2012 Presidential Election

[Rasaq]

Man...Kthx is one angry human being. Keep this up and your kids are going to find you by the computer midway through another rant dead from a heart attack.

[Bioture]

is heavensent still around

is he out there somewhere

i just wanted to say that i've waited 4 years to prove you wrong

I'll tell HS to get on forums (we are friends IRL). Though you might want to wait another 4 years just so the third part of the quote is wrong. Still a chance he is the omega president. World's supposed to end in a month and a half. Mayans and shit.

[Ephemeral]

BTW Summa,
I said two weeks because everyone is going to have to come together before Jan 1 and vote down the monster tax increase set to kick in (this tax increase would be in excess of $3500 for any family earning $70k per year). Note, this tax increase occurs automatically UNLESS both Democrats and Republicans vote to change it. Given that the Congress is just as divided as before (or more so) and the status quo, what makes anyone think that middle income families aren’t now going to be paying the ‘bill’ for the benefits that the Feds provide? So my thinking is that the acid test is going to be very quick here, no election honeymoon, this is going to be put to the test almost immediately.
eph

[renzi]

kthx> gays and god and such

[Ephemeral]

In the show The West Wing, which is in general heralded as a decently accurate portrayal of Presidential politics; they claim that a newly elected President has about 60 days at the start of their term to REALLY do something. The rest will all be watered down. If something isn't set in motion by the end of January (February if you wanna be generous), expect very minimalist changes over the course of the following four years. I disagree that this was the worst case scenario though. I did take up your mantle of voting for the non-incumbent in all circumstances though.

The more interesting thing I heard tonight, although I can't recall exactly from whom I heard it, was the claim that as the Republican party currently stands, a non-catholic Republican cannot win the presidency. In terms of polling, Republicans have been demolished for a while now in regards to women and minority voters, particularly Hispanics. Someone (believe it was a Dem, so maybe take with a grain of salt) was making the claim that unless key fixtures in the Republican platform are changed that specifically target those groups (i.e. immigration policy and abortion), which probably won't happen because they have become stalwart fixtures in the platform; then there is no chance with how the American population statistics are going that we will see a non-Catholic Republican president (hispanics tend to be Catholics is the link there). And as much as I think the guy sensationalized his argument to the point of never, he has a point. The Democratic party has a growing base in terms of population and already has the moral high ground in regards to issues their key demographics see as valuable to them; while the Republican party has a shrinking base and has alienated many growing demographics with their platform's policies. I mean, look at this election: Over 50% of ppl said the primary issue was the economy, over 50% believed Romney was more knowledgeable about the economy; Romney was the Republican's economic candidate. And he lost. It may be difficult in the near future for Republicans to win a General Election unless something changes.

Agreed. The demographics of those who vote have clearly changed and left the Republicans in the dust. But I can’t help but feel that after two years and 6 billion dollars spent for the status quo is a huge failure by the American public.

There is one more irony here, that being that this election was won by taking those states which benefited from the auto industry bale out. (I am a guy who loves old cars and is very familiar with automobile history.) After WW2 America had many independent car companies like Hudson, Kaiser, Studebaker, and Packard. But the ‘Big 3’ used economy of scale pressure to run all the independent car companies out of business. AMC, run by Romney’s father, was the last of these independent companies. If there was ever a time for America to step up and bailout out a company it would have been then. Instead America got three decades (1960s, 1970s, 1980s) of the Big 3 selling crap and it took Japanese competition kicking their ass before quality was ‘rediscovered’.
So the Romney family first got screwed by no bailout for the auto industry and then decades later got screwed by an auto industry bailout. lol
eph

[Supreme]

Ron Paul 2012!

[Mantra-Slider]

Chris Christie 2016!!!

[Summa]

There is no mandate, nothing has changed. We have put the same situation back in place, a Democratic President but Republican House majority, but expect different results? I think Obama has about 2 weeks to make his promise of bipartisanship work but after that business and the economy will begin to vote. If Obama can get the Republicans on his side (by selling out) perhaps he can actually get something done.

But the group of people who I am most familiar with, those who own small ($1M - $50M and employ between 10-100 people) businesses, over-whelming think this is another four years of uncertainly. Several do not think they will survive unless Washington quickly turns things around. In short, this was the worst case scenario as far as business confidence is concerned.

This is an epic failure by Republicans, they could have run a monkey as a candidate and done better than Romney. So perhaps this will be the thing that shakes them up and they begin to work with the Democrats. (Yeah right.) I expect another four years of ‘this mess isn’t my fault’ from Obama and another four years of a completely impotent Congress. IMO we should have thrown them all out of office and started over.
eph

In the show The West Wing, which is in general heralded as a decently accurate portrayal of Presidential politics; they claim that a newly elected President has about 60 days at the start of their term to REALLY do something. The rest will all be watered down. If something isn't set in motion by the end of January (February if you wanna be generous), expect very minimalist changes over the course of the following four years. I disagree that this was the worst case scenario though. I did take up your mantle of voting for the non-incumbent in all circumstances though.

The more interesting thing I heard tonight, although I can't recall exactly from whom I heard it, was the claim that as the Republican party currently stands, a non-catholic Republican cannot win the presidency. In terms of polling, Republicans have been demolished for a while now in regards to women and minority voters, particularly Hispanics. Someone (believe it was a Dem, so maybe take with a grain of salt) was making the claim that unless key fixtures in the Republican platform are changed that specifically target those groups (i.e. immigration policy and abortion), which probably won't happen because they have become stalwart fixtures in the platform; then there is no chance with how the American population statistics are going that we will see a non-Catholic Republican president (hispanics tend to be Catholics is the link there). And as much as I think the guy sensationalized his argument to the point of never, he has a point. The Democratic party has a growing base in terms of population and already has the moral high ground in regards to issues their key demographics see as valuable to them; while the Republican party has a shrinking base and has alienated many growing demographics with their platform's policies. I mean, look at this election: Over 50% of ppl said the primary issue was the economy, over 50% believed Romney was more knowledgeable about the economy; Romney was the Republican's economic candidate. And he lost. It may be difficult in the near future for Republicans to win a General Election unless something changes.

[Ephemeral]

There is no mandate, nothing has changed. We have put the same situation back in place, a Democratic President but Republican House majority, but expect different results? I think Obama has about 2 weeks to make his promise of bipartisanship work but after that business and the economy will begin to vote. If Obama can get the Republicans on his side (by selling out) perhaps he can actually get something done.

But the group of people who I am most familiar with, those who own small ($1M - $50M and employ between 10-100 people) businesses, over-whelming think this is another four years of uncertainly. Several do not think they will survive unless Washington quickly turns things around. In short, this was the worst case scenario as far as business confidence is concerned.

This is an epic failure by Republicans, they could have run a monkey as a candidate and done better than Romney. So perhaps this will be the thing that shakes them up and they begin to work with the Democrats. (Yeah right.) I expect another four years of ‘this mess isn’t my fault’ from Obama and another four years of a completely impotent Congress. IMO we should have thrown them all out of office and started over.
eph

[T3l Ca7]

I think you have a winner ... not that you got whole lots to choose from. Just saying ...

[Money]

[Mantra-Slider]

[Salubrious]

This seems fitting for your discussion

[Summa]

Although I do agree with your assessment of the US educational system, I refrained from painting a more grim picture for the following two reasons. First, I am not so sure that the current trend of ‘wiki-style’ education is limited to just the US; it seems to me that it is persuasive in many other countries and is probably being driven by the internet and other instant delivery of information. Second, US universities are still held in very high regard as shown by the number of non-US people who flock to them. In fact, I think that most of the prestigious PhD programs are now populated with more non-US folks than US folks. This seems to be an endorsement of a world class system.

I think that this much is true for the Western World. Places like South Korea, Japan, and to some degree China are still holding on to more classical education practices and in some cases have stayed with the 6 days on 1 day off schedule vs the western world's 5 days on 2 days off; as well as a year round schedule that has 2 larger breaks rather than one that gives students 3 months to forget everything and lose all desire to go to school. It's a style of education that is demonstrating high levels of success with extremely high literacy levels, economic and business success, and good graduate level education; however it would never work with lazy Americans entrenched in their ways. As for our Universities, you are right that our post-graduate programs in America are the best in the world, and also graduating more foreign people than American; however Undergraduate programs are essentially garbage. I can't find the statistic exactly to cite, but it goes something like this: What was considered a standard test in 1965 was given to High School Junions, to which the average score was a 76%; in 2005 the same test was given to High School Juniors to which the average score was 49%; it was then given to college Juniors to which the average score was a 77%. It is part of an article that makes the argument that the college education is the equivalent of what a high school education was and that America does not actually want to give its citizens free education, it wants to monetize it and collect on its investment by lowering free education standards and forcing people to pay the gov't back through public college tuition in order to have a functional education (I agree with the first part of the article, not so much the 2nd).

As for most of everything else you posted, I agree almost entirely.

But the really scary part is that we still have not been told exactly when the US figured out that this was an outright pre-planned attack and not a spontaneous demonstration. Was the White House really thinking that it was spontaneous for two weeks or did they know much earlier but not telling us? And what did the American public take away from the debate on this? Some bullshit semantics where it looked like Obama came out ahead because he used the words ‘act of terror’ buried in weeks of spontaneous demonstration rhetoric. And Romney falls on his face because he cannot correctly raise the issue and got sucked into a ‘debate 101’ mistake.

In debate you're taught 2 ways to win: 1) make a better argument or 2) undermine the person's legitimacy. Those can both be accomplished through a variety of methods, but US politics has basically shrugged the first (probably because the populace couldn't understand a decent arg if it hit them in the face), and voila Obama wins a debate because of #2. However, as far as the details of Obama declaring things later rather than sooner; I actually appreciate him for that. It is not a case like Katrina where the damage was obvious and apparent, and safety had been assured, and the facts of what happened were clear and apparent; so a timely response should have been made. Nor was it a case like 9/11, where regardless of having all the facts on hand, an immediate response had to be made. While the Republicans have criticized Obama for being slow at times, I like that he tends to wait until the facts are there and there is a definitive answer; I also read in one of his books a long time ago that he disagreed slightly with Bush always being on TV talking about terrorist groups, because it gives them a form of legitimacy in people's and their own minds.

This is because the economy hinges on ‘certainty’.

This is the most true sentiment ever. This is actually why anyone with an ideology should never be an economist. Ideologies pre-suppose answers and seek to find justification to support that answer. Economies need to be built on fact, following the facts, to whatever outcome it leads to; even if it is one your ideology wouldn't believe in.

[DKFett]

Change it to the white one, duh.

Republicans across America have the same logic.