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Author Topic: Who should become the next US president?  (Read 63717 times)

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Sondra

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #460 on: November 02, 2008, 06:10:22 PM »

Two more days! Are we ready people?  ??)
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alexis

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #461 on: November 02, 2008, 06:26:23 PM »

Polls look good, MUCH better than 2004. They are based on a certain turnout of youth voters though ...
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Alexis

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #462 on: November 02, 2008, 08:36:12 PM »

Quote from: 1161
Vote now!   ;D

http://www.economist.com/vote2008/


[It's totally meaningless, but fun anyway, just like a real Florida election!]


I'm Italian and if I could vote I surely vote for Obama!This election involving not only US,but the rest of the world aswell.
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #463 on: November 02, 2008, 10:27:52 PM »

Quote from: 1581
I'm Italian and if I could vote I surely vote for Obama!This election involving not only US,but the rest of the world aswell.

There's an old joke about the Presidency of the United States being too important a job to be left to the Americans. I doubt many of the rest of us would have gone for Boy George and we'd have at least one less war and a more functional financial sector to show for our efforts. Bush is what you get when you're dumb enough to "vote with your gut" (your gut's for digesting food, fool) or vote for "the guy you'd like to have a beer with:" I mean, do your drinking buddies look like they ought to be running anything more complicated than a TV remote? :)
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Kaleidoscope_Eyes

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #464 on: November 02, 2008, 11:01:58 PM »

Who will it be? Oh-Bummer or McCain-not..... Just kidding.

Seems like it will be Obama...  :-/
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #465 on: November 03, 2008, 12:54:57 AM »

Quote from: 568
Polls look good, MUCH better than 2004. They are based on a certain turnout of youth voters though ...

A lot of those polls are based on previous turnout patterns and if anything are low-balling young and African American voters. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence that turnout is way up at advance polls this year, and if that pattern continues through Tuesday it'll be very much to Obama's advantage.  :)
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #466 on: November 03, 2008, 01:07:11 AM »

Would it be surly to mention that a two-point lead is within the margin of error?


Poll Gives John McCain Glimmer Of Hope
By Toby Harnden in Columbus, Ohio, and Alex Spillius in Wallingford, Pennsylvania
From The Telegraph 03 November 2008

A Mason-Dixon survey in Ohio, the state that gave George W. Bush victory in 2004, recorded a surprise two-point advantage for the Republican.

Mr McCain has just finished a two-day bus tour through the state, which the Republican has to win if he is to have a chance.

He is scheduled to visit a staggering seven states today, holding a series of rallies mostly in airport hangers in a bid to hit local television news bulletins.

The 72-year-old Vietnam War veteran showed on Sunday he was in no mood for quitting. "There are just two days left, two days," he told a raucous crowd in Wallingford, Pennsylvania.

"We are a couple of points behind in Pennsylvania. The pundits have written us off just like before, but, my friends, the Mac is back!"

It came as Mr Obama was also making a last push to carry the traditional swing territory.

In Ohio, he showed no signs of letting up as he held rallies in Cincinnati, Columbus and Cleveland
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aspinall_lover

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #467 on: November 03, 2008, 01:15:43 AM »

Well, Geoff, good points on all bases.  But I can't wait to watch the returns on TV Tuesday night.  It WILL be interesting..................VERY...............
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #468 on: November 03, 2008, 01:23:59 AM »

One last (I hope) Palinism:

Sarah Palin speaks on the First Amendment
Glenn Greenwald
Salon October 31st

Somehow, in Sarah Palin's brain, it's a threat to the First Amendment when newspapers criticize her negative attacks on Barack Obama.  This is actually so dumb that it hurts:

    In a conservative radio interview that aired in Washington, D.C. Friday morning, Republican vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin said she fears her First Amendment rights may be threatened by "attacks" from reporters who suggest she is engaging in a negative campaign against Barack Obama.

    Palin told WMAL-AM that her criticism of Obama's associations, like those with 1960s radical Bill Ayers and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, should not be considered negative attacks. Rather, for reporters or columnists to suggest that it is going negative may constitute an attack that threatens a candidate's free speech rights under the Constitution, Palin said.

    "If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations," Palin told host Chris Plante, "then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media."

Maureen Dowd recently made an equally stupid comment when she complained that her First Amendment rights were being violated by the McCain campaign's refusal to allow her on their campaign plane.

The First Amendment is actually not that complicated.  It can be read from start to finish in about 10 seconds.  It bars the Government from abridging free speech rights.  It doesn't have anything to do with whether you're free to say things without being criticized, or whether you can comment on blogs without being edited, or whether people can bar you from their private planes because they don't like what you've said.  

If anything, Palin has this exactly backwards, since one thing that the First Amendment does actually guarantee is a free press.  Thus, when the press criticizes a political candidate and a Governor such as Palin, that is a classic example of First Amendment rights being exercised, not abridged.

This isn't only about profound ignorance regarding our basic liberties, though it is obviously that.  Palin here is also giving voice to the standard right-wing grievance instinct:  that it's inherently unfair when they're criticized.  And now, apparently, it's even unconstitutional.  

According to Palin, what the Founders intended with the First Amendment was that political candidates for the most powerful offices in the country and Governors of states would be free to say whatever they want without being criticized in the newspapers.  In the Palin worldview, the First Amendment was meant to ensure that powerful political officials such as herself would not be "attacked" in the papers.  Is it even possible to imagine more breathtaking ignorance from someone holding high office and running for even higher office?
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aspinall_lover

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #469 on: November 03, 2008, 02:25:12 AM »

Geoff..............do you want to be a "political analyist"???  No pun.......seriously.....you KNOW your stuff, dude!!!
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #470 on: November 03, 2008, 03:16:38 AM »

Quote from: 1255
Geoff..............do you want to be a "political analyist"???


You wouldn't know someone at Fox who'd take a resume by any chance...?  ;D

G1qAnx-_LmY



 :)
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Joost

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #471 on: November 03, 2008, 01:42:01 PM »

I'm already looking forward to following the whole thing on CNN... Too bad it will take place in middle of the night and early morning for us, so I'll see how long I can keep my eyes open...

I remember that four years ago I fell asleep around 3 AM and that Kerry still seemed to be ahead of Bush around that time... Then I woke up about four hours later with the TV still on... The first thing I heard when I woke up was that Bush had won... What a nightmare that was...  :(
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #472 on: November 03, 2008, 02:42:14 PM »




You can see the depth of McCain's problem: even with the polls (predictably) tightening, he still wouldn't win even if he carried every one of the toss up states, something he is not all likely to do. The real question tomorrow night is going to be how big Obama's margin is and how many Senate and House seats the Democrats pick up. (My guess: Obama wins by about 5 points and 325-350 electoral votes, and the Democrats pick up around 6 Senate seats and 20 in the House.)  :)

map from Real Clear Politics
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #473 on: November 03, 2008, 02:47:15 PM »

Here's something I hope proves to be true:  :)


Last of the Culture Warriors
     
By Peter Beinart
Monday, November 3, 2008; Page A21
The Washington Post

Why has America turned on Sarah Palin? Obviously, her wobbly television interviews haven't helped. Nor have the drip, drip of scandals from Alaska, which have tarnished her reformist image. But Palin's problems run deeper, and they say something fundamental about the political age being born. Palin's brand is culture war, and in America today culture war no longer sells. The struggle that began in the 1960s -- which put questions of racial, sexual and religious identity at the forefront of American politics -- may be ending. Palin is the end of the line.

This won't be the first time a culture war has come to a close. In the 1920s, battles over evolution, immigration, prohibition and the resurgent Ku Klux Klan dominated election after election. And those issues played into that era's version of the red-blue divide, pitting newly arrived, saloon-frequenting, big-city Catholics against old-stock, teetotaling, small-town Protestants. In 1924, the Democratic convention split so bitterly over prohibition and the Klan that it took more than 100 ballots to nominate a candidate for president.

Then, in the 1930s, the culture war died. A big reason was the Depression, which put questions of economic survival front and center. In the 1920s boom economy, politicians were largely free to focus on identity politics. By Franklin Roosevelt's election in 1932, that was a luxury America's leaders could no longer afford.

The other thing that killed the '20s culture war was generational change. Over time, Catholics and other immigrants left their ghettos and began to assimilate. The cutoff of mass immigration in 1924 ushered in an era of cultural consolidation in which the differences among white Americans came to matter less and less. When Democrats nominated a Catholic, Al Smith, for president in 1928, he lost in a landslide. But by 1960, when they nominated John F. Kennedy, he grabbed a far larger share of the Protestant vote, and won.

Something similar is happening today. Our era's culture war also began in prosperity. It was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the high point of America's postwar boom, that African Americans took to the streets in vast numbers to demand equal rights. And it was in the early 1960s, as a result of the vast increase in postwar college enrollment, that students began challenging the conformity of American life. In 1962, the Port Huron Statement spoke of a generation "bred in at least modest comfort." It was those middle-class baby boomers who sparked the movements for women's rights and gay rights and the rise in blue-state secularism, all of which helped touch off this era's culture war.

The relationship between prosperity and cultural conflict isn't exact, of course, but it is significant that during this era's culture war we've gone a quarter-century without a serious recession. Economic issues have mattered in presidential elections, of course, but not until today have we faced an economic crisis so grave that it made cultural questions seem downright trivial. In 2000, in the wake of an economic boom and a sex scandal that led to a president's impeachment, 22 percent of Americans told exit pollsters that "moral values" were their biggest concern, compared with only 19 percent who cited the economy.

Today, according to a recent Newsweek poll, the economy is up to 44 percent and "issues like abortion, guns and same-sex marriage" down to only 6 percent. It's no coincidence that Palin's popularity has plummeted as the financial crisis has taken center stage. From her championing of small-town America to her efforts to link Barack Obama to former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, Palin is treading a path well-worn by Republicans in recent decades. She's depicting the campaign as a struggle between the culturally familiar and the culturally threatening, the culturally traditional and the culturally exotic. But Obama has dismissed those attacks as irrelevant, and the public, focused nervously on the economic collapse, has largely tuned them out.

Palin's attacks are also failing because of generational change. The long-running, internecine baby boomer cultural feud just isn't that relevant to Americans who came of age after the civil rights, gay rights and feminist revolutions. Even many younger evangelicals are broadening their agendas beyond abortion, stem cells, school prayer and gay marriage. And just as younger Protestants found JFK less threatening than their parents had found Al Smith, younger whites -- even in bright-red states -- don't view the prospect of a black president with great alarm.

The economic challenges of the coming era are complicated, fascinating and terrifying, while the cultural battles of the 1960s feel increasingly stale. If John McCain loses tomorrow, the GOP will probably choose someone like Mitt Romney or Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal to lead it back from the wilderness, someone who -- although socially conservative -- speaks fluently about the nation's economic plight and doesn't try to substitute identity for policy. Although she seems like a fresh face, Sarah Palin actually represents the end of an era. She may be the last culture warrior on a national ticket for a very long time.
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alexis

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #474 on: November 03, 2008, 07:19:05 PM »

Geoff, I will feel much better if/when the numbers are in. You notice the RCP poll you have up above is about 60-80 electoral votes less for Obama than a few days ago.

As of now, Palin could still possibly be one unfortunate "threshing accident" away from the Presidency.
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Alexis

Penny Lane

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #475 on: November 03, 2008, 07:57:49 PM »

Quote from: 568
As of now, Palin could still possibly be one unfortunate "threshing accident" away from the Presidency.

Please don't say that.  I would be horrified if that happened.  :o ??) >:( :'(

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alexis

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #476 on: November 03, 2008, 08:41:15 PM »

Quote from: 1620

Please don't say that.  I would be horrified if that happened.  :o ??) >:( :'(


Sorry, I was just joking, I read that on some thread somewhere this AM.

Sorry  :)
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Alexis

Jane

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #477 on: November 03, 2008, 09:30:34 PM »

Good luck for you tomorrow, American friends!
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Geoff

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #478 on: November 04, 2008, 01:31:44 AM »

Quote from: 568
Geoff, I will feel much better if/when the numbers are in. You notice the RCP poll you have up above is about 60-80 electoral votes less for Obama than a few days ago.

All they've done really is move Ohio and Virginia out of the "leaning Obama" category back into the toss ups. That's where they should have been all along, I think. It's still going to be the Democrats' night.  :)

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Penny Lane

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Re: Who should become the next US president?
« Reply #479 on: November 04, 2008, 01:39:31 AM »

Quote from: 568

Sorry, I was just joking, I read that on some thread somewhere this AM.

Sorry  :)

It's all right, Alexis, no worries.   :)

Anyway........  I am hoping tomorrow will go well, and I will not be voting for McCain-Palin.  I will be busy all day Tuesday but I will keep my eyes and ears wide open for any election news I can get.
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