The 2012 Elections Thread - Page 2

Have fun looking forward to this kind of nonsense times a million leading up to the elections.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/yblog_upshot...-trip-to-india

No kidding. This is just a very modest beginning.

I just had to slap this one down from my own sister on Facebook. One tea-party win and people abandon even the *pretense* of fact-checking? She's normally a pretty rational woman. Wrong most of the time, but fairly decent about it.

My hopes for a nice, quiet Christmas are going down the fucking toilet.

So happy to have Republicans back in power so they can tackle the big issues. BARF.

My favorite part of that article is this:

I tremble with fear looking to the day India unleashes its mighty Simian Army upon the unsuspecting world.

So, according to Republican leaders if they 'read it on the it internet' it must come from a credible source. "Obama's spending $200 million a day on trip to India, must be true I read it on the internet." Sad, sad times we're living in.

Thanks a lot, fuckin Internet!!

Re: the '200 million dollar figure'

Obviously the republicans are craven villains trying to destroy Obama using every lie available to them as part of their arsenal, but when I heard that people were upset about his overseas travel, I wondered what the figure was that had them pissed

When I read "200 million a day" it was immediately obvious that it was utter nonsense. If you're an adult person and you believed it would cost a billion dollars for the President to travel abroad for five days, you are a moron and do not deserve to be in government. If you're someone who sat at home, heard it would cost 200 million dollars a day and didn't erupt in uproarious laughter, you don't deserve the right to vote (I'm about 90% serious on that point, I am very much on the fence about a civics test for voting)

It's a laughable figure, and the fact it was repeated just makes me ashamed to live in a nation of dunder headed mouth breathers.

Also, is it not entirely racist and xenophobic that the republicans have been complaining about literally every over seas trip this president has ever taken? He's the POTUS. He has duties to represent our country to our business partners and allies around the world. What part of that do these "heart landers" not get? It's absolutely maddening, so I'm going to just stop thinking/talking about it now, but still, these are embarrassing times to call yourself a citizen of the "land of the free"

I know it's comments on Yahoo, but c'mon. The article is about the absurdity of the claim, yet a bunch of the commenters are acting like the 200M figure is valid.

Also, moronic, the idea that this is somehow Obama just taking a vacation. Seriously?

You know, even if the trip is costing $2 Billion, the president has already made us a profit!

If he's going to keep delivering like this, let him take the entire population of Rhode Island in his entourage for all I care. And I can't even begin to describe how much I love reading that PK feels so intellectually superior to so many people in this country.

If you believe that the President's entourage and security teams would incur 200 million dollars in expenses a day for international travel? I am absolutely intellectually superior to you

EDIT And I say this not to brag, but I am much more informed about the basic tenets of American citizenship than most Americans are. Sadly, that is just a fact. More than half the country can't name two out of three branches of government

and yet you can't use a period key thoughout an entire post. For the record, you used 2 of them you could have ctrl-c and pasted them. I guess you didn't use your superior intelligence to think of that, eh?

ETA. Also, it doesn't matter how much the President's trip costs as long as he is safe. If he's bringing the entire Asian fleet or 25 armored limo's who cares?

You are most correct. It's like the people who scoff that the president's limo is not a hybrid.. That's because it's a combo tank/race-car, and his safety is the first priority

Bobby Jindal is a definite "NO" for 2012.

But everyone's favorite Democratic Action Hero is a HELL YES!

Huckabee and Romney aren't viable candidates in 2012 for the same reasons they weren't viable candidates in 2008: each alienates one of the two major power base of the current GOP, i.e. Wall Street for Huckabee and social conservatives for Romney.

While Huckabee seems to realize this and is steadily erasing all the qualities that made the Wall Street faction of the party hate him/people like me not write him off as an irredeemable dick, Romney is never, ever going to be able to escape the two things that will forever doom him with the Palin crowd. Those things are, of course, that they view the Church of Latter-Day Saints as a non-Christian cult and Romney's health care plan in MA is virutally identical to "Obamacare."

I think Thune has the best chance of both winning the primary and being viable in the general, provided that the RNC succeeds in going all Lenny in Of Mice and Men on Palin.

Haaaaaaaahahahahahah - oh PLEASE YES...

I can beat Obama in 2012, says Palin

I wuld pay $1,000 or more to be in the audience of an Obama/Palin Presidential debate. And fuck those that would want him to go easy on here - I would want him to rip her metaphorical throat out.

...Or it's just hype to promote her lame ass new show...

Or vice-versa, with the show being a "non-partisan" extended advertisement for her to build up her profile prior to announcing the presidential bid. From my understanding (though I admit it's limited so I may well be wrong) wouldn't she have to recuse herself from the show if she formally announced her candidacy? Something about the networks theoretically having to air "equal time" for candidates or something? Though that may just be broadcast networks.

I still suspect Palin won't run though...the muckety-mucks in the GOP will make it very clear to her that she wouldn't win, and she'll likely be making enough money from her cable TV show and speaking gigs that she won't care.

Then again, maybe she really is that arrogant and stupid, but I simply don't see "The powers that be" within the GOP allowing her to get the nomination.

I would pay $1000 or more for that to matter, but if this election happened tomorrow she could easily win.

I don't think she will win in the long run. I don't even think she'll be the Republican nominee. But I don't think we should be laughing that hard yet. News that she's interested chills me to the bone. I thought she was content with being a celebrity.

She'd only win tomorrow because she wouldn't have had three or four months to repeatedly embarrass herself in front of the world press.

The Palin brand is driven largely by the speculation/hope/dread that she'll be running for president in 2012. If she doesn't plan on running, delaying that announcement as long as possible maximizes the value to her brand. Expect the same with a future endorsement.

If she is planning on running, she's picking a very odd way of building up for it. Quitting half-way through her first term and doing a reality show seem like a less-than-ideal way to convince a majority of voters that you are presidential material. People knew Al Gore definitely wasn't running in 2008 when they saw him in a hot tub on SNL. A reality show on TLC says the same thing to me. Besides, any candidate that has ever finished a term in high elected office has a silver bullet of an argument against her. She quit halfway through her first term as chief executive of a state with less than 700,000 people because she and her family couldn't handle the pressure. Now we're supposed to trust her to be chief executive of a country of 307,000,000? How can the country trust her not to quit when things inevitably get tough? If she gets the nomination, how can Republicans trust her not to quit the first time she sees herself down double digits in a poll?

What if she did get the nomination, jvc? Who would you vote for in 2012? The mouth-breathers will lurch poll-ward in legions, but will intelligent, reasoned Republicans keep her from the White House by....abstaining?

It's difficult to imagine any circumstances under which she would get my vote. What gives me hope is that the Republicans will have the more interesting primary races because it is wide open, contested, and likely to produce a new political star. This should mean that more independents and moderates will be drawn to vote in the Republican primaries, weakening the influence of the far right. Just a hope, though. Honestly, I'm just hoping Mitch Daniels gets in and gains traction. With Jindal and Christie sitting it out, I'm hoping one of the candidates I don't know much about surprises me with the substance and maturity utterly lacking in the bunch from 2008.

ETA: If Obama is still vulnerable and Palin, Gingrich, or some other far right candidate with limited appeal outside the Tea Party gets the Republican nomination, I wouldn't be surprised to see someone like Bloomberg jump in.

Cheers for that. I couldn't imagine you voting for her, in all honesty.

Prior to this election cycle, there is no way Palin would get the nomination. However, the GOP proved that, when they used the astroturf people to fan the spark of crazy in the fringe of the fringe of their party into a flame, they lost all control of the primary process in their party. It's like that line from TDK "...in their desperation, they turned to a man they didn't fully understand."

There is a serious chance Palin would win the nomination if she ran because of that. Everything she does--especially the Joe Miller saga--suggests she's stupid and arrogant enough to think she's a viable candidate.

Personally, I want her to run and win the nomination. It's the only way that Obama is guaranteed a second term. He may be a disappointment, but the scope of his domestic policy achievements is staggering. If his legislative legacy remains intact, we might actually get a great domestic policy platform going when/if a Democrat with balls and actual Democratic ideals gets in there and gives the individual items teeth.

Thankfully, Texax Governor Rick Perry won't run in 2012:

We re-elect a man who lies about a war but Obama doesn't deserve a second term why exactly?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101122/...politics_obama

Well Frank Rich makes a rather compelling case that that's exactly what may happen. The GOP really have played Dr.Frankenstein when it comes to this monstrous woman...

Could Palin become the sharp end of a Republican Party becoming the victims of their own current success?

Frank Rich is right to take her seriously and his last graphs about the kinds of criticisms being lobbed at her only making her stronger are right on, but I still don't think she'll ever run. The life she's been handed is too lucrative for her to give up, and when she experienced the kind of disclosure any candidate has to go through during her stint as a national candidate, it only infuriated her and filled her with the enduring thirst for revenge. I think she likes where she is too much to risk becoming a has-been.

Palin doesn't have a shot. She's national news because she is the only viable one out there who has said they might run in 2012. No one is really publicly tearing her down because the left would love it and the right needs someone as a focal point of their hopes to beat Obama. She quit her first term as Gov. during the worst economic crisis of this generation, she has zero shot at surviving negative hits and deep down every conservative knows this but in the absence of a national figure they'll nod and support her.

Sometime in the next several months we'll find out who is going to run against Obama in 2012. Obama has very little chance of winning because of his Presidency. He ran in 2008 based on a lot of rhetoric and no experience.. he has shifted from that rhetoric, failing to live up to the "hype" and his experiences in the White House hasn't exactly been the great and resume worthy. As long as the right doesn't shoot themselves in the foot and put someone with no experience (read: Palin) and too far right (see: Huckabee) and runs a by the books campaign there is a legitimate shot at winning the White House.

I agree with an article I read in the Washington Post by some Democratic strategists. If Obama wants to be remembered as a great President, he should announce he isn't running for a second term and focus on fixing our country and being more centrist and working with the GOP congress. This would pave the way for a fresh Democratic candidate who could conceivably win based on Obama's performance and presumably popularity for setting our country on the right path but for the next two years if Obama is in campaign mode, bashing the right as he has done for the last several months he will continue to alienate the middle, fail to get anything done in Washington and have an even worse record. The State of the Union is going to be one of the most critical in recent memory because this will set the tone and possibly determine the fate of our nation for the next 2 years.

He's been at the center and the GOP has no intention of working with him. None. The GOP's idea of people working with them is having them give in to whatever they want.

Snaieke's concern over Obama's legacy is so very touching.

I remember reading that piece in the Washington Post. It was pretty silly. This response from The Huffington Post was worth a read.

And I think Obama's bashing of the right is smart. It rallies his base, voters agree with much of it and, most importantly, he's right. Now that the Republicans are convinced they will fix everything, Obama needs to call them on their shit. They can't simply be the party of no anymore.

Like a lonely uncle that just got out of prison.

Obama's main problem is that, first, despite the blackness, it's very, very clear that he's an easily rolled child of privilege. If you never had to fight for anything in your life, you just don't understand what a fight is or how to engage in one. The guy eats oranges with a fork and knife. He traveled the world as a child. He went to--literally--the most exclusive private school in Hawaii. After that, he went to Occidental, then Columbia, then Harvard. These aren't exactly the stations of the kind of "hard childhood" he likes to sell as a narrative.

His method of resolving conflict as the head of the Harvard Law Review was to basically cave to the conservatives. Only, it doesn't really count as caving if you actually share their view of the world, which many have effectively argued he does, most recently Paul Krugman. (He even flirted with the idea of being a Republican at the beginning of his career. It's sort of obvious now that he probably would have gone that way if it weren't abundantly clear that people who look like him weren't going to be upwardly mobile in that party in the foreseeable future.)

Boehner, on the other hand, was a poor kid. He knows what it means to have to fight for something. Put a rich kid up against a poor kid, and the rich kid is going to end up with a bloody nose and begging the poor kid to like him. It's just a shame people like Boehner made the decision to sell themselves Lonesome Rhodes-style and persecute people like themselves in exchange for large sums of money.

If Obama wants to repair the damage he--and Rahm Emanuel--did to his relationship with the base, he needs to give people reason to believe he isn't some Republican Lite fully grown rich kid. He needs to actually fight for the interests of the working classes and minorities and let people like Eric Holder off the leash.

You're out of your damned mind if you think that's true. I may not agree with everything Obama does, but to even imply that he's a rich kid born with a silver spoon in his mouth is beyond the pale.

No, no. I can totally see how Barack Obama would be confused with an effete Republican elitist but for his smooth mochachino skin.

I just don't want two years of gridlock and don't think our country can afford to get in a pissing match. I'd prefer to see shit get done. I'm confident this new class of House GOPers will come in ready to get to work.

Republicans have been obstructionist children ever since Obama got into to office, so I really don't see that happening.

You don't know, like, anything about Obama's past and how his grandmother raised him, do you?

Hahahaha. HEH.

I'm familiar with the biography, yes. I just don't think being raised by grandparents because your teenage mother made a few bad decisions automatically equates to a hard life. Especially when your grandparents provide every conceivable advantage to you. The guy is kind of a wimpy dick--he mocks his own supporters and friends--and I think it is linked directly to his background.

I don't necessarily believe that coming from a relatively privileged background makes you a bad or weak person. Eric Holder and FDR are kids from privileged households that I think are fundamentally decent and principled people. I just think it's far more likely that you're going to be a weak and bad person if you come from privilege.

I would'nt be surprised, though, to see this become a dominant theme during the upcoming campaign: "President Obama is just too selfish and entitled not to seek re-election! Why, if he really loved this country he'd just choose not to run again! See here, even these two Democrats think so!"

I hate to give Snaike some credit...But why do presidents need second terms? Every second term has sucked since at least JFK/LBJ.

-JFK/LBJ: Vietnam plus the civil unrest at home.

-Nixon: Watergate

-Reagan: Iran Contra.

-Clinton: Impeachment. Glass Steagal repeal.

-Bush: Fall out from all the shit he did in his first term. Katrina. Bank Ballout. Iraq did get "better" but still.

Second Terms are all about ego. Nothing major usually gets passed during a presidents second term. Legistlation stalls for 4 years until a new president is sworn in.

One party is worse at campaigning, but wants to do the messy work of running the country despite the rampant corruption and cronyism that fuels Washington. The other party would like to just win every election it can and then do as much as they can to bolster their team because running the country is much harder than winning elections and the latter assures a better, cleaner result for their political party while the former is no guarantee for success.

Some form of this will play itself out over the next 2 years. Both sides have pretty much already said as much, and history has proven that that's how the two parties prefer to do things. So, yeah, what else is new? Just not sure this thread really has a reason to exist yet.

Straight question, Snaieke: would you vote for a Palin presidency?

You're as bad as Star Wars fanboys and Lucas. Jesus Christ, man!

Okay, I'm done. Obama is an idiot.

I guess practically begging them to participate in good faith negotiations and compromising constantly, while getting nothing in return, wasn't bipartisan enough.

This guy is a fucking moron.

Speaking of said good faith, the Republicans blew him off for dinner earlier in the month citing "November 30" as the rain date. Anyone know if they are showing up this time?

I mean, when the President invites you to dinner, it's sorta bad form to just blow him off. You gots to make the rain date at least. Otherwise you just come across as partisan maroons.