Between Barack and a Hard Place: Ultimate US Elections 2012 Thread

[Donald M.]

Some vile organisation called the Christian Men's Defense Network* is blaming Obama's victory on "the slut vote".

Charming.





* because if any group needs defending in the US, it's Christian men. Apparently.

Sure, blame Obama's loss on the "slut vote" but instead they should be blaming Romney's loss on the "nut vote". There weren't nearly enough drooling lunatics like the Christian Men's Defense Network voting to get Romney into the White House.

[Gryphon]

Im happy I live in canada, our conservative party, got rid of most of the nuts and made an extensive outreach to minorities and immigrants.

[Donald M.]

Im happy I live in canada, our conservative party, got rid of most of the nuts and made an extensive outreach to minorities and immigrants.

If they ever hope for a return to relevance, the Republican Party should strongly consider doing the same. While going total bugshit benefited them in the short term, we all now see how well it has worked as a long-term strategy.

[Gryphon]

If they ever hope for a return to relevance, the Republican Party should strongly consider doing the same. While going total bugshit benefited them in the short term, we all now see how well it has worked as a long-term strategy.

Courting minority voters is THE reason the conservatives got a majority.

[ChadH]

Secret Service potentially looking into her comments, I reckon.

I'll bet they stuck the new guy with that assignment.

I found this bit particularly charming:
"I didn't think it would be that big of a deal," she said. "The assassination part is kind of harsh. I'm not saying like I would go do that or anything like that, by any means, but if it was to happen, I don't think I'd care one bit."

[LtMarvel]

justified or not, that was one of my main concerns about the ACA

companies can now use it as an excuse to either cut pay, not hire, or get rid of employees because they can claim they "can't afford health insurance for their employees" which means "they can't afford it because it cuts into their profit margin"

Those companies will stunt their growth.

And if we were ever organized, we could boycott Applebees and other places that treat their employees so shabbily....

[king mob]

Im happy I live in canada, our conservative party, got rid of most of the nuts and made an extensive outreach to minorities and immigrants.

Even the Tories here did something similar though the loonies are still there (some have links with American loonies) but Cameron is a Tory PM with openly gay members of his government, nobody considered that possible as recently as a decade ago. Then again he knows there's a lot of gay, black and Asian conservatives who would vote Tory if they wern't a party full of racist homophobic nutters.

[Aubergine~!]

America needed someone to really clean up the mess.

Not Obama or Romney


A REAL American!

That would, if nothing else, make presidential debates must see tv.

Be even better if they happened in the middle of the ring, WWE style.

Somebody with a tiny dick whose appeal has been fading for years, but who still feels the desperate need to overcompensate and brag about how awesome he is all the time? Wow, Hulk Hogan really is a Real American!

Citation needed on the bold bit.

Unless the rumoured sex tape has actually hit the net, in which case can we please never talk about this again?

Please. He was only ever a mediocre wrestler at best, who for some reason managed to get over big time with a whole bunch of fans.

That reason being charisma out the wazoo, mostly. He wasn't a good worker in terms of putting on technical masterpieces, but the man knew how to work a crowd.

[Aubergine~!]

No, everyone unemployed couldn't find work because of the housing mortgage crisis caused by the government forcing banks to give loans to people - most being the Illegal Aliens, who can't afford them. Clinton, Bush, and Obama are all to blame for this. This mess is the fault of both parties. Obama is both indirectly and directly involved and made things a whole lot worse.

I'm just going to cut off the rest of the stuff to spare people from the rest of the lunacy.

I agree that both parties share the blame for the crisis. However, you still haven't actually addressed my point: that you, and people like you, are gigantic hypocrites.

And other things besides, but that's the main thing.

[SUPERECWFAN1]

On SNL they really never went after Karl Rove or anything funny that we would suspect. I watched the cold opening and talk about missed chances to score laughs. In all , the opening was a sketch where Romney (played by Sudakis) drinks a lot of milk in sadness and anger over losing. The funniest lines was where his sons all looked alike . And these exchanges,,,

"Father , please come inside ....Paul Ryan is impressing us with his feats of strength."

"The guy couldn't even carry Wisconsin !"


"Father please come inside ... Donald Trump is doing this funny thing where he's racist."

[Puma]

Karl Rove is still an idiot

Conservative political strategist Karl Rove has used a provocative phrase to explain how Mitt Romney lost the presidential election Tuesday, saying President Obama won reelection “by suppressing the vote.”

Really? Few others make that assertion about the Obama victory.

And normally, the words voter suppression refer to efforts by the politically powerful to make it harder for people – especially people who might oppose the politically powerful at the polls – to cast ballots. The online reference Wikipedia defines it as tactics that "can range from minor ‘dirty tricks’ that make voting inconvenient, up to blatantly illegal activities that physically intimidate prospective voters to prevent them from casting ballots.”

RECOMMENDED: Election 2012: 12 reasons Obama won and Romney lost

Mr. Rove, a force behind big-money ad campaigns aligned with Republican candidates, appeared to redefine the term.

Appearing on Fox News Thursday, Rove implied that Obama’s suppression strategy was to make Romney unlikeable, so that the Republican’s potential supporters wouldn’t show up to vote for him.

“He succeeded by suppressing the vote, by saying to people, 'you may not like who I am, and I know you can’t bring yourself to vote for me, but I’m going to paint this other guy as simply a rich guy who only cares about himself,' ” Rove said.

By his definition of suppression, it sounds just like traditional “opposition research” and negative advertising. Does Rove (himself a purveyor of negative ads in his work for George W. Bush and now at the Crossroads GPS group) have some different point to make, or is this just sour grapes over the election outcome?

Fox News host Megyn Kelly responded to Rove. “But I mean [Obama] won, Karl, he won.”

Before she interjected, Rove had also said this: Obama has become “the first president in history to win a second term with a smaller percentage of the vote” than four years before.

That doesn’t necessarily prove anything about vote suppression. But it leads into a broader, and legitimate, debate.

Whether one calls it suppression or not, there’s genuine hand-wringing among Republicans over what some call the “missing voter” conundrum – a dearth of white-voter turnout that caught many by surprise.

Although ballot counts for African-Americans, other nonwhites, and Hispanics all appear to have risen in 2012 compared with 2008, the number of white voters seems to have declined by 6 million or more. Sean Trende, an election analyst at RealClearPolitics, estimates the number of white no-shows is even larger once you account for the population changes, as well as for the 2012 ballots that remain uncounted.

“We find ourselves with about 8 million fewer white voters than we would expect given turnout in the 2008 elections and population growth,” Mr. Trende wrote Thursday. (Whites were the voters for whom Romney had the biggest appeal.)

The no-show pattern surprised many conservatives, who thought their base was energized to vote.

The definitive story of why the expected voters didn't materialize, and how much impact it had on the outcome, remains to be unearthed. Negative ads against Romney might have played a role. And by some early accounts, one big factor was Republicans' failure to mount successful "get out the vote" efforts in key states.

http://news.yahoo.com/karl-rove-why-...215625694.html

[7thangel]

Messina: Obama Won On The Small Stuff

Barack Obama’s campaign manager, Jim Messina, said Friday that the president’s reelection was won “on the micro stuff.”

"Politics too much is about analogies and not about whether or not things work," Messina told BuzzFeed. "You have to test every single thing, to challenge every assumption, and to make sure that everything we do is provable."

"That's why I love numbers," he said. "Because you know good or bad whether what you're doing is working."

Messina spoke to BuzzFeed Friday after sharing a panel stage with Romney aide Brian Jones at a conference for the International Association of Political Consultants at the Hilton New York. There, Messina and Jones evoked a contrast between one campaign that had the advantage on macro-messaging, and another that invested millions in analytics and metrics.

"We had to win this on the micro stuff," Messina said.

Jones, by contrast, said the Romney campaign had been characterized by a basic mistake about the electorate itself.

"Neil Newhouse, our pollster, had always said, 'Guys, if we can win independents in Ohio, we can win this race.' But we won independents by seven, and we lost," Jones said. "We thought the game would be one thing, and it ended up being another.”

Obama for America made what Messina called an "unparalleled" $100 million investment in technology. The reelect, said Messina, would be different than 2008 — a time when the iPhone was in its first iteration, when Facebook was one-tenth of its current size, and when the Obama campaign sent just one tweet on all of Election Day ("We thought it was a stupid technology that would never go anywhere," said Messina).

Under Messina — the metrics-obsessed brain behind the operation — the campaign once defined by ideals and hope and change, became all about the data.

"We were going to demand data on everything, we were going to measure everything," he said during the panel. "We were going to put an analytics team inside of us to study us the entire time to make sure we were being smart about things."

Every night, Obama's analytics team would run the campaign 66,000 times on a computer simulation. "And every morning," said Messina, "we would come in and spend our money based on those simulations."

Their models ultimately predicted Florida results within 0.2%, and Ohio within 0.4%. The only state they got wrong, noted Messina, was Colorado, "where we got one more point than we thought we would."

The Obama campaign was able to do that, he said, because it turned away from mainstream polling from shops like Gallup, which he called "wrong the entire election" — specifically, in their prediction that fewer minorities and young people would turn out to vote.

"We spent a whole bunch of time figuring out that American polling is broken," said Messina. "We never did a national poll. We only did local and state polls."

Jones, for his part, offered a glimpse at what went wrong with “Orca,” the failed Election Day turnout tracking system, pitched by the GOP as "the Republican Party’s newest, unprecedented and most technologically advanced plan to win the 2012 presidential election"; Jones said the project was essentially a version of what "every campaign" has done in years past.

"There were a couple of glitches throughout the day, but it largely worked as intended," said Jones. "But ultimately it didn't really matter."

The software, meant to offer quantitative voter turnout data over the course of Election Day, proved dysfunctional and ultimately crashed by 4 p.m.

(Messina said the Obama campaign tried the same thing in 2008: "Ours crashed too." They named the project Houdini, but this year called it Gordon. "I said, 'Why is this thing called Gordon?' They said, 'Don't you know Gordon is the name of the person who killed Houdini?'")

Jones argued that despite the Orca crash — and clear wins by President Obama on issues like health care and the middle class — Romney "won on the vision for the future, on being a strong leader, on the deficit," he said.

"Ultimately, though, it just didn't matter," Jones added. "These guys just ran an incredibly proficient and strong and well-organized campaign. We had a little bit of the edge on the macro-messaging, but it just didn't matter."

[Guy1]

Everything's good Pizza once you taste what they make as the gas station down the street from my house.
Ketchup and boot leather.

[7thangel]

a new congress, one open to compromise

Congressional Republicans’ ‘Compromise’: Everyone Should Accept Romney Tax Plan

Seemingly ignoring that over than 3 million more Americans voted for President Obama than Mitt Romney on Tuesday, Congressional Republicans are moving quickly to embrace Speaker John Boehner’s (R-OH) call to adopt a tax “compromise” that is virtually identical to the tax proposal that Romney made the centerpiece of his failed campaign.

The running theme this week is what Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the “Rumpelstiltskin fairy tale” that the country can increase revenues simply by lowering tax rates:

Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA): On ABC’s This Week, Chambliss said, “Bowles-Simpson said, look, eliminate all these tax credits and tax deductions. You can generate somewhere 1 to 1.2 trillion in additional revenue. You can actually lower tax rates by doing that. And I think at the end of the day, what’s got to happen, George, we’ve got to get this economy going again.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK): In a Friday column, House Budget Committee member Cole wrote: “However, raising tax rates is not the only way to increase revenue, nor is it the best way. Speaker Boehner has proposed comprehensive tax reform to raise revenue and lower rates. Eliminating inefficient loopholes and deductions will generate economic growth while creating a simpler, fairer tax code.”

Rep. Kevin Brady (R-TX): In a Wednesday Tweet, House Ways and Means Committee member Brady opined: “Stronger economic growth from tax reform that lowers rates and closes loopholes will generate higher revenue to bring the deficit down.

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA): In a letter to his Republican caucus, the House Majority Leader wrote: “What would be best is a fundamental reform of the tax code that lowers rates, broadens the base, makes America’s businesses competitive again, and reduces the burden imposed by taxes on work and investment.”

Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI): In a Wednesday press release, the House Ways and Means Chairman wrote: “There is a better path forward than simply increasing tax rates, and one in which both sides can claim victory. We can address both our jobs crisis and our debt crisis by focusing on tax reform that strengthens the economy. There is bipartisan support for tax reform that closes loopholes and lowers rates.”

Rep. Tom Price (R-GA): On Fox News Sunday, House Republican Policy Committee Chairman Price, a member of both the Ways and Means and Budget Committees, said “We can increase revenue without increasing the tax rates on anybody in this country.”

The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says there will be no significant negative impact on the economy should the lower rates on the wealthiest Americans be allowed to expire. And the notion that lowering rates will magically create more revenue is indeed a right-wing pipe dream.

broken clock

Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol: Raising Millionaires’ Taxes ‘Won’t Kill The Country’

[...]

But on Fox News Sunday, conservative Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol counseled Republican leadership to stop “falling on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires”:

I think honest debate, fresh thinking, leadership in the Republican party and the leadership in the conservative movement has to pull back, let people float new ideas. Let’s have a serious debate. Don’t scream and yell over what one person says.

You know what? It won’t kill the country if Republicans raise taxes a little bit on millionaires. It really won’t, I don’t think.

I don’t really understand why Republicans don’t take Obama’s offer to freeze taxes for everyone below $250,000. Make it $500,000, make it a million.

Really? The Republican party is gonna fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic, and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile to Republicans?

Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) infamous budget proposal would have cut taxes on those making more than $1 million, while ending tax cuts for those with the lowest incomes — a plan Kristol predicted Republicans would have difficulty defending. But even in the face of poor election results and exit polls that showed 60 percent of Americans support higher taxes for the wealthy, Boehner reiterated his opposition to raising taxes on Friday, as did Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

[dupont2005]

"Really? The Republican party is gonna fall on its sword to defend a bunch of millionaires, half of whom voted Democratic, and half of whom live in Hollywood and are hostile to Republicans?"
If that's the case, then half of whom actually want their taxes increased as well. Maybe more than half. I'm sure Ben Stein isn't the only well off conservative saying the GOP fiscal ideology doesn't work.