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Katy Tur gets destroyed

jamesbyoung said:
Marcus, stop the nonsense. You are twisting out of context what she did say. That fact is that she did not say, did not infer, the Senate was gerrymandered.

Please stop.
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Yes, she asked if gerrymandering could help improve "the situation", presumably in the senate since that's what the discussion was about.

What do you imagine she was talking about when she brought up gerrymandering in that context?

She also seems to misuse the word "kerfuffle".
 
diz said:
Yes, she asked if gerrymandering could help improve "the situation", presumably in the senate since that's what the discussion was about.

What do you imagine she was talking about when she brought up gerrymandering in that context?

She also seems to misuse the word "kerfuffle".
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Not that she said the Senate was gerrymandered, which has been the false OP of the thread.

The argument to make something false of what she said is indeed a kerfluffle.
 
Jason Warfield said:
Given the almost daily stupidity that comes from FOX News and other conservative outlets, I guess you have to crow over the little victories, don't you?
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The stations you watch don't have a Bret Baier, Neil Cavuto, or Martha McCallum on any hour of their programming. Fox does have real journalists unlike the filth you're watching.

Fox is more than Hannity and Ingraham. I don't watch that garbage either, just like I won't watch Maddow, Tapper, Hayes, or any of the other propagandists like Hannity.

But Bret Baier is as solid of a journalist as there is today.
 
Marcus1124 said:
The precise quote: ""Is gerrymandering something that would help improve the situation? How does that sort of divide promote consensus in the Senate, or even in the House?"

While I will admit that her question's due to the rather disjointed and unclear phrasing (evidence in and of itself of her vapidness) makes it unclear precisely what she was saying, but it clearly indicates at least a question in her mind as to whether gerrymandering would have AN effect on the Senate is pretty clear.

I would put this up there as slightly less stupid than Don Lemon's serious questions as to whether the disappearance of a large aircraft could be due to it flying into a black hole.
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Gerrymandering may well have an effect on the Senate, even if Senatorial elections cannot be gerrymandered. Gerrymandering certainly has an effect on Presidential elections, as voters do consider such issues when deciding on their vote. It looked to me like she was asking whether such might be the case also in the Senate, using gerrymandering as a more general example of the kind of power play her interlocutor on the show (don't know who he is) was talking about with respect to Mitch McConnell. In other words, her question was: how do the apparently unfair practices of political parties affect consensus in the Senate or the House?

I agree the question was poorly worded. Then again, hardly anyone is on the ball with respect to their utterances all the time.
 
ashurbanipal said:
Gerrymandering may well have an effect on the Senate, even if Senatorial elections cannot be gerrymandered. Gerrymandering certainly has an effect on Presidential elections, as voters do consider such issues when deciding on their vote. It looked to me like she was asking whether such might be the case also in the Senate, using gerrymandering as a more general example of the kind of power play her interlocutor on the show (don't know who he is) was talking about with respect to Mitch McConnell. In other words, her question was: how do the apparently unfair practices of political parties affect consensus in the Senate or the House?

I agree the question was poorly worded. Then again, hardly anyone is on the ball with respect to their utterances all the time.
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Yes, obviously the most likely explanation for Katy asking if gerrymandering might be the solution for Senate minoritarianism is that she's metaphorically playing the equivalent of 3D chess while her critics are playing checkers. It's as if she's thinking 500 moves ahead in a contest her opponents can't even being to contemplate!

This seems far more plausible than the alternative possibility of "she said something stupid and now some people on teh internets feel compelled to go to ridiculous lengths to defend her".

Let's just hope that in the future MSNBC will not fail Katy by providing so-called "expert commentators" that can't keep up with her geniusy-level of genius.
 
It should be noticed that there is a school of thought that says while the Senate cannot be gerrymandered like House seats in the true sense of the word, the Senate itself giving two votes to every state regardless of population, can be considered an effort to manipulate power in Congress and thus is a type of gerrymandering.

How Republicans Gerrymandered the Senate | Washington Monthly

[FONT=&quot]One of the most important political stories of the last decade is how the Republicans gained power in both state legislatures and the House of Representatives by gerrymandering districts. But did you know that in the late 19th century, they also gerrymandered the Senate? That is the fascinating story Ian Millhiser recently told.[/FONT]
Two days before the lame-duck President James Buchanan left office, he signed legislation carving off part of Utah Territory, which stretched across most of modern-day Nevada, about a third of Colorado and some of Wyoming, to form part of what we now know as Nevada. Congress would soon pass two more bills expanding Nevada at Utah’s expense.This largely forgotten act of line-drawing enabled one of the most consequential gerrymanders in American history. Because the virtually unpopulated Nevada became its own territory, Republicans could admit it as a state just four years later. That gave the Party of Lincoln two extra seats in the Senate — helping prevent Democrats from simultaneously controlling the White House and both houses of Congress until 1893.​
[FONT=&quot]Have you ever wondered why there are two Dakotas? Same story.[/FONT]
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Please read the entire article. This article makes the claim that making many western territories into states even though they had a fraction of the population is a type of gerrymandering.

For my money, it is not exactly gerrymandering in it true sense, but the issue and the argument that goes with it is actually present.

So before we tie Katie Tur to the stake and throw the flaming torches onto the kindling, we should be aware of the dispute goes beyond a mere mistake and there indeed may be some foundation to it.
 
This is the kind of thread you get when you want to take the focus off of how badly republicans are Gerrymandering and taking voter's voices away from them.
 
diz said:
Yes, obviously the most likely explanation for Katy asking if gerrymandering might be the solution for Senate minoritarianism is that she's metaphorically playing the equivalent of 3D chess while her critics are playing checkers. It's as if she's thinking 500 moves ahead in a contest her opponents can't even being to contemplate!

This seems far more plausible than the alternative possibility of "she said something stupid and now some people on teh internets feel compelled to go to ridiculous lengths to defend her".

Let's just hope that in the future MSNBC will not fail Katy by providing so-called "expert commentators" that can't keep up with her geniusy-level of genius.
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I have no idea how you got any of that out of what I wrote. I never said she was "thinking 500 moves ahead in a contest her opponents can't even begin to contemplate." Nor did I say anything that should license that kind of inference. It doesn't take a genius to recognize that gerrymandering, as an example of unfair partisan practices, can have all kinds of indirect effects (including effects in the Senate). McConnell may feel more empowered, for example, if he recognizes it's more likely than not that Republicans will have more of an edge in the house than they should have. Continued gerrymandering may affect voter turnout in Senatorial elections. And so on. While her interlocutor was giving examples of unfair power plays in the Senate, that doesn't mean she can't just start talking about unfair power plays in general. That's how conversation sometimes works.
 
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