mjmooney Posted November 9, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted November 9, 2012 Not really arguing pro-Bush policies, just saying that you don't need to look that far back when Democrats thought that we were turning into WW2 Germany. Only now, the pendulum has swung the other way and Republicans think we're turning into Cold War Russia AND WW2 Germany. Nazis and communists (and socialists) are one and the same, apparently. As are Muslims and atheists. The education table upthread gives a clue. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 To be fair the Nazi and communist regimes in Germany and Russia were similar in many ways. Obviously calling something both Nazi and communist at the same time is a bit silly but I can see why they're often lumped together. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kwan Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 But that's the whole point of it. It's the same government, but people on both sides try to paint it in a way that makes them feel better, so Dems cry fascism (despite the fact the Patriot Act got voted 98-1 in the Senate) and Pubs cry communism (despite the fact that TARP and the bailout were Bush ideas) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFCforever1991 Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 Anyone that think Obama is a Socialist, just needs to go North to Canada to see he really isn't.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted November 9, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted November 9, 2012 Is the communist party still illegal in the US? I remember back when Americans ridiculed Soviet elections because you could only vote communist - and the Russian riposte was that in America you could only vote capitalist. At least that's never been true in the UK and Europe (as far as I know). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mantis Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 I don't think the communist party was ever illegal in the US was it? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFCforever1991 Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 Voting is the illusion of choice Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mjmooney Posted November 9, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted November 9, 2012 I don't think the communist party was ever illegal in the US was it? Apparently not, I must have imagined that! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted November 9, 2012 Author Share Posted November 9, 2012 Voting is the illusion of choice If there are differences between the parties you're picking from, then you're wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chrisp65 Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 If there are differences between the parties you're picking from, then you're wrong. If I don't want my house demolished and the Tories say they can demolish it with a big ball and Labour say they can demolish it with a JCB and the Libs say they'll repair it but secretly intend to burn it down if elected, then there are three differences and no choice. Sorry to pick a silly example, but we are essentially being offered shades of the same thing and not an alternative. Lots of drones or loads of drones is not choice. 3 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted November 9, 2012 Author Share Posted November 9, 2012 If I don't want my house demolished and the Tories say they can demolish it with a big ball and Labour say they can demolish it with a JCB and the Libs say they'll repair it but secretly intend to burn it down if elected, then there are three differences and no choice. Sorry to pick a silly example, but we are essentially being offered shades of the same thing and not an alternative. Lots of drones or loads of drones is not choice. Yes, but that doesn't happen (at least in Singapore and the US, I know nothing about politics in Britain). As long as there are ideological differences, however small, between the parties on the ballot, you have a choice, even if you don't like all of them. Analogy: say the Tories want to demolish your house and Labour wants to do it as well, but Labour will compensate you with $1000, then there is a choice, even if both choices are bad choices, because they are qualitatively different. I know a lot of you disagree with me on this, and I understand that in times of economic difficulty like these, political apathy can become quite tempting, but (again, basing this solely on what I know of US and Singapore politics) a look at the general beliefs of different parties makes it abundantly clear that they are different from each other and hence pursue different policies - even if they yield the same results. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tonyh29 Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 this could be my favourite quote yet from a Republican The first thing to understand is that this was not a victory for Obama. He did not win this election; Americans did not vote for four more years of Obama. His victory was simply a by-product of our defeat Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AVFCforever1991 Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 Well the GOP did pick the wrong candidate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
legov Posted November 9, 2012 Author Share Posted November 9, 2012 Well the GOP did pick the wrong candidate. Who else could they have picked? Herman **** Cain? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peterms Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 Who else could they have picked? Herman **** Cain? It does make you wonder how a process involving so many people, so much time, and so much money, can throw up such utter **** morons. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarewsEyebrowDesigner Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 George Carlin famously pointed out that perhaps it isn't the politicians that suck, but the people that suck. A society if greedy self-obsessed fuckwads will produce greedy, self-obsessed fuckwad politicians. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Risso Posted November 9, 2012 Share Posted November 9, 2012 It does make you wonder how a process involving so many people, so much time, and so much money, can throw up such utter **** morons. It's like fishing in a trout lake though. However expensive your gear, you're going to catch a trout. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
maqroll Posted November 10, 2012 Share Posted November 10, 2012 Interesting article on the Romney election day implosion The Romney Campaign’s Ground Game Fiasco by Eli Lake, Daniel Klaidman, Ben Jacobs Nov 9, 2012 5:03 PM EST They were the gang who couldn’t shoot straight. Romney’s ground-game operation was a disaster—from technology that didn’t work to field operatives who didn’t understand their tasks. The result: Obama won. When Republican fundraisers solicited the party’s big donors on behalf of Mitt Romney this year, the centerpiece of the pitch was a state-of-the-art campaign to identify the party’s likely voters and make sure they came to the polls on Election Day. Political pros call these county-by-county, block-by-block campaigns theground game. And while most of the media attention focuses on candidate speeches, debates, and ad buys, it’s the ground game where elections are won and lost. U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and vice presential candidate Paul Ryan pay a visit to a campaign office in Richmond Heights, Ohio, Nov. 6, 2012. (Emmanuel Dunand / AFP / Getty Images ) The story starts in 2008. The Romney campaign sought to counter Team Obama’s highly touted, high-tech voter-targeting system, nicknamed Narwhal after the Arctic sea mammal. Narwhal provided the Obama campaign with reams of specific data on voters—finding single women in conservative counties, for instance, or families with children who have disabilities. In 2012, the Romney campaign unveiled its own killer app and called it Project Orca—the fierce great whale that is the natural predator of the Narwhal. The only problem: Boston’s Orca turned out to be toothless. At least that’s the way it was supposed to work. But on Tuesday, it became clear that the deployment of Orca was doing more harm than good. “I think it’s fair to say that pretty much everything about the system that was supposed to work actually failed,” said one campaign official who witnessed the breakdown from the Romney war room on the floor of Boston’s TD Garden. The Romney high command had cloaked the system in secrecy to maintain what it hoped would be a true competitive turnout advantage. But by limiting the number of people with access to Orca, the campaign was not able to train its field operatives to use it or do the necessary beta-testing to work out the kinks that typically plague new software. But Beeson also said Orca was able to provide voting data on 91 percent of the precincts and accounted for turning out some 14.3 million voters. “At the end of the day I can look any donor in the eye and say we used our resources effectively,” he said. “This is the first time we have attempted to do anything on this scale. By no means was it an abject failure.” Others who worked on the ground for the campaign disagree, however. In many instances, the voter lists that were loaded on the smart phones of field operatives didn’t match the precincts where they’d been sent, campaign officials said. In addition, there were massive credentialing problems, so Romney poll watchers were not permitted to operate at many precincts. In many rural precincts, poor cellphone coverage made it difficult or impossible for Romney forces to transmit information. Finally, because poll watchers tend to be older, tech-averse volunteers and because there was so little training, many of them simply couldn’t master the technical aspects of the task. “We were sold on Mitt as this brilliant manager and turnaround artist,” said John Ekdahl, one of those poll watchers in Florida who used Orca. “But it was a snake-oil kind of program. I say this as a Web developer. This was throwing money at a product that just didn’t work.” Ekdahl first published his critique of Orca on the conservative website Ace of Spades. Other poll watchers who asked not to be named had similar complaints. The mood grew increasingly grim on Tuesday as Romney officials realized that their supposed state-of-the-art answer to the Chicago’s turnout juggernaut was a bust. Walking down the central aisle of the Romney war room you didn’t hear the humming of a well-oiled turnout machine, one campaign official recalled. You heard the panicky tones of operatives flooded with calls from the field about technical snafus and mass confusion. There were other problems for Romney’s ground game in the battleground states. The Obama for America team, for example, had field operations in states like Ohio stay behind after the 2008 election and slowly but surely pick up steam as Election Day 2012 approached. The Republicans closed their field offices after the 2010 midterms. “We were never going to have the same size and staff as the Obama campaign,” Beeson said. He added that the Republican National Committee was several million dollars in debt by the time Michael Steele left the job, putting resource constraints on the party in terms of operating field offices in states like Ohio. Finally, the Republicans were never able to match the Obama campaign’s ability to use data from purchase histories, voting registration, and campaign contacts to tailor specific messages to specific voters in a process known as micro-targeting. Republicans first pioneered the use of this kind of data in the 2004 election cycle but mainly used the data to target television ads, direct mail, and robocalls, according to Republican strategists. The Democrats were able to use this kind of data in deploying armies of volunteer door-knockers and others who targeted their voters over time. Beeson acknowledged that his party will be seeking to learn from the Democrats in terms of micro-targeting. “They have taken this to an organic, micro, micro level,” he said. “We will be looking at how they did it.” Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted November 10, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted November 10, 2012 I've seen versions of that about Canada and the UK too. The US really is the most capitalist/least socialist of all western and developed nations, even with Obama in charge. 2012 Index of Economic Freedom (i.e. adherence to free market economics, according to the right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation and [Rupert Murdoch's] Wall Street Journal.) begs to differ: 1. Hong Kong 2. Singapore 3. Australia 4. New Zealand 5. Switzerland === ^^^ FREE MARKET / MOSTLY FREE MARKET vvv === 6. Canada 7. Chile 8. Mauritius 9. Ireland 10. USA 11. Denmark 12. Bahrain 13. Luxembourg 14. UK 15. Netherlands 16. Estonia 17. Finland 18. Taiwan 19. Macau 20. Cyprus 21. Sweden 22. Japan 23. Lithuania 24. St. Lucia 25. Qatar 26. Germany 27. Iceland 28. Austria (tracing the historical ratings, the US began turning away from free market policies during Dubya's administration) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
leviramsey Posted November 10, 2012 VT Supporter Share Posted November 10, 2012 I think the Republicans being for older whiter males is a given isn't it? They were breaking down all the voting demographics earlier today and it was along the lines of 99% of the black vote, 75% of the hispanic vote and 30% of the white male vote went for Obama. Personally, I'd have been more interested in seeing it broken down as economic groupings. I'm guessing the poor and medical insurance lacking people voted Obama. It just translates that many black and hispanic are poor and lacking health insurance. 40 Counties with the highest median household income (2011) and how they voted Loudoun, Virginia (median income: $119,134) - Obama: 81,900 vs. Romney: 74,794 Fairfax, Virginia ($105,797) - Obama: 260,835 vs. Romney: 173,786 Arlington (city*), Virginia ($100,735) - Obama: 81,178 vs. Romney: 34,433 Hunterdon, New Jersey ($99,099) - Obama: 25,148 vs. Romney: 36,979 Howard, Maryland ($98,953) - Obama: 84,017 vs. Romney: 54,094 Somerset, New Jersey ($96,360) - Obama: 70,168 vs. Romney: 63,159 Prince William, Virginia ($95,146) - Obama: 103,161 vs. Romney: 74,371 Fauquier, Virginia ($93,762) - Obama: 13,891 vs. Romney: 20,955 Douglas, Colorado ($93,573) - Obama: 54,093 vs. Romney: 93,930 Montgomery, Maryland ($92,909) - Obama: 286,493 vs. Romney: 110,940 Charles, Maryland ($91,733) - Obama: 45,621 vs. Romney: 23,637 Nassau, New York ($91,414) - Obama: 243,649 vs. Romney: 212,882 Stafford, Virginia ($91,348) - Obama: 27,130 vs. Romney: 32,429 Morris, New Jersey ($91,332) - Obama: 90,313 vs. Romney: 114,265 Putnam, New York ($90,735) - Obama: 17,851 vs. Romney: 22,436 Calvert, Maryland ($89,393) - Obama: 18,963 vs. Romney: 22,413 Williamson, Tennessee ($86,962) - Obama: 24,328 vs. Romney: 68,090 Delaware, Ohio ($85,365) - Obama: 36,131 vs. Romney: 58,980 Santa Clara, California ($84,895) - Obama: 315,869 vs. Romney: 126,330 York, Virginia ($84,167) - Obama: 13,165 vs. Romney: 20,182 Anne Arundel, Maryland ($84,138) - Obama: 115,960 vs. Romney: 118,165 Carroll, Maryland ($84,117) - Obama: 26,067 vs. Romney: 53,960 Suffolk, New York ($84,106) - Obama: 274,830 vs. Romney: 259,348 Sussex, New Jersey ($83,839) - Obama: 23,406 vs. Romney: 37,215 Carver, Minnesota ($83,348) - Obama: 20,745 vs. Romney: 31,155 Alexandria (city), Virginia ($82,748) - Obama: 52,434 vs. Romney: 20,205 Fort Bend, Texas ($82,271) - Obama: 101,043 vs. Romney: 116,028 Collin, Texas ($82,237) - Obama: 100,754 vs. Romney: 195,933 Rockland, New York ($82,217) - Obama: 60,446 vs. Romney: 52,936 Forsyth, Georgia ($82,209) - Obama: 14,544 vs. Romney: 65,853 Rockwall, Texas ($82,061) - Obama: 8,112 vs. Romney: 27,098 Norfolk, Massachusetts ($81,889) - Obama: 200,891 vs. Romney: 144,654 San Mateo, California ($81,657) - Obama: 143,976 vs. Romney: 53,853 St. Mary's, Maryland ($81,657) - Obama: 17,982 vs. Romney: 25,096 Hamilton, Indiana ($80,999) - Obama: 43,794 vs. Romney: 90,740 Scott, Minnesota ($80,864) - Obama: 29,714 vs. Romney: 40,321 Kendall, Illinois ($80,655) - Obama: 21,219 vs. Romney: 23,076 Monmouth, New Jersey ($79,334) - Obama: 125,471 vs. Romney: 140,376 Bergen, New Jersey ($79,272) - Obama: 193,470 vs. Romney: 155,267 Chester, Pennsylvania ($79,160) - Obama: 122,232 vs. Romney: 123,280 24 of 40 go Romney's way, however note that it's an even split among the top 20 and that Obama's wins are generally by much bigger margins than Romney's (note that this is the median so a county where there's a few very high-income people and many low-income people will show up as a low-income county (New York County, New York (i.e. Manhattan) has a median household income of $47,030)). If you looked at median individual income (ages 18-65), Obama may do even better (a fair number of the larger richer counties that Obama won get their high averages despite having greater-than-average numbers of single people, e.g. Arlington, Alexandria, San Mateo, and Santa Clara). *: Virginia has a distinctive local boundary system... Edison Research exit polling: Income under $30,000: Obama 63-35 $30,000-$49,999: Obama 57-42 $50,000-up: Romney 53-47 $100,000-up: Romney 54-46 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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