What a farce, taking a nice DFH word, with positive connotations, and co-opting it with political newspeak.

The two party system has turned into a complete farce. The participants have either sold out or cashed in, depending on the point of view. Congressional districts are gerrymandered safe and money talks.

I could teach these cabals of bumbling buffoons a thing or two about partying. Let's party with some Mardis Gras Indians while examining the situation.

Political parties, Funk that! Turn up The Wild Magnolias, Party is one of those songs that sounds best loud.

If I ask you whether you would like to party, you can feel secure knowing that I am not talking about Democrats or Republicans.

Sex, Society, and Politics: The Effects of Sex And Class on Political Party Affiliation

Depending on the geographic location in the United States, political party affiliation can be a crucial part of social life. How you choose your friends, your outlook on key political policies, your ideal government, and your public conduct are only a few of many life choices that can be affected by political party affiliation. Although there are many factors that have been associated with these differences, this text will focus on two key factors: social class and sex. Social class and sex have been analyzed and identified as controlling agents in selecting a political party affiliation. In order for one to understand the connections between social class, sex, and political party affiliation, there must be a universally agreed upon definition for each variable. I would first like to define sex and clarify why I employ the use of sex and not gender as a variable of choice.

Sex is affiliated with the biology of one‟s identity, whereas gender is affiliated with the masculine and feminine characteristics exhibited by a person (Hatemi, McDermott, Bailey, and Martin, 2011). A biological female is not necessarily feminine and a biological male is not always masculine. Although masculinity and femininity (and therefore gender) may play a role in political party affiliation, the focus of this research requires that gender be placed aside and sex be used as the biological control factor. “It is important to decouple sex from gender in predictions of voting behavior because it is not clear that they predict the same outcome…The cast majority of political behavior research implicitly assumes that sex and gender represent commensurate and interchangeable measures for predicting political preferences or behaviors” (Hatemi et. al. 2011). Assumptions such as these are only damaging to discourse on the topic because it does not have empirical evidence to support it. Therefore, removing gender in a way removes a bias that may interfere in the determination of one‟s sex by giving them a label that is not biologically consistent with their identity.

2016 Election: Party Platforms on Cannabis

If you are a one-issue voter, that issue being cannabis re-legalization, then the Libertarian Party gets your vote. Given the opportunity the Libertarians would lead us to re-legalized cannabis. What do we know about where the other two parties say they stand on this issue?

In the upcoming election party platform, the Democrats say, “Because of conflicting laws concerning marijuana, both on the federal and state levels, we encourage the federal government to remove marijuana from its list as a Class 1 Federal Controlled Substance, providing a reasoned pathway for future legalization.”

Well, I guess that’s better than a “fuck you.” You can find the complete, original post on the Dems HERE.

Now, over at Republican HQ, “Dale Jackson, a heating and air-conditioning man and father of an 8-year-old autistic son, flew up to the site of the Republican National Convention on Monday, to ask his party’s platform committee to endorse the use of medicinal marijuana where appropriate.

He wanted to take Georgia’s fight national.

Jackson found a delegate who would pitch the idea, but his luck ended there. The 112-member committee that is currently drafting policy positions for the 2016 presidential contest rejected it out of hand, by a voice vote of two-thirds or more.

The Repubs wont even discuss cannabis “where medically appropriate.” I apologize for my earlier kick at the Dems. So maybe it comes down to this — is this the election in which enough votes shift to the Libertarians making them national players, or is it more important to keep the racist, xenophobic bigot Donald Trump out of the White House, and importantly for cannabis, keep Chris Christie out of the Office of the Attorney General? This is today’s question. Discuss amongst yourselves and let’s hear what you think.
Complete original post on the Repub side is HERE.

During my college days, I belonged to the F.A.R.T. party. Friday Afternoon Recreation Time convened every Friday, starting at noon, on the Cathederal of Learning lawn.

Everyone was welcome. Just bring what you have, a couple doobies, a six pack, a frisbee or the girls from across the hall. The weekend has begun.

Around our house, there is a running joke, borrowed from an Elvin Bishop song banter, "Best party I was ever at, there was just two people". It is a good dad line to pull out when the kids start talking about their exploits..

Here in the USA, we need more parties!

Australians can vote for the Sex Party, Hemp Party and Smokers' Rights Party in this week's election

THE AUSTRALIAN SEX party is just one of 50 minor players on the ballot in the Australian election.
Voters sick of the Liberal-Labor duopoly in Australian politics have plenty of choice at polls on Saturday with a car enthusiasts’ party, the Marijuana (Hemp) party, and other parties with no policies in the running.
While Malcolm Turnbull’s Liberals or the Labor party led by Bill Shorten will be elected to high office, minor party alliances can hold the balance of power in the upper house Senate.

Who Drinks More: Liberals or Conservatives?

Liberals, according to a new paper in the Journal of Wine Economics by Pavel A. Yakovlev and Walter P. Guessford of Duquesne University. The paper, “Alcohol Consumption and Political Ideology: What’s Party Got to Do with It?,” looks at alcohol consumption and voting patterns from 1952 to 2010 and finds that as states become more liberal politically, beer and spirit consumption increases, while wine consumption goes down.

The abstract:

Recent research in psychology and sociology has established a connection between political beliefs and unhealthy behaviors such as excessive alcohol, tobacco, and illegal drug consumption. In this study, we estimate the relationship between political ideology and the demand for beer, wine, and spirits using a longitudinal panel of fifty U.S. states from 1952 to 2010. Controlling for various socioeconomic factors and unobserved heterogeneity, we find that when a state becomes more liberal politically, its consumption of beer and spirits rises, while its consumption of wine may fall. Our findings suggest that political beliefs are correlated with the demand for alcohol.

The remaining DFHs must come together and party!

Republicans are from Nashville, Democrats are from Funkytown

It's a familiar stereotype: Country-music fans are Republicans; pop and hip-hop listeners are Democrats. Well, according to a new analysis by the Echo Nest, those stereotypes happen to strike pretty close to the truth.

The Echo Nest, whose platform powers the customized webcasts at Spotify and iHeartRadio, among other sites, uses sophisticated analytical tools to categorize songs for the sake of generating compelling playlists. It also has been developing (anonymized) "taste profiles" of listeners based on their use of those sites and the feedback they provide.

The company recently looked at those profiles to see if there was any correlation between political affiliation and listening habits. Its chief technologist, Brian Whitman, put it this way in a blog post Thursday morning: "Can we tell if someone is a Republican just from his or her iTunes collection? And if so, which artists are the key 'tells' for both sides?"

As it happens, many of the profiles included information volunteered by the users about the politicians they supported. The company took the profiles with unambiguous party affiliations, then fed half of them into its "statistical machine learning classifiers" to try to come up with a model for identifying Republicans and Democrats from their taste profiles alone.

What it found, Whitman wrote, was that the profiles' data about favorite musical properties -- more than just the names of a listener's favorite artists and songs -- provided good clues to party affiliation. This was especially true for Republicans, who tend to listen to fewer types of music than Democrats.

Sex, drugs and rock n' roll, that about covers it. Are you with me?

Have a great weekend!