President Obama Re-Elected - Page 608

On September 30 2012 18:43 Souma wrote:
This year's debates seem like such a farce, just like the entire election. The debate questions were handed out prior. It's going to be so scripted. Gross.

There they go again.

The first three of the October 3 debate's six segments will focus on the economy, moderator Jim Lehrer said in a statement provided by the Commission on Presidential Debates.

The other three segments will focus on health care, the role of government, and governing, according to the release.

Each segment is to be a 15 minute portion of the 90 minute program.

The statement also acknowledged that the topics could change "because of news developments."

http://www.2012presidentialelectionnews.com/2012/09/topics-for-first-presidential-debate-on-oct-3-announced/

An Iranian news agency picked up — as fact — a story from the paper about a supposed Gallup survey showing an overwhelming majority of rural white Americans would rather vote for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad than President Barack Obama.

[...]

The Iranian version copied the original word-for-word, even including a made-up quote from a fictional West Virginia resident who says he'd rather go to a baseball game with Ahmadinejad because "he takes national defense seriously, and he'd never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does."

Homosexual acts are punishable by death in Iran, and Ahmadinejad famously said during a 2007 appearance at Columbia University that "in Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country."

The Iranian version of the article leaves out only The Onion's description of Ahmadinejad as "a man who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and has had numerous political prisoners executed."

[...]

Onion editor Will Tracy put out a tongue-in-cheek statement that referred to Fars as "a subsidiary of The Onion" that has acted as the paper's Middle Eastern bureau since it was founded in the mid-1980s by Onion publisher T. Herman Zweibel.

"The Onion freely shares content with Fars and commends the journalists at Iran's Finest News Source on their superb reportage," Tracy said in jest.

It's not the first time a foreign news outlet has been duped by The Onion. In 2002, the Beijing Evening News, one of the Chinese capital's biggest newspapers, picked up a story from The Onion that claimed members of Congress were threatening to leave Washington unless the building underwent a makeover that included more bathrooms and a retractable dome.

A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm could be explained by the simple fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribe money around Capitol Hill. That is of course true, but there is more to it than that. Some members of Congress will claim that they are protecting constituents' jobs, but even that doesn't really explain it. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases means that some areas, such as Washington, D.C., and San Diego, are heavily dependent on DOD spending, but in most of the country the balance is a net negative: More is paid out in taxes to support the Pentagon than comes back in local contracts.

Economic justifications for Pentagon spending are even less persuasive when one considers that the $600 billion spent every year on the DOD generates comparatively few jobs per dollar spent. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost R&D (from which the civilian economy benefits little), exorbitant management expenditures, whopping overheard, and out-and-out padding--including, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A dollar appropriated for highway construction, health care, or education will create many more jobs than a dollar appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement: The jobs argument is thoroughly specious. A University of Massachusetts study claims that several alternative ways of spending money would produce anywhere from 35% to 138% more jobs than spending the same amount on DOD (http://www.peri.umass.edu/fileadmin/pdf/published_study/PERI_military_spending_2011.pdf ).

...

When I arrived on the Hill during Reagan's first term, I was a conventional, mainstream Republican. I believed in the notion of peace through strength. At that time the slogan translated quite literally into spending more money on the Pentagon. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan not long before, and the Warsaw Pact seemed like a powerful and monolithic threat. I did not know then (and was probably too naively trusting to have believed it even if someone had tried to dispel my illusions) that the intelligence agencies were systematically inflating the Soviet threat, and that the Soviet military was far weaker than we imagined.

The senior appointees at the CIA--chief among them Robert Gates, who was then deputy director for intelligence--became so enamored of the concept of the Soviet threat that they somehow missed the fact that the collapse of the Warsaw Pact lay only a few years ahead. Senators attending the hearings for Gates's confirmation as CIA director in 1991 brushed aside testimony from former CIA employees about his intelligence distortions because the fix was in, and President George H. W. Bush was not to be denied his nominee.

...

My doubts as to the proper management of our military-industrial complex here at home began to grow around the same time. I worked in a congressional office representing a district in Ohio where the B-1 bomber--a project the Carter administration had canceled and the Reagan administration had revived as a cornerstone of its buildup policy--was a significant source of employment. One can generally tell which weapon system is built in a congressman's district by the contractor models on the office desks, the pictures on the walls, and the frequent presence of lobbyists from the company that builds the system. In our case, it was all B-1 all the time.

By the late 1980s, as the first production examples began to enter service, a funny thing happened--although it would not have been funny to the taxpayer who was funding the plane at a then considerable cost of $280 million each. The aircraft's defensive avionics, which were supposed to detect and neutralize enemy electronic systems seeking to find and destroy the B-1, were seriously interfering with the plane's own offensive avionics, whose goal was to help it find enemy targets and attack them. In other words, the contractors had managed to build a self-jamming bomber.

Three planes were written off in crashes shortly after the B-1 entered operational status. Two of these were caused by a poor design in the fuel of hydraulic lines. It soon became evident that needless secrecy surrounded the crash reports: The services hid the details even from Armed Services Committee members with the requisite clearances and an obvious need to know what had happened. The B-1 was AWOL in the first Gulf war, and when it took part in operations in Kosovo in 1999, it flew only after older aircraft--like the antique B-52 it had been intended to replace--had already suppressed Serbian air defenses. There are dozens of weapons systems like the B-1 rattling around in the Pentagon's closet--cold war dinosaurs that are overpriced, underperforming, and unreliable. Every one of them has a coalition of congressional supporters who protect it from conception until decades later, when the military retires it from service; and even then, many in Congress will lobby for a reversal. Keeping these dinosaurs operating assures jobs for constituents. But at what cost to the rest of us?

...

This procedure (referring to numerous cover-ups) is now standard both in military departments and civilian agencies. If there is a procurement scandal, the solution is the Band-Aid of toothless "acquisition reform," leaving the same people to administer the programs. The failures of high-level policy judgments that played the biggest part in allowing 9/11 to occur were disguised as the much less significant failures of intelligence collection, analysis, and interagency sharing. Why? If the public were to blame policy judgments at the top, George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, and several cabinet secretaries might be on the hook. But if the fault could be placed on operatives lower down the food chain, as well as on "institutional failures" of the bureaucracy, Congress and the public could be distracted by the monkey motion of "reform" and government reorganization. This is how we ended up with even more bureaucracy in the form of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, not to mention the monstrosity of the Department of Homeland Security.

The dysfunctions of our uniformed military, our intelligence agencies (85 percent of whose funding flows through military budgets), and the rest of government did not arise overnight, and they did not form in a vacuum. They are partially the products of odd and seldom-remarked schizophrenia that has grown up in our political culture. There are many people active in politics who claim they would man the barricades and fight to the death against socialism. But these are almost always the same people who also say they adore the U.S. military, which is probably the largest--certainly the most lavishly funded--socialist institution remaining on Earth since the collapse of the USSR and the transformation of China.

America's military bases are separate little worlds with their own law enforcement and traffic rules--not to mention their own grocery stores (commissaries), big-box stores (PXs), and so on, down to their own DOD Dependents School system, child care centers, housing, and comprehensive health care system--all of them run by the government. There are important historical reasons why these facilities arose, having to do with the low salaries of the old draft military and the frequent remoteness of military bases from retail business, schools, and essential services (on the frontier or overseas, for example). These facilities remain an important factor in the retention of military personnel, particularly those with dependents, to this day. But it is a socialist, or at least highly welfarist state, arrangement. Today, with the advent of the all-volunteer force, salaries are much higher; according to the Congressional Budget Office, military pay averages around the seventy-fifth percentile when compared to civilian jobs with comparable skills. Other studies by the CBO have demonstrated that in several cases, such as the commissaries (the huge retail grocery chains operated by the DOD), a cash allowance would give service members the same level of grocery benefit that they enjoy now--at substantially less cost. Yet whenever the Pentagon offers a proposal to change these arrangements--such as letting annual healthcare premiums for retirees rise with inflation (they have remained the same since 1995)--Congress invariably rejects it, with the free-market, fiscal hawk Republicans usually leading the opposition.

This same sort of military socialism prevails in regions of the country heavily dependent on military contracts. Loudon County, Virginia, an outer suburb of Washington, D.C., offers a perfect example of this ethos. It is the richest county in the United States when measured by median household income. It is very enthusiastically Republican. And the number-one and number-two military contracts in the country, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, are located there. Fairfax County, the county next to Loudon, has the second-highest median household income in the country. The fifth-ranked military contractor, General Dynamics, is based there.

It is no anomaly that areas of the country heavily involved in military contracting are so wealthy. A study by the Project on Government Oversight found that in the thirty-three of thirty-five job categories the government paid billions more to private companies than they would have paid government employees to do the same job. On average they paid about twice as much. A source industry has told me that DynCorp employees acting as security guards at military bases are obtained under contracts paying the company four dollars for every dollar the guard gets paid. Beyond the extravagant profit margins involved, this arrangement reveals that the military can no longer guard its own facilities with its own personnel. Since the 1990s, our army can no longer even feed itself whenever it takes the field; service contractors such as Halliburton do that for the usual exorbitant markup. And the taxpayer takes a further hit, because the contractors often hire retired military personnel (or lure serving personnel to retire by offering them more pay); this means that these ostensibly private employees are frequently getting paid both a salary from the government that is washed through the contracting company, which takes its cut, and a government pension. To top off the bargain, this process is how the military loses some of its most experienced personnel.

On October 01 2012 01:40 TheRabidDeer wrote:
Does anybody know why Gary Johnson isnt able to take part in the Presidential debates? He is a seriously good candidate but so very few know about him.

EDIT: I know this isnt about obama or romney, but I am curious about the Presidential debates and how it is only 2 parties when we arent a strictly 2 party system.

On October 01 2012 01:40 TheRabidDeer wrote:
Does anybody know why Gary Johnson isnt able to take part in the Presidential debates? He is a seriously good candidate but so very few know about him.

EDIT: I know this isnt about obama or romney, but I am curious about the Presidential debates and how it is only 2 parties when we arent a strictly 2 party system.

The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) began in 1987 by the Democratic and Republican parties to establish the way that presidential election debates are run between candidates for President of the United States. The Commission is a non-profit, corporation as defined by Federal US tax laws, whose debates are sponsored by private contributions from foundations and corporations.

The Commission sponsors and produces debates for the United States presidential and vice presidential candidates and undertakes research and educational activities relating to the debates. The organization, which is a nonprofit corporation controlled by the Democratic and Republican parties, has run each of the presidential debates held since 1988. The Commission has moderated the 1988, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008 debates. Prior to this, the League of Women Voters moderated the 1976, 1980, 1984 debates before it withdrew from the position as debate moderator with this statement after the 1988 Presidential debates: "the demands of the two campaign organizations would perpetrate a fraud on the American voter." The Commission was then taken over by the Democratic and Republican parties forming today's version of the CPD.

During the 2000 election, the CPD stipulated that candidates would only be invited to debate if they had a 15% support level across five national polls. Ralph Nader, a presidential candidate who was not allowed to debate because of this rule, believed that the regulation was created to stifle the views of third party candidates by keeping them off the televised debates. Nader brought a lawsuit against them in a federal court, on the basis that corporate contributions violate the Federal Election Campaign Act. After a series of FEC actions and lower court decisions, the D.C. Circuit Court ultimately ruled in 2005 that because Congress vested discretionary power in the FEC (meaning that an FEC action would have to rise to the level of arbitrary and capricious to be challenged), the court would not overrule the FEC's determinations that "found that the third-party challengers had failed to provide 'evidence that the CPD is controlled by the DNC or the RNC,'" and that the CPD provided sufficient rationale for barring third party candidates from entering the debates as audience members out of fear they might have disrupted the live debates in protest over having been excluded as debate particpants. [lol wtf!?]

On September 21, 2012, Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson filed an anti-trust lawsuit against CPD, the RNC and the DNC in D.C. Circuit Court citing the Sherman Act and claiming "restraint of trade" for denying competition to, for example, potentially receive the $400,000 annual presidential salary. Although the complaint recounts the history of CPD formation, it omits any mention of either the Nader/Hagelin 2000 lawsuit or the FEC. The Johnson complaint asks "for injunctive relief by temporary restraining order ... by enjoining defendants ... from conducting presidential debates unless all constitutionally-eligible candidates are included whose names will appear on the ballots in states whose cumulative total of electoral college votes is 270 or more."

On October 01 2012 01:47 Praetorial wrote:


Presidential debates are only held between the two candidates who will actually have a chance to win not only because it gets more attention and viewers that way, but because candidates have more leeway to directly address specifics of their opponent's arguments.

On October 01 2012 01:57 TheRabidDeer wrote:

How is an election a proper election if you only give 2 candidates a chance though? Why does every election have to be "vote for the lesser evil" instead of "vote for who you WANT to win"? I mean, they allow a lot of participants in the primary debates (9 at one debate for an example)... why not for the presidential debates themselves?

On October 01 2012 01:40 TheRabidDeer wrote:
Does anybody know why Gary Johnson isnt able to take part in the Presidential debates? He is a seriously good candidate but so very few know about him.

EDIT: I know this isnt about obama or romney, but I am curious about the Presidential debates and how it is only 2 parties when we arent a strictly 2 party system.

On October 01 2012 01:57 TheRabidDeer wrote:

How is an election a proper election if you only give 2 candidates a chance though? Why does every election have to be "vote for the lesser evil" instead of "vote for who you WANT to win"? I mean, they allow a lot of participants in the primary debates (9 at one debate for an example)... why not for the presidential debates themselves?

EDIT: I see, screamingpalm. This just doesnt seem right to me. The RNC and DNC have huge amounts of advertising funds and are able to get these debates on prime time TV... if anybody wants a change to happen these institutions are holding us back.

On October 01 2012 01:40 TheRabidDeer wrote:
Does anybody know why Gary Johnson isnt able to take part in the Presidential debates? He is a seriously good candidate but so very few know about him.

EDIT: I know this isnt about obama or romney, but I am curious about the Presidential debates and how it is only 2 parties when we arent a strictly 2 party system.

On October 01 2012 02:33 Mohdoo wrote:


0 chance of winning due to running on a nonviable platform. We may as well invite my younger brother to participate, since he's just as relevant.




Please stop drifting this thread off topic. This question has been brought up roughly around 600 times in this thread. Its been discussed. Its a good subject for its own thread. But it is 100% irrelevant to this topic, which is the 2012 general election.

On October 01 2012 01:47 Praetorial wrote:


Presidential debates are only held between the two candidates who will actually have a chance to win not only because it gets more attention and viewers that way, but because candidates have more leeway to directly address specifics of their opponent's arguments.

On October 01 2012 01:57 TheRabidDeer wrote:

How is an election a proper election if you only give 2 candidates a chance though? Why does every election have to be "vote for the lesser evil" instead of "vote for who you WANT to win"? I mean, they allow a lot of participants in the primary debates (9 at one debate for an example)... why not for the presidential debates themselves?

EDIT: I see, screamingpalm. This just doesnt seem right to me. The RNC and DNC have huge amounts of advertising funds and are able to get these debates on prime time TV... if anybody wants a change to happen these institutions are holding us back.

On September 30 2012 23:28 screamingpalm wrote:


Source

Gotta love The Onion lol.

On October 01 2012 03:18 NovaTheFeared wrote:


-How is an election a proper election if you only give 2 candidates a chance though?
--He's only not invited to the debates, Johnson can take his 4% support and run as far as he can with it.

-Why does every election have to be "vote for the lesser evil" instead of "vote for who you WANT to win"?
--Duverger's Law, plurality voting rules across the nation make 3rd parties virtually unsupportable.

-I mean, they allow a lot of participants in the primary debates (9 at one debate for an example)... why not for the presidential debates themselves?
--The primaries are more fluid in support levels (see every conservative Republican that temporarily surged ahead of Romney), meaning lower levels of support were necessary to be a "viable" candidate. It's different in the general election. Also, even in the primaries the candidates least likely to win received almost no questions. So, if the candidates support/chance to win roughly corresponds with the airtime he receives at the debates, Johnson should get either no questions (like he will, uninvited) or something like 1 question in 3 debates.

On October 01 2012 05:37 ticklishmusic wrote:



This is Iran, supposedly the greatest threat to world peace. The world seems like a safer place all of a sudden.