President Obama Re-Elected - Page 555

On September 20 2012 16:56 Souma wrote:


Oof, 12-years-old is way too young. I was thinking more around the age of 16 or even 18.

Mitt Romney has had a light campaign schedule lately. He held his first rally in five days on Wednesday night.

And there is another place where his presence is oddly lacking: in the television ad wars.

Despite what appears to be a plump bank account and an in-house production studio that cranks out multiple commercials a day, Mr. Romney’s campaign has been tightfisted with its advertising budget, leaving him at a disadvantage in several crucial states as President Obama blankets them with ads.

One major reason appears to be that Mr. Romney’s campaign finances have been significantly less robust than recent headlines would suggest. Much of the more than $300 million the campaign reported raising this summer is earmarked for the Republican National Committee, state Republican organizations and Congressional races, limiting the money Mr. Romney’s own campaign has to spend.

With polls showing President Obama widening his lead in some of these states and the race a dead heat in others, Mr. Romney’s lack of a full-throttle media campaign is risky, especially as he struggles to get his message out over the din of news about his campaign’s recent setbacks.

In some states the disparity is striking. Mr. Obama and his allies are handily outspending Mr. Romney and the conservative “super PACs” working on his behalf in Colorado, Ohio and New Hampshire.

And in states like Florida, Iowa, Nevada and Virginia, where the Romney and Obama forces are roughly matching their spending dollar for dollar, the super PACs are responsible for nearly half the advertising that is benefiting the Republican nominee.

After three weeks of bad news for Mr. Romney — first that he received a negligible bounce from his convention, then that Mr. Obama was overtaking him in the polls and finally that he had been secretly recorded disparaging the president’s supporters as government-dependent freeloaders — the lack of a more forceful advertising offensive is one more way that the Romney campaign finds its message obscured.

Each day that slips by is a loss of precious television time in an air war that is only going to grow heavier and louder, making it difficult for any ad to leave a lasting impact.

“In a world where we know advertising imbalances lend opportunities for persuasion, it is surprising that any campaign would allow imbalances to continue,” said Erika Franklin Fowler, co-director of the Wesleyan Media Project. “Especially following several weeks of ad dominance by the opponent.”

Mr. Romney’s absence from the air made sense before the party’s convention in late August, since the campaign’s cash flow became so slow over the summer that it was forced to borrow $20 million to carry it through the event, when his formal nomination freed up tens of millions of dollars for the general election.

Yet at the same time Romney aides worked hard to project the image of a fund-raising machine far outpacing the president’s.

Romney aides released informal dollar figures that lumped several pools of money — some available for his use, others not — into a single figure, providing a perception greater than reality: $106 million in June and $101 million in July, far more than Mr. Obama and the Democrats.

Yet those figures obscured the fact that most of the money Mr. Romney was raising was reserved for those other political entities like the Republican National Committee.

And the party committee, which Mr. Romney helped propel to record-breaking receipts in July, is allowed to spend only about $22 million on advertising that is coordinated with Mr. Romney.

Even now, a large though unknown portion of Mr. Romney’s fund-raising is not going directly into his campaign account.

A closer look at Mr. Romney’s own filings revealed that Mr. Obama, while trailing in overall party fund-raising, was pulling far more money than Mr. Romney into his campaign account, the most useful and flexible dollars a candidate has to spend, in part because of strong collection from small donors who could give again and again without hitting federal limits.

Mr. Romney’s aides declined to discuss their advertising plans, saying that unlike the Obama campaign, which has reserved more than $40 million in time through Election Day, it will not telegraph its intentions for competitors to see.

As of the end of July, the Republican Party had an additional $15 million left to spend in coordination with Mr. Romney before it reaches its federal spending limits. And though no one knows the precise amounts, the Romney campaign will have millions at its disposal that it can drop into a television market at any given moment.

So far it is only buying several days or a week of advertising at a time, a sign that it is being extremely frugal. According to a review of spending figures provided by a group that tracks political advertising, from Sept. 10 through Sept. 24, Mr. Romney and his allies reserved $3.7 million in advertising time in Ohio. That compared with $5.2 million for Mr. Obama and his allies.

In Colorado, Mr. Romney is being outspent $2.2 million to $1.5 million during that same period. In New Hampshire, Mr. Obama is spending $1.2 million, compared with $380,000 to benefit Mr. Romney. The vast majority of that is coming not from the Romney campaign but from American Crossroads, the conservative super PAC.

Asked about the campaign’s budget on Wednesday, Spencer Zwick, Mr. Romney’s finance chairman, said simply, “We have spent our money smartly and efficiently.”

The emerging strategy comes after several days of soul-searching. Romney officials are very clear-eyed about the damage done by two straight weeks of bad media coverage and the embarrassing comments caught on tape (see below for their assessment of what hurt the most in the past 10 days). They don’t dispute they are locked in serious turbulence, but they also take solace that things are not worse after what they consider the darkest stretch of the campaign.

“We are going to look back at this as the week he got his act together, or the beginning of the end,” said a top Republican who works closely with the campaign.

The campaign is moving fast to calm nerves, especially among donors. To get a flavor of the challenge before them, a top donor said that after Romney spoke at a fundraising breakfast at the Hilton New York on Friday, a will-Mitt-win poll was taken at one table of 10 men, each of whom had paid at least $2,500 to attend, and some of whom had raised as much as $50,000 for the campaign. Not a single man said yes.

On September 20 2012 14:44 ticklishmusic wrote:
I'm Asian and pretty liberal. Must be college.

Remember, Santorum said the smart people will never be with them. How flattering.

On September 20 2012 17:34 Defacer wrote:
You know what's bad for fundraising? Sucking.



http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81428.html

Perhaps the only amendment to the Constitution that people who self-identify as Republicans believe to be absolute, unfettered, and unlimited is the second one, which guarantees the right to bear arms. I, too, believe in the presumptive right of a law-abiding adult to own a firearm, and have exercised that right. But I am not persuaded that this right should extend to felons, minors, the mentally ill, or persons under a restraining order. Again, a rule of reason applies. One would also think that it might not be wise to extend the unrestricted right to purchase firearms to terrorist suspects or drug runners. But crackpot legal theorists on the right, who have no problem when it comes to distinctly unconstitutional restrictions on rights of privacy or habeas corpus, not to mention the right to a speedy trial, to have evidence openly presented, even the right not to be tortured (all enumerated in the Bill of Rights), suddenly become unrelenting constitutional absolutists when it comes to the purchase of firearms. Why? In situations such as this, when behavior defies all rational explanation, it is generally helpful to look at the money trail.

...

The Florida legislature passed, and Governor Rick Scott signed into law, a bill that would prohibit physicians from even asking patients (for example, one exhibiting suicidal symptoms) if they owned a firearm. The draft bill would have levied fines of up to $5 million and jail time for any physician who violated it, although these draconian punishments were reduced before passage. So much for the GOP's claim, loudly enunciated during the debate over the health care bill, that the government shouldn't come between patients and their doctors. The issue, of course, had nothing whatsoever to do with the legal right of a citizen to own a firearm. The Florida legislature was grandstanding on behalf of the NRA.

...

The Republican Party has engaged in a full-scale assault on what it calls "judicial activism" (meaning judicial independence). Newt Gingrich went on a tirade about this in Iowa in December 2011, stating that if elected president he would ignore judicial decisions he didn't like--an extreme example of a widespread attitude. The party's belief that national security as it defines it should trump the most fundamental rights laid down by the Framers bears a heavy burden for the evisceration of the Constitution it claims to revere. Madison and the Founders were very clear on this point: that constitutional republics should not be armed camps. The GOP's version of national security--perpetual war, a bloated military budget, and diminished constitutional protections--is a far cry from anything the Founding Fathers would recognize or advocate.

Democrats--ever sensitive to the whiff of corporate money (as in their vote to indemnify the telecommunications companies for illegal surveillance), or afraid of being tarred as soft on terrorism, soft on crime, or soft in general--have closely followed the GOP's trail. None of this would have happened in the presence of a vigilant press or a resolute citizenry conscious of its rights and skeptical of distractions, scare tactics, or intimidation. Sadly, we have been dumped down, beaten down, and conditioned into accepting the invalidation of the Constitution as the new norm with scarcely a whimper. A public that pays more attention to reality TV than its status as free citizens cannot withstand an unremitting encroachment on its liberties by calculating, unscrupulous, and power-hungry leaders. The crowning tragedy--or sick joke--is that those who have postured and preened the most ostentatiously about their devotion to the Constitution have been the most indifferent to its destruction.

For destruction it is. There are now numerous provisions in the Bill of Rights that exist on paper just as the Estates-General did during the French monarchy--it existed on paper but was moribund. If a free citizenry is too apathetic, too intimidated, too distracted, or just plain too ignorant to exercise its statutory liberties, those liberties will not last long.

On September 20 2012 19:14 Souma wrote:
Just came across a powerful passage in Mike Lofgren's book.



No matter who wins this presidency, the country is still going down a dark path. Obama is not going to change that. Romney would be worse than Obama, obviously.

For anyone interested in a piece Mike Lofgren wrote for Truth Out: http://truth-out.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=3079:goodbye-to-all-that-reflections-of-a-gop-operative-who-left-the-cult

The Republican Party has become a dangerous entity, and the Democrats are only a little better. To the conservative posters in this thread, I hope you carefully read that article. I respect Republican ideology, but at this point in time, it is foolish to throw your support behind the Republican Party if you actually believe their politicians are working towards a better America.

On September 20 2012 20:12 Derez wrote:

I never understand this kind of longing for the past. It seems to me like the interpretation given to the constitution and the bill of rights is always contingent on the time and circumstances, and there has never been a time where they were respected to their fullest possible interpretation. Torture has always been part of US behavior in war, not all trials are fair (or have ever been), and JFK won the presidency by what probably were fraudulent votes coming out of Chicago. This mythical image excists of a 'better' america somewhere in the past, but I really don't think it ever excisted.

Which is why I don't buy all the 'down a dark path' rethoric. Overall, politics is still pretty responsive to the electorate, the only people who feel that it isn't are the minorities far out of the mainstream (Ron Paul and the likes). People will still take note when core liberties are being violated: as long as the average american has no fear of torture, feels like his own trial will be fair, he obviously has nothing to worry about. I'd even argue that in the 'big picture', the amount of freedom, responsiveness and representation has increased tremendously since the creation of the US: representation for women, afro-americans, gays, you name it. It seems to me that you're much better off now than you ever were.

Lee, Bernays, and Gingrich have all had a lasting impact on the political use of language in America. If you seek monuments to their accomplishments, you have to look no further than your daily paper or television news program. It is to them that we owe stories about "collateral damage" rather than "dead civilians." In that spirit, allow me to offer up my own devil's dictionary of contempo­rary American political terms.

American exceptionalism: a doctrine whose proponents hold that by divine dispensation America is exempt from all laws gov­erning international norms, physics, or rationality.

Authentic: used to describe a candidate who is unaware of current events and doesn't read a newspaper, and is proud of it.

Class warfare: a technique by which teachers, nurses, firemen, and cashiers are believed to be oppressing derivatives traders and CEOs, which includes unreasonably complaining that their wages aren't keeping up with the cost of their health insurance.

Conservative: a person profoundly respectful of heritage, tradition, and old-fashioned values while preaching the revolution and strip-mining the Grand Canyon for high-sulfur coal.

Darwin's theory of evolution: an evil doctrine that denies the teachings of the Bible. Social Darwinism, on the other hand, is what made America great and is perfectly consistent with the Sermon on the Mount.

Elites: insufferable, overeducated snobs who are not real Ameri­cans and may in fact be French. Mitt Romney (Harvard MBA and JD) and George W. Bush (Yale, Harvard) have often criti­cized such scoundrels.

Empower: If an American worker loses his pension or Social Se­curity, he is empowered.

Free-market capitalism: the economic system by which Halli­burton gets sole-source, cost-plus government contracts.

Global warming: a hoax perpetrated by a worldwide conspiracy of biased scientists. Fortunately it is being combated by right-wing foundations, oil companies, televangelists, and other disin­terested believers in objective fact.

Job creators: the truly creative engines of economic growth in our society: real-estate flippers, mortgage-backed securities bundlers, leveraged buyout specialists, dividend drawers, and hedge-fund billionaires.

Level playing field: what every lobbyist wants in the spirit of fairness. The only way to achieve it is by bribing politicians to award a sole-source contract to his client.

Liberal (pronounced librull): a satanic ideologue who is at once a socialist leveler, an elitist defender of privilege, an atheist, and a secret Muslim determined to bring sharia law to America.

Patriot: someone who loves America more than he loves the ma­jority of the people living therein.

Populist: an advocate for the interests of "real" Americans who vehemently fights for the abolition of all government regulation of Wall Street investment banks.

Prolife: the unconditional support of the first nine months of a human being's existence. After that period has expired, the same human being has an unconditional right to be executed by the state, sent off to war, or die without health insurance.

Real Americans: the minority of Americans who look, think, and act exactly as I do.

Rogue state: a country that violates international law by com­mitting armed aggression, torturing prisoners, assassinating opponents, and possessing weapons of mass destruction. cf: american exceptionalism

Sharia law: a fundamentalist religious doctrine imposed on a given political jurisdiction. Any resemblance to public statutes on abortion in the Commonwealth of Virginia is purely coincidental.

Take our country back: Give us what we want right now, even if we don't know what it is.

Tea Party: people covered by Medicare who hate socialized medicine.

Washington spending: the bad sort of spending that doesn't go toward earmarks to campaign contributors, subsidies to big oil, or the military's half-trillion-dollar budget. Everyone knows the Pentagon is across the Potomac in Virginia, not in Washington.

Win-win situation: see level playing field.

"Now and then the president says I'm the grandfather of Obamacare. I don't think he meant that as a compliment, but I'll take it. This was during my primary; we thought it might not be helpful," Romney said during a Univision candidate forum Wednesday.

On September 21 2012 03:17 ziggurat wrote:
I have seen a few clips of Obama's appearance on Letterman and I was a bit surprised by some of the inaccurate statements he made.

1. He claimed that he had never called his political opponents "unpatriotic" which of course anyone who was alive in 2008 knows isn't true
2. He claimed that he "inherited" a trillion dollar deficit, but the trillion dollar deficit only came in FY 2009
3. He claimed that he couldn't remember how much the national debt was (?!?)

When politicians say things that aren't true I usually want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Obama was trying to say that he had never called Romney unpatriotic? Maybe by "inherited a trillion dollar deficit" he meant that he inherited a bad economy such that he had no choice but to pass incredibly costly programs?

But how is it even possible that he doesn't know how much the debt is? Did he get nervous and freeze up? Maybe he was just stunned that Letterman was asking him moderately challenging questions? Or did he just not want to say "sixteen trillion" on the air? But seriously, how can the president not know the national debt when the size of the debt has been one of the biggest issues in the campaign?

So assuming that Obama wasn't "lying" when he made these comments -- can anyone offer any defence for these statements?

On September 21 2012 03:17 ziggurat wrote:
I have seen a few clips of Obama's appearance on Letterman and I was a bit surprised by some of the inaccurate statements he made.

1. He claimed that he had never called his political opponents "unpatriotic" which of course anyone who was alive in 2008 knows isn't true
2. He claimed that he "inherited" a trillion dollar deficit, but the trillion dollar deficit only came in FY 2009
3. He claimed that he couldn't remember how much the national debt was (?!?)

When politicians say things that aren't true I usually want to give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Obama was trying to say that he had never called Romney unpatriotic? Maybe by "inherited a trillion dollar deficit" he meant that he inherited a bad economy such that he had no choice but to pass incredibly costly programs?

But how is it even possible that he doesn't know how much the debt is? Did he get nervous and freeze up? Maybe he was just stunned that Letterman was asking him moderately challenging questions? Or did he just not want to say "sixteen trillion" on the air? But seriously, how can the president not know the national debt when the size of the debt has been one of the biggest issues in the campaign?

So assuming that Obama wasn't "lying" when he made these comments -- can anyone offer any defence for these statements?

http://www.thecomedynetwork.ca/Shows/TheDailyShow?videoPackage=123839

On September 21 2012 03:37 Defacer wrote:
The Daily Show was on fire last night with Chaos on Bullhshit Mountain. It's obvious that Stewart is taking Fox's post-video propaganda machine a little personally.

Link For Canadians.

On September 21 2012 03:29 madsweepslol wrote:

1. Did he call anyone other than Bush unpatriotic? If not, then I think he's just being lawyerly, since technically Bush wasn't a political opponent, even though that's basically who he ran against.
2. Obama was inaugurated during FY '09, when Bush/110th Congress policies were still in place, so yeah, that's inheriting it.
3. Either incompetence or, as you said, not wanting to say the number on air, i.e. playing politics.

On September 21 2012 03:39 madsweepslol wrote:

Seriously, I can't remember the last time I saw Stewart so biting or sardonic. Makes me wonder how his debate with O'Rielly's gonna go down.