Elections'08 Thread

[michaelpaciocco]

Might as well put it here.

Also, while I'm sure almost no one cares. Canada is having an election. It started Sunday Sept 7, and will be over October 14.

That is all

[K-Box]

If and when Canada gets both a) nukes of its own and b) someone as shithouse crazy as George W. Bush as president, I'm sure the rest of the world will start to care soon enough.

In more American news, Bill O'Reilly defends both the intelligence and the integrity of Barack Obama, while criticizing both the wisdom and the whining of John McCain's campaign, on the "lipstick on a pig" non-controversy, on FOX News:



Um ... what the fuck?

I think I just woke up here:

[michaelpaciocco]

A) No Nukes, but we got Oil (well, sorta. The Alberta Tar Sands is kind of a strange thing).
B) Our current prime Minister, Stephen Harper.



Conservative, and boring as the day is long....

Next up, Liberal Leader Stephane Dion, whom is basically Al Gore without the funny


Finally, New Democratic Party Leader Jack Layton. For those of you whom don't know...the NDP will never ever form a government on the federal level, but just the same, I include him.

[K-Box]

This was the only funny moment on this week's Saturday Night Live.



That being said, it was fucking hilarious.

[michaelpaciocco]

I was wondering when you were going to put this up.

Michael

[K-Box]

Bob Barr wants McCain, Obama off Texas ballot

Libertarian Party nominee sues, saying they missed the filing deadline

Libertarian presidential nominee Bob Barr's campaign filed suit Tuesday seeking to remove Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama from the ballot in Texas, alleging that the two major candidates missed the deadline for officially filing to be on the ballot.

The lawsuit by the former Republican congressman from Georgia claims that neither McCain nor Obama met the requirement of Texas law that all candidates provide "written certification" of their nomination "before 5 p.m. on the 70th day before election day," because neither had been formally nominated by their respective parties in time. The suit was filed in the Texas Supreme Court in Austin.

That would have been Aug. 25. Obama did not accept his party's nomination until Aug. 28, McCain his on Sept. 4.
__________

In any other election year, I would say that there's no way that Barr's crazy scheme could work, but this is an election year in which every single pundit who has made absolute pronouncements about what can and can't happen has been proven wrong, so ... I'll still say that there's no way that it could work, just because I want to be proven wrong.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, if you do the Electoral College math, Texas counts for 34 votes, all of which were guaranteed to go to McCain.

Which, in turn, would mean that, if those 34 Electoral College votes went away, it would be literally mathematically impossible for McCain to win the presidency.

If Barr actually pulls this off, it will be the most EPIC IRL TROLL in American political history, one which people will be talking about from now until the end of time.

[Anders]

www.ballot-access.org/2008/09/16/barr-sues-texas-for-excusing-late-filing-by-republican-and-democratic-presidential-candidates/

There are Texas Supreme Court decisions that have put candidates on the ballot even though deadlines were not met, but they involved errors by party officials. In this case, party officials made no errors; they were simply unable to comply with the law. Lenora Fulani had filed a similar lawsuit in Indiana in 1988, since both the Democratic and Republican Parties had failed to file timely. In Fulani v Hogsett, the 7th circuit ruled that, since she was also listed on the ballot, she had standing to sue; but that she filed her lawsuit eleven weeks after the deadline had been missed, so was guilty of laches.

www.ajc.com/community/content/news/stories/2008/09/16/bob_barr_lawsuit.html

Barr first raised the issue in a press release earlier this month. Ashley Burton, a spokesperson for the Texas Secretary of State’s office, responded at that time, saying, “Both parties made filings with our office before the deadline, supplemented their filings and will be on the November ballot.”

Also this:

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/sfgate/detail?blogid=14&entry_id=30395

"Where the campaigns advertise tells us a great deal about the candidates' electoral strategies. Post-convention ad buys give us the first insights into the campaigns' assessments of where they think they are competitive as the fall campaign heats up. Advertising represents reality," said Professor Ken Goldstein of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the director of the Wisconsin Advertising Project.

According to the WAP:

"McCain and Obama are roughly even in spending in Colorado, Florida, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Obama is out-advertising McCain by nearly 3:2 in Missouri and by nearly 3:1 in Virginia. McCain has aired virtually no ads in Indiana, Montana and North Dakota. McCain's campaign is, however, out-advertising Obama by over 3:2 in Pennsylvania and over 2:1 in Iowa. McCain is also out-advertising Obama by a wide margin in Minnesota -- a state where Obama has spent just $18,000."

And this: Obama is airing ads in Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, North Dakota, and Virginia -- which were red states in 2000 and 2004. Is he serious or just trying to bleed the McCain/RNC of cash? North Dakota?

I have no idea how reliable this is, but I'm sure someone here will find it interesting.

[K-Box]

A Conservative for Obama
My party has slipped its moorings. It’s time for a true pragmatist to lead the country.

By Wick Allison, Editor In Chief, D Magazine

THE MORE I LISTEN TO AND READ ABOUT “the most liberal member of the U.S. Senate,” the more I like him. Barack Obama strikes a chord with me like no political figure since Ronald Reagan. To explain why, I need to explain why I am a conservative and what it means to me.

In 1964, at the age of 16, I organized the Dallas County Youth for Goldwater. My senior thesis at the University of Texas was on the conservative intellectual revival in America. Twenty years later, I was invited by William F. Buckley Jr. to join the board of National Review. I later became its publisher.

Conservatism to me is less a political philosophy than a stance, a recognition of the fallibility of man and of man’s institutions. Conservatives respect the past not for its antiquity but because it represents, as G.K. Chesterton said, the democracy of the dead; it gives the benefit of the doubt to customs and laws tried and tested in the crucible of time. Conservatives are skeptical of abstract theories and utopian schemes, doubtful that government is wiser than its citizens, and always ready to test any political program against actual results.

Liberalism always seemed to me to be a system of “oughts.” We ought to do this or that because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether it works or not. It is a doctrine based on intentions, not results, on feeling good rather than doing good.

But today it is so-called conservatives who are cemented to political programs when they clearly don’t work. The Bush tax cuts—a solution for which there was no real problem and which he refused to end even when the nation went to war—led to huge deficit spending and a $3 trillion growth in the federal debt. Facing this, John McCain pumps his “conservative” credentials by proposing even bigger tax cuts. Meanwhile, a movement that once fought for limited government has presided over the greatest growth of government in our history. That is not conservatism; it is profligacy using conservatism as a mask.

Today it is conservatives, not liberals, who talk with alarming bellicosity about making the world “safe for democracy.” It is John McCain who says America’s job is to “defeat evil,” a theological expansion of the nation’s mission that would make George Washington cough out his wooden teeth.

This kind of conservatism, which is not conservative at all, has produced financial mismanagement, the waste of human lives, the loss of moral authority, and the wreckage of our economy that McCain now threatens to make worse.

Barack Obama is not my ideal candidate for president. (In fact, I made the maximum donation to John McCain during the primaries, when there was still hope he might come to his senses.) But I now see that Obama is almost the ideal candidate for this moment in American history. I disagree with him on many issues. But those don’t matter as much as what Obama offers, which is a deeply conservative view of the world. Nobody can read Obama’s books (which, it is worth noting, he wrote himself) or listen to him speak without realizing that this is a thoughtful, pragmatic, and prudent man. It gives me comfort just to think that after eight years of George W. Bush we will have a president who has actually read the Federalist Papers.

Most important, Obama will be a realist. I doubt he will taunt Russia, as McCain has, at the very moment when our national interest requires it as an ally. The crucial distinction in my mind is that, unlike John McCain, I am convinced he will not impulsively take us into another war unless American national interests are directly threatened.

“Every great cause,” Eric Hoffer wrote, “begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” As a cause, conservatism may be dead. But as a stance, as a way of making judgments in a complex and difficult world, I believe it is very much alive in the instincts and predispositions of a liberal named Barack Obama.
__________

... Holy shit, it's official; civil war has finally been declared within the conservative movement.

[jessebaker]

No it isn't. Until there is a massive and public "We are renouncing the Republican Party and Bush and company and forming our own party" action, the sane conservatives are still the bitch boys for the neo-con war-mongering deficit creators, as far as them being pussies who won't put their money where their mouth is as far as destroying Bush and the Republican Party by publicly leaving it and denouncing Bush and company as the reason why it's happened.

[K-Box]

Running tally: Which prominent Republicans have crossed party lines to endorse Obama?

In order of appearance:

• Susan Eisenhower, granddaughter of President Dwight Eisenhower
  
• Catholic Professor Doug Kmiec
  
• Former Iowa Representative Jim Leach
  
• Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel
  
• Maryland Representative Wayne Gilchrest
  
• Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan

Anyone want to start a betting pool on if and when Colin Powell will join them?

[jasonlatta]

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 20, 2008

Now that he’s finally fired up on the soup-line economy, Barack Obama knows he can’t fade out again. He was eager to talk privately to a Democratic ex-president who could offer more fatherly wisdom — not to mention a surreptitious smoke — and less fraternal rivalry. I called the “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin (yes, truly) to get a read-out of the meeting. This is what he wrote and sent me:


BARACK OBAMA knocks on the front door of a 300-year-old New Hampshire farmhouse while his Secret Service detail waits in the driveway. The door opens and OBAMA is standing face to face with former President JED BARTLET.

BARTLET Senator.

OBAMA Mr. President.

BARTLET You seem startled.

OBAMA I didn’t expect you to answer the door yourself.

BARTLET I didn’t expect you to be getting beat by John McCain and a Lancôme rep who thinks “The Flintstones” was based on a true story, so let’s call it even.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET Come on in.

BARTLET leads OBAMA into his study.

BARTLET That was a hell of a convention.

OBAMA Thank you, I was proud of it.

BARTLET I meant the Republicans. The Us versus Them-a-thon. As a Democrat I was surprised to learn that I don’t like small towns, God, people with jobs or America. I’ve been a little out of touch but is there a mandate that the vice president be skilled at field dressing a moose —

OBAMA Look —

BARTLET — and selling Air Force Two on eBay?

OBAMA Joke all you want, Mr. President, but it worked.

BARTLET Imagine my surprise. What can I do for you, kid?

OBAMA I’m interested in your advice.

BARTLET I can’t give it to you.

OBAMA Why not?

BARTLET I’m supporting McCain.

OBAMA Why?

BARTLET He’s promised to eradicate evil and that was always on my “to do” list.

OBAMA O.K. —

BARTLET And he’s surrounded himself, I think, with the best possible team to get us out of an economic crisis. Why, Sarah Palin just said Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.” Can you spot the error in that statement?

OBAMA Yes, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac aren’t funded by taxpayers.

BARTLET Well, at least they are now. Kind of reminds you of the time Bush said that Social Security wasn’t a government program. He was only off by a little — Social Security is the largest government program.

OBAMA I appreciate your sense of humor, sir, but I really could use your advice.

BARTLET Well, it seems to me your problem is a lot like the problem I had twice.

OBAMA Which was?

BARTLET A huge number of Americans thought I thought I was superior to them.

OBAMA And?

BARTLET I was.

OBAMA I mean, how did you overcome that?

BARTLET I won’t lie to you, being fictional was a big advantage.

OBAMA What do you mean?

BARTLET I’m a fictional president. You’re dreaming right now, Senator.

OBAMA I’m asleep?

BARTLET Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

OBAMA Yes, sir.

BARTLET I mean tons.

OBAMA I understand.

BARTLET I didn’t even think there were that many white women.

OBAMA I see the numbers, sir. What do they want from me?

BARTLET I’ve been married to a white woman for 40 years and I still don’t know what she wants from me.

OBAMA How did you do it?

BARTLET Well, I say I’m sorry a lot.

OBAMA I don’t mean your marriage, sir. I mean how did you get America on your side?

BARTLET There again, I didn’t have to be president of America, I just had to be president of the people who watched “The West Wing.”

OBAMA That would make it easier.

BARTLET You’d do very well on NBC. Thursday nights in the old “ER” time slot with “30 Rock” as your lead-in, you’d get seven, seven-five in the demo with a 20, 22 share — you’d be selling $450,000 minutes.

OBAMA What the hell does that mean?

BARTLET TV talk. I thought you’d be interested.

OBAMA I’m not. They pivoted off the argument that I was inexperienced to the criticism that I’m — wait for it — the Messiah, who, by the way, was a community organizer. When I speak I try to lead with inspiration and aptitude. How is that a liability?

BARTLET Because the idea of American exceptionalism doesn’t extend to Americans being exceptional. If you excelled academically and are able to casually use 690 SAT words then you might as well have the press shoot video of you giving the finger to the Statue of Liberty while the Dixie Chicks sing the University of the Taliban fight song. The people who want English to be the official language of the United States are uncomfortable with their leaders being fluent in it.

OBAMA You’re saying race doesn’t have anything to do with it?

BARTLET I wouldn’t go that far. Brains made me look arrogant but they make you look uppity. Plus, if you had a black daughter —

OBAMA I have two.

BARTLET — who was 17 and pregnant and unmarried and the father was a teenager hoping to launch a rap career with “Thug Life” inked across his chest, you’d come in fifth behind Bob Barr, Ralph Nader and a ficus.

OBAMA You’re not cheering me up.

BARTLET Is that what you came here for?

OBAMA No, but it wouldn’t kill you.

BARTLET Have you tried doing a two-hour special or a really good Christmas show?

OBAMA Sir —

BARTLET Hang on. Home run. Right here. Is there any chance you could get Michelle pregnant before the fall sweeps?

OBAMA The problem is we can’t appear angry. Bush called us the angry left. Did you see anyone in Denver who was angry?

BARTLET Well ... let me think. ...We went to war against the wrong country, Osama bin Laden just celebrated his seventh anniversary of not being caught either dead or alive, my family’s less safe than it was eight years ago, we’ve lost trillions of dollars, millions of jobs, thousands of lives and we lost an entire city due to bad weather. So, you know ... I’m a little angry.

OBAMA What would you do?

BARTLET GET ANGRIER! Call them liars, because that’s what they are. Sarah Palin didn’t say “thanks but no thanks” to the Bridge to Nowhere. She just said “Thanks.” You were raised by a single mother on food stamps — where does a guy with eight houses who was legacied into Annapolis get off calling you an elitist? And by the way, if you do nothing else, take that word back. Elite is a good word, it means well above average. I’d ask them what their problem is with excellence. While you’re at it, I want the word “patriot” back. McCain can say that the transcendent issue of our time is the spread of Islamic fanaticism or he can choose a running mate who doesn’t know the Bush doctrine from the Monroe Doctrine, but he can’t do both at the same time and call it patriotic. They have to lie — the truth isn’t their friend right now. Get angry. Mock them mercilessly; they’ve earned it. McCain decried agents of intolerance, then chose a running mate who had to ask if she was allowed to ban books from a public library. It’s not bad enough she thinks the planet Earth was created in six days 6,000 years ago complete with a man, a woman and a talking snake, she wants schools to teach the rest of our kids to deny geology, anthropology, archaeology and common sense too? It’s not bad enough she’s forcing her own daughter into a loveless marriage to a teenage hood, she wants the rest of us to guide our daughters in that direction too? It’s not enough that a woman shouldn’t have the right to choose, it should be the law of the land that she has to carry and deliver her rapist’s baby too? I don’t know whether or not Governor Palin has the tenacity of a pit bull, but I know for sure she’s got the qualifications of one. And you’re worried about seeming angry? You could eat their lunch, make them cry and tell their mamas about it and God himself would call it restrained. There are times when you are simply required to be impolite. There are times when condescension is called for!

OBAMA Good to get that off your chest?

BARTLET Am I keeping you from something?

OBAMA Well, it’s not as if I didn’t know all of that and it took you like 20 minutes to say.

BARTLET I know, I have a problem, but admitting it is the first step.

OBAMA What’s the second step?

BARTLET I don’t care.

OBAMA So what about hope? Chuck it for outrage and put-downs?

BARTLET No. You’re elite, you can do both. Four weeks ago you had the best week of your campaign, followed — granted, inexplicably — by the worst week of your campaign. And you’re still in a statistical dead heat. You’re a 47-year-old black man with a foreign-sounding name who went to Harvard and thinks devotion to your country and lapel pins aren’t the same thing and you’re in a statistical tie with a war hero and a Cinemax heroine. To these aged eyes, Senator, that’s what progress looks like. You guys got four debates. Get out of my house and go back to work.

OBAMA Wait, what is it you always used to say? When you hit a bump on the show and your people were down and frustrated? You’d give them a pep talk and then you’d always end it with something. What was it ...?

BARTLET “Break’s over.”

[Anders]

I've never wanted the West Wing to be a documentary more than now.

[K-Box]

Sept 21, 2008 12:17:38 GMT -8 Anders said:

I've never wanted the West Wing to be a documentary more than now.

... Actually, I hate to say it, but this actually really illustrates why, in spite of my own liberal politics, I often found The West Wing to be insufferably annoying, because it really was always Democratic Party fan fiction, and if there's one thing I can't fucking stand about far too many of my fellow left-wingers in the media, it's how goddamn preachy they are in their arguments, a tendency which is only made worse when they have free reign to insert their speeches into the mouths of their Mary Sues, with only their strawmen opponents to challenge them.

And quite frankly, anybody who thinks that Obama hasn't been displaying as much anger as a black man can get away with displaying, who's running for the most powerful office in the land, has not watched a single goddamn speech he's given since the Republican National Convention, because he has been both passionate and aggressive, and anything more than that would scare the shit out of white America.

Oh, and this ...

Yes, and you’re losing a ton of white women.

... Is now provably untrue, since all of the polls, from Gallup to Rasmussen, have shown that white women have swung back to supporting Obama just as much as they did before the RNC, AND those same polls show that white women give Sarah Palin far higher disapproval marks than white men do, but then again, this article was written by Maureen Dowd, whose entire journalistic career was literally based on writing about nothing Bill Clinton's penis for several months in a row, so I suppose I should expect this sort of Failboat bullshit from her.

[jessebaker]

Which is going to make the "October Suprise" thing even more important. ESPECIALLY if my great conspiracy fear that there will be an attempt on McCain/Palin in order to create assassination fanboy fever with one of the two riding the other one's dead, bloodslick corpse into the White House.

ESPECIALLY given that with Palin, the neocon Republicans would probably be more incline to find ANYTHING, if McCain is elected, to get rid of him ASAP in order to slide Palin into the big chair without having to bother with democracy as far as having Palin rejected in an actual fair campaign.

Speaking of which, both McCain and Obama are now ironically silent about the backlash against the "black check" bailout of the banks, who even now are being investigated for mass fraud by the feds. Neither side wants to make the first move towards the issue of the backlash, since they know that this could and would hurt them in November.

[Anders]

Sept 23, 2008 19:34:31 GMT -8 K-Box said:

Sept 21, 2008 12:17:38 GMT -8 Anders said:

I've never wanted the West Wing to be a documentary more than now.

... Actually, I hate to say it, but this actually really illustrates why, in spite of my own liberal politics, I often found The West Wing to be insufferably annoying, because it really was always Democratic Party fan fiction, and if there's one thing I can't fucking stand about far too many of my fellow left-wingers in the media, it's how goddamn preachy they are in their arguments, a tendency which is only made worse when they have free reign to insert their speeches into the mouths of their Mary Sues, with only their strawmen opponents to challenge them.

I'd think that a little annoyance would be a better alternative than current reality, but maybe we have different tolerances there.

I didn't mind the preachiness which I think rarely went overboard, but the strawmen did piss me off. There were many times when their opponents just shut up instead of give an obvious retort.

whose entire journalistic career was literally based on writing about nothing Bill Clinton's penis for several months

For a while now, you've been overusing and misusing this word and it's getting a little annoying. Just a friendly nudge from a fellow verbal ticcer.