, Greenland. | Getty

In The Arena
Protecting Our Shared Arctic

By MARK BRZEZINSKI and BJORN LYRVALL
British Prime Minister David Cameron is shown. | Getty

Washington And The World
Right-Wing Wins Come at Too High a Price

By STAN GREENBERG

Politics
What My British Win Taught Me About 2016

By JIM MESSINA

Here is the methodology, using one age group as an example: According to exit polls, 5,488,091 voters aged 60 to 64 years old supported Romney in 2012. The mortality rate for that age group is 1,047.3 deaths per 100,000, which means that 57,475 of those voters died by the end of 2013. Multiply that number by four, and you get 229,900 Romney voters aged 60-to-64 who will be deceased by Election Day 2016. Doing the same calculation across the range of demographic slices pulled from exit polls and census numbers allows one to calculate the total voter deaths. It’s a rough calculation, to be sure, and there are perhaps ways to move the numbers a few thousand this way or that, but by and large, this methodology at least establishes the rough scale of the problem for the Republicans—a problem measured in the mid-hundreds of thousands of lost voters by November 2016. To the best of my knowledge, no one has calculated or published better voter death data before.

“I’ve never seen anyone doing any studies on how many dead people can’t vote,” laughs William Frey, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in demographic studies. “I’ve seen studies on how many dead people do vote. The old Daley Administration in Chicago was very good at that.”

Frey points out that, since Republicans are getting whiter and older, replacing the voters that leave this earth with young ones is essential for them to be competitive in presidential elections. But the key question is whether these election death rates will make any real difference. There are so many other variables that dead voters aren’t necessarily going to be a decisive factor.

“The [GOP] does rely too much on older and white voters, and especially in rural areas, deaths from this group can be significant,” Frey says. “But millennials (born 1981 to 1997) now are larger in numbers than baby boomers ([born] 1946 to 1964), and how they vote will make the big difference. And the data says that if Republicans focus on economic issues and stay away from social ones like gay marriage, they can make serious inroads with millennials.”

But what if Republicans aren’t able to win over a larger share of the youth vote? In 2012, there were about 13 million in the 15-to-17 year-old demo who will be eligible to vote in 2016. The previous few presidential election cycles indicate that about 45 percent of these youngsters will actually vote, meaning that there will about 6 million new voters total. Exit polling indicates that age bracket has split about 65-35 in favor of the Dems in the past two elections. If that split holds true in 2016, Democrats will have picked up a two million vote advantage among first-time voters. These numbers combined with the voter death data puts Republicans at an almost 2.5 million voter disadvantage going into 2016.

Gotta get that youth vote

How to: Big breasted women dancing. free abortions, legalize gay marriage and finally more big breasted women dancing !

Honestly judging from my Facebook list of friends I don't know if I would trust any of them voting or operating heavy machinery...

Going by the fact that you have Facebook friends, I wouldn't trust you to do the same...

Traditional 50, Puerto Rico, Canada, and DC.

Works for me.

The reason alot of people vote Democratic isn't because they like Dems, it's because the Republican party is toxic to them on fundamental issues. Well that and the two party system sucks but that's another story.

Gays, blacks, hispanics and Islamic folk get ***on by Republican candidates all the time in public. At least the Dems have the decency to at least paint the colorful rhetoric they give a ***.

"They lie to us better."

Sadly the truth.

Politics is theater. It's always been theatrics to some effect.

Who wants to go to a theater and be called an ISIS sympathizing, sodomite who refuses to work yet snuck across the border to steal jobs from 'real' Americans? What insane person would vote for people who actively antagonize them?

Take into consideration the obsession with social engineering rather than fiscal issues and you push more people into the Democratic camp. Or just out of voting Republican.

Most libertarians are only voting Reps because a lever for Libertarians is essentially a protest vote.

Wait a second. This:
gets no mention, but
is flagged as spelling in context?

Shakespeare -- or whoever he/she/they were who wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare, depending to which theory you subscribe -- got it right.

"All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."

and we aren't really offering anything tangible...

plus we have been sending really warped mixed messages lately.

like...we need to keep government regulation out of our daily lives!...except for the homophobic wedding cake bakers they need special government protection!

I've said before I'll say again...the problem with most "small government" advocates is that they're only proponents of small government where it benefits them, and they're still fans of government oversight where it benefits them and their ideals. And many of them are still all about the spending that goes into the defense industry.

See DOMA, that the "small government" supports really loved.

yeah but it's a lot of fun when they only got one vote in your district and you can scream WOOOOOOOOOOOOO! because you are the wingnut that voted for them... /shrug

what's weird is in '08 they got two votes and it bothered me a lot.... did they count my vote twice? or is there another crazy person in my neighborhood?....

/squints and peers out shutters

Maybe those bakers should go their own way.

Should they call it another lonely day?

You do understand don't you, that any advocacy of the different standard based on race IS in fact racist right?

Like we're talking about allowing the concept of political sensitivity and political correctness to instruct us as to when it is ok to be racist.

I.E. "it's ok to be racist by holding the black president to a different standard because we don't want people to think we're racist."

You know, we were doing just fine here and pretty much all came to an amicable agreement on that conversation, and I'm not even going to go into it with you.