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

[Shellhead]

It's a Right wing fantasy that will never, ever, ever happen.

I think that self-deportation plan sounds legit. First the brown people, er illegal aliens will self-deport themselves. Then the Republicans can fly away on totally magical unicorns. Makes sense to me.

[longdecember]

No one sane would even think it would. I swear there are so many parts of the Republican Party that appear to be literally delusional.

This is a false flag. Romney pays 15% yet wants to be in charge of the mechinism.

[Darrell D.]

I think that self-deportation plan sounds legit. First the brown people, er illegal aliens will self-deport themselves. Then the Republicans can fly away on totally magical unicorns. Makes sense to me.

Only after Zombie Reagan wins on a ticket with Zombie Nixon as veep.

[GozertheGozarian]

Only after Zombie Reagan wins on a ticket with Zombie Nixon as veep.

We do get Nixon's Head and Headless Agnew in the 3000 election.

[Spike-X]

President Obama slow jams the news with Jimmy Fallon and the Roots.

[jmc247]

RNC Spokeswoman: Republican Economic Platform Will Be The Bush Program, ‘Just Updated’

Media Press Secretary of the Republican National Committee, said that the Republican party’s economic platform in 2012 is going to be the same as it was during the Bush years, “just updated”.

http://thinkprogress.org/economy/201...ted/?mobile=wp

The man wouldn't wouldn't be named for most of the last three years and the primary and is considered a big government enemy of the tea party is suddenly being strongly embraced one by one by the new party elite since Romney clinched the nomination.

Marco Rubio: George W. Bush 'Did a Fantastic Job'

George W. Bush, in my opinion, did a fantastic job as president over eight years, facing a set of circumstances during those eight years that are different from the circumstances that a President Romney would face.

http://m.theatlantic.com/politics/ar...ic-job/256274/

It could have something to do with the fact Romney no longer need the anti Latino immigrant, small government tea baggers, they checked the polls and realized Bush is back to being supported by half the nation, or it could be a sign Romney has sent out the word (who is by the way very close to George W Bush, his father and brother) to try to give Bush the Reagan treatment that he lead America through its darkest hours since Pearl Harbor and unlike Hoover acted to stop a Great Depression.

Regardless if you consider it true or not it's a narrative that can sell to the public like the idea Reagan won the Cold War mainly the idea worked because they repeated it constantly and Reagan was likable personally.



Mitt Romney I think understands the party needs a new Reagan or Republican FDR like figure. By reforming Bush in the eyes of the public into the Republicans FDR they are also protecting Romney from attack given Mitt's current positions are all virtually the same as Bush's or to the right of Bush.

I think it's a politically astute plan. It's certainly smarter then McCain's idea that he could run away from Bush politically in 2008 and told the President to maintain a low profile and don't defend his policies. McCain was connected to all Bush's unpopular policies and the ones he used to distance himself from Bush that he was against waterboarding didn't help as the nearly 60% of the public supported it.

By not having Bush defend his policies in 2008 McCain was telling the President not to try to rebuild support for policies McCain himself virtually all strongly supported. Obama turned 2008 into a referendum on Bush/McCain's policies and Bush was told not to defend them by McCain's campaign and McCain made a half hearted defense of the major policies he backed like the TARP or Immigration Reform, and I could go on and on.
.


For Romney he already knows Obama will tar him as a Bush clone who will lead America off an economic cliff. That won't hurt him if the image of Bush is recast as having saved the country from total economic collapse. Romney has personally already started selling the notion to the public.

How effective the plan is I suspect in large part up to Bush and how willing he is to re-enter the spotlight in major way not to attack Obama, but to talk about the issues and remind the masses how likable he can be when he wants to be... Romney could only wish he had that kind of personal charm

[worstblogever]

Let me get this straight... Romney is going to try to win by convincing the public that President George W. Bush was competent?

The guy who created a massive budget deficit by awarding tax breaks to the richest 1% of Americans while trying to fight the war on terror, and a whole separate war in Iraq based on a lie... then empowered the bank crisis by eliminating restrictions on them that would have prevented them giving out tons of s***ty loans and asking the American taxpayers to bail them out for their, and his mistake... while the housing and job market collapsed, and the United States fell behind every other major country in education, scientific development, and infrastructure... THAT guy is a great leader, and Romney wants to follow his example?

...

Guess this confirms the "out of touch" thing, then.

[7thangel]

Sugar Daddies
The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.

If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

His use of the verb killed was meant in jest, of course, much as Foster Friess ($1.8 million in known contributions, and counting) was joking when he suggested that “gals” could practice birth control by putting Bayer aspirin between their knees. America’s billionaires are such cards! And we had better get used to their foibles and funny bones. Whatever else happens in 2012, it will go down as the Year of the Sugar Daddy. Inflamed by Obama-hatred, awash in self-pity, and empowered by myriad indulgent court and Federal Election Commission rulings, an outsize posse of superrich white men will spend whatever it takes to have its way with the body politic and, if victorious, with the country itself. Given the advanced age of most of this cohort, 2012 may be seen as the election in which the geezer empire struck back.

This isn’t quite what was supposed to happen. When the Supreme Court handed down its five-to-four Citizens United decision in 2010, pre-vetting Mitt Romney’s credo that “corporations are people,” apocalyptic Democrats, including Obama, predicted that the election would become a wholly owned subsidiary of the likes of Chevron and General Electric. But publicly traded, risk-averse corporations still care more about profits than partisanship. They tend to cover their bets by giving to both parties. And they are fearful of alienating customers and investors. Witness, most recently, the advertisers who fled Rush Limbaugh, or the far bigger brands (*McDonald’s and Wendy’s, Coke and Pepsi) that severed ties with the conservative lobbying mill responsible for pushing state “stand your ground” laws like the one used to justify the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Florida. While corporations and unions remain serious players in the campaign of 2012, their dollars don’t match those of the sugar daddies, who can and do give as much as they want to the newfangled super-PACs.

Sugar daddies—whom I’ll define here as private donors or their privately held companies writing checks totaling $1 million or more (sometimes much more) in this election cycle—are largely a Republican phenomenon, most of them one degree of separation from Karl Rove and his unofficial partners in erecting a moneyed shadow GOP, David and Charles Koch. At last look, there were 25 known sugar daddies on the right (or more, if you want to count separately the spouses and children who pitch in). You’ve likely heard of Sheldon Adelson, the Vegas tycoon who is Benjamin Netanyahu’s unofficial ambassador to the GOP. But you may be less familiar with Irving Moskowitz, the bingo entrepreneur who funnels his profits into East Jerusalem settlements. Or Robert Mercer, the hedge-fund master of “flash trading” who poured a clandestine $1 million into ads attacking the “ground-zero mosque” and nearly another $3 million into a scale-model railroad in his Long Island mansion. Or Steven Lund, the co-founder of Nu Skin, which became “direct selling” sponsor of the Romney-run 2002 Winter Olympics after having spent much of the nineties settling complaints over false advertising and other unscrupulous practices with the Federal Trade Commission and six different states’ attorneys general.

The list of 25 does not include donors whose names we may never know: those who are legally allowed to remain anonymous when giving to patently political “social welfare” nonprofits like Rove’s Crossroads GPS. That particular Rove money drop reported to the IRS last week that nearly 90 percent of its first $76.8 million haul (from June 2010 through December 2011) had come from two dozen donors giving $1 million or more, including two contributions of $10 million each. While Obama has his own super-PAC–“social welfare” nonprofit combo, the proceeds totaled only a pathetic $6.7 million last year. A paltry $100,000 contribution is all it takes for a Democratic donor to get priority access to the White House, according to the New York Times. George Soros is on the sidelines, and Obama so far has claimed only two sugar daddies of his own: Bill Maher and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg. Their products may at times emit noxious fumes—let us briefly *recall Maher’s 1989 big-screen turn in Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death—but even the biggest show-business bombs can’t roil the environment like, say, Harold Simmons’s vast Texas site for dumping radioactive waste.

During the primaries, the Republican sugar daddies fanned out to support various contenders, gladly bestowing tens of millions in mad money on the vainglorious crusades of Newt, the Herminator, and the two Ricks. But today these donors are starting to coalesce around Mitt. In retrospect, Romney, a one-percenter incarnate, is their natural candidate. And, for all intents and political purposes, they will own him if he makes it to the White House. The Center for Responsive Politics has calculated that just 10 percent of Romney’s donors for 2012 have been from among the hoi polloi (those contributing $200 or less)—compared with 52 percent for Santorum, 48 percent for Gingrich, and 45 percent for Obama. The only Americans fired up and ready to go for Mitt are those who can and will give to the max, all keenly mindful of the dividends certain to accrue to them in a Romney administration.

[...]

[more at link]

[the4thpip]

Newt to drop out.

[worstblogever]

Newt to drop out.

Well, this should free him up to serve as president of the moon.

[Darrell D.]

Newt to drop out.

To the absolute surprise of no one.

[Spike-X]

Newt to drop out.

Newt's abandoning his campaign? Did somebody tell him it had cancer?

[Darrell D.]

Newt's abandoning his campaign? Did somebody tell him it had cancer?

He found a younger, more attractive campaign.

[Loren]

A trailer for an upcoming...well, "documentary" is probably not the right word, but it's the one they're using. In any case, this'll probably be the craziest, most conspiracy-filled campaign video you'll see all week:

"Dreams From My *Real* Father"

Were you aware that Obama's daddy was secretly an American Communist, and that his mother posed for nude photos in a men's magazine?

And actually including nude photos that one claims are of the President's mom? If he's mistaken, then that's practically defamatory. Whereas if he were right, it would simply be the most classless thing I've ever seen thrown at a Presidential candidate. ("Considering voting for Barack Obama? Well, consider this...here are nude photos of his mom.")

[KiFF86]

A trailer for an upcoming...well, "documentary" is probably not the right word, but it's the one they're using. In any case, this'll probably be the craziest, most conspiracy-filled campaign video you'll see all week:

"Dreams From My *Real* Father"

Were you aware that Obama's daddy was secretly an American Communist, and that his mother posed for nude photos in a men's magazine?

And actually including nude photos that one claims are of the President's mom? If he's mistaken, then that's practically defamatory. Whereas if he were right, it would simply be the most classless thing I've ever seen thrown at a Presidential candidate. ("Considering voting for Barack Obama? Well, consider this...here are nude photos of his mom.")

If only Democrats were smart enough to have used this against W....... wait what am I saying