(August 19, 2014 at 10:08 pm)Polaris Wrote: Republicans may win by a narrow margin because the Democrats have been sabotaging themselves since Obama took office (well starting in 2006, which is why the Tea Party had such an unexpected success).The Tea Party is unpredictable, and might hurt the GOP more than help it. They seem to strike a chord among the rank-and-file conservatives and pseudo-libertarians much more so than the Green Party does among liberals. Because the USA has limited itself to two distinct political parties, the main effect any third party has is to drain votes from one of the two. The extreme polarization of politics here makes a mockery of the democratic ideal. We're only one choice short of having no choice at all.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
