Hey, it’s thanks to Fox News that Bush was elected in the first place so don’t blame them for not using this technique again.
I’m not saying that Romney was winning. I’m saying that Americans changing their vote over a natural disastaster is fucking moronic. Obama helped organize support like he was supposed to. There was no way Those states could fund everything by themselves. All I’m saying is that this doesn’t validate his policies, something that those who changed their votes based on this occurence didn’t bother looking at.
And I know how the electoral college works…
Yes, bush did make mistakes, but blaming him for this country’s current ailments, four years later, is completely asinine.
Assumes majority of Americans watch Fox News
No, it’s not.
I don’t know that anyone changed their vote, or that it changed enough votes to effect the outcome of the election. Conservative media outlets are blaming the loss on this and other things, but it really didn’t have any effect on the outcome of the election. Obama would have won regardless.
Some of the things that certain Republicans are talking about right now are things that we probably won’t see from most conservative news outlets. The political people, people that are Republicans, rather than Social Conservatives, are talking about what went wrong, as any party does after a loss. And what they’re talking about is stuff like broadening the base - the alienation of minorities, women, the educated, etc. A lot of these guys are pissed about the Senate seats they essentially threw away that were winnable, but were run by Tea Party types who defeated moderates in the primaries. And how these guys, particularly Mourdock and Akin brought the party down with their misogynistic comments.
They said the same stuff after 2008. the problem is that their base doesn’t support what they need to do politically/electorally, and that the racist/sexist/Jesus/anti-intellectual/anti-science rhetoric is the same organizational rhetoric that the party uses to organize and energize it’s base.
After 2008, and again after 2010 and the rise of the Tea Parties, political analysts have been discussing how the GOP is becoming a regional party, and you can see this after every election now - the Red is almost all in the south now. these relatively conservative mid-western states, like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, even Iowa, are all Blue states now, and they really aren’t Blue states. Michigan is Romney’s home state, a state his father governed and was extremely popular. Some of these states had previously been swing states and others were just plain Red states, but they easily went blue. Indiana went red this time, although it was blue in 2008, and had it gone blue again, you would have seen a clean sweep of ALL the Northern states East of the Mississippi.
The GOP has used the Southern strategy and the Jesus strategy to organize and energize voters sympathetic to these social messages, and that worked when that was just a token to part of it’s base. But in doing so, it’s alienated everyone else, so the GOP is essentially left with just that base, and has essentially become a regional party. It can’t have any national power and can only act in the role as obstructionist, and that further alienates those that actually want to get something done or solve problems.
The economic problems were totally his responsibility. the two wars are/were expensive. The conservative policies of deregulation were the direct cause of the financial collapse that led to the recession from which we’re still trying to recover. The huge budget deficits that Obama has now were inherited from the military contracts that the government is locked into for years. These account for most of the deficit, and there’s nothing that can be done about it - you can’t break the contracts. Bush’s prescription drug program wasn’t paid for - the money for it was borrowed from Medicare, which Obama now has to repay. And while Bush increased spending, almost all of it military spending, he reduced taxes, which created the deficits and debt.
so, that’s a lot of big problems at once, but to make matters worse, the GOP filibustered everything in the Senate from 2009, and the GOP took the house in 2010 and has blocked EVERYTHING that the other party has attempted to do. So, you have conservatives saying, “Hey, he can’t blame Bush, he had four years to fix all this shit and he hasn’t.” Well, that’s because those same conservatives are well-organized, well-funded, and well-disciplined, and have made a concerted effort to obstructionism.
All of these problems are indictments against some of their most basic ideological planks: pro-war, deregulation, deficit spending while cutting taxes at the same time, etc. All of those policies have always been disastrous, yet, this organization manages to bullshit a new generation into believing that they’re great ideas, American ideas, and that anyone that argues against them is an Un-American/commie/socialist/terrorist/atheist/scientist/Satan-worshipping/dope-smoking/girlyman/fag or something, who want to eat white, christian babies. And people believe it, and the people that believe it are not the kind of people given to reason.
Again, I’m not saying that Romney would have won…
Yes it is. If it’s the House that’s impeding progress, blame the House, not the president 4 years ago.
You mean blame the House now, and not the president now. You can be unhappy that Obama hasn’t solved them immediately, but you can’t blame him for them, because they were caused the previous administrations policies and actions. So, yeah, you can blame Bush for this stuff - that’s fair and accurate. And like I said, there are certain things that are locked in - the debt to Medicare for Bush’s prescription drug program, the wars, the war debt, the military contracts - military expenditures are more than 80% of the federal budget now, and that doesn’t include the cost of the wars, which were mostly paid for through the sale of T-bills/bonds.
I’m actually starting to think that it’s time for the massdebating hall to make a return.
Obama’s not entirely innocent himself when it comes to debt raising…
Zen, would you or another mod be willing to move all the political debating to a new thread? It’s kinda getting out of hand.
His debt was from a bailout to save the American auto industry and a huge bailout to restart the economy after an almost total economic collapse. Both of those things worked. And, the cost of all of that only added $200 billion to that years deficit on top of the yearly budget deficit he inherited from Bush. Bush had no such issues at all his first year, yet his first budget was $1.7 trillion, which is roughly a $1.5 trillion increase from Clinton, who left Bush no yearly deficit, and in fact had balanced the budget and had a $225 billion annual surplus that he was using to pay off the national debt.
It’s not out of hand, it’s fine. Calm down.
Ah, so Obama has absolutely NOTHING to do with the $16 trillion debt? Right. And I’m the Queen of England.
Also, Clinton only passed ‘his’ balanced budget bill after the GOP, which controlled the House and the Senate, bombarded him with the bill over and over again, which he insisted on vetoing… over and over again…
All this talk about “red” and “blue” and “swing” really makes me wonder… is no-one in the US concerned about the fact that there are only two real parties?
I mean really, two points of view can’t represent a nation of over three-hundred million people…
That’s one party for every 150m people. In Belgium we have like one party for every 1m people.
It was Clinton’s budget. He sent it to the House. But it was a bipartisan effort to get the specifics of the budget, that’s true. But, yeah, it was Clinton’s budget.
He’s responsible for about $800 billion of it. It’s $11 trillion when he took office, and he is locked into a great deal of mandatory spending, which includes repayment to Medicare for money borrowed from the fund to pay for Bush’s prescription drug plan, mandatory military spending that accounts for than 80% of the annual federal budget, as well as interest on the national debt, which is now, by itself, higher than the entire annual federal budget during Clinton’s last years in office.
Much of our debt is from 2 wars for which we sold T-bills and bonds to finance. We have to pay the interest on that debt as well as pay the bearers of the T-bills/bonds.
Obama’s two expensive projects were the auto bailout, which has been repaid, and the $800 billion stimulus to restart the economy. He has no other expensive programs of his own that have contributed to the deficit/debt. There have not yet been any costs from his Health Care Law.
you can’t increase the deficit AND cut taxes -that’s what Bush did, not Obama. Obama was/is locked into mandatory spending as well as being locked into Bush’s tax cuts for the first part of his presidency. (they’ll expire next year BTW.)
I don’t like political parties. they only exist as organizations to elect people to office, nothing more.
I’m aware of the tax situation, expirations, can’t cut them and increase deficit, etc.
Now, Obama is still involved in the war overseas, even after we’ve gotten who we were aiming for. Even if much of the conflict was Bush’s fault, we’re still over there. Yes, Obama has set a deadline for when he wants to bring the troops home, but that’s in 2014. Why not bring them home now, saving lives and money?
Too many parties leads to confusion. The winner-take-all system is the most stable imo and, believe it or not, is susceptible to less corruption than a multi-party system. Need I remind you of Hitler, whom took Germany with only around 3% of the popular vote?
The NAZIs got about 34% of the vote in the election before the fire, but the power didn’t come from their plurality in the Bundestag. Hitler seized power as Chancellor after the Reichstag fire and seized power as Fuhrer after Hindenburg’s death. When the German Army swore an oath of allegiance to him, he used that power to dismantle the democratic government and began the Third Reich.
Now, Germany has a billion parties, but they are so famously uncorrupted that their biggest political scandal in some time was a couple years ago when the leader of the SPD was photographed having lunch with a businessman. My GF said that she didn’t expect SPD to win a plurality for a very long time. It was a big deal. And that’s for a politician having lunch with a businessman.
Meanwhile, in our two party system, bribery is now legal and defined by the SCOTUS as free speech. That’s how fucking corrupt we are, that bribery is perfectly legal and not only legal, but constitutionally protected free speech.
EDIT: Speaking of the elections and politics: I read about this lady some time ago and forgot about her until today - she won her election:
https://www.nbcnews.com/technology/ingame/world-warcraft-playing-candidate-wins-election-1C6892843
I was referring to their earlier elections. Besides, even with that 34%, they wouldn’t have won anything in the US.
Also, I HIGHLY doubt that the system is as black-and-white as you’re painting it.
edit: It’s nearly midnight. I’m off to bed. Post your replies and I will get back to them tomorrow.
The point is that they didn’t take power through democratic means or through their plurality, and it had nothing to do with Germany having a parliamentary democracy. they were the plurality party at that time, meaning the party holding the highest percentage of seats. If the Germans had had only 2 parties, Hitler wouldn’t have had to go through all the shit he did in order to seize power, he could have done it immediately.
As far as the current German political system being black and white with regard to corruption: yes, it is. The German people in general are rule-followers. Lenin said that it was impossible to start a revolution in Germany because of all the ‘Keep off the grass signs’ or something like this. Yes, their culture is famously ordered - they love watches and they are fucking punctual. Their politics are generally not corrupt.
it sure is words in here
Not from 'murca, so these last pages are a breeze to scroll down 
For those who wonder, I went with:
“I’m sorry to hear about your grandfather. work-related-words. With my deepest sympathy.”