EPTPresident Obama Re-Elected - Page 783
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Hey guys! We'll be closing this thread shortly, but we will make an American politics megathread where we can continue the discussions in here. The new thread can be found here: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=383301 | ||
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DannyJ
United States5110 Posts
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2012/oct/11/fact-checking-vice-presidential-debate-between-joe/ http://factcheck.org/2012/10/veep-debate-violations/ Here's the section on the Romney tax plan (yet again): Tired Tax Claims Biden falsely claimed that Romney has “another tax cut coming” that “will, in fact, give … $250,000 a year” to millionaires and “raise taxes” on middle-income families by $2,000 a year. That’s not true. Biden is citing the work of a nonpartisan group that has said the Obama campaign has misinterpreted its study. For his part, Ryan claimed that “six studies have verified” that Romney’s tax plan is mathematically possible — that it can reduce income tax rates by 20 percent across the board and offset the loss of revenues by reducing or eliminating tax deductions without benefiting the wealthy or increasing the deficit. But Ryan inflates the number of “studies” by including blog items and the work of campaign advisers. Biden: They’re holding hostage the middle class tax cut to the super wealthy. And on top of that, they’ve got another tax cut coming that’s $5 trillion that all of the studies point out will in fact give another $250 million — yeah, $250,000 a year to those 120,000 families and raise taxes for people who are middle income with a child by $2,000 a year. Biden is referring to an August study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center. It’s true that the report (page 19) calculates that those in the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers would receive a $246,652 net tax break. It also says on page six that “taxpayers with children who make less than $200,000 would pay, on average, $2,000 more in taxes.” But it is not a study of Romney’s plan. It is an exercise in trying to determine if a “revenue-neutral individual income tax change that incorporates the features Governor Romney proposed” could be revenue neutral without benefiting the wealthy. TPC Director Donald Marron disagrees with Biden’s interpretation of the study. “I don’t interpret this as evidence that Governor Romney wants to increase taxes on the middle class in order to cut taxes for the rich, as an Obama campaign ad claimed,” Marron wrote. “Instead, I view it as showing that his plan can’t accomplish all his stated objectives. One can charitably view his plan as a combination of political signaling and the opening offer in what would, if he gets elected, become a negotiation.” Ryan seeks to discredit the Tax Policy Center’s study by claiming, falsely, that six studies prove Romney’s tax plan can accomplish all of its goals. We wrote about this before when Romney and Ryan referred to “five different studies.” At that time, we wrote that one of those “studies” was a blog item (not a study), one was a campaign white paper coauthored by Romney’s chief economic adviser, and one was a newspaper op-ed written by yet another campaign adviser who later updated his calculations in a blog item. Romney and Ryan counted the updated blog item as a “study.” The fifth study was written by Harvey Rosen, a Princeton economics professor who once served as chairman of President George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers. Rosen assumes Romney’s tax plan would add an extra 3 percent to the economy — an assumption that Rosen calls “reasonable.” But Romney’s plan is designed to be revenue neutral, so it would not reduce the tax burden on the economy and, presumably, would have less of a growth effect. Bush’s large tax cuts in 2001 and 2003, for example, did reduce the overall tax burden and yet the year-to-year changes to the real GDP were just over 2 percent. The latest study cited by the Romney campaign comes from Alex Brill, a research fellow at the conservative, pro-business American Enterprise Institute. Among Brill’s assumptions: Romney could raise revenue by taxing the interest income from state and local bonds and the investment income of life insurance contracts. Both are currently not subject to federal taxes. But, as the Washington Post points out, “taxing interest on state and local bonds or on the value in life insurance policies, for example, would violate Romney’s preference for preserving low taxes on savings and investment.” William Gale, a coauthor of the Tax Policy Center’s study, told the Post that Brill proves his point: that Romney’s plan cannot be accomplished unless “you give up on some of the goals.” And a bonus article about Romney's lie that he will cover preexisting conditions, just because it caught by eye when I was on the website: http://factcheck.org/2012/10/whats-romneys-plan-for-preexisting-conditions/ | ||
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Signet
United States1718 Posts
On October 12 2012 17:11 DannyJ wrote: Obama was strangely passive last debate and this time Biden was oddly hyper aggressive... Perhaps that is a sign that the Obama campaign realizes that their passivity was a mistake. He probably shouldn't go that far in the 2nd debate, but even that would be much better than his 1st debate performance. | ||
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sc2superfan101
3583 Posts
supposedly, Biden interrupted Ryan 82 times during the debate. that's about one interruption per minute. let's say that Ryan made (or attempted to make)... 20 points in the debate. that means he was interrupted 4 times every time he tried to make a point. perhaps more damning: the moderator, Martha Raddatz, interrupted Ryan 31 times. which means that Paul Ryan was interrupted about 111 times in 90 minutes. more than once a minute. | ||
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sc2superfan101
3583 Posts
On October 11 2012 10:46 imareaver3 wrote: Okay, so much of this is unsubstantiated. For example, saying that Obama's support for the Arab Spring caused the death of our ambassador is like saying Reagan caused 9/11 by allowing funding to go to anti-Soviet Afghan rebels. I mean, you can make the connection, but it's a crazy causal link that requires a long chain of events that couldn't possibly have been predicted. Similarly, arguing that Obama's support for Arab Spring increased tensions in the area doesn't make sense. I mean, tensions have increased, but that's because of the Arab Spring itself--you have no causal link, no reasoning whatsoever, showing that it was Obama's actions specifically that led to the increase in tension. Your argument that Obama's over-reliance on drone warfare has lead to increased tensions completely ignores the fact that Al-Qaeda had been greatly weakened in areas where we have used drone strikes, and ignores the effective recent drone-backed anti-Al-Qaeda offensive in Yemen. (AP ) Barring the complete lack of credible plans from anyone to deal with the incredibly complex Israeli and Iranian situations, which no president in the past 40 years has been able to resolve, I hardly think we can fault Obama. So finally, in response to your claim that Obama's done nothing to improve the situation in the Middle East, I'll list two things that have happened: 1. The routing of Al-Qaeda from the Middle East proper, especially from strongholds in Pakistan and Yemen. While it has regrouped in Mali and Libya, there's no indication that it's as strong there as it once was. 2. Presiding over the creation of democratic governments in Egypt and Tunisia. While the jury's still out on what'll become of these governments, they are democratic (so far) and preferable to the dictatorships they replaced. Libya, especially, is friendly to the US--in what other country would a militia that attacked a US consulate immediately be the focus of (kind of) pro-US riots? I mean, since when has that happened? in the interest of saving space, i'm gonna spoiler my response: + Show Spoiler + the point of me saying that the Arab Spring led to the murder of an Ambassador was not to say that Obama's support of the revolutions or helping kill Qaddafi caused the murder, but that the revolutions themselves may not be the most beneficial things to America. Obama's immediate and seemingly unconditional support of them looks a little suspect now. especially if you take the assassination as a part of the broader anti-American protests/riots that occurred after the assassination. i like the comparison though, because Reagan and Reagan's administration do bear some of the blame in the events that lead to 9/11. preferring Hekmatyar over Massoud (1) during that invasion was what helped establish the Taliban as the primary players following the withdrawal. Reagan, Bush 1, and Clinton all carry some of the blame for not paying attention to what was going on with Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Bush 2 carries some of the blame too. of course, what's past is past, and i recognize that hindsight is always 20/20, but it's not too much to call failures what they are, and to expect foresight to be close to 20/20 from our leaders. along this line, we can ask Obama to take responsibility, to some degree, for the actions of the governments that came into power during the Arab Spring and in the aftermath. has Al-Qaeda been weakened by the drone strikes? even if they have, we do know that more civilians are being killed (2) by them than before. that certainly won't help relations with either the leaders or the people of these countries. "It doesn't make any sense. There is no one that will tell you that this will do anything other than make a lot of people angry, a backlash will come back, and everybody who's been killed will have an extended family of 100 people, who will, inevitably, at some point, get access to this country." Ray McGovern, a veteran CIA security analyst i like how we attribute all of the success in beating back Al-Qaeda to Obama, when it seems that it is under his administration that they are on their way to becoming stronger and more widespread than they have been since 2001.(3)(4) it's not like their takeover of Mali is some minor issue either. they now control an area the size of France, and are able to train terrorists to infiltrate many African countries using this area as a base of operations. and for the citizens of Mali, they are about to enter into another Taliban regime, like the one the Afghans lived in. one minor victory in Yemen aside (btw, a American Embassy security chief in Yemen was assassinated earlier today-late yesterday) there seems to be little evidence that Al-Qaeda is on the run, on the ropes, or even really hurting all that bad. the killing of the leadership may have hurt them (using intell gathered from Bush's enhanced interrogation, I should add), but it didn't kill them by any means, and furthermore, drone-warfare CANNOT defeat them. almost every Muslim leader and most Western leaders will tell you that. most security/military experts will tell you that. Obama's over reliance on drone-warfare is most definitely a valid criticism to make. some isolated victory using drones in Yemen proves nothing, because i didn't say "reliance at all", i said "over-reliance". Iran and Israel. it's a tough nut to crack, to be sure. but then, Obama is the President, so it is kind of his job to fucking deal with it. i don't care how hard it is, or if he's too inexperienced and uninterested to come up with a legitimate response. he has a job, and he is not doing it, and unlike you, I'm not going to give him a pass on it just because the people he spent all of 2006-2008 criticizing couldn't do any better. he literally based his entire 2008 candidacy on the idea that he WAS going to deal with this crap in a better way than Bush and Reagan and Bush 1 and Clinton and Carter. you don't get to be President and not take responsibility for what happens to the world under your watch. Concerning the "democracies" that we've helped establish... well, we'll definitely have to wait and see. i can tell you right off the bat that Egypt's government is NOT more desirable or better for us, right now, than it was. however bad Mubarak was, he sure as shit wasn't going to start a war with Israel, and he was relatively friendly with the US, and relatively secular. i think it is pure naivety to suggest that democracy is always preferable to dictatorship. now, if the Muslim Brotherhood and the new Egyptian government can keep their cool and not freak out, then we might call this a good thing. as of now, it is far too soon to be lauding it as Obama's achievement. wether Libya's new government is friendly to us or not remains to be seen. as of yet, i am relatively happy with them. in fact, I'm happier with their government than I am with my own, because at least their President didn't fucking lie to the American people about the attacks at Benghazi. 1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud 2: http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/insidestoryamericas/2012/06/2012668456229408.html 3. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/09/09/a-stubborn-terror.html 4. http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/10/11/al-qaedas-resurgence/ | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On October 12 2012 23:59 sc2superfan101 wrote: so, i don't know how valid these numbers are, but: supposedly, Biden interrupted Ryan 82 times during the debate. that's about one interruption per minute. let's say that Ryan made (or attempted to make)... 20 points in the debate. that means he was interrupted 4 times every time he tried to make a point. perhaps more damning: the moderator, Martha Raddatz, interrupted Ryan 31 times. which means that Paul Ryan was interrupted about 111 times in 90 minutes. more than once a minute. The debate really was a joke. I'm not surprised that the liberal blogosphere is happy with Raddatz's performance. She clearly was in the tank for Biden to the point where it was embarrassing. As for the interruptions, most of them happened during the middle 30 minutes of the debate. There was a prolonged period of time where Ryan basically didn't get to say anything. Oh well, and as I mentioned last night, really it all comes down to how the public perceived Biden and the moderator. They're either going to care or they're not. I tend to think that they probably won't, particularly because it is a VP debate. As for the presidential debates, I doubt Obama would be able to get away with what Biden did. For one, I think it would be highly out of character for him. Biden could make it work (sorta) because he's Biden. More importantly, Romney wouldn't let Obama get away with it. Ryan was too respectful last night. Romney will put his foot down. | ||
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ziggurat
Canada847 Posts
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/republicans-biden-laughed-issues_654261.html | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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sc2superfan101
3583 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:15 oneofthem wrote: i mean, unless the revolution is directed against communists, it's pretty questionable if it's even beneficial. even then, it's debatable. Soviet control of Afghanistan might very well have been preferable to Taliban control. of course, arming and supporting Massoud and his allies would have been the most preferable. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:11 xDaunt wrote: The debate really was a joke. I'm not surprised that the liberal blogosphere is happy with Raddatz's performance. She clearly was in the tank for Biden to the point where it was embarrassing. As for the interruptions, most of them happened during the middle 30 minutes of the debate. There was a prolonged period of time where Ryan basically didn't get to say anything. Oh well, and as I mentioned last night, really it all comes down to how the public perceived Biden and the moderator. They're either going to care or they're not. I tend to think that they probably won't, particularly because it is a VP debate. As for the presidential debates, I doubt Obama would be able to get away with what Biden did. For one, I think it would be highly out of character for him. Biden could make it work (sorta) because he's Biden. More importantly, Romney wouldn't let Obama get away with it. Ryan was too respectful last night. Romney will put his foot down. If it isn't obvious from the first debate, it's not about listening to the moderator. It's about ignoring the moderator, interrupting the speaker, and most importantly always getting in the last word. Apparently, it's not even about the facts. It's about the conviction with which you talk. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
As for Libya specifically, Obama's problem is that his administration has been caught red-handed lying to the American public about what happened on September 11. Rather than come clean, his administration has continued to spin, dodge, and weave to the point where it has dug itself into an enormous hole that is about to cause massive political damage to his reelection campaign. The sad part is that I really don't see what the justification for lying in the first place was. Though stupid, leaving an ambassador's security detail undermanned isn't really that big of a deal politically. It does make one wonder what the White House was thinking and whether there is something that they're trying to hide. | ||
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xDaunt
United States17988 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:31 paralleluniverse wrote: If it isn't obvious from the first debate, it's not about listening to the moderator. It's about ignoring the moderator, interrupting the speaker, and most importantly always getting in the last word. Interrupting the moderator is fair game. Interrupting the other debater should not be. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:32 xDaunt wrote: Interrupting the moderator is fair game. Interrupting the other debater should not be. Ha. Ha. Ha. Deal with it. | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:28 sc2superfan101 wrote: even then, it's debatable. Soviet control of Afghanistan might very well have been preferable to Taliban control. of course, arming and supporting Massoud and his allies would have been the most preferable. i'm not even going to touch this, facepalming so hard. tough crowd | ||
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TheTenthDoc
United States9561 Posts
Then there's his inability to cogently answer the question of "why shouldn't we withdraw American troops from the most dangerous area in the world" and his going off on Obama immediately when asked about the negative tone of the campaign. Not to mention when Biden called him on hypocrisy in saying the stimulus money was useless while voting for it and trying to get some for his district or Biden calling him on his pro-spending voting record. On October 13 2012 00:32 xDaunt wrote: Here's the bottom line on the Middle East and its significance on the election. American's position, standing, and influence have taken a dramatic turn for the worse in the Middle East during Obama's watch. Much of that has coincided with the Obama administrations conscience decision to pull back from the Middle East and reorient to strengthening our sphere of influence in the Pacific. This opens him up to attack, even if not all of it is justified (and I don't think it all is). As for Libya specifically, Obama's problem is that his administration has been caught red-handed lying to the American public about what happened on September 11. Rather than come clean, his administration has continued to spin, dodge, and weave to the point where it has dug itself into an enormous hole that is about to cause massive political damage to his reelection campaign. The sad part is that I really don't see what the justification for lying in the first place was. Though stupid, leaving an ambassador's security detail undermanned isn't really that big of a deal politically. It does make one wonder what the White House was thinking and whether there is something that they're trying to hide. Regarding point one, it's important to note that Ryan (and Romney) cannot list one single thing they would have done, only things they WOULDN'T. If Obama hammers this home, he can score points there. | ||
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RonNation
United States385 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:11 xDaunt wrote: The debate really was a joke. I'm not surprised that the liberal blogosphere is happy with Raddatz's performance. She clearly was in the tank for Biden to the point where it was embarrassing. As for the interruptions, most of them happened during the middle 30 minutes of the debate. There was a prolonged period of time where Ryan basically didn't get to say anything. Oh well, and as I mentioned last night, really it all comes down to how the public perceived Biden and the moderator. They're either going to care or they're not. I tend to think that they probably won't, particularly because it is a VP debate. As for the presidential debates, I doubt Obama would be able to get away with what Biden did. For one, I think it would be highly out of character for him. Biden could make it work (sorta) because he's Biden. More importantly, Romney wouldn't let Obama get away with it. Ryan was too respectful last night. Romney will put his foot down. The debate was a joke because Paul Ryan would: A) Not answer questions B) Talk in circles for minutes at a time C) Tell irrelevant stories about his wife having a baby. It's no fucking wonder he was interrupted when he's NOT SAYING ANYTHING. | ||
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paralleluniverse
4065 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:39 TheTenthDoc wrote: So, let's set aside Biden's performance. Does anyone agree Ryan did a pretty poor job here? I mean, for all his reputation as some sort of ultra-intelligent policy wonk, he couldn't persuasively answer most of Biden's points (holding the middle class tax cuts hostage went unanswered, the fact that Romney directly wrote an article saying GM should go bankrupt went unanswered, the lack of a clear focus or starting point in their loophole deductions went unanswered, his saying he had a Democrat supporting his plan and various other institutions doing so as well was demolished while he was saying it) and generally came off as out of his depth. Considering I loathe the man I may be biased here though. Then there's his inability to cogently answer the question of "why shouldn't we withdraw American troops from the most dangerous area in the world" and his going off on Obama immediately when asked about the negative tone of the campaign. Not to mention when Biden called him on hypocrisy in saying the stimulus money was useless while voting for it and trying to get some for his district or Biden calling him on his pro-spending voting record. Regarding point one, it's important to note that Ryan (and Romney) cannot list one single thing they would have done, only things they WOULDN'T. If Obama hammers this home, he can score points there. Ryan isn't a policy wonk. His budget is basically: assume that spending is X% of GDP, without specifying how to get spending to X% of GDP, now what's the deficit? But didn’t the Congressional Budget Office evaluate Mr. Ryan’s plan and conclude that it would indeed reduce the deficit? I’m glad you asked that. You see, the budget office didn’t actually evaluate his plan, because there weren’t enough details. Instead, it let Mr. Ryan specify paths for future spending and revenue, while noting — in what sounds to me like a hint of snark — that “No proposals were specified that would generate that path.” http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/viewmessage.php?topic_id=330491¤tpage=717#14338 The following 2 articles in the above post are the most fun: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/24/opinion/krugman-galt-gold-and-god.html http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/06/opinion/06krugman.html?_r=1 | ||
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sc2superfan101
3583 Posts
On October 13 2012 00:37 oneofthem wrote: i'm not even going to touch this, facepalming so hard. tough crowd maybe we should ask the women of Afghanistan how they feel about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliban_treatment_of_women | ||
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oneofthem
Cayman Islands24199 Posts
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