A quote about the 2016 presidential election

Strong governments, you gotta watch john adams miniseries. Tom hanks produced it. Nina Gold was the casting director.

This version of baba seems like an IMDB bot.

Me too! I am a Federaleist! And no, I don't have to show you my badge. BTW why is there a bite-sized chunk missing out of his hat? I'm all for a "high fiber" diet but come on now!

Except that's not quite how it worked. In the early '90s, there was a diversity of political voices on talk radio. Even within liberal and conservative groups, you had a variety of talk show hosts, with varying opinions. Then, around the mid-90s, Clear Channel began buying up stations, and, regardless of show ratings, dumped those programs which weren't owned by Clear Channel, replacing them with their own. This is how certain talk show hosts began to dominate the airwaves in the major markets.

So you wound up with a handful of nationally syndicated talk show hosts who drive the discussion, because operating a radio station isn't a cheap business, and few people were willing to risk spending a lot of money in an industry that's not the massive profit center it once was. It'd be like buying a newspaper today. Podcasting is slowly taking the place of the diversity we once had in the radio market, but I'm still meeting people who not only don't listen to podcasts, but they don't even know what they are! Its possible that the internet will completely supplant other sources of news and information and entertainment in the near future, and then we might see a broadening of discussion. Which would be a good thing. Let's get the Libertarian Party to the same level of national recognition that the Republicans have, and the Green Party to that of the Democrats.

Is the "comedy value" worth the human cost?

Definitely. Obama's death toll is in the hundreds of thousands but watching him blame everybody else is totally worth it.

Yup, that retcon nonsense, or clear channel provided conservative water in a desert of liberal ideology & NPR that comprised the entire spectrum pre-clear channel in the mid-90s.

The market provided, and the consumers (and their apparent demand for an alternative to lib-speak radio) responded.

The fact that your nonsense garners such support on this board reflects not an accurate assessment of the past but wf current active membership's bias.

Actually, if you had paid attention to what I said, it wasn't solely one political view which got pushed out by Clear Channel. It was a number of other conservative radio hosts who also had their shows canceled. Chuck Harder was one conservative radio host who was beating Limbaugh in the ratings, but since Clear Channel didn't own his show, when they bought stations which carried his show they dumped it for one that he owned.

I always liked the Jerry Doyle show. He's not only conservative, he was on Babylon 5.

Reality is this: Chuck Harder wasn't bringing in the numbers that Rush Limbaugh was bringing in. Limbaugh, love him or hate him, put AM radio back in front of America's attention.

The Wikipedia entry on Harder disagrees, as do the ratings numbers for the time when Harder was on the air. Nor did Rush put talk radio on the map. If you watch the final episodes of the ORIGINAL WKRP, you'll see that folks in the radio industry were already talking about shifting AM stations to talk formats. (Fictional show, but the creator and many of the writing staff had all worked in radio before getting into TV.)

Another thing that Clear Channel would do is if they bought a station in a market where non-Clear Channel stations carried programs, they would pull those shows off the other stations and move them to the station they owned. In some markets, this hurt the stations which had a top-ranked show yanked out from under them. In other markets, it damaged the show.

In Nashville, for example, they yanked Art Bell from a high powered station owned by a competitor, and moved it to a pissant AM radio station which didn't have nearly the same coverage area. His show promptly plummeted in the ratings in this area because of it.

Nonsense. If that were true, Democrats would not have won the popular vote in five of the last six Presidential elections.

Bill Clinton never won the popular vote. You're 3 of 9.

Yes he did, both times in fact. In fact only 4 US presidents have ever been elected having lost the popular vote.

(Of course you're now going to say that winning the popular vote means getting over 50% rather than winning the most votes, so I'll just cut that nonsense off before it gets started).

No, he didn't. In 1992 Republicans split between Bush and Perot, leaving Bill with 43%. Do you know what the electoral college normally looks like with a 57-43 win in the popular vote? I'll give you a hint. In 1984 the popular vote was 59-41 and the electoral college was 525 to 13.
In 1996 Clinton got 49% of the vote, yet in 2012 Obama beat Romney by getting 51%.

Ross Perot ran as an independent in 1992; the Republican candidate was George HW Bush. Clinton got more votes than either of them, and he got the most votes of any candidate again in 1996.

Winning the popular vote doesn't require an absolute majority. @gturner is lying again and ought not to be entertained.

I thought it was inferred that he meant by "winning the popular vote" actually meant "winning a majority of the popular vote".

It's a Republican thing - ever since Clinton won. "Oh!! Oh, No, he did not!! There are ONLY two parties and one candidate MUST get the majority!!!!" [heads explode all over Conservatopia]

You mean implied, not inferred. And no, it's not implied since they're entirely different things.

The word you're looking for is "plurality". Louisiana requires a candidate to win a majority or there's a run-off election between the top two candidates. It ensures that the winner actually has a majority and thus prevents government by a minority, thus helping give the winner at least some small mandate instead of being a place-holder that the majority of citizens voted against.

Close enough. That is like bitching about people using the terms "download" and "upload" interchangeably.

No, the words we're looking for are the ones we're using. The popular vote can be won with either a plurality or a majority, and you're the only one who is trying to confuse the issue.

The United States presidential election does not have "run off" elections. Whoever wins the majority of votes - majority, as in "the most" - wins the election. Period. Full stop. Shut the fuck up about it.

And that's how a Democrat get into office with most people voting against the Democrat, which is how we ended up with wildly racist Democrats like Woodrow Wilson.

If you don't like it, run for office and put forth a bill to change it. But, Bill Clinton won the election in 1992. Period.

Yes, he did, even though the majority of Americans voted against him.

We should, though.

That may well be. I don't agree. Neither did the founding fathers. But, if you think so, take it to your representative for a vote in the legislature and see what happens.

The VP was a runoff election for decades.