Since there are a few VOG Members who enjoy debating politics, and since the 2012 Election Campaign has now officially started, I thought it best to start this SINGLE thread so that the Members can voice their opinions without the need to start multiple Political Threads. It might be interesting to use this thread as a documentary on the feelings of motorcycle riders towards the political race as it develops and later check back on it to see what has changed. It will also be interesting to use this as a documentary of various political promises and see if the candidates change their promises midstream. I'll kick off this thread with a segment from MSNBC about "what could be the first Billion Dollar Campaign in US History":
The Official 2012 Election Thread
Andy
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My issue isn't his color, as I recall he's half white. My issue is his utter lack of experience and the "fair share" divisive uncompromising politics. NONE of his promises from his first term were realized. Furthermore if you don't understand his apology tour of Europe and the Middle East nothing I could direct you to or link you to would convince you. As as usual, a Dem had to resort to name calling using the F bomb to get their point across because their logic doesn't hold up. Please explain to me WHY market plummeted today if not for the election. The Greek issue has been looming for a long time and the market would take a hit and recover, but not like today. Today was the worst drop in a YEAR. Ah, but that's just a coincident cause our salvation has his second term.Gambit said:
I wonder what actually goes thru his head on a day like today. "I was re-elected and the stock market has taken its worst hit in a year...Job well done."
One last issue don't confuse his win with the people have spoken. A slim majority have spoken and the electoral college was overwhelming, but barely over 50% elected him. He is the FIRST president to be RE-ELECTED with fewer popular votes than his first election. He won, but he's certainly NOT the overwhelming choice of the electorate.
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Can't wait to post The Official Canadian Election Thread. That should get about a dozen responses and a yawn or two. Does anyone remember when that is. I'll get back to you all on that when we find out. I'm sure there people will tell the other people which will tell those people and our people will then know.
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Actually the sheer number of people on welfare/public assistance bothers me.It is indicitive that we have big problems. The costs bother me as well..and then the abuse and kids not being taken care of bother me as well.That does happen. So..yeah,It does bother me and I consider it a problem,just one of many. Maybe it should bother you as well. With that, Ihave things to do so later. Take care.conklij said:
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This honestly bothers me a lot too. It also bothers me that its being spun for political gain. This campaign season a lot of republicans seemed to act like everything was all honky-dory and Obama came along and just unemployed people and put them on food stamps. It is costing us too much money to have people on food stamps but if we're going to solve the problem we need a little unbiased reality check. We already went off one fiscal cliff. The result was millions losing their jobs and getting foreclosed on. A lot of those people ended up needing food stamps. The real issue here is not wether a republican or democrat is in office, if these people find jobs they won't be on food stamps anymore and we'll save a bunch of money. So quit arguing over wether or not we should repeal Obamacare. If a provision in it is preventing or slowing hiring then get together and amend the damn thing. After all we all agree we want to keep the good parts, so leave them be and fix the bad parts. And if a jobs bill looks like it will add good jobs and can be paid for by cutting something that's not...then quit obstructing to make the other side look bad and do it! In the Clinton years we had higher taxes and lower spending. The rich weren't being punished and the poor weren't being abandoned. So lets cut the partisan crap, cut where we can cut, raise where we can raise, and get on with it.clif02 said:
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You nailed it, you nailed it, you f'ing NAILED it. While Biggie's post was dead on for the facts held within, if just really shows how easily the population is manipulated. The manipulation of the weak minded is so unbelievably obvious it is scary. Gays, I completely get as the GOP hates them, but the manipuilation of females and hispanics was quite comical....and yes, don't think for a second that they were not manipulated.clif02 said:
On the flip side, the GOP statistics were comical. It really hit home just far out of touch they are in regards to what their purpose in life really is.
Now, onto the one and only reality which cannot be manipualted much longer. FINANCES!
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So, you want to blame President Obama for the market drop today? Let me ask you, do you also credit him with the nearly 70% gain in themarket over the past four years?You undoubtedlyrealize that many factors influence how the market does on any given day -- today, it's the election, tomorrow it's Europe, and by next week the market could just as easily rebound. Do you credit the President at all with the economic improvement in this country (despite what Fox and other right-wing pundits will say, the economy is improving)? I already can guess the answer so I'll ask another question: ifMcCain had been in the Oval Office the past four years and we were in the same economic position, would you blame or praise him for the present conditions?carl_i said:
Here's a fact for you to consider: the stock market historically has performed much better under Democratic administrations than it has under Republican administrations (http://www.theatlantic.com/business...ance-under-democratic-presidents-totally-crushes-gop-but-does-it-matter/263657/). The reality of this fact, though, is that it probably doesn't matter that much but it is an interesting tidbit. So your concern about today's drop is just you whining about the outcome of the election.
And, just so you're not confused about the outcome of the election, Romney clearly wasn't the choice of most of the electorate.
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Maybe if the GOP ran on economics and presented us with a real plan to move towards solving our problems they would have won. Instead they have let the crazy's take over their party which just did not sell once again. They have abandoned the principles of conservatism and embraced an angry mean spirited and frankly frightening agenda. Talk about manipulating their base. Have you read the litany of conspiracy theories being shoveled here and elsewhere on the internet? The Republican standard bearer Ronald Reagan is rolling over in his grave.phoenix9 said:
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I guess we will all find out soon enough. "The other guys plan is no better" is not a great argument for a major political race is it?ddawg said:Just like Obama's comprehensive economic plan?![Image]()
By the way - exactly what is Obama's comprehensive economic plan to fix the economy. He has had 4 years and an election to work it out. Please share it.
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Tell it to the 59 million 621 Thousand 4 hundred and 36 people who voted for Obama. If you read the post I was referring to the GOP's failed presidential campaign strategy of which there is no debate. They lost..Again. Time to change strategy. Or should they just keep beating their heads against the wall? If they want to win the White House they have to lose the loonies, distance themselves from the extremists, embrace a more diverse electorate, and offer alternative solutions. They might also try nominating a candidate and letting him run as himself rather than trying to shape him into something he is not. Remember the Reagan Democrats?ddawg said:
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ddawg said:Just like Obama's comprehensive economic plan?![Image]()
By the way - exactly what is Obama's comprehensive economic plan to fix the economy. He has had 4 years and an election to work it out. Please share it.
- DOW January 20, 2009 7949.09
- DOW November 07, 2012 12932.73 (Today's drop was from Europe's Debt Crisis announced today but you can blame Obama.
- Jobs lost Janaury 2009: 598,000
- Jobs created October 2012: 171,000
Remember, "Liars figure but figures don't lie"
http://graphics8.nytimes.com/news/business/0915taxesandeconomy.pdf
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Nice rant.conklij said:
I was pointing out the fact that you Obama supporters have criticised Mitt Romney because his Economic plan was not detailed enough. Yet, you cannot tell me what Obama's Enomic plan is. After 4 years in office, an intense presidential election, and the #1 chaallenge facing this country - the economy. You cannot define what Obama's plan is to turn the economy around.
Of note - Romney had 5 Nobel prize winning economists endorse his Economic recovery plan. Can you produce even 3 Nobel prize winning Economists that endorsed Obama's Economic plan? I'll save you the trouble - you can't.
The reality is, you voted for a guy with no plan, on emotion and bias. Mitt Romney was one of the most qualified, educated, and accomplished person to ever run for the presidency. He did not win - because people like you voted on emotion and bias. That's the way it goes. The real loser will the the country. Stand by - watch the debt - see what happens.
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Why the Conservative Media Got It So Wrong by John Zeigler
Conservative Filmaker / Commentator
There is no doubt that going into the final days of this presidential election there was a greater disparity in the perceptions of what the outcome would be among the media elites of each political side than any other time in the era of modern technology. Liberals were completely convinced that President Obama would be reelected, while conservatives tended to not just believe Mitt Romney would beat him, but that he would do so in a landslide.
So why did the conservative media get it so wrong? Because I am a conservative who was confident that Obama would win a tight race, I think that I may be in unique position to explain why this happened.
First, while you would think that the advent of modern technology and the explosion of polling data which now exists (it is truly staggering how much more information there is today than there was, say, in 1980) would help in making political predictions, it actually does the opposite. This is because having access to so many numbers allows political partisans to cherry-pick which data points they like in order to fit their agenda and preferred outcome.
As Mark Twain is alleged to have said, there are lies, damned lies, and statistics.
For conservatives, this natural human inclination to embrace the data that they like and discard the rest is greatly enhanced, and essentially injected with steroids. This is because they have a very understandable and highly justified distrust of a news media which has been showing open hostility to the prospects of our candidates for as long as any of us can remember.
While I am not the very first person to question the credibility of everything I hear in the news media, having once worked for a polling institute and having commissioned several high profile national polls myself, I understand that polls, while hardly perfect, should not generally be thought of as part of the biased news propaganda machine (which is why, ironically, the Fox News poll is often not at all favorable to conservatives).
But because conservatives are understandably so distrustful of everything they are told by the media, it becomes easy for them to fall into the trap of assuming that polls showing Obama winning are inherently flawed. They are even able to come up with enough real numbers to make arguments which appear to be based in intellect, even though they are really being driven by emotion and self interest.
This phenomenon was made even more pervasive because to the conservative political junkies who spend their lives absorbing every possible news item with the assumption that it is simply not possible to comprehend how anyone would vote to reelect Obama. This fed into their fervent belief that the polls must simply be wrong (as did their forgetting that, when nearly everyone votes in a swing state, it really doesn't matter how much more enthusiastic one side is than the other).
What they didn't seem to understand is that an incredibly small percentage of the electorate was dealing with the same data points about Obama as they were. The vast majority of voters, especially those who make up "undecideds," make their candidate selections based on a frighteningly small amount of "information" (which is why, as silly as it was, Obama was politically smart to jump on the "Big Bird" issue).
Not realizing this reality further perverts what is already the modern bubble in which commentators tend to live due to this era of extreme media fragmentation. Because we all gravitate to the information we want to believe is true, this creates a set of circumstances in which the truth gets easily lost.
For instance, at the well respected conservative website Hot Air, well over 90% of their respondents to a poll the day before the election believed that Romney would win, most by a large margin. It is not a coincidence that the site provided information and commentary which almost universally both backed up and facilitated that belief.
Related to this is also the commercial aspect of the modern news media. There is absolutely no doubt that partisan outlets (which now describes about 100% of the media) do far better with their audiences when they tell them what they want to hear. I personally got an enormous amount of irrational grief (and actually lost twitter followers!) because I dared to write about how I thought Obama would win, even though my predictions were actually more optimistic than what the left was tending to portend. The fact that I was correct will mean absolutely nothing to my detractors because credibility no longer has any currency in this celebrity driven culture.
This last point is why Dick Morris can add to his extraordinary record of being catastrophically wrong about just about every major prediction he makes without fear (as long as Fox News renews his contract) of being held accountable. Conservatives are not going to be angry at conservative commentators for telling them what they wanted to hear. They will now simply blame the mainstream media, fraud, and the "low info" voters instead. The conservative outlets themselves will now be all too happy to still have Obama around as a cash cow for the next four years.
I will say that I was shocked that the usually credible Michael Barone also fell into this trap of predicting a Romney landslide based on instinct rather than actual data, but the fact that it can even happen to him proves just how strong all of the forces at work here really are.
I was not influenced by these factors not because I am particularly smart, but rather mostly because I don't trust people. I only trust actions based on self interest. I was perfectly willing to buy the notion that the polls were, to a small but significant degree, biased in favor of Obama, but there were far more reliable factors which told me this was not really the case.
It was clear to me that beating Obama would require a performance equivalent to a major "upset" in sports. In almost all cases when such an event happens there is at least one moment when something dramatic occurs to change the balance of the contest. The first debate was not that moment. All that did was get Romney into the game. He still needed to land his knockout punch and, despite being given the Benghazi story as weapon with which to deliver it, he was either unwilling or unable to do so.
When the Romney campaign decided at the last moment to make a significant play in Pennsylvania (the graveyard of modern Republican presidential candidates) it was a dead give away about what was really happening. Interestingly, those who interpreted that action through their hearts and their wallets saw it as a sign of strength and a coming Romney landslide. Those of us who only seek the truth saw it for what it really was: an act of desperation caused by the belated realization they couldn't win Ohio because they were too weak in their response to Obama's attacks on the auto issue there.
One of the many reasons that the conservative movement is in such deep trouble is that those who were wrong here will suffer no consequences and those who knew the truth will receive no benefit.
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