[Official Thread] OBAMA WINS RE-ELECTION

[Dalton]

Ed Schultz said "Unleash the Biden". Given his speech at the DNC, I think they'd be well-advised to do such. Ryan is great on style over substance and polishing turds; Biden is a seasoned statesman and I just hope he doesn't get caught in a verbal trap.

[weemadando]

So what if he does? Stay on the attack - say it's better to mis-speak than to have nothing of value to say.

[Dalton]

Obama may not be willing to take that risk. We shall see.

[Lord Falcon]

What about the war in Afghanistan? A survey shows 69 percent of the population wants to get out of Afghanistan, and I admit Obama made a mistake, but are potential voters also going to forget that Obama got us out of Iraq and killed Osama Bin Laden? I mean, what if Romney says he is for ending the wart in Afghanistan in the debates? What if he makes Obama look weak?

[Block]

What about the war in Afghanistan? A survey shows 69 percent of the population wants to get out of Afghanistan, and I admit Obama made a mistake, but are potential voters also going to forget that Obama got us out of Iraq and killed Osama Bin Laden? I mean, what if Romney says he is for ending the wart in Afghanistan in the debates? What if he makes Obama look weak?

What mistake did Obama make?

[Lord Falcon]

Well, basically, there was a surge in 2009 that Obama responded by sending more troops. The surge in violence only got worse. So, I meant his mistake is trying too hard to make sure the Afghanis are stable once we leave as opposed to getting us out in the quickest fashion possible. But our actions didn't stop the Taliban, and they will most likely return to power once we leave. It was the previous administration that fucked up, and we should just acknowledge it, use it and learn it from for future conflicts, and leave. We need to stop interfering. I mostly disagree with Star Trek's Prime Directive, but this is one instance in which it should be applied.

[Flagg]

Obama said he would conduct a surge in Afghanistan during the '08 campaign, so he was upholding a promise. The fact that it failed miserably isn't really his fault, though I do blame him for not recognizing the lost cause and getting us the fuck out.

[Coop D'etat]

Biden handled himself well in the 2008 debates, but considering who he was debating, that doesn't really matter much. Best thing for Biden is to be armed with facts. Paul Ryan may bring the charm, but Biden can still win with facts.

Obama on the other hand has a steeper hill. Romney needs to just appear capable of assuming the president. Obama not only needs to have facts, but some amount of charm and wit in repudiating Romney's arguments and attacks, and find some way to make Romney look like a fool.

Romney can't just show up and appear capable. He's losing and has never led in the polls. He needs a solid victory, not a draw.

The debates are Romney's best chance to change the dynamics of the race. Just showing up and not losing anything is giving up on winning this thing.

The most important thing for Obama is avoid screwing up. He's the one in the comfortable position.

[Block]

Obama said he would conduct a surge in Afghanistan during the '08 campaign, so he was upholding a promise. The fact that it failed miserably isn't really his fault, though I do blame him for not recognizing the lost cause and getting us the fuck out.

It didn't fail, more troops and a more aggressive campaign mean more violence. It happened in Iraq too. The goals of the surge were achieved, so I'd call that successful. You can argue the goals weren't the proper ones, and I might agree with that, but that's a seperate issue.

[Lord Falcon]

True, Block, but how many of the common, ignorant rabble that is the population of the US, especially in the South, view that? As another failure from this dumb nigger president.

[Dalton]

True, Block, but how many of the common, ignorant rabble that is the population of the US, especially in the South, view that? As another failure from this dumb nigger president.

Watch yourself. I understand the context, but others here have hair triggers.

[Raj Ahten]

Just for those who say Obama and Romney are no different the following editorial informed me of something I wasn't aware of; Romney wants to give millions of acres of federal lands to states, no doubt so they can be despoiled as quickly as possible. A legacy for the whole nation? Fuck that, some insiders have to make a profit! Apparently Utah is one of the biggest cheerleaders for this, with the legislature & governor having signed a bill demanding 30 million acres from the federal government. Romney's support of this type of bullshit alone makes me say fuck him now, fuck him tomorrow and fuck him forever.

From the New York Times

September 27, 2012, 9:00 pm
The Geography of Nope
By TIMOTHY EGAN

SALT LAKE CITY - In a part of Italy where chestnut trees are thick in the Apennine foothills, I once asked a neighbor in the little community where we lived how I might kill a wild boar. This impulse was driven by appetite, mostly - glimpses of those feral beasts on my morning runs that had me dreaming of a blood-red ragu made of local cinghiale.

The answer was, dream on. If you want to hunt in Italy, or most of Europe for that matter, you'd better belong to a private club, with access to a rich man's estate.

It struck me then, in the kind of epiphany that takes living in another country to appreciate, that the public land endowment of the United States is one of the greatest perks of this democracy. Rich or poor, every citizen of the United States of America has title to an area almost the size of Italy.

This ticket to roam free in the American backyard is no constitutional guarantee. The great, unfenced public domain, much of it forested or hidebound in sage and mesquite, is the envy of the rest of the world only because a few visionary souls bucked the powers of their day.

But now the powers of this day are trying to tear away at that inheritance. The election could determine whether big sections of our shared setting continue to be held by the general public. A radical plan to overhaul a century of sensible balance has been embraced by the Republican presidential ticket.

Handing over millions of acres of public land has long been a dream borne on the vapors of single-malt Scotch sipped inside trophy homes in the 1 percent ZIP codes of the West. Usually, the idea vanishes with the vapors. Not this year.

First, a little background. We play on this turf - national parks, national forests and the 252 million acres of the Bureau of Land Management. We use much of it as a source for oil and natural gas. We look to it for clues about the continent's first inhabitants: native sites, holding shards of cultures that predate Charlemagne's time. Or we just let it be.

Finding the right balance is the trick. Imagine two families who hate each other trying to manage the same summer home. The biggest threats over the last 50 years have come from demands of the so-called Sagebrush Rebellion - a Western-sounding name for a property grab by well-connected special interests.

It takes a truly small-minded politician, or one so ignorant of the nation's rich public land history, to upset the balance. This year, that politician is Mitt Romney.

Romney, you may recall, made news in the West earlier this year when he told a Nevada newspaper that "I don't know what the purpose is" of all this federal land in the West. It would be nice to think he just doesn't get it, because he's never spent any time in the free outdoors.

But Romney has since coupled the black hole of his knowledge with support for Republican efforts to end federal control over large sections of the West. The Utah legislature has passed a bill, signed by the governor, that demands that the federal government hand over almost 30 million acres to the state. Other states are looking to follow Utah's lead, and Romney has cheered their efforts.

Who cares, so long as the oil drillers stay away from the canyons, arches and ochre-colored wonderlands of the West? As for state control - why should anyone think a governor here in Salt Lake City would be any less of a steward than someone in a federal uniform?

Here's why: The states, of course, are cash-strapped, and want these lands only so they can industrialize them quickly, with minimal regulations. If you want to know what our public lands would be like under states in the pocket of oil companies, just look at the closing days of George W. Bush's presidency, when drillers pressed to scar up land near some of the most iconic national parks and monuments in the Southwest. Only a change in administrations, and lawsuits that back the people's right to manage the lands properly, stopped them in their tracks.

Second - and more importantly - these are our lands they want to take away. The toddler in Tuscaloosa has equal claim to the stunning Vermilion Cliffs outside the Grand Canyon as does a cowboy in Arizona. One day, when we are a nation of 600 million, these community-owned treasures will be all the more valuable.

Romney has promised to let oil companies have their way - no surprise, given that his chief energy adviser, Harold Hamm, is an oil billionaire with stakes in multiple energy sites throughout the West.

But no major-party presidential nominee has ever taken a stance as radical as Romney's. At a wide-ranging public lands conference at the University of Colorado in Boulder earlier this month, veteran public lands users - ranchers, hikers, managers - from all facets of the political spectrum expressed astonishment that Romney had sided with his party's most extreme fringe.

The first presidential debate - next Wednesday, Oct. 3, in Denver - gives the moderator Jim Lehrer a chance to ask a rare question about something beyond the cackle of magpies inside the Beltway. Please, Jim: your audience at the University of Denver, and all over the West, would love to hear something about the public lands stance of both candidates.

I had some hope for a more mainstream view when Paul Ryan was named Romney's running mate. He boasted that he's summited 28 of Colorado's 14,000-foot mountains. Alas, Ryan also claimed to have run a sub-three-hour marathon, only to get caught lying - shaving off more than an hour - when Runner's World fact-checked him.

Better to take the top of the ticket at his word: a lord of the manor who wants to give away our home on the range.

[Lord Falcon]

Sorry, Dalton. I personally don't think of Obama that way. I meant it's how THEY think of him. I read something encouraging. According to The Huffington Post's estimate, Obama has around 330 electoral votes. Romney has only 190. And I've read you need 270 to win.

[Dalton]

Five thirty eight has a lower forecast, but still pegs Obama at over 80% chance to win.

[Fiji_Fury]

I can't properly comprehend how that elitist buffoon Romney can be considered a contender by so many Americans. Short memory must be part of the answer, but he's spouting the same kind of irresponsible, socially bankrupt policies on "small government" and "lower taxes = magic jobs" that led the USA into the 2008 financial crisis in the first place. If ever that line of reasoning was true, globalization makes it effectively mistaken because the wealthy won't reinvest substantial marginal capital (the margins they would save off lower taxes) into the US economy. Margins are better in developing countries and mixed global markets. I mean really, if that policy worked, the USA would have been consistently surging in economic growth since Reagan started those cuts in the 80's... and I have a hard time accepting that the policy has worked given the 20 years of economic trends that simply don't match the "trickle down" premise.

[Patrick Degan]

I can't properly comprehend how that elitist buffoon Romney can be considered a contender by so many Americans. Short memory must be part of the answer, but he's spouting the same kind of irresponsible, socially bankrupt policies on "small government" and "lower taxes = magic jobs" that led the USA into the 2008 financial crisis in the first place. If ever that line of reasoning was true, globalization makes it effectively mistaken because the wealthy won't reinvest substantial marginal capital (the margins they would save off lower taxes) into the US economy. Margins are better in developing countries and mixed global markets. I mean really, if that policy worked, the USA would have been consistently surging in economic growth since Reagan started those cuts in the 80's... and I have a hard time accepting that the policy has worked given the 20 years of economic trends that simply don't match the "trickle down" premise.

Because the thirty or forty million-plus fools willing to vote for Romney have been sold on a vision that you can somehow have all the goodies of a modern civilisation without actually having to pay for any of it, because they don't want the "undeserving" to get anything, and because they've been brainwashed into the Cult of the Rich that's been pushed in this country since the 1980s. Since a good number of this group are also very deeply religious, they're already prone to magical thinking in the first place, and the "religion" a good number of them follow has been based around the odious con-job known as the Gospel of Prosperity™. While for others, it's all about making sure at all costs, all costs, that "them Sluts" can't get abortions and "them Queers" can't get married, elsewise God's Curse™ will fall upon the land. In large measure, Romney's base practise the politics of the unreal. It's also because a not insignificant percentage of them just can't stand the idea of a black guy sitting in the Big Chair in the Oval Office —the dirty little not-secret of modern conservatism.

In short: greed, fear and ignorance, with a dollop of hatred, are the drivers for the Romney vote.

[Wing Commander MAD]

A Pennsylvania judge has blocked enforcement of the key section of a voter identification law which the state legislature enacted and Republican Gov. Tom Corbett signed last March, meaning that the law will not be in effect for the Nov. 6 election.

Judge blocks Pennsylvania voter ID law

Enforcement for this election is blocked, though it may stand for future elections.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Don't hold your breath for it.
Now that 'they' know it won't be in place for the 2012 election, expect them to quietly forgot about it, at least until 2016 rolls around.

[Block]

The does give people 4 full years to get their free ID's. I mean at some point you are just being lazy.

[Crossroads Inc.]

Which is why I will bet you will see the push for these dry up.
People know about them now, they have time to prepare, IE the whole reason for them (to keep certain voters away form the polls) becomes moot.
What I expect now is basically for the GOP To now try and push some OTHER form of "Voter ID" bill with some new restriction that has not yet been considered.

Basically around Feb and Mar of 2013, I would eat my hat if ANY big name Republican is going on about the need to protect against "voter fraud"

The right wing may CLAIM That there was a lot of voter fraud in the election, how else will they be able to explain Mittens loosing? But no one will do anything about it.

[Block]

I think it'll depend on what the House and Senate look like and what seats are up for grabs in 2014.

[Alferd Packer]

The right wing may CLAIM That there was a lot of voter fraud in the election, how else will they be able to explain Mittens loosing? But no one will do anything about it.

Their main problem is that in-person voter fraud doesn't exist, statistically speaking. I think there have been something like 850 cases nationwide in the last decade (out of 140 million registered voters). When this is taken into account, there is nothing to fight. You can only try this for so long before someone starts skewering you with this simple fact. In-person voter fraud may or may not be easy to commit, but no one does it.

[Block]

The right wing may CLAIM That there was a lot of voter fraud in the election, how else will they be able to explain Mittens loosing? But no one will do anything about it.

Their main problem is that in-person voter fraud doesn't exist, statistically speaking. I think there have been something like 850 cases nationwide in the last decade (out of 140 million registered voters). When this is taken into account, there is nothing to fight. You can only try this for so long before someone starts skewering you with this simple fact. In-person voter fraud may or may not be easy to commit, but no one does it.

Their counter argument is that it's hard to prove and that voter fraud is much more rampant but goes uncaught.

[Dalton]

Their counter argument is that it's hard to prove and that voter fraud is much more rampant but goes uncaught.

These clowns exemplify what I like to call Holmes' Law: "Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts."

[Terralthra]

The does give people 4 full years to get their free ID's. I mean at some point you are just being lazy.

Or transgender, in any state which does not currently have procedures for changing gender on an official state ID (which is more than you might think). The number of potentially disenfranchised trans* individuals from voter ID laws far exceeds the number of in-person voter fraud incidents.