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Subscribe to RSSHeadline from our new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls: A marginal -- but not substantial -- improvement for Romney since last week’s debate… In Ohio, Obama leads among those who have already voted by 2-to-1 margin… Tonight’s main event: Biden vs. Ryan… And College Man: Obama hits his fifth-straight college campus when he visits the University of Miami (FL) at 3:25 pm ET, while Romney campaigns in North Carolina at 6:00 pm ET.
The Daily Rundown's Chuck Todd previews Thursday's high-stakes vice presidential debate.
DANVILLE, Ky. -- So how much did the political environment change after last week's presidential debate as we head into tonight's VP showdown here in Kentucky? According to our new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls of three of the most important battleground states, it changed at the margins -- but not substantially. A week ago, right before the debate, our NBC/WSJ/Marist poll of Florida had President Obama with a one-point lead among likely voters, 47%-46%; now it is still one point, 48%-47%. In Ohio, Obama was ahead by eight points; now it is by six, 51%-45%. And in Virginia, Obama had a two-point edge last week, 48%-46%; now it is Romney by one, 48%-47%. So our poll shows some improvement for the GOP presidential nominee, but we seem to be back to where we were before the conventions: It's a very close race with Obama still enjoying a structural edge in the battleground states. And why was there only a little change in these surveys -- conducted Oct. 7-9 -- since last week’s debate? These numbers probably tell the story: More than 90% of the likely voters in these three states say they made up their minds BEFORE the debate. Here is a question to be asked: Is Romney over-performing in national polls and under-performing in the battlegrounds? Sure seems like it.
Slideshow: Biden on the campaign trail
Slideshow: Ryan on the campaign trail
*** Other examples: Here are more examples of marginal change since the first debate, per our NBC/WSJ/Marist polls: Obama's favorable ratings remain above 50% in all three states among likely voters (51% in Ohio and Virginia and 52% in Florida), and his overall job-approval numbers among registered voters are near 50% (48% in Florida and Virginia and 47% in Ohio). Meanwhile, Romney saw his fav/unfav rating tick up in Florida and Virginia (to 49%-44%), but it still remains under water in Ohio (44%-50%). And brand-new New York Times/CBS/Quinnipiac polls also show a marginal improvement for Romney. In Colorado, it’s Romney 48% Obama 47% vs. Obama 48% Romney 47% from a month ago. But in Virginia, they have Obama ahead, 51-46% vs. what they had before, Obama 50% Romney 46%. And in Wisconsin, it’s Obama 50% Romney 47% vs. Obama 51% Romney 45%. Bottom line: There has been some battleground-state improvement for Romney, but not a significant amount. Essentially, we’re back to where things were before the conventions -- which is a close race that slightly favors the president.
Charles Dharapak / AP
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney takes a picture for well-wishers after an unscheduled stop at a Chipotle restaurant in Denver, Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012.
*** A deep dive into Ohio: Our new NBC/WSJ/Marist poll also provides two explanations why Obama maintains his lead in the Buckeye State. One is early voting. According to the survey, nearly 1 in 5 respondents have already voted in Ohio, and Obama is winning them by a 63%-37% margin; among those who plan to vote on Election Day, Romney is leading, 52%-42%. What also helps to explain the president’s advantage is party ID. Last week, it was D+5 among likely voters; this week it’s D+11. But here is something else to chew on: 46% of likely voters in the survey describe themselves as conservative (when it was 35% in 2008, per the exit poll). So while the poll’s party ID in Ohio was more Democratic than last week, it was also much more conservative. Meantime, the NBC/WSJ/Marist poll of Virginia was more Republican.
*** Biden vs. Ryan: Today’s main event, of course, is the Joe Biden-vs.-Paul Ryan debate here in Danville, KY. According to Pew, 40% expect Ryan to perform better in the debate, while 34% expect Biden to do better. Ryan also enjoys a stronger fav/unfav rating (44%-40%) than Biden does (39%-51%) in the survey. Our most recent national NBC/WSJ poll shows similar fav/unfav numbers: 37%-33% for Ryan and 37%-38% for Biden. As we wrote yesterday, Biden has more pressure on him going into the debate, but Ryan has the higher expectations, especially among base conservatives. And a question: Just how many will tune in to the debate? We’re putting the over-under at 40 million. Remember, there are two MLB playoff games tonight, as well as Steelers-Titans NFL football game.
Slideshow: On the Trail
*** The skinny on tonight’s debate: Both Biden and Ryan will be seated. And moderator Martha Raddatz of ABC will ask questions built around nine topics (at 10 minutes per topic), and the questions will alternate between domestic and foreign policy. And that means Libya will come up. Here’s how Bloomberg describes yesterday’s congressional hearing on the topic: “Requests for additional security at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, before the Sept. 11 attack were rejected by the State Department because of a desire to convey ‘normalization,’ the Republican chairman of a House panel [Darrell Issa] said.” Yesterday was not a good day for the Obama administration, nor the Clinton State Department. We still don’t know the basic answer to this question: Why, five days after the attack, did Susan Rice get briefed incorrectly? Obviously, some critics of the administration want to be believe the worst -- that it was on purpose. But do we really think the administration thought that story would hold? More troubling, it seems, was the intelligence failure, both on the front end (no warning) and on the backend (too long to figure out what happened). And it appears a lot of good old fashioned CYA – a legacy the intelligence community has been trying to shake for a decade.
*** College man: Before tonight’s debate, President Obama holds a rally at the University of Miami (FL) at 3:25 pm ET. By our count, this is the president’s FIFTH-straight event at a college campus in the past week -- the others were at the University of Wisconsin (WI), George Mason University (VA), Cleveland State (OH), and Ohio State (OH). Meanwhile, Romney campaigns in Asheville, NC at 6:00 pm ET.
*** The Senate numbers: Lastly, here are the Senate numbers from our new NBC/WSJ/Marist polls: In Florida, it’s Bill Nelson 52%, Connie Mack 39%; in Ohio, it’s Sherrod Brown 52%, Josh Mandel 41%; and in Virginia, it’s Tim Kaine 47%, George Allen 46%.
Countdown to 2nd presidential debate: 5 days
Countdown to 3rd presidential debate: 11 days
Countdown to Election Day: 26 days
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Vote for President Obama because it's the right thing to do!
...for yourself
...for your family
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trust me, you'll feel good about it!
I'm fired up and ready to go!
4 more for 44
1) Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) at a recent hearing, said there should have been more security in Benghazi. Fact: Along with House GOP, Chaffetz voted to CUT embassy security funding by $128 million last year, and $331 million in 2012.
2) Since January 2009, GOP Congress has blamed our President for their own obstruction and moral turpitude. After running on JobsJobsJobs, they voted down every jobs bill - including the Veterans Jobs bill a few weeks ago. GOP congressionals have been INTENTIONALLY USELESS for the middle class.
3) GOP candidate Romney debated the U.S. President on the national stage last week, and DENIED the very centrepiece of his policy plan. Romney insisted his famous $5Trillion tax cut stump speech NEVER, ever happened.
Summary: Though Chaffetz/GOP voted to cut funding to U.S. embassies against Secretary Hilary Clinton's wishes, the wheeze is to blame Benghazi on the President .~~5.2 million jobs were created without GOP's help.~~Do not believe Mitt Romney, he's not telling you the truth.
Unemployment Initial Claims Down 30,000
In the week ending October 6, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 339,000 (the lowest level in 4½ years), a decrease of 30,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 369,000. The 4-week moving average was 364,000, a decrease of 11,500 from the previous week's revised average of 375,500.
http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/eta/ui/current.htm
The Barry admin has a lot riding on “Gaffe” Biden making up for Barry’s Hillaryously poor debate performance. And they are taking big risks with “Gaffe’s” preparation for the VP debate, hiding him away from the public and trying to fill his brain with knowledge.
The first thing that comes to mind is Married With Children’s Bud Bundy’s description of how his moron sister Kelly’s brain works: “It’s like a shot glass already filled to the rim and if you pour in one new drop of knowledge, then one old drop of knowledge has to spill out.”
But, the most dangerous thing that could happen is, by keeping “Gaffe” out of the public view, the part of his brain than makes him so gaffe-prone is subjected to steadily increasing pressure, with no relief. That could build up and up and when they finally let “Gaffe” out on the debate floor you could see a volcanic explosion of moronic stupidity on the order of Mount St. Helens!!!!
http://gallery.usgs.gov/videos/234
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
What Everyone Needs To Know Before Watching The VP Debate
1. Romney and Ryan would eliminate health care for 31 million people who are poor or disabled. Medicaid, which helps poor Americans, some seniors, and children afford health care, is right in the crosshairs of Paul Ryan’s House budget. He proposed cutting $1.4 trillion from the program, a move that would kick about 11 million people off Medicaid over the course of ten years. The Romney-Ryan plan is even worse, and is estimated to force about 44 million people off the program.
2. Ryan considers Social Security a “Ponzi Scheme.” In the Fall of 2011, Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme,” and Paul Ryan agreed. Ryan wants to privatize the program.
3. 62% of Ryan’s budget cuts come from programs that benefit low-income Americans. Ryan’s budget proposes “$5.3 trillion in non defense budget cuts.” 62 percent of the reductions would come from programs that specifically help low-income Americans:
4. Ryan voted for future defense cuts he now blames on Obama. Though Ryan claims Obama somehow orchestrated the sequester, a series of across-the-board spending cuts triggered if Congress can’t produce a better plan, the VP pick himself was a supporter of the mechanism. Not only did he vote for legislation to establish it, he peddled the plan to his Republican colleagues and proposed a similar initiative in 2004.
5. Ryan and Romney cannot cut taxes across the board by 20% and lower the deficit because it’s mathematically impossible. Ryan claims they will achieve these twin goals by closing loopholes and getting rid of deductions for the rich. But, as the Tax Policy Center points out, even if they got rid of every single deduction and loophole, they would still need to find more revenue. That means they’d need to start raising taxes on the middle class.
6. Ryan voted to increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion under Bush. During the Bush years alone, Ryan voted with his party’s leadership to increase the debt ceiling by $4 trillion. In total, he has voted six times to raise the debt ceiling, increasing it by $5.8 trillion.
7. Ryan wants to kick 1 million students off of Pell Grants. As part of his budget, Ryan proposed cutting Pell Grants for nearly 1 million college students. Seventy four percent of Pell Grant recipients in 2011 came from families with incomes of $30,000 or less. There is no evidence that these cuts will curb rising college costs.
8. Ryan’s budget included the same $716 billion in Medicare savings included in Obamacare. The $716 billion that Obamacare takes out of Medicare will almost definitely come up in tomorrow’s debate. Ryan has claimed that Obama “raided” Medicare to pay for his health care reform. In fact, Ryan wants to make Medicare a voucher program and proposed taking the same cuts out of Medicare in his budget. But whereas Obamacare uses those funds to eliminate fraud and increase efficiency, Ryan proposed taking that money to pay down the deficit.
9. Ryan supported economic stimulus under Bush. If he’s going to follow the lead of his running mate, Ryan will invoke Obama’s stimulus plan, the Recovery Act, as failed legislation that wasted taxpayer money. But when George Bush was president, Ryan was supportive of a stimulus, and actually made a rousing case for infusing the economy with money, saying that it helped create jobs. Watch it:
10. Ryan used to supports a key aspect of Obamacare. Ryan will likely say at the debate that the Affordable Care Act is government overreach. In fact, he might even invoke “death panels,” as he has done at recent town halls. But Ryan proposed something extremely similar to these so-called “death panels” in 2009 — twice. In December of 2010, Ryan also asked the Department of Health and Human Services for an Obamacare health care grant “for the Kenosha Community Health Center, Inc to develop a new facility in Racine, Wisconsin, an area within Ryan’s district.”
11. Ryan opposes abortion access for rape victims. When it comes to abortion rights, Ryan is among the most extreme anti-abortion members of Congress. He believes rape victims shouldn’t have access to abortions and co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment that would have defined a fertilized egg as a human, thus outlawing not just abortion but also in-vitro fertilization and some forms of contraception.
12. Ryan supports a constitutional amendment banning same sex marriage. Ryan is vehemently opposed to marriage equality for same-sex couples. He has twice voted to amend the constitution to that effect, supported a same-sex marriage ban in his home state, and claimed that preventing same-sex couples from getting married was a “universal human value.”
http://thinkprogress.org/election/2012/10/10/983871/what-everyone-needs-to-know-before-watching-the-vp-debate/
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Lyin Ryan's Idol Ayn used Medicare and Social Security in her old age government money just like Lyin Ryan used Social Security for his education. Might I add his used government money to build their business
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden2012
I am so glad Glen Doherty's mother told Team Willard to KNOCK IF OFF!
According to Ellefsen, Doherty found his exchange with Romney to "insincere and stale."
Even Queen Annie recognizes it!
October Surprise?
What did the president know about the Benghazi attack and when did he know it? More to the point, when did the president choose to share his knowledge of events with the American people?
In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack the administration's consistently articulated position was that the violence was a result of protests over an offensive video. Several days after the attack Ambassador Rice made the rounds of the Sunday talk shows to emphasize that very point. Yet we have since learned that the State Department knew from day one there was no protest outside the embassy prior to the violence and that the episode was a complex attack without precedent in U.S. diplomatic history.
The cynics among us (count me in that camp) would argue the administration deliberately peddled a bogus story because it would be inconvenient to acknowledge in the midst of a heated election campaign that a terrorist attack had occurred on a 9/11 anniversary. This would be especially inconvenient since they've been reminding us ad nauseum that bin Laden is dead and thus Americans are much safer. But the contradicting stories coming out about the attack are having a decidedly negative influence on the president's foreign policy poll numbers.
Suprise!
M Raddatz: Good evening gentlemen. Before we start the debate, does anyone have a question? Yes Mr Vice President.
Joey B: Good evening Martha, I do have a question. I noticed I have two microphones.
M Raddatz: Umm, yes Mr. Biden, you do.
Joey B: Does that mean I have to say everything twice?
------------------------------
Obama 2012 - Occupy Sesame Street
"The Obama campaign has distorted the results of a study by the Tax Policy Center a nonpartisan research group, and created a fictitious $5 trillion tax cut. Some news organizations have embraced the distortion. The TPC should issue a statement saying its results have been twisted, leaving no doubt. News organizations that bought into the fabrication should retract their previous reporting. Topping the list is NBC News, which is in the awkward position of having one of its broadcasts inserted in an Obama TV spot."
Like I said yesterday, if you want to see what a lying sack of $hit looks like then watch any Democrat (like Andrea Mitchell) move their lips when discussing Romney's tax plan.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/robert-j-samuelson-tax-cut-fiction/2012/10/10/829e7d9e-12ef-11e2-be82-c3411b7680a9_story.html
Good News
Crescendo, Clapping hands
http://ametia.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/clapping.gif?w=640
Obama wins by landslide in 7-Eleven coffee cup survey
To figure out whether President Barack Obama will win re-election, don’t bother consulting costly scientific polls. Just check out the self-serve coffee at your local 7-Eleven convenience store.
As it has done in every presidential election since 2000, the convenience store chain is selling red and blue to-go coffee cups marked with the names of the major party candidates, as well as regular, unmarked cups for undecided voter in its “7-Election.”
So far Obama is ahead nationally by a wide 60-40 margin, although more scientific polls have the national race as virtually a dead heat. In the closely contested swing state of Ohio, where both candidates are campaigning heavily this week, the coffee cup poll favors the incumbent 57 to 43, with undecided coffee drinkers excluded.
http://on.today.com/SRYLLR
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4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Romney Interview ...
The Columbus Dispatch editorial board (10/10/2012 – "We don't have a setting across this country where if you don't have insurance, we just say to you, 'Tough luck, you're going to die when you have your heart attack," he said as he offered more hints as to what he would put in place of "Obamacare," which he has pledged to repeal.
"No, you go to the hospital, you get treated, you get care, and it's paid for, either by charity, the government or by the hospital. We don't have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don't have insurance."
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/10/11/health-care-called-choice.html
This is the second time in recent weeks where he refers to those without health insurance as "living in apartments" and suggesting that they would only use the ER for life threatening illnesses. He appears to be clueless to not only to the size of the health insurance problem in our country but what actually happens on Main Street.
Obama spokes-propagandist Jay Carney was Clintonesque when pinned down on his lies and argued that all depends on what the meaning of a 'terrorist act' is.
Obama of course will take decisive action on his administrations lack of integrity and honesty on this matter, and will appoint a committee.
No one quite captured in words in this campaign season what Elizabeth Warren said. This is why I’m shocked when I see certain male journalists on television who are Republicans. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Not with the make-up of today’s Republican Party. They’re journalists. And this is 2012.
Elizabeth Warren,Democratic Candidate for the United States Senate:
Last night during her debate:
And I want to be blunt. We should not be fighting about equal pay for equal work and access to birth control in 2012. These issues were resolved years ago until the Republicans brought them back.
Scott Brown had exactly ONE chance to vote for employer provided birth control and voted no. Scott Brown had ONE chance to vote for equal pay for equal work and voted no. Scott Brown had ONE chance to vote for Sonia Sotomayor, a pro choice judge and he voted no.
Backhouse, Beverly and Feisty. Your crap isn't sticking. You got nothing. Your campaign is starting to feel like the ambassador and three brave Americans this administration let down and turned deaf ears to just moments before their demise. Shame on you. Run on the Messiah's record.
Go Joe Biden. Time for a Home Run.
OBAMA IN 2012.
bill fairfax va. If your party would have been working with the President for the last four years this may not happened. Your party is so concerned in getting the President out of office it has lost focus on the real issues. You know thats true but you republican/tea party friends can't admit it that your wrong!
Philosophical question regarding the debate: Will Biden's empty chair be as empty as Obama's empty chair?
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Obama/Biden 2012 - We'll continue to poll test our statements on Benghazi until we get it right
Please read this. It was written last night.
“Never Loved Lawrence O’Donnell As Much As Today”
I just tuned into MSNBC after a long day. I was thrilled that he has spent the last 10 minutes and maybe a few more on the shameful shooting of Malala Yousufzai.
Malala Yousufzai is a brave girl who stood for women and girl's right to have a normal life. She isn't ask for a lot, just that girls be given an opportunity that can help them develop. Apparently, that is a lot for the Taliban. Like Cowards can only be, they shot her as she was boarding her bus to School. Because, in Taliban Circles, shooting a 14 year old girl is the ultimate level of courage (or cowardice!) that they can show. Because, Taliban, think that they have a direct line of communication to GOD - when actually, even Satan will not want to be on their side.
The issue of women's rights needs mainstream attention. Issues relating to women's right in developed world needs mainstream attention. Issues relating to women's right in the developing world and the middle-east needs mainstream attention.
I am glad that Pakistan is outraged, the Chief of Army is outraged, the public on the street is outraged. I want USA to be outraged for the prescription that GOP has for women.
I want my daughter to grow in a world where she doesn't need to understand this issue because it has been solved. I want my wife to grow old and tell these tales to her grandchildren when they gawk and cannot imagine a world where women were treated unfairly ...
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/10/1142939/-Never-loved-Lawrence-O-Donnell-as-much-as-today
Albany Joe: "But, the most dangerous thing that could happen is, by keeping “Gaffe” out of the public view, the part of his brain than makes him so gaffe-prone is subjected to steadily increasing pressure, with no relief."
Hey, that's just "Hillaryous", Albany.
From 2008:
"Biden's brush with death came two decades ago, just months after he gave up
his own campaign for president. Biden, who had suffered headaches for weeks,
found himself with a headache so severe that he lay down in a fetal position,
then passed out for five hours. Upon awakening, he made it to a hospital, where
doctors discovered a ruptured aneurysm -- a condition so severe that a priest
said he was called in to administer the last rites.
A brain aneurysm is a bulging blood vessel, which occurs when a spot in the
vessel weakens and blood pressure forces it out like a balloon. A ruptured
aneurysm is generally extremely painful -- many doctors say it is typically the
most painful headache you'll ever experience.
About half of all ruptured aneurysms prove fatal, and many others lead to
lifelong disability. Neurosurgeons at Walter Reed Hospital were able to save
Biden's life by putting a metal clip on the artery to stop the bleeding. Biden
also survived a blood clot that lodged in his lung as he recuperated.
Through screening, a second aneurysm was discovered a few months later and
surgically removed before it burst."
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-10-20/health/biden.health_1_second-aneurysm-biden-s-republican-joe-biden?_s=PM:HEALTH
If that was a liberal making fun of Ann Romney's health, would it be equally as amusing?
Two tweets from The Obama Diary:
(AP) - US jobless claims plunge to 339,000, lowest level in 4 ½ years, hopeful sign for hiring.
Home foreclosures hit five-year low — bit.ly/Ri3gk0
#newswatch
Dennis,
In the weird world of Willard, if you don't own a personal aircraft & have an elevator for your multiple cars... your a common apartment dweller!
I still want one someone to explain to me which ER's treat chronic illnesses such as cancer, MS, diabetes, etc!
Since Willard can't maybe one of the mental midgets who lurk around here want to take a stab at it!
joanna smith1 Thats a empty chair in front of your keyboard now. Your just empty talk!
Willard and Little Eddie lie so much, it's hard to imagine anyone voting for them and dismissing all of his repeated lies on every position. It sure bothers me and millions others, that these men the talking lying buffoons, are fooling so many.
The irony.
So Smitty, another philosophical question, using your "reasoning", are the Democrats obligated to work with President Romney if such an event were to occur?
Bill - seriously can't find anything else to rant about??? You sir are trying to make a mountain out of a mole hill. Before you get froggy - I have total respect and admiration for the men that died for our Country and am just a pissed off that this even happened.
Now - terrorism is going to happen and I ask you put it into prospective - because I am sure you voted to re elect President Bush and Cheney and I doubt that you held them to the same standards that you are trying to hold this Administration. 9-11 killed 3,000 on American soil. This attack murdered 4 Americans on foreign soil - big difference.
Be truthful with yourself and fellow readers and posters -
I'm at the point that I just can't wait for it to be over!
Self Educated -- Maybe you better go back to school. Our embassies are our sovereign land -- American soil. You also be truthful. What would you be saying that if the story was the same and the names were changed from Obama/Biden to Bush/Cheney.
Our president has failed us, that is the short version.
Is it me, or has Obama really just never had his heart in the job...???
Obama hasn't earned a second term. While all his supporters are calling out Romney for lying, they are gleefully ignoring the promises Obama made in his campaign. I seem to remember something about bringing our troops home?? Not important to you all I see.
Since everyone is so willing to give both candidates a free pass on their plans to double down on decades of failed foreign policy and military intervention, maybe one of you can explain to me, what is going on in the Middle East that justifies the loss a single American soldier, not to mention thousands of lives and billions of dollars. Imperialism, interventionism, repaying defense contractor campaign contributors, and nation building don't cut it for me.
Gary Johnson 2012
I find these poll numbers interesting since they don't mesh with what I'm seeing in most other polls this week. I wonder what % of Dem/Rep/Ind voters they used?
By now, anyone who hasn't made up his/her mind about his/her choice(s) for the upcoming elections is living in a cave. The polls are meaningless.
The minions of the unthinking right have the perfect candidate. They know Romney is a liar and don't care. They know Romney refuses to tell his plans, but that's not scary, because even if he shared them, he's a liar and can't be trusted. They don't care. They hate Obama. They'll vote for Romney, because they don't care about morals or principles, and money is the most important thing in life.
You know President Obama took a huge gamble when he opened the door for single-payer health care, which is exactly what he did. It's just not obvious yet. He is trying to find a way to fight an entirely different kind of threat to our security that we have never faced before. Our enemies DO NOT fight under a flag. You wish like crazy he had not signed the PATRIOT Act, that he had closed Guantanamo, that he had vetoed the NDAA, and that he had grabbed Romney by the throat at the first debate and called him out as the lying snake he is.
You'll vote for Obama because you really do buy into hope and change. You know change doesn't come overnight. You know that our economy was heading into a full-blown depression when he was sworn in. Not a depression, you say? Try this on for size. The reason you don't see soup kitchens is because we have food stamps. We have unemployment insurance. Those are socialist solutions to capitalist problems. That's really how it is. Unbridled and unregulated capitalism is a disaster.
So you'll vote for President Obama - as I will - hoping that he's going to get rid of the Wall Street influence in his administration. Hoping that he can continue to thwart external terrorist threats. Hoping he can get the message across that the old consumption economy is obsolete. Hoping he can move education to the front burner. Hoping he can reform campaign finance.
There's still a glimmer of hope with President Obama. Romney promises a return to the Dark Ages.
Another tweet, TOD:
According to the Marist Ohio poll, Obama is banking 63% of the early vote, and 1.2 million have already voted; could be curtains for Mitt.
Gaffe Bidens unfavorabilty rate is 51%. First time I have heard that. Good luck tonight. So, the moderator is a friend of the President, how convienent. Wonder if the Democrats would let Chris Wallace be a moderator?
I think his heart was into it, but he just didn't realize that so much of the work involved playing golf.
joanna smith1 The irony
No they not. But don't we send people to work for what's best for the country? Not for their political party. That what the republican/tea party is doing working for their own good not the country. Just look at how Congress & the Senate has been voting. For the last 2 years its been nothing but party line votes. The country can't work together divided.
sirie: "Is it me, or has Obama really just never had his heart in the job...???"
It's you, of course. Look, we can argue policies till we turn blue, but if I had to fault President Obama for anything the last four years, it's that he put TOO much of his heart and soul into this job and not enough into watching his back for all the people who were just waiting to twist the knife before he even finished taking the oath of office. As a friend put it to me last week after the debate (which I'll concede he didn't seem to have his heart in), Barack Obama ran for President because he honestly believed he could change this country for the better, and has never had any time or patience for the political gamesmanship that goes along with the job that someone like, say, Bill Clinton, always enjoyed with great relish.
Except I don't really consider that a fault. Do you?
When the American people find out that our President made up the story of the "video' they will finally realize that Obama doesn't care if he starts riots around the world, all that matters to him is his job. Which I might add that he is terrible at his job. What a failure to America and now a failure to the whole world.
His standing in all polls will be way down in another week or two. Looks like he "leaned Forward" and fell over. What a pathetic President he has turned out to be.
David Walker
Even with that, I'd say left out several items. All these mistakes and you still think that he deserves a second term? Just because you think Romney is worse? Voting for the lesser of two evils still leaves you with evil in the end.
OMG -- A 7-Eleven survey?????? A survey where . . . oh sh!t LMAO. This one is going on facebook to show how ignorant and desperate the left is.
@JH -- It's not the riots we have to worry about now -- it's WAR. Boots have now been placed on the ground at the Jordan border near Syria. This has shut the mouths of the left who for weeks have been claiming Gov. Romney is the war monger. War is Obama's final gasp at retaining the Oval Office and the hypocrites on the left will defend his war and be shamed along with him.
As Mitt begins to pull ahead in the polls leave it to NBC and the rest of the liberal rags to try to minimize it.
Your straw man argument is ridiculous. Just remember contraception is available the argument is over who pays, the individual or the community. I am sure that because there is a right to bear arms you would be supportive of a federal subsidy to buy a gun. After all why should poor people be denied their second amendment rights?
First Read:
And that's why the Ohio Republicans are desperate to curtail early voting as much as possible and are going to go all the way to the Supreme Court to do it. They're not even pretending that this has anything to do with mythical voter fraud.
The only serious voter fraud is in absentee ballots, and that fraud favors Republicans. Republicans love fraud as long as it stuff the ballot boxes in their favor.
I hope Joe Biden presses Ryan on Romney's tax cut plan.
The elimination of home interest rate deduction should be the centerpiece of criticism.
Housing starts remain the single biggest reason why our economy isn't growing faster. Historically, housing has led every recovery, but as in the Great Depression, the collapse of the housing market was accompanied by a collapse in the financial sector.
Romney's 20% across the board tax rate cuts is going to be made up by eliminating or reducing deductions and is now revenue neutral, according to Romney in first debate.
The home mortgage interest deduction is the largest single tax deduction hard-working Americans take.
When the rich see their home mortgage interest deduction eliminated, they will shift their investment funds into paying off their mortgage. They will save on the interest payment (way better than 0% 10 year Treasury bond) and still get their 20% cut in tax rate. Win, win for rich folks.
Working families will see their home mortgage interest deduction disappear under Romney's plan (as currently stated). They will not be able to just pay their mortgage off, so they will lose the tax savings on their interest payments and may well pay more under Romney's "tax cut" plan.
Families who want to own a home will see their tax incentive for buying a home disappear. They may decide to continue to rent instead. and the rich can invest in more rental housing.
Our recovering housing market will suffer from less home buying under Romney's tax cut plan in a time where we really need it to recover more quickly. Housing prices will suffer as demand for single family homes is hit by the elimination of the mortgage interest deduction.
Romney favors the rich here again with his current revised tax plan.
Romney- more for the rich and less for the working family.
Romney- hurting the housing recovery and slowing the economy with his tax plan.
Romney- bad for America (unless you're rich)
OBAMA 2012.....For America's continued recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression.
blah blah blah. NBC loves Obama. We get it.
Obama hasn't learned anything about being president in the last couple years. Does anybody expect him to learn how to debate with somebody that's smarter, better informed, and with better ideas in just a few weeks?
He got squashed in the first debate because he doesn't know what he's doing. He'll get squashed in the next one.
When Obama stands up, and talks about how he's going to fix things, liberals swoon. But when he has what he says questioned, and doesn't have a teleprompter to tell him how to avoid answering, he falls flat.
Poor poor liberals. They got used to the idea of debating with Bush. They just don't know how to handle it when they're out classed, and out smarted.
Gee new NBC "polls" to dispute all of the polls that are unfavorable to Obama... is anyone at all surprised by this? How far did they have to skew the polling towards Democrats this time? an extra 25 - 30%?
Must have been awfully bad since they didn't even provide links to the poll results.
Pat, somebody should tell Granny Warren is a millionaire herself.
all her arguments on Browns votes have been debunked because she only looks at the name of the bill rather than reading what's in it...as he's explained and shown to have done on numerous occasions.
besides if you really want a count on the "war on women" why don't you count the only politician with a confirmed kill in the war on women...teddy kennedy
Same old phony poll by NBC to support Obama - claiming that Democrats hold a larger margin of support now than in 2008, when there was a record high number of people who identified as Democrats and a record low number who identified as Republicans.
By the way - Marist had one of the worst track records of any major pollster in the 2004 & 2008 elections, overestimating the Democratic candidate by an average of about 3% - In fact, they actually called the 2004 election for Kerry by 1%, when the actual result was a Bush win by 2.4%.
In comparing the final polls with actual results for 2004 & 2008, the pollster with the actual best average record was IBD/TIPP with an average error rate of 0.5%. They now show Romney ahead among Likely Voters by 5% (49% for Romney vs 44% for Obama).
What plan does Gaffe Biden and Obama have? All I see on this page is Romney is bad, nothiing about what Obama has in store for the next 4 years! Does anybody know his plan? The ONLY plan I here is tax the job creators! How many Democrats out there got a job from a poor person? Guvment is broke and unsustainable and Obama's plan is ?
Obama 2012 - Hope all you want, it won't change anything
---------------------------------------
"No they not"? Oh, you mean 'No they do not'. Got it. So you do agree that the opposition party can oppose. Can't disagree with you there. Do you disagree with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJxmpTMGhU0
Good Morning Backhouse
Summary: Though Chaffetz/GOP voted to cut funding to U.S. embassies against Secretary Hilary Clinton's wishes, the wheeze is to blame Benghazi on the President .~~5.2 million jobs were created without GOP's help.~~Do not believe Mitt Romney, he's not telling you the truth.
Backhouse, It's a shame the Republicans would stump so low to politicize the death of America to fear monger in hopes to getting to the White House.
Ditto multiple choice Myth Romney using the Navy Seal, who , by the way, couldn't even remember the Navy Seal 20 minutes later. It behooves how any one can vote for this FAKE.
For the record, I don't trust Myth Romney either. MYTH HAS TOO MANY CONTRADICTIONS!!!
Romney's emotional story remembered very differently by friend of fallen SEAL
Ellefsen said Doherty remembered Romney as robotic.
"He said it was pathetic and comical to have the same person come up to you within only a half hour, have this person reintroduce himself to you, having absolutely no idea whatsoever that he just did this 20 minutes ago, and did not even recognize Glen's face."
http://mynorthwest.com/category/ronanddon/
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Alan NJ:
Just remember also that the Republicans think that an employer has the right to ask women whose health insurance he covers whether they are using contraception for birth control or for other medical purposes that don't offend him and to deny them coverage if he doesn't like the answers. Republicans believe that if a women's boss can't play the role of Holy Inquisitor, it's suppressing his freedom of religion.
Vote for Romney
Your Country depends on it.
Your Family depends on it.
Your future depends on it.
America can not sustain four more years of failed leadership again. It will destroy us.
Time for a change. Time for someone with ideas. It is time for Leadership.
Bev - 5.2 million jobs or a net of 125,000. Lie all you want. Isn't strange that the unemloyment rate soared to 10% under Obama, and 4 years later there are only a net of 125,000 jobs but the unemployment rate dropped 2.3%!
That's a tough one JS1, ranks right up there with the sound of one hand clapping. Besides that, it's looking more and more like Clint was on to something.
http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2012/10/the-new-yorker-eastwooding-137676.html?hp=r3
Beverly in Chicago:
Why shouldn't social security be privitized? If I had my money I surely wouldn't be getting back 75 cents on the dollar the way it will be in the future thanks to the Clinton admin (a tax and spend legacy carried on now by Obama)...Heck - he can't even get a budget together...more of the "voting present" I suppose..sadly a very weak and ineffective leader
With that in mind the federal govt. is the last entity I want handling my healthcare...
Ben-636050
do you realize that blaming the Obama Administration for this is so yesterday? Today it's:
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) said that he voted to cut funding for U.S. embassy security: "I Absolutely’ Voted To Cut Funding For Embassy Security"
Btw, show me evidence that the Obama administration may have ignored intelligence that the attack was imminent.
It's nothing different than Republicans leaving the biggest pile of sh*t to clean up for Obama WHILE complaining that he's not fast enough in less than 4 years WHILE Romney claiming he would need 2 terms to fix the exonomy.
Republicans = bunch of lying hypocrites
Here's what the mother of the former SEAL killed in Benbghazi thought of Romney's latest attempt to score political points off the deaths of people he cares nothing about:
http://thinkprogress.org/security/2012/10/10/986301/romney-navy-seal-mother-libya/
What percentage of the current administration's policies are CARRY-OVERS from the previous administration? Anyone know?
What percentage of GOVERNMENT workers (Foreign service, military, diplomatic corps, etc.) are CARRY-OVERS from previous administrations?
Something to think about while you're making those blanket statements of condemnation about this administration. Something for those who condemn and blame the previous administration for all our current woes to ponder.
Albany Joe, I remember that episode of Married with Children. What a great a show and what an accurate description of Biden
With that said, now i dont pay attention to ads floating around with one exception. See on the radio Im lazy to change the station or turn down the volume and it isnt quite as easy to block out. So the comical commercial that aired is suggesting that the most important issues this country is facing is the Gay issue. Yes the ad suggested the most important issues were about Gays.
before you libbies start your reverse bigotry, I just want to know why the Barry admin is doing whatever it takes to avoid reality? After all Bin Laden's Dead and GM's Alive right? We have ClunkerCare for all. We had stimulus, isnt everything good in the world?
its more like the actual policies. Patriot act (i disapproved then and now) for starters. Next person
God is answering my prayers, so far, to save us from these evil extremist right of Mitt and Paul. Along with the "Party of No" which doesn't care about anybody , but the corporate, business and military world! "Farmers and Vets. not covered now for a months because the republican House refused to act on a Farm Bill and Vets. Bills and then went home for 2 and 1/2 months leaving them with no coverage! Greed takes many forms, just ask the republicans!
I think Obama and the Democrats declare victory if Biden doesn't face plant it walking on to the stage.
Obama/Biden 2012 - We start with low expectations - then we lower them
good point Dangerfield... makes you wonder!
joanna smith1 No they do not
I made a mistake I admit it, unlike the republican/tea party. I'm sorry but you tube is not the place I get my news. Now I see where you come up with the gems you post. So troll on.
Caesar,
I'll take the Clunkycare you describe over Vouchers to make private insurance companies rich!
Fact Check of the Day:
Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars.
Factcheck.org says that is "Nonsense".
"The American Enterprise Institute, which conducted the study, is described in one of Romney’s ads as “nonpartisan” and “independent.” In fact, it is a conservative, pro-business think tank whose leaders include former Vice President Dick Cheney and whose academic advisers include Romney’s chief economic adviser, R. Glenn Hubbard. Three of its board members — including its chairman — gave nearly $1.7 million in combined contributions to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future."
Here is the link to read more: http://factcheck.org/2012/10/romneys-4000-tax-tale/
baylLIE
How many democrats voted to cut the funding for security? Tell the whole story or STFU.
The only mess that Obama is cleaning up is his own mess and every other democrat and republican that was in office since 1900 or before. And he is failing at his job. If this mess is ever going to cleaned up we have to start new. Romney will get the job done.
Ben-636050
Backhouse, Beverly and Feisty. Your crap isn't sticking. You got nothing. Your campaign is starting to feel like the ambassador and three brave Americans this administration let down and turned deaf ears to just moments before their demise. Shame on you. Run on the Messiah's record.
Look Bennie,
We don't expect it to penetrate you. You have the IQ of 5th grader. Don't pretend you know what's going on.
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Ben-636050
Backhouse, Beverly and Feisty. Your crap isn't sticking. You got nothing. Your campaign is starting to feel like the ambassador and three brave Americans this administration let down and turned deaf ears to just moments before their demise. Shame on you. Run on the Messiah's record.
Look Bennie,
We don't expect it to penetrate you. You have the IQ of 5th grader. Don't pretend you know what's going on.
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Dangerfield, I remember the wars that were carryovers. Then the threats of Mitt to take us into Syria and Iran. Got to keep the military industrial complex making profits like Ike warned us about back in '58!
Bev - that's what Romney is good at - re-introducing himself. I think he has tried to re-introduce himself to the American voters about ten times so far this year. Each time, we give him a weak smile, tell him no thanks, and he goes away for a couple weeks, huddles with his Bush leftover advisers, and comes back and wants to shake our hand again.
Hopefully, in 26 days, we can give him a really cheerful GOODBYE for the last time. Willard Wrongme - wrong about America, and wrong FOR America.
Obama/Biden 2012 - Romney/Ryan 1040
Bayllie -- It is up to the state department to allocate its funds and find cost cutting areas that do not endanger American lives. The buck stops at the top and yesterday, today and tomorrow this administration is to blame. Did you listen to Lt. Col. Wood???? He practically said an idiot could see this coming but pleas for more security were ignored and/or refused. There are memos, there is the ambassador's diary -- you on the left are shameless and repugnant for defending such an action from any administration. Despicable defense.
@Bevey -- What in the hell does that mean Bevey??? You got nothing and that response shows it. Your campaign is in shambles; the walls are caving in and the quicksand is rising above your head. Be good little minions now and sink with the Titanic.
Eric,
It is not nonsense! It is out and out lies!
happy 42,
Privatization of Social Security would eat up 15-20% of the amount of money you would receive because the companies doing the privatizing would eat it up in profits and paper work!
Ah, so you prefer your news to be processed and filtered. Which do you prefer, by Maddow or Schultz?
Keep telling yourself the polls aren't moving away from Barry, that nobody has noticed that Barry lied about the embassy attacks, that this month's jobless report numbers really are accurate, that the Barry really does have a plan that doesn't involve any of the failed policies and failed ideas of the past four years, that this community organsizer can lead from behind, that the world no longer respects the US or fears retaliation for blatant attacks on Americans.
Oh wait - you don't have to tell yourself these things because the left wing biased media is already telling you this. Cronkite must be spinning in his grave.
The US media used to be an example for the world - a beacon. It's become a third world re-tread and the libbies blindly and happily accept it.
clwyd, just stick to threatening other posters.
gotta take what they can get HAHAHA
Yeah Bev because you say the most intelligent, coherent things. BEV, do you think typing in bold and with the faux hostile in your face words empowers you? Thats ok BEV remember FOX NOISE: WHERE REALITY IS A CONSPIRACY
I'm not a big fan of early voting, as it leaves the door open for all sorts of "mischief." It doesn't matter which side is more guilty. Both could take advantage and some, on occasion, have.
There's no reason why we shouldn't stick with the system of election day poll-voting, and absentee-ballot-voting for those who cannot be within the confines of their respective districts on election day.
Fewer chances to cheat, means less cheating. It's just that simple.
Having said that; It will be interesting to see how the numbers shake out on election day in Ohio, when people actually have to go to the polls to cast their votes. FIRST READ makes it sound like Obama already has it won there, based on the early voting alone.
Is that yet another attempt at the "make 'em feel helpless" strategy?
And while we're at it, there's one more thing; if Romney's gains since the debate are so "marginal", then why has he taken the lead in two (2) national polls that previously showed Obama ahead?
Methinks Mitt Romney has gained much more than some news agencies are willing to admit. Apparently NBC News is one of those agencies.
All I know is that we need to get someone new in the White House, or pretty soon none of us will be able to afford TV's or computers with which to view your news broadcasts OR your websites!
DEMOCRATS FOR ROMNEY 2012
Backhouse "1) Rep Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) at a recent hearing, said there should have been more security in Benghazi. Fact: Along with House GOP, Chaffetz voted to CUT embassy security funding by $128 million last year, and $331 million in 2012."
Since there could be no funding cut unless it was also passed by the Democrat controlled Senate and signed by Obama, we have to conclude that it was also supported by Obama, or that it was not actually implemented.
So what's your point?
Fairfax Bill, the math expert who explained how pollsters "oversample" Democrats, puts on his foreign policy (dunce) cap:
The cynics among us know for a fact that the Republicans have been trying to exploit the deaths of American diplomats since the 9/11 anniversary, when Romney violated his promise not to engage in politics and made a fool of himself by criticizing a statement from the US embassy in Egypt as "sympathizing" with the attackers when the statement was issued before any attack had occurred and contained nothing indicating any sympathy with violence.
And now, Romney has been shamed into shutting about about the former SEAL killed in Benghazi by the man's mother, who objected to Mitt using her son's for his cheap political tricks.
As has been noted, the Republicans slashed half a billion dollars from the State Department's budget for security in the last two years. The Republicans are the ones with blood on their hands, and their trying to smear it on Obama.
Correction: The Republicans have not been exploiting the deaths of Americans in terrorists attacks since this year's 9/11 anniversary. They've been doing it ever since the actual attacks of 9/11 2001.
@Backhouse - Elijah Cummings, (Democrat - Maryland) who brought up that many Republicans voted to cut funding for embassy security...guess what?
HE ALSO VOTED AGAINST MORE FUNDING FOR EMBASSY SECURITY!
I suppose if I say, "that's the pot calling the kettle black" I would be accused of racism.
Marginal Change headline could read, Massive Gains with Independents. It all depends on how you want to spin it. Besides 11% advantage for democrats in Ohio is a ridiculous number. I'm not going to once again go over the NBC/WSJ/Marist polling nonsense as it has been done so many times by multiple people if you believe their numbers (or any poll numbers in general) after all the proof of oversampling and bias your just not worth any more time.
30,000? Really?
The four-week moving average, considered a more accurate gauge of labor market conditions, slid 11,500 to 364,000 according to the labor department.
This NBC poll disagrees with all of the other major polls, and is just wishful thinking designed to keep Dems from getting discouraged and staying home on Nov 6th. The fact remains that Romney made considerable gains in all of the major polls, and Obama is in deep trouble.
Well, well, well. Hmm, hmm, hmm:
I see that the usual characters are spouting off about the attack at Benghazi, determined to use the deaths of patriots to somehow bolster the chances of a Presidential candidate who RAN to France when he should have been serving his country.
The problem is, none of what they say is true. In their zeal to attack this black, Democratic President, they will use any tool necessary to bring him down to their level. Traitors all.
Aside from the fact that the host country carries responsibility to protect those missions on their soil....there is this:
"US Sent Counterterrorism Teams to North Africa Before Benghazi Attack." Kimberly Dozier, 10/12/2012.
Shame on all of you who are using this attack to further your own personal agendas. Those of you on the fringe right owe the families of these victims as well as President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a sincere apology.
Anyone else tired of the same three of four people posting campaign articles at the beginning of every election thread? Most have nothing to do with the actual article and many are just copy and paste campaign talking points that are long and boring. I know it won't stop but I find it pathetic.
JH-479998
But yet the very Republicans who point their lying fingers at Obama are the very Republicans who voted for the cuts.
My goal was to point out the Republican HYPOCRISY but apparently it went right over YOUR head but that's nothing new with you, is it JH?
joanna smith1 Maddow is the best. Now smiffy go back to you tube and watch your cute cat videos and than spice it up with all the right wing nut job videos you want. Its been fun. You have made my day with your you tube mentality.
@ Beverly in Chicago
How very liberal - rather than address an issue you offer insults - and pooly delivered I might add. "Penetrate you"? Are you suggesting sex or assault? "IQ of a 5th grader"? IQ has nothing to do with age.
No doubt Bennie is just as tire as a lot of us that get our news from more than just CNN and MSNBC - that read, analyze and digest the news - not just regurgitate and parrot - and then have to try and re-explain it to people that don't want to be confronted with the truth and with reality.
If you actually did the research you'd know that Bennie is accurate - Barry knew, Barry refused to help, Barry is lying to protect himself and his ridiculous idea that the terrorists are no longer threats.
ComradeChaos
So why, instead of saying WE F*CKED UP as Congress, do Republicans keep pointing their lying fingers ONLY at the Democrats?????
Dangerfield: I would imagine you would find that the majority of people who work for the US Government are NOT political appointees. The political appointees are the ones in the policy making and decision making positions. The bureaucrats and career service officers are the ones who have to implement the rules established by the politicians.
Like any other employees, if you don't like the job your boss has given you, you can always walk out the door. The low level staffer is not the one who will decide what jobs will be done.
ZMan2012
The opportunity for "mischief" is no greater in early voting than it is on Election Day.
If you want to avoid all that potential mischief, I guess we'll should just abolish Election Day voting as well and have all political offices filled by appointment by the Republican Central Committee. A similar system works OK in Communist China. At least for the Communist politicians and the American capitalists who benefit from the cheap Chinese labor made possible by avoiding all that mischief that people do when they can vote.
This is fun watching you libs spiral out of control. The lies you spew everyday are not working and they will not. Keep it up though, it is very entertaining.
I would love to be a fly on the wall when Fisty Red Man watches Barry concede.
POLLS: Small ROBMEHOOD bounce back in key States, I find that hard to swallow, a bounce back of Lies don't work for me !!!!!!!!!!!!!
newdayDAWNING...RETURNED
but while eating his baquettes, he "longed" to be in Vietnam so it makes the whole Romney hypocrisy ok.
And while he criticized those who opposed Vietnam, Romney himself dodged the draft 4 times - another Romney hypocrisy.
And while other people's children are sent to wars to kill and/or be killed, Romney's 5 sons are too good to serve their country - yet another Romney hypocrisy.
Alan, NJ
Contraceptive coverage is a preventive coverage. The costs of a covered pregnancy costs the insurance company a lot more than contraceptive coverage. In 2014, all women will have pregnancy coverage under ACA. Presently, pregnancy coverage costs a lot extra for those who desire it.
An uncovered pregnancy is a cost we all share when the uncovered woman cannot afford the bills. Contraceptive coverage saves us all money.
You make a false argument when you say we pay for it. It is completely paid for by cost savings that insurance companies and hospitals and doctors and people who buy insurance receive due to the much lower cost of contraceptives relative to the much higher cost of a pregnancy.
LogicReguired
its entertainment. They know Barry has a record so they have to paint reality with a different brush, so they repeat over and over how Great he is doing without any support. The libbies try to drown you out on here with hostile tactics. Calling you dumb and stupid and every other small minded tactic used.
out poor libby friends think they can pick up the turd by the clean end. Take this place for what it's worth, A three ring circus
Neither does independent thought, but Patriotic, day in day out you just post propaganda. Its almost like you were an agent of Pravda
newday,
I can speak for myself and not your so-called usual characters. It is not to bolster anything. It is to make sure that although these patriots died in vain that the truth of their deaths not be covered up. I understand that those of you on the Left believe the end justifies the means but in this situation a line needs to be drawn.
Backhouse -
Did you even bother to check the vote on this move? Let me help you out with that,
147 yea Republican
149 yea Democrat.
Damned GOP! LMAO.
LogicReguired
Anyone else tired of the same people bitchin' about what's going on here but keep coming back just to bitch some more?
The reason I read this site is to see how the idiots leftists in America don't think !
Vote Romney unless you like how low America has sunk !
Your on your knees now how low can you go ???
@ Houston!
Houston - You have a problem.
How does this compare with Barry and Joe dragging Bin Laden's body out at evey campaign stop?
Much easier for the libbies to cover their ears and shout "nananananan" than face the truth.
geo-1957883 "Bev - 5.2 million jobs or a net of 125,000. Lie all you want. Isn't strange that the unemloyment rate soared to 10% under Obama, and 4 years later there are only a net of 125,000 jobs but the unemployment rate dropped 2.3%!"
There is a lot of misinformation being disseminated by various people, so let's look at the ACTUAL employment figures under Obama from the official government Bureau of Labor Statistics;
In December 2008 (Bush's last full month in office), Total Employment was 143,338,000 jobs.
In September 2012 (last month), Total Employment was 142,974,000 jobs.
That's a net LOSS of 338,364 jobs under Obama's tenure, and with population growth we now have an estimated 6 million net new workers in the labor force - how anyone could call that a 'success' is beyond me.
Here is the link so you can verify for yourself - let the 'spin' begin;
http://www.bls.gov/schedule/archives/empsit_nr.htm#current
The only thing not true is the line the Obama administration has been trying to feed the public on the attack. FACT: Nothing to do with a video protest. FACT: Despite REPEATED requests for more security, despite intelligence and warning signs, extra security was DENIED. FACT: Administration was told within 24 hours the attack was a planned terror attack but for weeks they have lied about what they knew and have continued to say they need more time for the "investigation" to unfold.
The attempted cover up to protect your President over the protection of our people overseas is what is traitorous. Thanks for adding in the race card as to show your complete denial of mistakes made that resulted in American deaths. You have shown everyone how out of touch with reality you and Obama are and why you can't be trusted with four more years!
Talk to the Hand
hypocrisy- is the state of promoting or administering virtues, moral or religious beliefs, principles, etc., that one does not actually have or is also guilty of violating
so let me translate this into simple English for you because you have a hard time uinderstanding anything more than simple:
the GOP is blaming others for something they are just as guilty of doing
Every time you post this crap above (which you always fail to attach to any credible source), you keep proving that the GOP is bunch of lying hypocrites. So keep doing it.
Mark Twain once said ... "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics" !
I think "Polls" are a category 3 event. Time and time again, we see an oversampling of Democrats. The only "POLL" that will ultimately matter, is the poll of the voting American Public on November 6th !
Until then, the mainstream media will desperately try to spin Obama's record which has been ineffective in handling our economy. Today, I see on MSNBC that "lantern-jaw" Lawrence O'Donnell is now apparently doing a commercial advertisement for Barack Obama. Perhaps he is now officially getting paid for what he has unofficially doing for a long time ... shilling for Obama !
So much for "journalism" when the newsgivers are "in the tank" and the pretext of objectivity has been officially shattered.
But blaming Bush never goes out of style, right?
I'm still laughing at the two bimbo's wearing the white sweatshirts that say "Mitt for Ohio," I'm sure they are part of the paid gang that Romney employs, but shouldn't it say "Ohio for Mitt," or is it saying Romney is ONLY for Ohio?
I believe it was Newt Gingrich who said something like; Romney will say and do anything, including lie, to get the nomination, well, his lies continue on!!
OBAMA/BIDEN....2012!!!!
remind me again what's the relevance of the color of the Presidents skin? I'll wait for the forthcoming rational explanation. I emphasize rational
ROY WILSON-336103
we lost 4.6 million jobs from the end of 2008 through March of 2009. Hardly DURING Obama's tenure, wouldn't you say? Or did the falling-off-the-cliff unemployment stop magically just because Bush turned in his WH keys?
Would you call Romney a liar for saying that a president is not responsible for the 1st 6 months of his presidency because what goes on during that time was already put in motion by the previous administration?
Romney failed as governor in Mass -MASSACHUSETTS - not the most difficult state in the country. His 30 smething approval rating here in the Bay State proves it.
Also tell me, if Bush took over easy and f*cked it up in 8 years, how the hell do you expect anyone to take over f*cked up and turn it into easy in 4?
Pat Boston MA.
Two tweets from The Obama Diary:
(AP) - US jobless claims plunge to 339,000, lowest level in 4 ½ years, hopeful sign for hiring.
Home foreclosures hit five-year low — bit.ly/Ri3gk0
#newswatch
Another tweet, TOD:
According to the Marist Ohio poll, Obama is banking 63% of the early vote, and 1.2 million have already voted; could be curtains for Mitt.
All three deserve another round of applause!!!
Clapping hands
http://ametia.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/clapping.gif?w=640
I also loved the link about Lawrence O'Donnell. Lawrence has so much compassion and wisdom.
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
So if it saves the insurance company money why do they need a mandate?
Again, if your logic is correct why does a profit making business require a government mandate to force them into saving money?
The republicon do nothing house cut embassy staff funding by almost half a Billion dollars and then sent the spending bill to the Senate. What happened there? Filibusters! The choice was to not fund our people overseas at all or give them what we could.
Would you republicons prefer no funding at all? That seems to be your plan.
Guess what? Republicons all march in step almost all the time. They are very militaristic in their organization. Just look at Emperor Norquist's pledge that they all signed. Party over country!
Democrats are a bit different. It is kind of like herding cats. There are always some crossovers. That is why that whole filibuster proof majority is a Myth. In reality it never existed. Just ask Max Baucus.
The Great Oz said so.
Caesar -The relevance for that remark is apparently different than the relevance of the racial rant in his campaign documented in the 2007 video. Libbie will not talk about that rationally either - in fact will make accusations of bigotry if it's even brought up.
Caesar,
The Libs throw around race all of the time because they think it will intimidate anyone who opposes their views. They also think they can use racial slurs because they support minorities. Just look at how the left treated Mia Love and Stacy Dash because they dont follow the lefts hand book on how to keep minorities down. I will answer you libs before you can scream out "how do they keep minorities down", easy.......look at the number of unemployed minorities under Obama. Its sick. But it is typical of the dems.....keep the minority groups out of work and dependent on the government and they will continue to vote for hand outs. But that must be Obamas white half coming out, keeping the minorities down.
Hey 45, #1.99, Lets not forget who got us into this mess, can you say "W" !!!
Smitty-4183671
joanna smith1 Thats a empty chair in front of your keyboard now. Your just empty talk!
Smitty,
Plus, Snookie Jo also has an empty head.
No, they have "created" a perfectly real $5 trillion increase in public debt. You know, the large sum of money that Republicans love to complain about, and add to, at the same time.
The article that you are quoting indulges in the same fiction. It tries to ignore the simple fact that it is mathematically impossible to reduce taxes and debt at the same time. The article then tries to pretend that it's all a "tax cut for the rich", while carefully ignoring the problem created by blowing such a large hole in the economy - which will, eventually, be paid by the middle class.
Chef Darrell
I'm sorry, I didn't realize that the 2 unpaid wars, unpaid Bush tax cuts, unpaid Bush mortgage, unpaid Bush mortgage interest, unpaid Medicare Part D, and Bush IOUs in SS all disappeared on January 20,2009.
But if you have any proof that they did, please share with us.
Red States are turning "BLUE" because Romney is a Fool !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Byron Raum says;
You are confusing "taxes" with "tax rates". Put more people to work by reducing small busness taxes, increase the number of people paying taxes. It's a simple concept - and one that Barry just doesn't get.
He would rather tax the businesses more, which drive them out of business and reduce - again - the number of working americans. More of the same stuff that got us here.
Despite all the ranting here the election has yet to be decided and the average partisan believer has little in common with the people who will make the decision. No matter who wins we will survive as the leadership in Washington has little to do with our everyday life. I hope most of us will look at what is happening rather than what is being said as the rhetoric is generally quite different than the actions of our elected officials. Think it over make a good decision and ignore the knot heads posting here, including me.
Guys I know, I wanted the dirtbag that made the comment to answer. I knew they wouldnt. It's a logical fallacy to believe minorities can NOT be racist. However I notice it seems to be the thing amongst liberal with their circular logic.
Besides we have BEV, the biggest racist on here and she's black.
Interesting, this is a quote from a Bloomberg article:
"IRS, Energy Department Oppose Solyndra Plan.The IRS says the
plan can't be approved because its principal purpose is to allow the owners of
Solyndra's parent to avoid future taxes."
How funny the liberal biased media doesn't show things like this, unless it involves a GOP. But Obama does it anyway, as he recieved huge donations from these "alternative" energy companies that he gave $90 BILLION to. Until Romney brought this up in the debate, I doubt any tax payers knew about this.
At this rate Obama better be careful, as the girls on "The View" might reconsider adding him to the cast after the election.
Are you seriously trying to make the argument that a profit-making business is always going to do something that is in its own interests?
By your logic, businesses never go into bankruptcy, and the economic collapse of 2008 never happened.
I believe it was McConnell, and the GOP Obstructionist 13 who started this. Most people, including me, couldn't find a reasonable explanation as to why on inauguration day, January 20, 2009, instead of these 13 Congressmen attending this President's inauguration, they were held up in a hotel room plotting to sabotage everything President Obama plans in the upcoming 4 years, 2009-2012. They didn't really know him, or give him an opportunity, their assault was forceful from day one:
On January 20, 2009 Republican Leaders in Congress plotted to sabotage and undermine U.S. Economy during President Obama's Inauguration:
The Guest List:
Frank Luntz - GOP Minister of Propaganda
Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) YOUR WANNABE VP...
Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)
Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA),
Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX),
Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX),
Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI)
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-CA),
Sen. Jim DeMint (SC-R),
Sen. Jon Kyl (AZ-R),
Sen. Tom Coburn (OK-R),
Sen. John Ensign (NV-R) and
Sen. Bob Corker (TN-R).
These people above were planning to destroy America while McConnell was saying:
Even with the country on the brink of default, the Senate's highest ranking Republican says his "single most important" goal is to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
"The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told National Journal's Major Garrett in October.
"Well, that is true," McConnell replied. "That's my single most important political goal, along with every active Republican in the country."
They hated President Obama from day one, never wanted him to succeed, even after 8 years of Bush destruction, they didn't even give him a chance, and you believe it's all behind a political party? Get your head out the sand.
OBAMA/BIDEN....2012!!!!
P.S. Here's your answer, above!!!
baylLIE
"We lost 4.6 million jobs from the end of 2008 and March of 2009".
You're right that Obama was not President at that time. Who had COMPLETE control of Congress though? And you lefties blame the republicans?
The democrats walked in in January of 2007 and started spending money like drunken sailors and smart business owners saw the writing on the wall and pulled back. That is why our economy took a fall. That and Barney Frank never letting George Bush reform the housing mess. And we can't forget Mr. Dodd's sweet arrangement with Countrywide who turned out to be quite guilty of wrong doing. Kind of funny that all three are gone now isn't it?
Alan NJ
Many women cannot afford pregnancy coverage. We pay for the increased costs of uncovered pregnancies that insurance companies incur as part of doctor and hospital bad debt costs when we pay our health insurance premiums. Total estimated cost of all bad debts is $1000 per insured family per year.
Insurance companies compete on basis of price of plans. At present, hospitals and doctors pass on the bad debt cost of uncovered pregnancies to all insurance companies. Therefore, any single insurance company that offered free contraceptives to uncovered women would incur a higher cost while still having to pay the higher bad debt cost of uncovered pregnancies.
The purpose of the mandate is to level the playing field for all insurance companies. But we all pay less in bad debt costs when the cost savings of preventative contraception reducing uncovered pregnancies is taken into account.
Just be gwaddamned! Media are changing poll numbers and interpretations every 15 minutes! Earlier this am, and on "morning Joe, (sic) everyone was claiming Romney had substantially moved the polls back toward Him. Now, this article says marginal? Additionally, when one reads the content, there's little indication the polls have in fact, moved at all, which means, in fact, a strong probability the President is gaining in voter strength. From what I see and hear, I contend, that is the case. Media, being the whores they are, are simply using their various forums to milk ad money from these campaigns, while at the same time, some, but not all, hope to drive votes toward Romney or the President, whichever has made them a better offer. Scurrilous conduct by the 4th estate! I say scurrilous!
You can smell the desperation of fact-checker's gone wild and manic cheerleaders for employment numbers that you don't need to be a Jack Welch to know are phony. There are polls changing all over and tonight it's all up to Joe to save the day! What a great day!
Caesar - don't hold your breath, quite a few libbies posting here cannot rise above throwing insults and shouting "Liar". Don't expect logic of any kind, circular or otherwise.
Tunnel vision and denial are cornerstone to the liberal mantra and faith. All you need do is look at the sources they seek for their "news". Anything that doesn't match what they hear on CNN or MSNBC must be a lie.
I thought Romney looked very Funky on the debate, rumors that Big Bird did a dump on Mitt's head, poor Mormon !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
bayllie "we lost 4.6 million jobs from the end of 2008 through March of 2009. Hardly DURING Obama's tenure, wouldn't you say?"
Perhaps your memory is slipping - Obama took office in January 2009. By the way - the BLS says you are seriously wrong on the job losses - but of course who am I to agree with the official government source when they disagree with YOU - perhaps you can make up some more figures, like perhaps the National Debt has not REALLY increased by over $6 Trillion since the end of fiscal 2008.
Patriotic (suspect),
And who added to the mess.......O!!!!! I dont understand how you libs can keep trying shout that two wrongs make a right. Everyone knows W screwed up, that is why dont see the right (at lease on these boards) defending him. But you clowns use W's failures as a way to justify Obama's failures???
JH-479998 "baylLIE "We lost 4.6 million jobs from the end of 2008 and March of 2009".....You're right that Obama was not President at that time."
Huh? Obama took office during January 2009.
It doesn't work that way. There is no evidence that reducing the tax rate on a business increases the number of people that business hires. I realize that this is a matter of religious faith with you, but unfortunately, in real life, it doesn't work that way.
Taxes are on profits. If you hire someone, you aren't taxed on the money you use to pay for them. There is no economic incentive to hire more people if your taxes go down. In fact, it is the opposite. Since employees are not taxed to you, the higher the tax rate, the less total taxes you will pay if you hire more people.
Let me illustrate it another way. Let's say that tax rate was 99%. Would you prefer to give the money to another employee, or would you prefer to give it to the government?
Let's go the other way. Let's say the tax rate is 1%. Would you prefer to squeeze as much as possible out of your current employees and keep most of the money for yourself, or would you prefer to let them work normal hours and hire another guy?
The incentives are the opposites of what you people tend to claim. The higher the tax rate, the greater the incentive to hire more people.
moshuluu you never answered, you had a long winded nonsensical rant that Republicans didnt like Obama but never explained why the color of the presidents skin is relevant. No, you pulled that explanation out of your rear and drew a conclussion that was baseless. Kind of like the Obama admin, kind of just bumble around hoping things will make sense. to Obama it does.
So moshuluu I believe you need to pull your head out of where ever you have it inserted.
Irish, best to ignore Patriotic American, its a bot that posts propaganda through out the day. its like the old radio broadcasts in the USSR.
We have had cheap access to contraception for decades now. why has the number of unwanted/uninsured pregnancies gone steadily up since then? There are many times more unwanted pregnancies now than when contraception was either unavailable or very difficult to obtain.
There is no evidence that increasing the availability of contraception will in any way lower the number of unwanted pregnancies. None.
bay lie, When will you grow up and move past the blame game ? It seems to be all you libs have to say because you are unable to say anything positive about your ineffective leader Obama.
Bush has been out of office for almost 4 years and you are still blaming him for everything. Do the Democrats in charge of Congress during his last 2 years of office get no share in this blame ??
Basically, what you are really saying is that BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA IS INCAPABLE OF MAKING A WEAK ECONOMY BETTER ! We are glad you have confirmed his incompetence ... many of us saw this all along !
TO: JH-479998 who wrote:
Of course we blame Republicans because Republicans had a president in office who Republicans claim wasn't "responsible" for anything.
However, I was there and I recall how Bush twisted Democrats' arms and made threats if Bush's spending bills weren't passed.
Republicans continue to play that silly "amnesia" game, but unless you lived on another planet when Bush was potus, you KNOW how Bush AND his Republican Rubber-Stampers ran this country into the ground.
And jim-1455434, if Republicans don't want anybody talking about Bush, the Republicans REALLY need to STOP bringing him up. Bush was the most hated president that ever occupied the Oval Office, and all Republicans try to do is defend the indefensible!
Obama/Biden 2012
Republicans want to make more taxpayers (expand the base). Democrats want to make more democrats. How do they do that? You nailed it, by keeping "them" down.
baylie
Nice strawman. I never mentioned ANY of that, only a response to the "you're tired of the whole blame Obama thing". Your response must be from the liberal playbook, blame Bush for everything. It is so passé.
Here's the deal. Bush is no longer president; Obama is. Obama campaigned for the job and now he owns it. If he is so inept as to be unable to surround himself with nothing more than tax cheats for advisers then that's his fault. If he can't run on his record (something tangible) that's his fault. If he makes campaign promises that are, as of yet unfulfillable, that is his fault.
Is it just me, that thinks Mitt Romney has a Psychopathic Personalty Disorder? God help us if he gets into office and he goes even crazier than he currently is. 1 hand on the Prozac bottle and the other on the red button
Obama/Biden 2012 We need Sanity in the WhiteHouse not a Psychopath
You keep using that word "fact." I do not think it means what you think it means.
Starderup
Bev - that's what Romney is good at - re-introducing himself. I think he has tried to re-introduce himself to the American voters about ten times so far this year. Each time, we give him a weak smile, tell him no thanks, and he goes away for a couple weeks, huddles with his Bush leftover advisers, and comes back and wants to shake our hand again.
Hopefully, in 26 days, we can give him a really cheerful GOODBYE for the last time. Willard Wrongme - wrong about America, and wrong FOR America.
Starderup,
You have described this imposter perfectly. Myth is not progressive at all. He keeps going back to yesteryear.
BTW: I would love for the American public to see his taxes. What is MYTH hiding?
Obama/Biden 2012 - Romney/Ryan 1040
sirie - it's just you.
Chuck in Olathe - funny perhaps you should look in the mirror when you talk about people who cannot handle the truth. You have a candidate who does nothing but lie and change his position every day yet you're willing to vote for him even though he stands for absolutely NOTHING.
Obama/Biden 2012
Fascinating. You demand real evidence while at the same time, making a bunch of random baseless statements about Obama.
Are you surprised that everyone is convinced Republicans are hypocrites? Look at yourself.
Look at all the Little Quisling Teatards running around whining...lololol The same old Paid for by Koch/Rove drug cartel getting paid $8 bucks an hour sitting in Mommy's basement posting lies and playing witch war-craft on XBOX
happy42xxx
Beverly in Chicago:
Why shouldn't social security be privitized
So the Robber Barons on Wall Street won't make you the stock exchanged; happy42xxx!!!!
4 more 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Unemployment peaked at 10% in October 2009 and now 3 years later is down to 7.8% and dropping. this is in spite of you republicons, who have set a new record for filibusters year after year starting in 2007.
111th Senate Breaks A Filibuster Record | TPMDC
@bayllie - maybe its because the democrat politicians are the ones who think they are demigods who know better then everyone else.
It was Prez-0 who has blown off most of the daily security briefings.
Let's be honest, the 'blame' lies squarely on his doorstep.
Where was he during the attack - campaigning & the it was off to Vegas to go to a reelection fundraiser in Vegas. How heartless was that? The bodies weren't even cold.
No, I don't think he is a psychopath. He just has a very low IQ. He wasn't being mean to the guy he introduced himself to 4 times; he just didn't remember him.
That's not evidence of being a psychopath. It's evidence of being stupid.
It also explains why he can make a speech and then 10 minutes later, contradict himself. He didn't understand what he was saying in the first place.
My personal belief is that he's a rather nice guy who, if left to himself would have fairly decent policies. It's just that he's surrounded by some really nasty people and belongs to a really nasty party. He did not have the good sense to switch parties like the rest of us when the Republicans went off the deep end.
In many ways, he's a lot like President W Bush. A fundamentally nice guy surrounded by scoundrels.
care to explain how the number of jobs added arent even enough to keep up with incoming demand let alone affect the unemployment percentage positively
The percentage is down because we have the highest number of adults out of the work force since the Carter years. It didn't go down because people found jobs - it went down because people finally gave up.
ComradeChaos, lets see you put the blame where it belongs, SQUARELY ON THE GOP/TP=AMERICAN TALIBANS DOORSTEP
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) voted to cut back on funds for embassy security. (AP Photo/J. Scott)
Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) acknowledged on Wednesday that House Republicans had consciously voted to reduce the funds allocated to the State Department for embassy security since winning the majority in 2010.
On Wednesday morning, CNN anchor Soledad O'Brien asked the Utah Republican if he had "voted to cut the funding for embassy security."
"Absolutely," Chaffetz said. "Look we have to make priorities and choices in this country. We have…15,0000 contractors in Iraq. We have more than 6,000 contractors, a private army there, for President Obama, in Baghdad. And we're talking about can we get two dozen or so people into Libya to help protect our forces. When you're in tough economic times, you have to make difficult choices. You have to prioritize things."
For the past two years, House Republicans have continued to deprioritize the security forces protecting State Department personnel around the world. In fiscal year 2011, lawmakers shaved $128 million off of the administration's request for embassy security funding. House Republicans drained off even more funds in fiscal year 2012 -- cutting back on the department's request by $331 million.
Once again the GOP/Teaparty=American Taliban have killed American Citizens overseas with there lack of knowledge about security
Seekingsanity;
Care to add anything of substance or will you just stand on the corner with the other libbies shouting"Liar" with no real point to make or evidence to back it up. Thanks for helping prove my point about libbies regurgitating CNN/MSNBC drivel.
Barry has a four year record of failure, economy and foreign poilicy. He is currently up to his neck - caught in his current campaign of lies concerning attacks on American embassies, failure to protect American lives and lies to cover his unbelieveable attempt to convince us that terrorists are no longer a threat.
Denial and tunnel vision are required to be a libbie. Thanks for helping prove that point too.
Ref the comment Along with House GOP, Chaffetz voted to CUT embassy security funding by $128 million last year, and $331 million in 2012. So lets see what happened...147 Reps voted no....149 Dems voted no....guess the Dems won that one...
tsk tsk cooked numbers. 4 years of new kids coming into workforce that have never had a job so they don't get counted if they still don't work.
"In the US, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they don’t count the actual unemployment numbers themselves, but instead they create the all important “Unemployment Rate’ simply on a survey. You might like to think that they actually get them from the real numbers of each of the unemployment offices of the 50 states. But they don’t. Instead they calculate the rate on a random survey called the Current Population Survey (CPS). Instead of calling the main offices of the 50 states, they phone 60,000 households every month and then estimate the unemployment based on their questions and answers from the sample. This is just over 1,000 households per state.
This is nice, but anyone can see it is open to various interpretations and contingencies, and could really be termed just interesting information. It is obvious that it can be manipulated and is subject to interpretation. The more important question is, “How many people have real jobs?”
Let’s take a quick look at the outcomes reported in September. This figure comes from its ‘sample.’ According to the BLS numbers, the “unemployment rate” fell to 7.8% in September. In May the rate was 8.2%. That shows a .4% reduction in unemployment..
However, let’s look at the actual number of people with jobs in those months. To determine the actual employment rate, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics surveys 390,000 businesses nationwide each month. It is a much more reliable figure than the ‘sample’.
In May, the actual employment number was 133,723,000. In September, the actual employment number was 133,797,000. That is an increase of 74,000 jobs. That is less than .001% growth. It is actually .0006%. How could unemployment realistically have dropped by .4%, from 8.2% to 7.8%? It has to be in the ‘sampling’ technique.
In the sampling technique that was used and reported, it is shown that there were some 582,000 new part time jobs. But the sixty-four thousand dollar question is, where did these jobs come from? Where are they? In addition to these jobs, revisions to prior estimates added some 86,000 jobs to the 114,000 that were already reported as having been added for September. In total, the number being touted in that down-tick in unemployment is well over 800,000 after ‘adjustments.’. However, it just doesn’t jive with the actual employment number."
http://www.thetribunepapers.com/2012/10/10/cooking-the-unemployment-numbers/
OH, one last thing, actually new jobs or lower unemployment should be contributed to the holiday seasons part time jobs (3 months).
I am in finance - math is my passion. I have spent hours looking over Romney/Ryan's plans working with the numbers. It does not add up at all.
This year motto: It's the MATH stupid!
Obama/Biden 2012
The President Looks good in Swing States
State Obama Romney RCP Average RCP Status
Ohio (18) 48.3 46.7 Obama +1.6
Virginia (13) 48.2 47.6 Obama +0.6
Florida (29) 47.5 47.5 Tie
Wisconsin (10) 50.0 47.7 Obama +2.3
Colorado (9) 47.0 47.6 Romney +0.6
Iowa (6) 48.6 45.4 Obama +3.2
Nevada (6) 48.2 46.6 Obama +1.6
Michigan (16) 48.0 44.3 Obama +3.7
New Hampshire (4) 49.8 45.3
Missouri (10) 43.8 49.0 Romney +5.2
Pennsylvania (20) 47.8 43.3 Obama +4.5
North Carolina (15) 46.2 49.2 Romney +3.0
Arizona (11) 42.7 50.3 Romney +7.6
Minnesota (10) 50.3 41.0 Obama +9.3
Oregon (7) 50.0 41.5 Obama +8.5
New Mexico (5) 50.8 41.5 Obama +9.3
Connecticut (7) 53.0 42.7 Obama +10.3
Georgia (16) 39.0 52.3 Romney +13.3
New Jersey (14) 53.0 38.7 Obama +14.3
Solid States
Obama/Biden (142)
California (55) Delaware (3)
District of Columbia (3) Hawaii (4)
Illinois (20) Maryland (10)
Massachusetts (11) New York (29)
Rhode Island (4) Vermont (3)
Romney/Ryan (76)
Alabama (9) Alaska (3)
Arkansas (6) Idaho (4)
Kansas (6) Kentucky (8)
Louisiana (8) Mississippi (6)
Nebraska (5) Oklahoma (7)
Utah (6) West Virginia (5)
Wyoming (3)
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2012/president/2012_elections_electoral_college_map.html
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
On September 12, 2012, USA Today ran this story
http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/world/story/2012/09/12/libyan-officials-us-ambassador-killed-in-attack/57752828/1
If you read the article, you find this nugget
|The protest was planned by Salafists well before news circulated of an objectionable video ridiculing Islam's prophet, Mohammed, said Eric Trager, an expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
The protest outside the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was announced Aug. 30 by Jamaa Islamiya, a State Department-designated terrorist group, to protest the ongoing imprisonment of its spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar abdel Rahman. He is serving a life sentence in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.|
So, the apology memo issued by Embassy officials in Cairo, later rejected by the White House, was nothing more than a diversion from the truth- like the nonsense spewed in the wake of the Libya attack.
You are left to draw two different conclusions-
One- Obama really did not know that this video was not to blame. You might reach that conclusion because, just days before these attacks, it was revealed that Obama does not bother with intelligence briefings. He seems to believe he has more important things to do.
Two- Obama knew, full well, that he was bald faced lying about the cause of the attacks.
Either way, the misinformation publicized a film no one would ever have heard about, but for Obama's marketing job; thus, the lie heard round the world was responsible for inciting violence around the globe. That, too, is laid at Obama's feet.
Whether he is incompetent or a manipulative liar is not important- the result is the same: death and mayhem.
Up to now, I had been comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter. I no longer do- Carter did not lie, cast desperately about for someone else to blame, or dismiss all responsibility for his foreign policy failures.
Carter may have been a terrible president, but he had integrity. Obama does not.
Aloha, Obama.
BYRON
With all due repect for what you have said , I think he fits the majority of these points below
The following characteristics of a psychopath, defined by Hervery M. Cleckley in 1941 in the book Mask of Sanityinclude:
Bush took over easy???? So the dot com bubble that burst at the beginning of Bush's term combined with the largest attack on American soil (all in his first 8 months of office) is what you call easy?
Tell me again the specific policies Bush passed that f*cked up the economy? Don't just say tax cuts and deregulation. Tell me what regulation was eliminated and how lower taxes brought on a recession.
No. Republicans claim they want to make more taxpayers. However, they have policies that do the exact opposite. I reference you my explanation earlier which points out that lowering the tax rate on business reduces employment. Please follow here: http://firstread.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/11/14366786-first-thoughts-marginal-change?threadId=3587071&commentId=70936803#c70936274
No. No typos. Reducing the tax rate on businesses reduces employment.
Decreasing taxes on richer folk tends to have a negative effect on the economy. That is because rich people don't really know what to do with money. They claim they do, but they actually don't. When you give a dollar to a poor person, it goes to buy necessities. Production of these necessities is what helps the economy. If you give an extra dollar to a rich person, it goes to Wall Street, where it is used by the Wall Street geniuses to cook up hare-brained schemes which can eventually crash the economy. We have already seen evidence of this in 2000 (the dotcom disaster) and 2008 (the housing bust.)
In general, the poorer the person, the more efficient their use of money, and vice versa.
also
Because of their inability to gauge when their actions are being perceived as dishonest, deceitful or dangerous, they also fail to accept that there are consequences for their actions. They always maintain a belief that they can outwit those who pursue them and that they will never be caught. Once caught, they believe they will find a way back out.
@IndependentinSD#1.141: I can assure you, you're not alone in your assessment of Romneys mental state. The man's as crazy as a bull ape humping a piece of rope. Regards
This is becoming amusing. The closer the election gets, the more pain NBC has to suffer admitting that Romney is ahead. They trumpet when Obama is ahead in the margin of error but call it a "slight" lead when Romney is ahead. AND have you noticed how desperated the Obamanites are, the lies just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Too bad while loving Obama they fail to have a clue what is really happening and who is really to blame. Sort of like they are Justin Beiber fans who can't seem to tell he can't really even sing. Poor little groupies, Obama is toast. So lie on and on and on, too many intelligent people have seen the truth.
Beverly,
Obama might have a slight lead now - but it is less than he had before the debates. Obama is trending DOWN while Romney is trending UP.
Romney is gaining momentum when it counts while Obama fades.
Elise, SF
I am in finance - math is my passion. I have spent hours looking over Romney/Ryan's plans working with the numbers. It does not add up at all.
This year motto: It's the MATH stupid!
Obama/Biden 2012
Elise, Why do the righties deny axioms?
Chuck in Olathe
@ Houston!
You get a prize for originality on that one. The boobie prize.
As far as I know, Bin Laden is at the bottom of the Indian Ocean, so he's not making any campaign appearances these days. And he was not an American diplomat, so it doesn't compare at all. You wingnuts claim that Obama can't run on his record of accomplishments, so naturally you whine and moan when he does. As much as you hate Joe Biden, he was correct: Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive thanks to Obama.
B.S. - Romney has not said what loopholes he would go after or how he would structure them. He said those are things he would work with congress on because giving details now would only hurt the process of working together in a bi partisan process later. So what numbers are you working with since his "plan" is more of a rough sketch. Either way assumptions are made on both sides and depending on what assumptions you make it can add up or it can not add up.
I think there is a lot to say about Mitts Mental Health Issues even his wife Queen Annie said she is worried about his Mental Well Being
Lower taxes bring about a recession by reducing employment. Please see 1.162 and 1.135 of this very thread.
I realize that it is an article of faith for die-hard Republicans to believe that somehow lowering taxes will INCREASE employment but there is no economic incentive for a business to hire more people if their taxes are lowered.
There is, however, an incentive to hire more people if their taxes are increased.
Please see above-referenced messages 1.135 and 1.162 for discussion of said incentives.
As mentioned, lower taxes bring about a recession by lowering unemployment in the private sector. In addition, they also bring aid the recession by giving the government less money, forcing the government to employ fewer people. This then ends up in a vicious cycle.
Of course, these are macroeconomic principles. It discusses incentives; there many be countervailing trends that will work temporarily against these incentives.
i am opposed to early voting. If we have to give people 2 weeks to find the energy to go vote then they aren't going to understand who and why they are voting anyway. Early voting is simply a way to get the people Obama has bought vote from the chance to vote on the way to their next drug deal of pick up thier welfare check and food stamps. to back this up I remind you all of "Obamaphones". the program the President developed to give free cell phones and 250 minutes a month to people on welfare and other government assistence. The Program costs us $1.6 BILLION a year plus added cost to our phone bills to cover it. The President has been buying votes since he was elected in 2008 when the program was launched. At least we know how the 47%ers' can afford cell phones
Hey miklkit, #1.111, GOP de-funding of our Embassy was like killing the staff !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Houston - thanks again for reinforcing my point about libbies throwing insults rather than pony up to the truth, not to mention providing us a perfect example of the requirement of denial and tunnel vision to hold the liberal perspective.
"Bin Laden is dead - GM is alive" used sooo many times by Joe. Do you need somebody to provide the dates Barry has taken credit for Ossama's death?
Barry's abandonment of the embassy's personnel - refusing to provide adequate security, and when - because of Barry's refusals - the personnel is murdered, he lies to cover it up. Not only is Barry a failure, he's demonstrably lacking in Character.
No doubt that libbies like you don't want to discuss the facts or face the truth - denial and tunnel vision personified.
Hey if you are 55 and younger get ready for a Health Voucher, You can choose between a Heart attack and a Stroke but you cant get both unless you pay that additional 8 thousand a year to your insurance company, and then you got to hope that they don't throw you off the insurance, because we know the insurance company has a heart and are not in it for the Bottom dollar
The GOP/Tea Party Chant is Lets Vote for Romney and lets get rid of all of the parasitic Seniors
Obama/Biden your Grandparents life depend on it
We cannot afford as a Nation Psychopathic Personality Disorder Myth Robme or If my mouth is moving I am Lying Paul Ryan in office
All of them. All of the numbers. All of the loopholes. There are not enough loopholes that exist that can be closed. Mr Romney may be as vague as he likes about this. Simple reality opposes him.
Beyond that, it is impossible to see how Mr Romney can possibly expect to work in a bipartisan fashion when it is believed by the other side that he is lying through his teeth. In order to work in a bipartisan fashion, you have to have some respect from the other side. The Republicans despise Obama; that is why he has been unable to work with them. Does anyone think that the Democrats despise Mr Romney any less?
Now, it is possible to argue whether the contempt is justified or not. But I don't think anyone will claim that the contempt doesn't exist.
Mr Romney's claims of bipartisanship are even bigger B.S. than his economic "plan."
Romney's strong performance of "LIES" fuels his party !!!!!!!!!!
Vote for President Obama because it's the right thing to do!
...for yourself = Romney
...for your family X 100 for Romney
...for your country X 200 for Romney
trust me, you'll feel good about it! Why would I feel good?
I'm fired up and ready to go!your fn high and should cn to rehab
4 more for 44 are you big bird? sorry he hates Obama 2
Chuck in Olathe - thank you for poving my point. As ususal, you post no facts only your opinions based on Romney/Ryan/Republican lies and deceit. You fail to take responsiblity for the Republicans oath to defeat the President at all costs - to hell with our country. You fail to take responsibility for your Repubicans blocking every jobs bill then having the audacity to sign a loyalty oath to Grover Norquist who is funded by Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel. You fail to recognize or act to stop the treason in your own party. You prove yourself to be just like your party - treasonous!
Obama/Biden 2012
Q22
If you look at contraceptive coverage on an individual basis, obviously a woman who uses contraceptives will reduce her chances of getting pregnant. Now multiply that by the number of women of child bearing age in the US and subtract the number who want to get pregnant.
Studies have shown a high correlation between increased access to contraceptives and reduction in number of unwanted pregnancies.
The rate of unintended and unwanted pregnancies in US rose from 48% in 2001 to 49/% in 2011 according to CDC.
Some of the increased rate in unwanted pregnancy is due to the misguided "abstinence only" government program pushed on us by Republican lawmakers, according to studies.
Others are certainly due to a lack of family planning services offered by such groups as Planned Parenthood who also are facing funding cuts in states such a Texas.
Romney proposes cutting all funding for Planned Parenthood. How will this lower the unwanted pregnancy rate? Mothers with children represent our largest Welfare group.
A state by state analysis shows the highest rates of unwanted pregnancies with high rates of uninsured and immigrant populations.
We presently have 43 million people without health insurance coverage and many more women do not pay for the pregnancy rider although they are covered by insurance.
I believe 32 states already require preventative contraception coverage. But, with all the uninsured, access remains a problem. Increase the budget for Planned Parenthood and I am sure the expansion of contraceptive services will lower the rate of unwanted pregnancies (and abortions).
The mandate for preventative contraceptive coverage is a winner anyway you look at it.
OBAMA 2012....for a healthier, more humane country.
Beverly in Chicago "The President Looks good in Swing States"
You are combining Pre-debate polls with Post-debate polls. Realclearpolitics has Romney ahead of Obama in their National Polls.
PS - Realclearpolitics had an average Democratic bias of 1.2% among the 12 major pollsters for 2004 & 2008 - Bias defined as poll results that overstated a Party's figure when compared with actual results.
The most accurate pollster for 2004 & 2008 was IBD/TIPP with an average error of only 0.5% - they have Romney ahead by 5% (49% for Romney vs 44% for Obama). IBD/TIPP had an average Democratic bias of 0.5% as well. Pew Research also had very good accuracy in 2004 & 2008, with an error rate of 0.95%, and Pew has Romney ahead by 4% among Likely Voters.
I don't know if there is any proof that Mr Norquist is funded by our half-friends, but certainly, the incentives are aligned that way.
The core of Mr Norquist's platform is the destruction of the US Federal government. Why would anyone but an enemy of America want our Federal government destroyed?
In a democracy, the government is the tool and process people use to do collectively what we are unable to do individually. Take away our collective strength, and we are easy pickings.
Byron Raum
Some of the rich people's money goes on vacation in the Cayman Islands where it doesn't do much to help the US economy, either. Some of it hides out in Swiss banks where its neighbors in the next vault over are drug money from Mexico and Iranian money being laundered to avoid US sanctions.
And speaking of Mitt Romney and Bain, it's now been reported that a lot of wealthy Americans' money was invested under Bain's guidance in the '90s on cornering the tobacco market in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Smoking in Russia increased by 33% thanks in large part to Romney's genius as a salesman. If he can sell Russians on ciggies, maybe he can sell himself to 50% of American voters. It's hard to say which is more toxic.
Romney lies, Romney lies, Romney lies....nananana
Obama show what he is an empty chair, anything else is excuses. Loooosers.........nananana.
The clown pinhead Stephany Carter , Obama's campaign adviser comment in morning Joe, nothing change in the polls , numbers are the same than before the convention. LOL
As of right now, realclearpolitics has Obama winning the electoral college.
Chuck in Olathe
The problem for you is that every time that slogan is repeated, it's still true. Every time you claim that Obama personally "refused" to provide adequate security to American diplomats, it's still a lie.
3 Democratic advertisers and 3 Republican advertisers reported!
Meanwhile, I love you First Read vaporheads...pretending as if 75% of this country was voting for your favorite candidate...
When none of you can even get a 55% lead.
Aw...who doesn't represent most of America now?
Yeah, it is you, only one party voting people!
Not one economist think this, nor does history show any of this to be true. Even Obama extended the Bush tax cuts because everyone knows raising taxes hurts the economy. I read your other posts and you simply don't have a full understanding of economics. There is no incentive for a business man to take risks with his money on investments or in expanding and hiring if the money he "might" make on that risk will be taken away. On the other hand when taxes go down businesses and people will take greater risks with their money because of course there is a chance for a better reward. Countries like Spain, France, and Greece all have very high tax rates and very high unemployment so your theory just doesn't hold up. When you have to give more money to the government it is simple math that you charge more for your product, give less to your employees, and cut back on overhead as much as possible to pay for that extra cost, and all those things hurt business and employment.
SeekingSanity -
hahhaha. I'm not sure what "poving a point" is, but good luck with that msnbc line of crap-noise. How about Barry turning his back on Israel, turning his back on the American embassies and the people serving in them, advertising to the world the identities of the people that carried out the execution of Bin Laden and then allowing them to be killed, lying about his complicity in all of these things?
Do some research and your own thinking for a change - and give up the immature attempts at insults. Only a libbie would accuse someone of being treasonous for an opposing opinion.
If you have a retirement account, or a 401k you have money in the stock market and when those rich people buy more shares of the stock you own with their dollar the market goes up and your investments do as well. Wall Street and Main Street are connected, nobody on Main Street gained when the market crashed, in fact we had our 401k's go way down in value. (Not lost as prices go back up you regain the value you had lost)
Houston - quit voting for your own posts. It makes you look silly, and when you insist on ignoring the facts it makes it a one way conversation I'm not interested in continuing - example: you say that Joe and Barry aren't constantly bragging about Ossama's death, yet admit that that it's a slogan "slogan" being the best example of "constant advertising.
You debate like Barry.
Thank you, NBC News for keeping the first debate in the news!!!
Governor Romney vs. The Empty Suit!!!
A 72-20 debacle, according to Gallup!
We don't need four more years of:
Joblessness
Embassy cover-ups
Form letters sent to fallen American Navy Seal heroes
The View appearances
Criticisms of the successful
Proclamations that local police departments are stupid
An incompetent Attorney General
A below-average-intelligence Veep
Illegal military deployments (see Syria, Yemen, Uganda, et. al.)
Jay Z-Beyonday fundraisers
Las Vegas smearing
More The View appearances
Michele Obama frowns and disappointments in "my country"
Fundraisers and golf outings
More joblessness
Vilification of entire American industries
Maligning of American small businesses and job creators
More View appearances
Romney/Ryan 2012
Beverlyin Chicago, Feisty Redhead Roselle, IL and PatBoston MA must be paid political operatives of the Obama reelection campaign. There is simply no other way to rationalize their posts.
Only a fool of the greatest magnitude could ever consider voting for a man who steadfastly refuses to even place his hand over his heart during the playing of America’s National Anthem!!! Any man who views this country with the level of resentment and disdain Obama has demonstrated by these actions is clearly unfit to serve in this hallowed role as President of the United States!!!
Beyond the posts of these paid political operatives, any more myopic minded single issue constituency’s that blindly support Obama without carefully examining his background and true agenda are in fact FOOLS OF THE GREATEST MAGNITUDE!
Romney/Ryan 2012
Most intelligent people have already made up their minds. Romney sucks plain and simple.
Remember this?
They came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.
Some of you seem to keep harping on the fact that Obama knew about Libya before it happened. I seem to recall people stating that Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened. I don't believe either case. As far as security in Libya, I blame the AMBASSADOR himself (and I'm sure I'll get an earful for this), but the man REFUSED all the security measures that were afforded him. And those who say our military was not armed are full of crap since our military is armed here in DC. Why would the military not be armed in a country that is not an ally of the US.
As far as Romney, he made a point at the debate about cutting down the federal government. I'm all for that starting with ALL OF THE REPUBLICAN CONGRESSPEOPLE!!!!
And for those conservatives/Romney supporters on here that say liberals only do name slinging, please, I'm begging you to look in the mirror.
BTW - I am a liberal who goes to work every day, pays my taxes, and has private investments to supplement the social security that will not be available to me when I retire.
Anyone who makes below $150,000 a year that thinks Romney isn't going to take your money, you really need to go to his platform website and read it, if you can muddle through all the junk that's on there.
Just my opinion, but I'd rather give Obama a chance with a Congress that is not going to thwart him at every turn. He has been the most unfairly treated President ever. What's really going to hurt is that IF Romney does become President, the Democrats may actually act in the same repulsive manner as the Republicans did for the past 4 years, and we the American people are going to suffer more.
The problem with that idea under no situation does "his money get taken away." He pays a proportion of it in taxes. He gets to keep most of it.
Your entire statement is a refutation of history. As President Clinton himself pointed out, unemployment went down after he raised taxes. When President W Bush lowered taxes, we did not have a boom in employment. When President Obama continued the tax policies of Mr Bush, we did not have a boom in employment. All of these are easily verified facts.
Lowering taxes has not resulted in an increase in employment. Raising taxes has not resulted in an increase in employment.
That is why Mr Obama did not wish to continue the tax cuts on the rich, he wanted them only for the 98%, the consumers, where the money people saved would immediately enter the economy. That is what he was trying to protect.
I realize that it is an article of faith for you that somehow lowering taxes increase employment, but facts and history do not bear you out. And it is easy to see why - the incentives are not aligned the way you think they are, as I have already explained.
LogicReguired
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate
The unemployment rate in Brazil, which has a center-left government, is 4.7%. The rates in the Scandinavian countries which all have progressive governments and very high taxes, are all lower than in the U.S. and the US rate is lower than in the U.K. now under conservative Tory rule and in a double dip recession. Your theory does not hold up.
ROY WILSON-336103
I forget that you, Roy, give credit to Bush for the 4% unemplyment he inherited, and use the starting point to lower the average and say: look how well Bush did!
So it all makes sense why you would think that the 1st few months have anything to do with a new president...I guess the financial meltdown, global recession, and credot crisis that caused the huge job lost happened on January 21, 2009, right Roy?
@ hearts2004
Point #1: I think the point being made by most is that Barry knew that the security was woefully poor - both reported by security analysis and by requests made by the embassy itself, - not that he knew about a specific planned attack.
Point #2: There was never any credible or marginally factual indications or proof that Bush knew about 9/11 before it happened - and even mentioning it points toward a lack of research and a reliance on libbie rumor-mongering.
Please provide a source for the accusation the Ambassador himself refused security.
Chuck in Olathe
Huh? Even if I did, I could only do it once per post. Do you think I'm the evil mastermind behind those unemployment numbers that are too low for Republicans' liking, too? Sorry, I have no special powers to alter post votes or unemployment numbers.
Some slogans slogans are true, and "Bin Laden is dead and GM is alive" happens to be the truth, as much as you may wish the reverse of those two facts were true.
Why aren't any Democrats talking about Obama's record? Get Obsessive!!
Is MSNBC getting money from the Democratic party? Those lean forward aren't very neutral.
Chef Darrell
Of course you never mentioned any of it because you would have to admit that all the bills I mentioned keep coming every single month - they didn't disappear on 1/20/09, did they?
And that's not blaming. That just assigning a name to a particular bill. Like Bush tax cuts that are still NOT PAID FOR after 12 years. And before you tell me that Obama extended them, I will tell you yes he did because he didn't want the Republicans to throw 911 First Responders and the unemployed under the bus.
Houston, you have a problem.......Never use Wiki for facts, it's very unreliable like msnbc!
I see the Dems are at it again, stroking each other with their fact less rants hours before this debate. You didn't learn from the last one?! AHAHAHAHA!! Prepare for another disappointing evening. We are laughing at your every post!!
R/R 2012 to restore the country for our children & grandchildren before it's to late!
Chris Dorr...
You are such a BORE!
...and what's this 4 more for 44 bullsh*t?? What? 44 straight months of unemployment over 8% (even when those who quit looking aren't counted)...
Expect a conservative LANDSLIDE this Nov.! Can't wait to see Ryan have his way with our pathetic VP...should be an arse whippin' much like Romney handed Obama! LOL!!!
Romney/Ryan 2012! Vote against the community-organizer-n-chief like your life depends on it...and it does!
45charlston
How low America has sunk? Hmmm, let's see. Since Obama took office my 401K has more than doubled in value, I now have affordable high speed internet in my rural home (instead of a 21K dial-up connection) thanks to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, and thanks to the ACA, I no longer have to pay 50% of my preventive healthcare, it is paid at 100%. I would say my life has greatly improved since Obama took office, so I don't know what you are talking about.
Obama/Biden 2012, Ryan/Romney 1040
4 more 4 44!
Houston;
So then you admit that Joe and Barry drag out the carcass of Bin Laden at every chance to brag - and use it it for political gain - which is where thsi started. Thank you. Just like the results of your hero's debate, all you can do is either admit the truth or shout "Liar" and hope nobody notices the lack of substance in your arguement. Sucks when the facts don't back you up, doesn't it Barry....er....Houson.
Glad you sort of admit to voting for your own posts - at least you show character while Barry's character slowly slips beneath the waves - perhaps to rest with Ossama. - because Barry has no doubt killed it just as dead.
Byron Raum "As of right now, realclearpolitics has Obama winning the electoral college."
Like I said - You are combining Pre-debate polls with Post-debate polls. If you use Post-debate polls, they are essentially tied in Electoral Votes, with the 'up for grabs' States trending towards Romney.
Don't get stuck in the past.
Brazil may have a left Government but it has a lower individual tax rate and a lower corporate tax rate. The U.K. May have a Conservative leader in government but has higher tax rates then U.S. so your point isn't valid. Besides of course you have other considerations like regulation, labor laws, education, ect.. ect... But again I will say that there is no economist that thinks high taxes help an economy.
Plus it doesn't take a degree to know that the more the government takes from the private sector the worse off the private sector will do.
smlfy2:
Glad your 401k is doing so well - no doubt this will be cheered by the millions of unemployed who can sleep better knowing you'll get to retire...
Keep in mind though, the Dow value is inflated artificially, both by the Obamaram Currency Printing Press and all the other 401k's that push the perceived values of stocks far beyond actual value.
With the left is cooking jobless numbers, hiding Obama failures and lies with the help of the liberal press, pumping up the Dow with the federal reserve printing more money a month ago and msi-representing polling results - all to try and drag this failed community organizer over the finish line - you're confident? Tunnel vision and denial are required to be liberal.
bayllie "I forget that you, Roy, give credit to Bush for the 4% unemplyment he inherited, and use the starting point to lower the average and say: look how well Bush did!"
Trying to change the subject since you can't argue the facts? You learn well from Obama. We were talking about jobs created.
You claim Bush was responsible for what happened when he was in office, so use the same standard for Obama. Obama said he 'had the answers to fix the economy' and asked for the job - now he's stuck with the results - A BIG FAILURE.
It could equally be said that Obama was elected in early November of 2008, so all Bush did after that was 'transition' to Obama's team over the next 2.5 months. I'd like to see one thing that you think Bush did that caused the collapse - remember that the Wall Street Congressional oversight committees were controlled by Democrats in Congress for almost 2 years before the meltdown.
Stop trying to absolve Obama from the dismal results over the last 4 years.
Bye - Gotta go do some work now.
So your saying because you personally are benefitting from a bunch of Obama free sh!t we all should vote for him. Basically you don't care about the economy as a whole or how everyone else is effected, you have had your vote bought and paid for with tax payer dollars that benefit you.
Nice argument, I want Obama gone even more now so you are forced to learn how to take care of yourself.
Hello folks, the only reason the government can get away with looking you in the eye and lying to you is because you allow it. They have you right where they want you, divided, distracted and in fear.
Our political system is a one headed two party system that serves the same masters, Wall Street and the banksters/Federal Reserve.
Aren't you more complex a human or individual that no one can stick you in one of two boxes? How about another choice?
LogicRequired wrote:
Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints! Can you read? The poster wrote he has "...affordable high speed internet in my rural home...." Affordable - NOT FREE! I have the same service thanks to ARRA and the cost is $39.95 monthly.
There is no such guarantee. In Ethiopia, the government takes 0% from the private sector, and the private sector isn't doing all so wonderfully. In fact, the same is true of most of the tax-free paradises that Libertarians love so much; the 3rd world is full of them.
Government provides a vital function for the economy. Without the government, there is no economy. Over-taxation will certain hurt private industry, as the Soviet Union has already proven, which was all government and no private industry, but there is no guarantee that it is true for any number significantly less than 100%.
The valuation of a stock is the P/E method - price over earnings. Corporate earnings have been at or near record profits today. Record profits were obtained during Obama's time. That is the reason why the value of stocks is high - due to the high profits, earnings went up, so prices went up as well.
Here's some numbers for comparison:
Current S&P 500 PE Ratio: 16.20 +0.02 (0.13%)
1:45 pm EDT, Thu Oct 11
Mean: 15.48
Median: 14.45
Min: 5.31 (Dec 1917)
Max: 123.79 (May 2009)
The current PE ration of 16.20 is somewhat higher than the mean of 15.48, yes, but it is nowhere near as inflated as you claim and is justified by the increase of profits - companies with a higher growth rate are worth more and all these companies have been growing.
Byron, please further your investigation in Ethiopia. Please take as many years as you can to get the real hard facts. Report back in 2025, Thanks.
You are the one who quoted realclearpolitics, and when I pointed out that that site didn't support your claims, you told me to not get stuck in the past. Can you provide some other evidence that backs up your claims?
You are the people who cite these principles and we point out that your heaven already exists on earth. What we are trying to do is prevent people like you from turning the US into Ethiopia.
The US is the only country in the world where it is considered politically acceptable for a major political party to have contempt towards the very idea of the existence of that country's government.
"Keep your filthy government hands off my Medicare!"
Romney has no control or influence over his own party and would be run over like a dirt road.
Romney wouldn't be anything more than a pencil pushing puppet, signing anything Republicans put in front of him.
Republicans, including Grover Nordquist, will write up anything they want and then intimidate Romney into signing bills that don't compromise at all with Democrats, which is probably why Republicans don't care how many times Mitt Robme flip flops, because Republicans know that Romney wouldn't be in charge anyway, they would.
Obama/Biden 2012
TO: ROY WILSON-336103 who wrote:
[bayllie wrote: "I forget that you, Roy, give credit to Bush for the 4% unemplyment he inherited [from Democrat President Bill Clinton]..."]
Hold it!
Neither George "Curveball" Bush nor the Republicans have EVER taken responsibility for ANY of their tremendous FAILURES, nor have the Republicans taken responsibility for crashing the entire United States Economy and causing the 2nd Great Depressionn!
To the contrary, Republicans are trying to repeat their same failures AGAIN and tell the American People, this time, there will different results.
Obama/Biden 2012
Roy. You might want to enroll in a remedial reading class.
Has the Republican party ever taken responsibility for anything? The entire Republican platform is based on the idea of denying responsibility while at the same time explaining vociferously why someone else needs to take responsibility.
The entire Republican taxation system is based on someone else having to take responsibility for the services provided by government, and resenting the idea that there might be someone, ANYONE out there who might have received more benefit from government.
NOJO
According to Reuters reporter Hadeel Al Shalchi in Sept 13, 2012 interview he did with NPR, he talked to many demonstrators from Sept. 11th protests at the Benghazi consulate.
He said at that time that he had heard from Libyan security guards working at the consulate that some of the guards had allowed the protest to get too close to the consulate walls.
He said from talking to demonstrators that an armed band took advantage of the protest to launch an attack on the Consulate.
So, ask Hadeel Al-Shalchi of Reuters if he still believes his report. I hope the FBI is asking him about it.
I knew I saw or heard this story and after a little searching here it is.
As to State Dept. Security budget cuts of $500 million over 2 years, there is only a couple of ways for State Dept to deal with cuts like these for security.
1) hire local security at lower wages. It seems like they did this in Benghazi.
2) reduce security elsewhere and shift it to Benghazi. For instance, they could have cut security at Baghdad Embassy which is huge and shifted it to Benghazi. But, if Baghdad Embassy was attacked, you would just blame this move of security for success of attack, wouldn't you?
When dealing with scarce resources, hard choices must be made. They don't always work out.
It is sad that in a world where America is the target of terrorists, we cut spending on security at our embassies and consulates around the world. It was a mistake to do so, and whoever did it should be held partly responsible for Benghazi murders as well.
ROY WILSON-336103
no, Roy, check your history. You have posted plenty about Bush's unemployment average.
yes, Obama is responsible for unemplyment going down while Bush's unemployment went up.
and we are better off then we were in 2008, wouldn't you agree? Unless you live in a parallel universe where up is down.
a big failure is what happened in 2008, you know unemployment growing, 401k shrinking...
hahahaha, now president-elect is responsible for what is going on? hahahhahahahha because Bush was in "transition? Maybe because Bush was in transition, we didn't bottom out...
That reminds me; people of Mass are greatful that Romney was busy for a year making connections for his 2008 presidential bid instead of being the governor. They fear that had he actually spent the time governing, the damage to Mass would have been much greater.
Four more years of Obama = four more years of hardship to the citizen of the United States.
NO MORE 4 44!!!
You are right. If Obama gets elected, things won't immediately get rosy. What your shallow analysis fails to consider, however, is that if we do not elect Mr Obama, we are returning to the policies of President Bush, which is what got us into this hole in the first place.
So yes, we will have four more years of hardship under Obama, but we will continue to have hardship if we make the the mistake of electing Mr Romney, and with Obama's policies, we are digging ourselves out.
Logic,
I want Romney gone yesterday along with the cult that he belongs to, the corporations he supports, the military and wants to give $2,000,000,000,000 more along with the pentagon that haven't even asked for it, the tax break to millionaires and the tax increase for middle class. What will he lie about at the next debate and then say I never said that? I think we know, abortion, pro-life and women's rights!
BayLie-
Every time you post this crap above (which you always fail to attach to any credible source), you keep proving that the GOP is bunch of lying hypocrites. So keep doing it.
Backhouse was blaming the whole de-funding thing on the GOP. I was pointing out the fact that it wasn't JUST the GOP but a bipartisan vote.
Same bunch of socialist sympathizers beating the drum for the muslim communist, Obama. Get a fkn life, schmucks! Bye!
American Girl... You, my dear, are way too sharp for some of these folks.
Fiesty... "his ability to maintain his "mental well being?" I'm thinking he'd have to achieve some first.
Bill, Fairfax... Perhaps you should peruse Beverly's post above. "Get your facts first, and then you can distort them as much as you please." Mark Twain
"When people who are honestly mistaken learn the truth, they will either cease being mistaken or cease being honest." Unknown
Smitty... In a nutshell: Bingo!
JoAnnaSmith... Umm, oh, never mind.
sirie... "Is it me, or has Obama really just never had his heart in the job...??? It's you. And, apparently, our Republican congress who didn't have their hearts or their minds on their jobs. The best argument yet for TERM LIMITS!!!
DingleB... You're "barking at the Moon."
Once again: There are only two things I don't like about "Mitt" Romney. His face.
LogicRequired... I can see why 'cause you could certainly use some. What about the two unfunded, unnecessary wars with the wrong countries based on lies and uttered by a lying, military deserter and his VP Dick "Halliburton" Cheney? Do you suffer short term memory loss or is it just "selective?" There people are nothing more than warmongers and profiteers.
TrustVerify... Absolutely right! As Gore Vidal so eloqently stated:"It makes no difference who you vote for - the two parties are really one party representing four percent of the people."
Tony D... Did you know that even paranoids have real enemies?
Chuck in Olathe
Of course, I did no such thing and I admitted to no such thing. Why is it that you wingnuts have to lie all the time? I think Myth Romney and Lyin' Ryan are setting very bad moral examples for their weak-minded fans.
Tony,
Get a good government and history book and look up socialist, muslim and communits to find out how stupid you sound. You should have stayed awake in History and Government classes in high school! Ignorance seems to run rampant in the right wing of the republican extremist party and teabuggers!
Talk to the Hand
But it's the Republicans that suddenly are complaining about the level of security at the Benghazi consulate.
BTW: It turns out that the security contingent was a lot stronger than originally known. There was a 7-member CIA rapid-response team there in addition to the two former SEALs and the local Libyan forces. Darrel Issa's merry band of idiots blabbed about it more than they were supposed to at the witch trial he's conducting:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-letting-us-in-on-a-secret/2012/10/10/ba3136ca-132b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_print.html
The Whig Party candidate, Zachary Taylor, won the presidential election of 1848. The Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, is forgotten. Martin Van Buren, a former president and the Free Soil Party candidate, placed third.
The Republican Party did not exist in 1848. There had been a different party called "Republican" or "Democratic-Republican" from about 1790 to about 1836, but that party's story will be covered separately.
The exact founding of the Republican Party is disputed, but aspects of the party were in existence around 1852 and its founding convention was on July 6, 1854 at Jackson, Michigan., In the fall of 1854 it elected 40 members to the U.S. House of Representatives (more if you count representatives co-nominated by the American and Republican parties). By the elections of 1856 it had gone from third party status to being the main rival of the Democrats.
What happened between 1848 and 1854 that could create a full-blown political party in so short a time? There were two main causes: the slavery issue and the rise and fall of the American Party, mistakenly called the Know-Nothing Party. Like the Republican Party, the American Party came into existence quickly and elected a large number of officials; it had the most members of any political party in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1854.
The Whigs, the number 2 party since the 1820's, had been formed in opposition to the Democrats as led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. The party was not formed around any particular principles. Led originally by Henry Clay, it was a loose coalition of men who sought office for any of a number of reason. In the north it included abolitionists and people opposed to the expansion of slave territories, and those favoring protective, high tariffs (customs duties); in the south it favored slavery and lower tariffs. This worked fine until about 1850, but the renewed struggle over extending slavery to new western states and territories demanded that men chose sides. The southern Whigs deserted the party to join the Democrats, who were clearly the party of slavery. The northern Whigs mostly hopped on the American Party on their way to becoming Republicans.
But the core of the Republican Party appears to have evolved from the Free Soil Party. It had grown out of the free soil movement, which stood against extensions of slavery. The failure of the Whigs to take a stand, as a national party, against extending slavery left a political opening which the Free Soil Party filled. They also attracted anti-slavery northern Democrats. An important part of their platform was free homesteads for settlers from federal lands. Their slogan was "Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men." Though they did not, as a party, advocate abolishing slavery in the southern states, their party was closest to an abolitionist view. In 1848 their presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, ran a distant third but received 291,623 votes. They sent two Senators and fourteen Representatives to Congress. In 1852 they ran John P. Hale for president, but received only 155,825 votes. Around 1852 they merged into the Republican Party.
The American Party was formed primarily as an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic group. Its recruits came mostly from the Whig Party, though many Democrats joined as well. Founded as a secret organization, so secret they came to be called "Know Nothings," they did not come out as the American Party until after their great successes in local and congressional elections of 1854. In 1856 Millard Filmore was their presidential candidate, gaining 8974,534 votes, one of the best third-party showings in U.S. history. But they were divided by the slavery issue, and by 1858 most American Party adherents in the north merged into the Republican Party, while in the south they rejoined the Democrats.
Though not a separate party, the abolitionists were an important component in creating the Republican Party. The idea of abolishing slavery was old; it had been declared abolished in Great Britain by the Somerset Decision of 1771, which helped precipitate the American Revolution. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies in 1833 also put Americans on a low moral footing. The debates about extending slavery to the western territories and new states made everyone in America aware of the abolitionist stance.
Steps to Civil War
Five great events mark the U.S.'s progress towards the Civil War: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision, and the election of the first Republican President.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Maine to be admitted to the union as a free state and Missouri to be admitted as a slave state. Most of the remaining Louisiana Territory - actually the land of sovereign native Indian nations - that the nation's leaders planned to annex was declared to be free. It seemed that this would stop the spread of slavery. But the annexation of Texas in 1845 and then northern Mexico (now the U.S.'s southwestern states) in 1848 changed the political equation.
California was the most populous of the conquered lands and applied in 1849 to become a free state. That would give free states a majority in the Senate as well as the House; slavers feared it was the first step to political defeat. A fierce debate ensued in Congress in 1850, with compromise as the result. California was admitted as a free state, but New Mexico and Utah were to decide for themselves if they wanted to allow slavery. In the District of Columbia the slave trade, but not slavery itself, was outlawed. And the most stringent Fugitive Slave Act ever was enacted.
The Fugitive Slave Act was very offensive to citizens in free states. Many people in the northern states who were not set on abolishing slavery in the south felt that if a slave escaped to a free state, they became free. It was a matter of states' rights and people's rights. Many of these citizens were driven into the abolitionist camp by the sight of escaped slaves being re-captured and by the prosecution of those who ran the Underground Railroad. They also lost interest in the Whig Party, which endorsed the Act along with the Democratic Party. This lead to the creation of the Free Soil Party, and eventually to the creation of the Republican Party
Kansas and Nebraska were the next Indian lands to be turned into states; they were to be free states under the Compromise of 1850. But in 1854 Stephen A. Douglas, a leading Democrat, proposed that instead the citizens in those territories be allowed to choose for themselves whether to be free or slave states. The pro-slavery Democrats had the votes to put the plan, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, through. The Whigs and the new American Party did nothing to stop it.
The abolitionists, free soilers, and those who wanted no extensions to slave territories (though they were willing, for the sake of keeping southern states in the Union, to allow slavery to continue where it already existed), needed a new party. They chose not to try to reform the Democrats, Whigs, or American Party. The Republican Party was born alive and kicking in 1854.
But, like the American Party and the Whigs, the Republican Party might have disappeared quickly if it had not been for the ongoing debate (and in Kansas, what amounted to a civil war) over slavery. The final straw that tipped the northern states against the long tradition of Democratic Party power was the Dred Scott Decision. It is important to recall that the American Constitution legalized slavery at the time the British Parliament was debating abolishing the slave trade. It was individual states that outlawed slavery. Since state-rights was an accepted political doctrine until the Civil War, for the most part this going-against the pro-slavery Constitution had been tolerated by the slavers who controlled southern state governments.
Dred Scott hoped that the result of his case would be like the Somerset decision had been in England. It would make clear that stepping onto free soil made you a free man. But the Supreme Court, dominated by Democratic Party appointees, declared that Dred Scott remained the private property of his owners. They went further, implying that no state had the right to deny a citizen the right to put his private property, including slaves, anywhere he saw fit. The Dred Scott decision was handed down in 1857. Republican Party candidates for local office and the House of Representatives dominated the elections in northern states in 1858.
Presidential Elections of 1856 and 1860
In 1856 the Republican Party overtook the Whig Party to become the great rival of the Democratic Party. But it was not simply a reformed and renamed Whig Party. The Whigs had been a national party; the Republicans were almost all in the non-slave states. The Whig Party had been political largely in the sense that it was a grouping of people who sought government offices; the Republican Party was a party of principles, a party that took positions on a variety of issues and promised to change the laws of the land in fundamental ways.
The Democrats nominated James Buchanan for president in 1856. The Republicans nominated John C. Fremont, who used the "free soil, free labor, free speech, free men" slogan for his campaign. The American Party and the Whigs both nominated ex-president Millard Fillmore. Buchanan won well less than half the popular vote, but took a large majority in the Electoral Collage (1,838,169 and 174). Fremont received the second largest number of citizen votes and votes in the Electoral College (1,341, 264 and 114). Fillmore placed third with a substantial number of popular votes but won only Maryland (874,534 and 8).
The congressional elections of 1858 were heavily influenced by popular reaction to the Dred Scott decision. The American Party and Whigs continued their declines. The Democrats, though still a national party, were increasingly identified with slavery. The Republicans continued to strengthen their role in free-state politics.
The presidential election of 1860 is one of the most interesting in American history. The Whig-American-Republican grouping had lost the presidency in 1856 because their vote was divided. Yet the Democrats divided their vote in 1860. The reason was simple: the voters had become passionate about the issue of slavery. In fact, with slavers fighting anti-slavery militias in Kansas, and John Brown having conducted his anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, they were doing more than just voting about the issue. The Republicans were all against slavery, though a large majority of the party were willing to allow it to continue to exist in the southern slave states if its expansion was stopped and slaves became free when they stepped on free state soil (reversing the Dred Scott decision). The Democrats divided into two factions, basically southern and northern factions. Stephen Douglas was the mainstream, northern Democrat; his position was to let each state decide whether to allow slavery or not. That was not good enough for the more radical slave masters, who nominated John Breckinridge on a platform of extending slavery. The remnants of the southern Whig and American parties merged into yet another party, the Constitutional Union Party. Nominating John Bell, they emphasized the need to preserve the union, going to great lengths to take no stand on slavery or its extension.
While the Constitutional Union Party candidate split off some votes that might otherwise have gone to Lincoln, the Democrat vote was much more closely divided. As a result, though he only received 40% of the popular vote (1,866,452), Abraham Lincoln received 180 Electoral College votes, compared to 123 total for the other 3 candidates. All of Lincoln's Electoral College votes came from free states, that is, from northern states plus California and Oregon.
Civil War
Passion often makes for bad judgment, and the slavers proceeded to make a series of mistakes that forced Lincoln and the Republicans to abolish slavery.
When 1861 dawned, with Lincoln soon to be inaugurated, the slavers actually still held the political upper hand. The majority of Supreme Court justices were pro-slavery. Republicans did not have a majority in either house of Congress. To abolish slavery would require a constitutional amendment, which could be blocked by one-quarter of the states; slavers controlled almost one half of the states.
Yet before Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated on March 4, 1861, 7 states announced they had seceded from the U.S. They joined together as the Confederate States of America, under the leadership of a leading member of the Democratic Party, Jefferson Davis.
Aside from the slavery issue, leading southern businessmen and politicians feared the Republicans for another reason. Some Republican politicians, including Lincoln, a former lawyer for the railroads, were backed by northern businessmen, in particular the owners of railroad and manufacturing corporations. Cotton growers feared higher protective tariffs on imported manufactured goods; the south was already deeply indebted to northern bankers and merchants.
Another mistake of the southerners was not taking the matter to the Supreme Court. It is very possible that the Supreme Court, with 5 southern members on it, would have ruled that states have a right to secede. But to admit that the Supreme Court had any jurisdiction over them was as galling to the southern secessionists as it was to the northern abolitionists who evaded the Fugitive Slave laws and Dred Scott ruling.
Not content to rule over a greatly diminished United States, the Republican Party and others who opposed secession (many northern Democrats were pro-slavery but anti-secession) forced a civil war upon the nation. There were two important effects of the Civil War upon the Republican Party (aside from the lasting effects of winning the war).
First, it became the party of Big Government and high taxes. It favored a centralized national government over state and local governance. The Republican war effort required high taxes to pay for men and their supplies, and that supported the industrialization process that went along with war. It became closely tied to northern manufacturing interests, which included a greatly enlarged class of millionaires created by war profiteering. Second, it took on the virtuous role of favoring the abolition of slavery and the improvement of the lives of economically deprived citizens, both Negro and those of European descent. This role is highlighted by the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided free land to western settlers.
These two roles corresponded to two ‘wings" of the party, the moderate wing and the Radical Republicans.
It was the Radical Republicans who supported the Confiscation Act (freeing the slaves of soldiers fighting the union), the Emancipation Proclamation, which was intended to abolish slavery in the confederate states, and the 13th Amendment, which did abolish slavery in the re-united states. They also pushed for the established the Freedmen's Bureau.
The Negro Wing of the Republican Party
In order to remain President in a war-weary nation, in the 1864 contest the Republicans had combined with pro-union, pro-war Democrats into the Union Party. Lincoln had taken Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, as his Vice-Presidential running mate. When Lincoln was assassinated the country suddenly had a Democrat for president and a Republican Congress led by the Radical Republicans. They denied the now-defeated southern former-slavers the right to sit in Congress; set up the Committee on Reconstruction to rule the southern states; and fought with President Johnson to the point of attempting to impeach him.
In 1866 and 1868 Negro voters helped elect Republican congresses and a new Republican President, Ulysses S. Grant. Radical Republican control of Congress resulted in all male Americans, regardless of their origins or skin color, receiving the right to vote upon passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870. The former slave states also remained under military occupation until new state constitutions, written to the liking of Radical Republicans, were in place.
White southerners, with few exceptions, became even more solidly identified with the Democratic Party. Many could not run for office or vote because of their records as traitors. Freed slaves, with few exceptions, joined the Republican Party, giving it a presence in the south for the first time. Many Negroes were elected to local and state offices. For the ex-slavers the situation was intolerable, and the solution was terrorism.
The Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the southern Democratic Party. In locality after locality, then state after state, former slaves were scared away from voting, and then from even being registered to vote. Until the Great Depression most black Americans would be Republicans; in the South they would constitute most of the Republican Party. However, after 1876 few black Americans were able to vote in the southern states. As a result black politicians could not be elected to office; in the South no Republicans could be elected to office at all; and the influence of blacks within the national party was minimal.
Wall Street Republicans
Starting with the civil war and accelerating into the 20th century the United States economy was rapidly industrialized. Even the agricultural economy was being mechanized, so that fewer people's labor sufficed to grow and harvest bountiful crops of wheat and corn. Displaced farmers migrated to the towns and cities. Even food came to be processed in great factories. Corporations were the main form of organization of the large-scale business that grew during this period. Much of politics of the era consisted of struggles between the wealthy, who owned stock in the corporations, and those who labored for wages, ran smaller businesses, or continued to farm on a small scale. Since the Republican Party both dominated the national government and dominated the northern state governments where manufacturing was concentrated, controlling the party was important to the men of great wealth. By using their wealth to support the campaigns of politicians, who in turn used all their power to help their donors, wealthy Americans came to dominate the Republican Party. Radical Republicans lost elections to business-sponsored candidates, and the business of the Republican Party came to be protecting corporate interests. After this point we may refer to the controlling elite of the Republican Party as Wall Street Republicans.
In 1872 a group of anti-corruption minded Republicans formed the Liberal Republican party and nominated newspaper editor Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate. The Democrats, eager to rebuild their party, decided to nominate Greeley as well. But with Grant still a war hero, the Democrats still the party of treason, and many black Americans still able to vote, it was any easy victory for Grant. Two demands of the Liberal Republicans were adopted by the mainstream Republicans. Except for 500 ex-confederate leaders, former rebels had their voting rights, and their right to run for office, restored. Civil service reform was also attempted.
The Presidential election of 1876 provides a good view of the changing social and political landscape. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, the Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes. The Klan had done its job: the Democrats swept the southern states excepting two remaining under military governance, South Carolina and Louisiana, plus Florida, then a sparsely populated state with only 4 electoral votes. The winner was disputed in those three states. After much bargaining Hayes was given the Presidency, but only after he promised to pull the remaining federal troops out of the South and, effectively, to do nothing about the disenfranchisement of black voters by the Democratic Party.
Despite more charges of corruption and economic hard times, the Republicans were able to hold onto majorities in Congress until the mid-term elections of 1882. The Democrat's combination of having a Protestant, white-racist wing in the south and a Catholic, immigrant-based, urban wing in the North, was proving to be too powerful for the Republicans. In 1884 the Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland in another close election. But for wealthy men and their corporations, this was not a problem; they controlled both parties quite effectively. The Supreme Court was filled with former corporate lawyers; it could be relied on to overrule state legislature or even a Congress that went against corporate wishes. With both parties dominated by business, a new movement arose. The Farmers Alliance, the Populist Party, labor unions, anarchism, and socialism all were important components of American politics in the late 1880's.
It is important to note that the average Republican voter of the era was not rich, corrupt, or mean-spirited. Most Republicans were farmers, tradesmen, or factory workers who had fought with the Union during the Civil War. They believed in hard work and honest business dealings; they were assets to their communities. Often they voted Republican because the only other choice was to vote Democrat. When offered an honest politician to vote for, or a Progressive Republican candidate, they usually availed themselves to the opportunity. Corporate domination of the Republican Party was carried out in backrooms and by creating a party machine that would see that corporate-friendly candidates were nominated.
Sugar, Hanna, McKinley and War
Many businessmen had great influence in politics at the end of the 19th century, but most were content with high tariffs (customs taxes on imported manufactured goods) and freedom from regulations. The Sugar Trust, however, took control of United States politics for profit to a new level: it required war, and it got war.
A prelude to the main show was provided by Hawaii, where a treaty had granted U.S. rights to a naval base in Pearl harbor in 1887. In 1893, aided by U.S. troops, American sugar cane growers overthrew the native government and asked for Hawaii to be annexed to the United States. But by the time a bill for that was ready in the U.S. Senate, Grover Cleveland had been elected President. He sent a commission to Hawaii that found most Hawaiians wanted to remain independent. No further action was taken until after a much bigger sugar fight.
Sugar magnate Henry Havemeyer had a few problems even after he became fabulously rich and the controlling person in the Sugar Trust. His factories turned raw cane sugar into the crystal white powder that had been a mainstay of world trade for centuries. Not only was very little sugar cane grown in the U.S. (mostly in Louisiana), but some U.S. farmers wanted to grow and refine sugar beets to compete with cane. What the Sugar Trust needed was cheap, untaxed imports of raw sugar, but very high tariffs on competing imported refined sugar. Congress was willing to go along (Havemeyer had perfected the stock-tip bribe: Senators could get rich quick by simply buying and selling sugar trust stock on Havemeyer's instructions) on the high tariffs for imported refined sugar, but Louisiana Senators vigorously opposed low tariffs on raw sugar.
Various interests in the U.S. had long coveted Cuba and other islands in Spain's American empire. Havemeyer determined to buy himself a President and a war. While it is well known that Mark Hanna raised vast sums of money to insure William McKinley triumphed over Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 Presidential election, the role of the Sugar Trust in that election has been overlooked. McKinley owed Havemeyer a war; many American expansionists like Theodore Roosevelt wanted a war anyway. Delay was necessary only because Havemeyer needed to have Citibank buy up sugar plantations in Cuba and Puerto Rico that would become vastly more valuable after the war. Forget the explosion of the Maine: America was going to war regardless. McKinley made demands of the Spanish, had them met fully, and then made even more aggressive demands that no nation would find acceptable.
On April 11, 1898 McKinley asked Congress to declare war, and Democrats and Republicans alike were happy to do it. Spain had already lost the Philippines, excepting Manila, to native rebels, and was barely holding its own against Cuban rebels. On August 12, 1998, the Spanish signed an armistice. 500 Americans had died in battle, while 5000 had died of tropical diseases.
In the Philippines the defeat of the Spanish started an even greater war: one against the Filipino people themselves. They fought guerrilla style; probably 1,000,000 died, many of them civilians; and 4,324 American soldiers were killed. In 1901 the Filipino leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, was captured. Most sugar plantations had new American owners. In 1942 the Japanese "liberated" the Philippines from the United States; in 1946, after driving out the Japanese, the U.S. finally allowed the Philippines to become an independent nation.
Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives
The heritage of the Radical and Liberal Republicans was partly buried by the rise of the powerful, corporate and increasingly conservative business wing of the party. But the same economic, technical and cultural changes that affected the entire nation affected the ordinary Republican citizens who often had much input into local politics even when corrupt men occupied higher office.
As the 20th century dawned the reform movement became a tidal wave. A number of streams of citizens' demands came together and fed into each other. Even some demands of socialists gained an audience among Republicans who had felt the brunt of the predatory tactics of the gigantic business corporations. Writers, including the muckrakers, novelists writing books like Frank Norris's The Octopus about Republican farmers being crushed by Republican railroad barons, and non-fiction like Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, had a notable influence on the Republican faithful. The financial panic of 1907 also undermined people's belief in the infallibility of the free market.
Anger at the patent drug industry, the alcohol industry, and the food industry was widespread. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, had become President in 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated. Though he had been a promoter of the Spanish-American and then the Philippine-American wars, and was from a very wealthy family, Roosevelt had shown concern for the plight of the poor when serving as New York police commissioner. During Roosevelt's presidency the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed in 1906. The conservation on national forests had started under Republican President Harrison in 1891; but Roosevelt pushed hard on this issue. He placed some 125 million acres in federal reserves, about 3 times the total of all of his predecessors.
While the reformers, known as the Progressive Movement, could be found in both political parties (and in third parties), they had more influence, during this period, in the Republican Party. In addition to Roosevelt, well-known Progressive Republicans included governor Robert ("Fighting Bob") La Follette of Wisconsin, California's governor Hiram Johnson, and governor Charles Evans Hughs of New York State. Issues like getting the right of women to vote cut across party lines, with suffragettes in Republican states working within the Republican Party.
In 1911 the National Progressive Republican league was formed to oust President Taft and get a progressive in the White House. Roosevelt decided to head the progressives and won most of the Republican primaries in 1912. But Taft controlled a majority of delegates to the nominating convention and received the nomination.
The Progressives thought Teddy could beat both the Republicans and the Democrats, so they split and formed the Progressive Party. The Democrats nominated the racist, but otherwise posing as progressive, Woodrow Wilson. Of course Wilson won and the Republicans would not regain the Presidency until 1920.
Roaring Back in the 20's
The 1920's were a critical period for the Republican Party. While the party would contain a progressive or liberal wing until the 1970's, during the 1920's the Wall Street wing gained an ascendency which it never lost. Partly this was because of President Wilson's performance in office, which led to a landslide in 1920 for Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding over Democrat nominee James M. Cox. It was the first presidential election in which women could vote, and they voted Republican.
After a postwar recession the American economy continued the process of rapid industrialization. The European industrial powers had worn themselves out, but America had entered the war only after selling them vast amounts of arms and food. Because the U.S. had spent relatively little on the war, its taxes were relatively low, and manufacturers had a global competitive advantage. Harding appointed men who believed businesses needed no regulation to the agencies that were supposed to regulate business. An ardent anti-conservationist, Albert Fall, was appointed Secretary of Interior.
At the same time businessmen were terrified of the Communist revolution that had taken place in Russia (with failed attempts in several other countries). Conservative groups labeled anyone demanding any reform a communist. Of course there were actual communists, belonging to the American Communist Party, which took orders from Moscow, but most progressives wanted reforms through democratic change, not a dictatorship created by a bloody revolution.
While the economy grew, the stock market ran wild. Taxes on the rich were reduced by two-thirds by the sympathetic Republican Congress. Tariff's on imported goods were greatly increased, supporting prices American manufacturers could charge at the expense of farmers and consumers. Scandals were plentiful, notably the Teapot Dome scandal. Meanwhile organized businessmen made black-market profits selling alcohol to the thirsty, a business made possible by the passage of the Prohibition amendment in 1919.
Harding died in office of natural causes and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. Republicans had another fling with Progressive ideas in the 1924 election, when some split again from the main party and nominated Bob La Follette for President. Calvin Coolidge led the main party ticket. The Democrats nominated a conservative Wall Street lawyer, John W. Davis. This time the Republican split did not prevent a Republican landslide. But Cal only served one term. The Republican nominee in 1928 was Herbert Hoover.
It is difficult to imagine now how popular Herbert Hoover was in 1928. He and the Republicans were so popular it looked as if the Democratic Party might cease to exist. He had become famous during World War I for getting food to the starving in Belgium. He had a good record as Secretary of Commerce; a little too good for the crooked politicians and their businessmen friends. The Democrats nominated Al Smith, who was devoted to making alcohol legal again. That and his Catholicism made him unpopular even in the "solid South" where the Klan, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was almost as anti-Catholic as it was anti-Negro.
Hoover received 21,391,381 votes to Smith's 15,016,443. Smith carried only the 5 solidest states of the Solid South. Hoover was sworn in as President on March 4, 1929. No one knew it then, but the stock market had already peaked.
The Great Depression and a Half-century in the Minority
The exodus of farmers, especially tenant farmers and laborers, for factory jobs continued during the 1920s. Agriculture had not prospered with the rest of the economy during the 1920's. Hoover tried to help by signing the Agricultural Marketing Act in June of 1929. It established a Farm Board that hoped to raise prices of agricultural products. But farmer's unsold surpluses were so large that it never achieved its goals.
By October of 1929 the stock market was down noticeably, though the economy itself was still going strong. Savvy investors like Joseph Kennedy were selling their stocks for cash. Confidence in quick paper stock profits began to wain, and then everyone wanted the paper profits they had accumulated in the 1920's converted to cash on the same day, October 29, 1929. Many speculators had borrowed money to play the market; they were forced to sell their stocks to cover the debts in their margin accounts.
The beloved free-market religion of the most ardent business Republican's had failed (the truest believers blamed the failure on government meddling, the very Devil in their world view). Suddenly realizing they were much poorer, stock speculators cut back on spending. Banks, panicking, called in loans. Demand for goods and services fell, businesses laid off workers, and consumption fell even further.
Herbert Hoover was President when it happened, and Herbert Hoover continued as President until the beginning of 1933. Though Hoover tried various measures, often Congress failed to support him (Republicans because they did not believe in government meddling in business, Democrats because they were delighted to see the nation blame Republicans for the problems). Among the measures tried by Hoover were public projects like the Boulder Dam, creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Norris-La Guardia Act that essentially legalized organizing labor unions.
The Democrats won the Congressional (and state and local) elections of 1930, then the Presidency in 1932. In a few short years the Republicans had gone from being the majority party to the minority party.
It is important to note that progressive "liberal" Republicans gained many important positions, notably in Congress, during the Depression years. Many of the acts that are now associated with the Democratic Party, such as Social Security, were in fact passed with broad support from both parties.
Not only would the "business" wing of the Republican Party need decades to see their party have an equal footing with the Democrats, but they would have to work together with a liberal/Progressive wing that had far more influence inside the party.
Towards the end of World War II and during Truman's presidency in particular the Republican Party gained mainly through some voters' irritation at the party in power. In 1946, for instance, the Republicans briefly had a majority in Congress. This success was capped with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President in 1952. But the former WWII commander was much more popular than the party he headed. Eisenhower won by a landslide, but the Republicans barely managed majorities in Congress. An important change took place in the South, however. Florida, Texas and Tennessee went for Eisenhower; the Republican Party began to acquire the southern constituency it would turn to for success after the 1960's.
Eisenhower's Republicans were content to undo what they saw as the most excessive New Deal legacies, such as wage and price controls, but left such programs as Social Security intact. They favored less government-held electricity creation and allowed corporations to begin building nuclear power plants. The economy was again expanding of its own accord, pumped up by a rising birth rate (the baby boom), exports (again, Europe lay prostrate), and pent-up demand from WWII and Korean War era rationing. America still liked Ike in 1956, but the Democrats still held their own in Congress.
Richard Nixon was Ike's Vice-Presidential running mate in 1956 and played an important role within the administration. He was fiercely patriotic and anti-communist, but also adamant that black Americans in the South should be treated as full citizens. In 1954 the Supreme Court, mainly appointed during the New Deal years, declared segregated (by race) schools to be illegal, even if the schools were truly "separate but equal." Southern Democrats and the Klan opposed, sometimes with violence, the integration of southern public schools. In one incident Eisenhower, at Nixon's urging, had to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Democratic governor Faubus tried to prevent the enrollment of "Negro" (the term used in that era) children. The Civil Rights bill of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, was passed with support from Republicans and northern Democrats.
In 1960, allegedly using massive fraud in Illinois, the Democrats won back the presidency by a hair. During the 1960's the Republicans struggled to remain relevant. Blacks enrolling to vote in the formerly segregated southern states forgot that the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and the Democrats were the party of Lynching. African-Americans would be the most reliable component of the Democratic party for the remaining decades of the 20th century, and they tipped the scales strongly against the Republicans.
Nixon and Revival
After Vice-President Richard Nixon lost his bid for the Presidency in 1960, what then passed as the ultra-conservative wing gained control of the party. They nominated Barry Goldwater for President in 1964; Lyndon Johnson, who had become President after Kennedy was assassinated, crushed Goldwater in the polls. But Johnson had fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident and involved the U.S. in a new land war in Asia, in Vietnam. He lost the support of anti-war Democrats, then decided not to run in 1968.
The Republicans next moved back to a centrist, Richard M. Nixon, for their Presidential nominee. The Democrats nominated another centrist, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice-President. The Democrats under Johnson had extended the New Deal to include what were called Great Society social welfare programs, also known as the War on Poverty. Nixon held to the traditional Republican belief that the only viable way out of poverty was hard work; programs appropriate in a Great Depression were not needed in the booming economy of 1960's America. Enough working class and middle class Americans agreed with him to elect him President. But the country was still Democratic; both houses of Congress had Democratic majorities, so Nixon had to gain some votes from Democratic congressmen to get his ideas enacted.
Richard Nixon had several remarkable achievements in office. In foreign policy Nixon recognized that Communism was not monolithic. By forging an alliance with Communist China he accelerated the breakup of the communist block countries and helped China regain its status as a great civilization. In domestic policy Nixon realized that the world had changed and that certain reforms had to be put into place to deal with those changes. Notably he signed into law the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In politics Nixon was able to see how the Republican Party might become a majority party again. As the more conservative of the two parties, and in particular the party favoring more individual initiative and less taxes, it was natural that it should find a way to break up the Democratic Party's monopoly in the southern states. The 1972 presidential election would demonstrate that strategy could work.
The War in Vietnam was the biggest issue in the 1972 election. The Democrats nominated George McGovern, who wished to withdraw from Vietnam and was very much in favor of extending New Deal and Great Society programs. The more conservative Democratic Party bosses, though temporarily unable to boss the grassroots around, nevertheless undermined McGovern's campaign. The new black voters for McGovern were counter-weighted by white, conservative, working and middle-class voters, especially in the south, voting Republican for the first time. Nixon won every state but Massachusetts, but the Democrats still held control of Congress.
There may have been an element of racism in the South when white voters began voting for Republican candidates, and later even changed their party registration. After all, blacks were now Democrats. But the main reason white voters switched was because most had little desire, themselves, for social welfare programs. Religion played a role too; the Republican Party was traditionally Protestant, as were white southern voters. These southern voters were also very anti-communist; the Democrats, and McGovern in particular, appeared to be soft on Communism.
But Richard Nixon had made a serious error in judgment on two points. Despite his great achievements, Watergate and the Vietnam War would destroy his reputation. In Vietnam he underestimated how badly the Vietnamese wanted to be free from American domination. No matter how much he threatened, no matter what horrible weapons he unleashed on the people of Vietnam, they continued to fight. Expanding the war into Cambodia backfired, strengthening the Cambodian Communists. Finally Nixon had to negotiate a withdrawal of American troops; after a face-saving period of time, the Communists took control of all of Vietnam. As a result Nixon lost the support of the militarists, who blamed him for losing a war, and of the pacifists, who blamed him for prosecuting it before losing it.
His second great error was unleashing his "dirty tricks" team on the Democrats. In retrospect he would have won the 1972 election easily by simply running an honest campaign. But the dirty-tricks gang was caught burglering the offices of the Democrats in the Watergate Hotel. Nixon tried to cover up his role in the affair, but a committee of Congress kept investigating until Nixon was compelled to resign to avoid impeachment. Since Vice-President Agnew had resigned due to a scandal in 1973, the new Vice-President, Gerald Ford, became the new President of the United States.
The Watergate scandal and disillusionment after the loss of the war in Vietnam temporarily stopped the Republican party's growth. Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a pardon, but the voters would not pardon Gerald when he ran for President in 1976. The Democrats, worried about their eroding base in the South, nominated a moderate Georgia former governor, Jimmy Carter, and regained the White House.
Reagan and Resurgence
But in the 1976, 1978, and 1980 elections the tendency of the country to realign around the parties on a new basis continued, with the results most visible in the south, where many formerly Democratic voters and elected politicians switched to being Republicans. The conservative wing of the Democratic party was weakened by these defections to the Republicans.
Since the Great Depression the only way the Republicans had been able to get a President elected was by choosing a moderate candidate like Eisenhower or Nixon. That was about to change. The Goldwater Republicans had never given up. As memories of the Depression evaporated, and the results of the 60's drug culture became apparent, their appeal to conservative values and free-market ideology gained ground in the party and with voters. Republicans nominated ultra-conservative former movie actor (and former Governor of California) Ronald Reagan for President in 1980. Jimmy Carter ran for a second term. His defeat is usually attributed to an economic recession, post-Vietnam bad feelings, and the fall of an American puppet, the Shaw of Iran. During the election campaign the revolutionaries in Iran held U.S. consulate members hostage. Carter appeared to be weak and ineffective in dealing with the situation.
From 1932 until 1980 American politics were dominated by the Democratic Party and the idea that the main purpose of government is social welfare and economic expansion through increasing the incomes (and spending) of the working class. Since 1980 (up until this essay is being written in 2005) politics has been dominated by the Republican Party and the idea that the main purposes of government is providing order and economic expansion through increasing the profits of business enterprises. Generally, voters have been happy with economic expansion no matter what the cause (and unhappy with stagnation or decline).
It was called the Reagan Revolution but in fact the Reagan era kept most of the New Deal and Great Society programs, though some were scaled back. It was in foreign policy that Reagan made the most dramatic changes. He escalated the cold war, not by an actual attack, but by increasing military spending to a degree that the Communist block countries could not match. He also found methods, some of them of questionable legality, to undermine socialist and left wing governments, in particular that of Nicaragua. These strategies cumulated (after Reagan left office) in the breaking away of the Eastern European states from Soviet dominance starting with Poland. A regime change in Russia and the breakup of the Soviet union followed.
While domestic policies ended the Reagan era little changed, the positive experience of having an expanding economy and victory over communism greatly strengthened not only the credibility of the Republican Party with American voters, but also the dominance of the conservative wing within the Republican Party.
The Christian Right and Newt Gingrich
In 1988 in the Republican presidential primaries television evangelist Pat Robertson began as a strong contender but withdrew from the race after his claim to have been in combat as a marine in the Korean War was shown to be false. George Bush, Reagan's Vice-President, became the Republican nominee and then President of the United States. He one-term presidency was characterized by a war against Iraq following the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, an oil-rich kingdom on the Persian Gulf.
Despite its Presidential victories in 1980, 1984, and 1988, the Republican Party was still far behind the Democrats in registered voters. To the extent that the two parties were a reflection of economic classes (with a majority of welfare and working class families registered Democrat, a majority of upper-middle and upper class families registered Republican, and the lower-middle to middle-middle class up for grabs), the Republicans were in a corner. Pressing policies like deregulation, lower corporate taxes, and a lower inheritance tax, all highly desired by the dominant Wall Street clique within the party, might have eroded what support they did have among the less wealthy voters.
It was clear to party strategists, which is to say Wall Street Republicans, that they needed to find a way to get votes from people whose economic needs they did not serve. Their success in breaking up the Solid South, the bastion of the Democratic Party until the 1970s, pointed the way. They would take advantage of non-economic, cultural issues to bring into the Party a huge group of voters who were not motivated, or not very motivated, by Republican economic policies.
The target group was fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. Though found everywhere in the nation, these individuals were most prevalent in the former Confederate states. They included some, but not all, Southern Baptists. Politically they had often been apathetic, with low voter turn outs for elections. But that was changing. A set of issues was chosen that would appeal to them, and with the financial backing of Wall Street republicans, a new set of political and religious leaders emerged. Pat Robertson has already been mentioned; other leaders included Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Moral Majority, and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. The issues that mobilized this movement were demands to make abortions (and even birth control) illegal; to allow or enforce prayer in public schools; and to make the Bible a basis for law.
While this new Religious Right, as it was called, helped elect President Bush in 1988, the alliance was insufficient to give him a victory in 1992. For eight years Democrat Bill Clinton would sit in the White House, but he was under siege from the Republicans, who gained majorities in the House of Representatives starting in 1994. This was the heyday of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who managed to direct people's anger against Bill Clinton, his first lady, Hillary, and all things "Liberal." Rush's show, spiked with humor at Democrats' expense, was the most popular show on radio. The Republican representatives in Congress were led by Newt Gingrich, who in the 1994 campaigns introduced the Contract with America. This avoided some big, divisive issues like school prayer and gun control. Instead it focused on reforming how Congress operated, tax cuts, tort (lawsuit) reform, and welfare reform (decreasing payments and eligibility).
Moments of Triumph: George W. Bush and the 2000 and 2004 elections
Despite having, or perhaps because of having, Bill Clinton in the White House, the period between 1992 and 2000 saw solid gains for the Republicans in Congress and at the local level. Focusing on cultural issues and promises to cut taxes was paying off.
The Democrats nominated Bill Clinton's Vice-President, Al Gore, for the Presidency in 2000. After a fierce primary struggle George W. Bush, one of the sons of former President George Bush and recently governor of Texas, won the Republican nomination. The Bush family had ties to Wall Street and in particular the petrochemical industry, but so did the Gore family. With little to distinguish the two candidates, and with the Christian Right as campaign foot soldiers, George W. Bush squeaked to a victory. The election was so close that a dispute arose over who had won in the state of Florida, where Jeb Bush, George's brother, was governor. Whoever won in the state would receive its Electoral College votes and win the Presidency. After a lengthy legal dispute the Supreme Court of the United States, voting 5 to 4 on strictly partisan lines, decided in Bush's favor.
With many American's wondering if George W. Bush had fairly won the election, Bush set about his agenda. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court; it was the first time since 1928 that Republicans controlled all the branches of government. Before President Bush could do much to implement his agenda, however, the Al Quada attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place on September 1, 2001. The stock market, overheated because the Federal Reserve had kept interest rates too low during the boom (sometimes called the Internet Bubble) of the late 1990's, plummeted, and the rest of the economy quickly followed.
The Republicans had come to be in charge just in time for another disaster that might make them look like Herbert Hoovers and lead to decades of Democratic Party rule. But George W. Bush was no Hoover. He responded vigorously to the Al Quada attack by invading Afghanistan. He secured a future supply of oil for the United States by invading Iraq after falsely claiming Iraq was attempting to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Rather than increasing social programs to help the country out of the recession, he pushed through tax cuts (that had been planned by Republicans for decades) that favored large businesses, heirs to fortunes, upper-middle class and upper class Americans. While this created a huge federal deficit, it did help revive the economy when combined with the Federal Reserve's lowering of interest rates.
The American voters rewarded George W. Bush and the Republicans by returning them to office in the 2004 elections (Bush's own victory was narrow; he received 62 million votes to Democrat John Kerry's 59 million). This is particularly remarkable given the both the poor performance of the American economy during his first term and the deterioration of employee and small business incomes. Many of the better paying jobs were moved overseas, and the destruction of small, independently owned retailers was particularly fast in this period.
At the time of the writing of this pamphlet, George W. Bush is President of the United States, the Republicans control a majority of the states, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Agree with them or not, that is a major accomplishment for a political party.
At the same time, the Wall Street Republicans appear to be losing control of the party to the religious Republicans. So far the religious Republicans have supported the Wall Street program of reducing taxes on the rich (the capital gains tax, dividend tax, estate tax, and upper-income bracket taxes). But the anger of lower-class Republican voters is fueled as much by economic failure as by cultural values. There is a great potential for backlash against Wall Street, which was given its wish-list. In contrast the promises to make the cultural changes that motivated lower-class citizens to vote with the Republicans have not been met.
The triumph of the religious Republicans within the party might jeopardize the allegiance of the moderate Republicans who are not homosexual bashers or believers in the rapture; who might actually believe that women have a right to contraceptives, abortion, and divorce; or who realize that the same science that makes NASCAR racers run and allows people to watch the races on TV also is absolutely certain that species evolved through mutations and natural selection. Just as American's demanded Prohibition and then revolted against it when they got it, actually banning abortion, contraception, and divorce; forcing every child in America to pray in school from the Evangelical prayer-book; and returning the TV to a 1950's-style sexual innocence, would almost certainly drive voters to elect less puritanical politicians. Which party might come out ahead in that backlash would depend on how the various parties position themselves.
Hey Sam, looking at Romney's face is very painful, a little funky I would say. With an on going investigation in Libya by the CIA, a desperate Romney trying to get attention, his interference was dishonourable and disgraceful, this Clown is irresponsible and should have been reprimanded, this is Mitt Romney's foreign policy experience and it scares the hell out of me !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I'm not sure I could feel good about a voting a President back in office who pushed an Un-Constituional bill onto the U.S.
Only 1 in 12 parts of Obamacare was deemed Constitutional. That was only after the SCOTUS re-worded it.
This is very simple Liberals. Your decisions are based on unchecked emotion. They are not grounded in the U.S. Constitution in any way, shape or form.
The only thing that blinds you from seeing that fact is your desire to gain what others have worked hard for and do it through a Socialist President.
This "early voting" trend is a little concerning. If Vegas has Obama winning by 2:1, AND the early voting/mail-in are for Obama 2:1, which party is TRULY enthusiastic about this election?
@LogicRequired "There is no incentive for a business man to take risks with his money on investments or in expanding and hiring if the money he "might" make on that risk will be taken away. On the other hand when taxes go down businesses and people will take greater risks with their money because of course there is a chance for a better reward."
What logic does it take to understand that THEY ALREADY HAVE ALL THE MONEY. How can you not understand that simple fact? Your plan fails because where does the extra money come from? How can they make more and be "rewarded" when no one but them have any money atm? Please explain where the money will come from to pay them back with interest? I forget the term, but the stock market is already 13 times over what the actual value is since we are already so far in debt. They already won the money game what do you not understand? Unless they reduce how much they think they have we are all hosed and will eventually lead to war/revolution if they do not get their heads out of their a$$. Neck deep in smelling their own greatness.
What logic does it take to understand that if someone is allowed to make a 1000 times what someone else makes that 999 are forced to make 1/999 of that person? If only 1 person out of a thousand can make that amount then capitalism only provides 0.1% of the population a chance to make that amount. If the limit is 100 to 1 then 1% of the population can make that amount and when the limit is 10 to 1 then 10% of the population can "win". How else can we control this limit without taxes? We let a bunch of people become kings and queens and they do not want their rule to end. They are doing everything in their power to stay in money/power.
Explain how Mitt's great plan is going to get us out of debt and create jobs? He now wants to cut taxes on the "47%" that "already" do not pay Federal income tax...please explain the logic in that? Even if it is not 5 trillion in tax cuts it is still a reduction in revenue is it not? Does that help or hurt the debt? He needs the congress that has not passed a budget in over 3 years to do the work for him, and cannot name specifics or any kind of details, some great leader... He is closing loopholes that the rich use instead of just letting them expire which would do the SAME thing. How is that going to create jobs or reduce the debt? Sounds like a circle jerk to me.
Then Mitt will start a war with Iran since that is what our masters Israel wants us to do. How much will that add to our debt and how are we going to pay for another war? Put that on the credit card too huh? There has not been one thing out of Mitt's mouth that will create jobs or reduce the debt.
Higher taxes scare rich people into doing what they always do, which is REDUCE THEIR TAX BURDEN TO ITS ABSOLUTE MINIMUM. They ALWAYS do this no matter what and how much they cry about it. The only time it does not help is when there are other countries or states that they can move business to avoid paying. The new country or state gets even less and this trend continues until you have what we have today where the tax rates are insanely low.
No one wants a bigger government, but how else are they forced to pay their workers a fair wage if they can keep as much as they want? What reward is there to pay their employees a fair wage? Nothing, there is no reason to pay people more if you can keep it all for yourself. Once again I expect people to reduce their tax burden to a minimum just like Mitt did which will have the adverse effect of them actually "wanting" to pay their employees more and re-investing back into their business instead of needing to be coddled/rewarded at every turn. With smarter harder working employees they might be able to relax and enjoy life a little, but they seem incapable of this, always needing MORE. Sounds just like a bunch of drug addicts to me.
Companies have been allowed to outsource reduce labor costs and have forced other companies to do the same or else. How can a company compete with another that both make the same product but one pays its workers 1/10 of what the other one does? This is another trend that has been allowed to continue and the worker to CEO/owner pay ratio has been getting farther and farther apart.
Outsourcing to other countries actually redistributes wealth anyway. Thanks for sending my money to another country a-holes. Why has outsourcing slowed down in countries like India? We sent them the money and now they expect to be paid more, just like us, imagine that. What about China where did they get all their money from? Crying about wealth redistribution yet you are causing it... Thanks for not helping out your fellow Americans.
To answer the question of where the extra money comes from is the Federal Reserve the only source of printed money in this country? What happens when people expect to be paid more or interest? How does that number keep going up and up yet our government is never forced to print any more? When our government is forced to print money we have to pay interest on it for some stupid reason. How much of our debt is caused by growth and inflation? Creating the very problems you are crying about...
Only a fool of the greatest magnitude could ever consider voting for a man who steadfastly refuses to even place his hand over his heart during the playing of America’s National Anthem!!! Any man who views this country with the level of resentment and disdain Obama has demonstrated by these actions is clearly unfit to serve in this hallowed role as President of the United States!!!
Beyond the posts of these paid political operatives, any more myopic minded single issue constituency’s that blindly support Obama without carefully examining his background and true agenda are in fact FOOLS OF THE GREATEST MAGNITUDE!
Romney/Ryan 2012
After reading the story, I guess Obummer and his sidekick Cracker have nothing to worry about.
Pathetic American U.S.A., the Libyan debacle perfectly epitomizes the ineptitude of the entire Obummer administration. For not providing the security they requested, to the bold faced lies they spewed for a week after the facts were well documented about the true nature of the massacre. This was a blatant dereliction of duty on Obummers part. Imagine, the outrage in the press had Bush gone to a campaign gathering withing hours of events similar to this unfolding under his watch. This would have been considered an act of war by any other POTUS except this jackass pretender and narcissistic a$$hole.
Houston-
Posted this last night in response to CO whining about the cuts of the nasty GOP.
Clear Voice,
And who was president when 9/11 took place and failed to protect thousands of Americans when there had been plenty of calls that Al-Quaeda was about to attack and reports of their members taking pilot training were ignored by the then president! GW Bushwhacker! The worst president ever!
Bill Fairfax VA
Your post listed Samuelson article. I checked it out.
It starts off with a BIG LIE. Nobody ever said the $5 trillion Romney tax cut plan is just for the rich, yet that is the lying straw man argument Samuelson attributes to Obama, which Samuelson easily refutes.
The $4.8 trillion cut has been cited by Pres Obama and others as representing the amount of revenue lost from cutting all tax rates by 20% over 10 years as Romney has proposed.
Samuelson does not refute this number at all. In fact, he concludes that Tax Policy Center report confirms this number.
I used to respect Samuelson's opinion, but after reading his false straw man argument, I've lost any respect I had for him. His article is the worst form of journalism.
Thumbs down on Samuelson and his false straw man argument.
$4.8 trillion 10 year cost of Romney 20% across-the-board tax cut according to TPC is TRUE .
Talk to the Hand
Houston-
Guess you didn't see the rest of my post or you're just pretending that you didn't see it. My guess is that you're pretending.
It seems there was PLENTY of security there, as the the boneheads running Issa's latest witch trial accidentally revealed. It appears from what Dana Millbank reported that CIA forces fell down on the job, though. I'm sure you'll figure out a way to blame that on Obama.
To Feisty and the rest of you...tonight will be the nail in the coffin for the policies and lies of the Obama administration and his re-election! Biden has no ammunition to combat Ryan's facts and the math!
Wake up American voters...unless you want Spain and Greece 2.0 for the sake of our children and theirs, the only moral vote is ROmney/Ryan!
Drill baby drill!
Polls or no polls, spin is all it is! The American voter has made up their mind already,the President put a cork in it when he debated Romney! You libtards didn't accept reality when Gov. Walker was elected in Wisconsin. So you called for a recall,(and spent a fortune in doing so as only you clowns can) and got your a$$ handed to you. Sound advice is that you better lube up for this election! ROMNEY/RYAN '12 RESTORE AMERICA, NOT THE AMERICAN DREAM BUT TO IT'S DESTINY!
biden biach slapped lyin ryan, lOOK AT ALL THE WHINING Neo Cons.
Romney/Ryan want to controll Womens Bodys. Women will not let Old Middle aged White GOP Men Dictate to them what they can or cannot do
.
Fact Check of the Day:
Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars.
Factcheck.org says that is "Nonsense".
"The American Enterprise Institute, which conducted the study, is described in one of Romney’s ads as “nonpartisan” and “independent.” In fact, it is a conservative, pro-business think tank whose leaders include former Vice President Dick Cheney and whose academic advisers include Romney’s chief economic adviser, R. Glenn Hubbard. Three of its board members — including its chairman — gave nearly $1.7 million in combined contributions to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future."
Here is the link to read more: http://factcheck.org/2012/10/romneys-4000-tax-tale/
No independents have been able to determine how Romney could cut taxes 20% across the board, increase spending, and not increase the deficit.
It's math. This is another subject that eluded Wrongme in prep school. He was busy giving free haircuts.
Eric-913730
Fact Check of the Day:
Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars.
Factcheck.org says that is "Nonsense".
Eric,
Thanks for the fact check link. I'm sure you must have a gazillion more.
Too bad there isn't enough space to list them all. I do not understand how anyone can vote for "MYTH" Romney when he has been proven over and over to be a LIAR and changes more than the second hand on a clock.
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
ahhh...love the people with the signs; "farmers for Mitt"...
Shocked and surprised they are not also for Obama as for the 2013 budget the Dept of Agriculture is the 5th largest outlay coming in at 154.5b....gotta protect those subsidies coming. Don't touch those welfare queens - let's focus our attention to PBS (.002% of the budget)....
wake up people...
Eloquent as always Fiesty. :)
Romney told his supporters that his Lies on the debate are starting to payoff in the polls !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Oh but Beverly, Myth is two things that any neo-con admires and is comfortable with. One, he is wildly successful in his endeavor for personal gain at the expense of many others, and two... he's the "right" color! That's about as deep as today's republican base's rivers run.
Survey findings that Romney is a Pathological Liar, who in their right mind would vote for this "ASININE"
Farmers for Mitt? The farm bill has been stalled for months in the house of reps. along with every other bill the gotp will not vote on. So lets elect a gotp president to fix things. That's retarded. This election is not a referendum on Obama or Romney. It is a referendum on the intellectual viability of the American people. Just as youth is wasted on the young, democracy is wasted on Americans. Canadians know...Mitt is not the answer. VOTE EARLY, VOTE SMART! Come on America.
In January 2009 unemployment was at 7.8% and rising fast. It hit 10% in October 2009 and has been going down ever since. It is now at 7.8% and dropping. Democrats did that.
The national debt as a percentage of GDP is at its lowest level since 2006. Democrats did that.
What have the republicons done? They have created exactly "0" jobs while voting to eliminate 7.4 million potential jobs. Every single Democrat plan has been filibustered or is sitting on Bohner's desk. Blame this economy ob the party over country republicons.
No republicon has ever won without winning Ohio. Obama is up by 6 points now.
...so far. I fixed it you you, MSNBC. Obama is his own and our worst enemy. Between Fast and Furious, Solyndra and Benghaizi is there any doubt Obama is totally incompetent??
Unemployment claims at lowest levels - down 30,000.
Except one large state hasn't updated their quarterly figures.
Cooking the books before an election???? Maybe??????
Just curious, do liberals listen, read, analyze, then think at all; or do they just do what they're told? How can anyone reviewing Obama's record, his lies, his lack of transparency, etc...think he needs four more years to run this country into the ground any further?
And if a GOP was in office, and allowed an American Embassy to be attacked knowing full well it had nothing to do with a silly video the liberal biased media would be on full blown impeachment. This needs to be brought to the attention of the citizens so they can decide if Obama, Hillary and the other liberal hacks, just shunned their pleadings for more security.
Romney's only foreign policy is teaching Big Bird how to flip flop to France !!!!!!!!!
That makes no sense at all. Who are you? Joe Biden????
brewsky23 - liberals read, research, debate facts and listen to what is actually said - unlike Republicans who just believe every lie that comes out of the mouths of Romney and Ryan.
See we actually believe it is important that our elected officals represent the people of the United States, not Grover Norquist - who gets funds from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Israel.
We know our President DID NOT ALLOW an American Embassy to be attacked but that unfortunately in turbulent times attacks like these happen. However, it was a GOP President who ALLOWED the attack on the World Trade Centers after having been warned that an attack on US soil would be made using our planes. His administration didn't even warn the airlines. Then he falsified information in order to attack Iraq - who didn't have anything to do with 9/11/2001.
Please try to get a few facts and maybe you'll see how derelict the Republican Party has been.
Obama/Biden 2012
Romney want to increase military spending to more than it was during the Vietnam War and the Korean War. Who is he planning on invading? The Soviet Union?
I will not follow that draft dodger anywhere. Real men lead by example.
Eric-913730 "Fact Check of the Day: Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars..........Factcheck.org says that is "Nonsense"."
Obama's 2013 Budget proposals call for 'Revenue increases' (new tax receipts) of $3.162 Trillion in 10 years (2022), and since the estimate is that the 'rich' share of that will be only about $700 Billion by Obama's plan to cancel the Bush tax cuts for the 'rich', who do you think will have to pay the other $2.4 Trillion in new taxes - Micky Mouse??????????????
Let's see now - Since about 60 million Middle Class people actually PAY income taxes, and they will have to pay the other $2.4 Trillion in taxes, my calculator says that's about $4,000 per year in new taxes for the typical Middle Class taxpayer.
By the way - FactCheck.org is owned and funded by the far-left liberal and Obama supporter George Soros, so do you REALLY expect the truth from them?
Listen to the hearings. Listen! Research! There was more actionable intelligence about an attack in Libya than the vague "bin Laden determined to strike U.S."
Plus the consulate was begging for more protection and got none.
Add to that the falsifying of th narrative that some video was to blame - for over a week after the truth was known! Your guys are looking pretty bad here.
For Eric..Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars.....Biden Oct 4 2012..."You know what they always say,'Obama and Biden want to raise taxes by a trillion dollars'. Guess what? yes we do"
@miklkit....Drafter dodger? Seems I heard something about that,,,ah yes a fellow by the name of Joe Biden...also a draft dodger, also participated in an anti segregation demonstration...and this guy is just a heart beat away from being Pres....Lord help us....
Hey stan, What happen to the cap "S" ?????????
Old Soldiers don't die, they just fade away, what are you waiting for ???
ROY,
The majority of the $2.4 trillion is covered with taxes from new jobs created (according to the CBO 12 million by 2016)
But can you fill in this gap …
The Romney/Ryan plan is to cut a total of $4.8 trillion from our income/tax revenue but he will not tell us how he will pay for it.
Their 20% tax cuts just for those making over $200,000/$250,000 totals $2.7 trillion over 10 years. Romney says he will pay for those tax cuts by closing loopholes. However there are only $1.7 trillion worth of loopholes in total that can be closed.
So where does his plan get the $1 trillion to cover the gap?
Obama/Plan is no Plan he just thinks that Romney plan is bad thats all he has got Romneys plan is bad so vote for me 23,000,000 out of work and 47 mil on food stamps 16.7 til in dept where is Obama plan?
Factcheck of everyday.
Obama lie to Americas, Obama lie in the UN , Obama lie to the World.
Osama is dead but AlQaeda is alive and strong. Obama foreing policy is a failure.
No more 4 of the same, no more 44 of stupidity.
Dennis, Columbus, Ohio "ROY, The majority of the $2.4 trillion is covered with taxes from new jobs created (according to the CBO 12 million by 2016)"
So there are fewer people working now than when Obama took office, but over the next 4 years Obama is going to 'magically' create 12 million new jobs?
Thanks for the laugh.
You are living proof that Obama can fool SOME of the people ALL of the time.
Obama is a Fraud. His longest job has been that of President of the USA. Pathetic.
Obama has never been successful at anything but Fraud and organizing the Million Man March for Louis Farrakhan Muhammad, Sr. and as Exective Director of ACORN to force Banks to make "Sub Prime Home Loans" to people who could not pay it back.
Obama has had success in the Weather Underground, The Woods Fund, Community Organizing, May 19 Coalition, the "New" Party, claiming he was born in Kenya (preface of his book, Journey in Black and White,) wearing a gold ring on his Ring Finger which says "There Is No God Except Allah” since his Harvard Days and still does. This is the same ring Michelle also placed on his finger at their Faux Paux Wedding.
Obama just last week sent 150 American Troops to Jordan to help the Jordanian Army in case Syria attacked them. But, Obama could not send just one Marine to protect the lives and property of America which led to the death of Ambassador Stevens and staff.
Obama is now involved in Criminal Investigations that will send him to JAIL along with other members of his Administration.
Obama has even outsourced the Vote Counting for the Nov 2012 Presidential Election. SCYTL, Barcelona, Spain is a Socialist Corporation that will be Counting the Votes of 18 Stats. SCYTL has taken in over $100 Million in US Tax Payers Money to Count YOUR VOTES FOR PRESIDENT.
The most important Election in USA History is being Counted by a Socialist Company in Spain.
Here's the kicker. The Department of Defense has also Contracted with SCYTL to count the Absentee Ballots of the US Military. What? That's right. Paid Millions to Count Military Votes.
How do you get a Contract with the Department of Defense to Count American Votes for President?? YOU have direct relationships with the White House and the Secretary of Defense. Leon Panetta, a confirmed Socialist/Communist.
Are you people waking up yet??? www.scytl.com check it out for yourself and then start raising hell with your Governors, Senators and Representatives in your State and in D.C.
ROY,
That is from the CBO and is the same number of jobs Romney said he will create in his first term.
But you diverted and didn’t answer my question, so can you tell us where the other One Trillion Dollars will come from?
The majority of people see Romney for what he really is. A looser who will never understand nor care about the 'very poor', and never pay honest taxes on his ill gotten gains stashed away in foreign countries. A plutocrat's plutocrat....poster child...but at least he's 'not the black one', and America's bigots, racists, Foxaholics, and terminally restless bullies out looking for a fight, as Limbaugh and Beck have taught them to, will still suck up to this uncaring self-important nowhere man with no moral compass.
SeekingSanity: That's actually a good idea for you if you believe the b.s. you posted. The Obama administration received numerous correspondence asking for increased security for the embassy. Thus, that is on him. And what does he do; he says it's due to a silly video and goes off to Vegas for fund rasiers with his 1%er friends for a few days. He, Hillary and the rest of the lying liberals knew darn well it was a terrorist attack as soon as it happened. As far as 911, you cannot be serious. That's like me telling the NYPD that someones going to be robbed sometime next month in the city. Is it their fault if they don't prevent it. That's about the intell they had for 911. But keep spewing your diatribe and hope others believe you.
Chad: It's people like you that are scary. You keep saying Romney doesn't understand the poor, he's not in touch; I guess Pelsoi, Obama, Clinton and the other millionaire liberal politicians are in touch. If that's the case why not elect a homeless, crackhead, drop out to run for President, as he would be in touch. You people are nuts.
Obama plan blame Bush do we need for more years of blaming Bush, Romney's plan help put Americans back to work
A review of board minutes and records by CNN show Obama crossed paths repeatedly with Ayers at board meetings of the Annenberg Challenge Project.
The Annenberg Foundation gave the project a $50 million grant to match local private funds to improve schools, and Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, according to participants and project records.
The project's organizing committee asked Obama to serve as the board chairman in 1995. Annenberg Project Executive Director Ken Rollings said Ayers was not a member of that ad hoc group when the decision was made.
For seven years, Ayers and Obama -- among many others -- worked on funding for education projects, including some projects advocated by Ayers.
ROY WILSON-336103
Let's see now - Since about 60 million Middle Class people actually PAY income taxes, and they will have to pay the other $2.4 Trillion in taxes, my calculator says that's about $4,000 per year in new taxes for the typical Middle Class taxpayer.
You might want to learn how to use that calculator pal. LOL
Bervely in chicago find another organization to find your fact. it so happen that Factcheck.org leans more to the liberal side they are not neutral. most of their answer defend the democrats even it they are wrong they look back in history to defend the present.
Comment #2:
Smartest thing Feisty has said in months!!!!!!!!!
3 weeks of biased reporting, soft numbers, personal attacks, one sided stories and lies to go. I can’t wait for the moment I cast my vote and do my bit for the nation. I believe that right now, every minute under this administration is wasted and bad for everyone particularly, future generations. Enough said!
R/R 2012
10-11-12
The newest research from Nate has it as the NOV 6 factors:
“Obama chance of winning 67.9% Romney 32.1%”
“Projected Winner Obama 293.5”
“Projected Loser Romney 244.5”
Popular Vote:
Obama 50.3% Romney 48.7%
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
However, if the election was being voted in “Now Cast” Today:
Totals
“Obama chance of winning 71.2% Romney 28.8%”
“Projected Winner Obama 293.4”
“Projected Loser Romney 244.6”
Popular Vote:
Obama 50.1% Romney 48.6%
If the President and Vice President continue to call Romney and Ryan out on their flip-flops, denials of their political records and their real agenda of shilling for the likes of Koch and Norquist the President's lead will only increase.
So the RWNJs can continue to cast their denials and distractions, which is pretty evident on this board, because even they can't defend Romney on vision or policy. First they'd have to figure out what it actually is, and then justify it. If they haven't been able to do that so far, I doubt they'll find that magic bullet in the next few weeks.
Job1...that is a pretty significant change from where he had it a few weeks ago if I'm not mistaken. I did see that yesterday, Real Clear Politics moved Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire from "Lean Obama" to "Toss-Up". The race is definitely tightening up with a small advantage for the President right now.
Frank,
They also moved Michigan to Tossup (16 EV's)
Again very scary that American want to go back to failed policies and have this country run by liars.
I can't comprehend why my fellow Amercian citizens continue to shot themselves in the foot and then complain about the pain. When the re elected President Bush I was shocked but as my mom always says you get what you deserve.
So my fellow citizens did you not learn from the Bush Administration that we got what we deserved for voting him into office - Two Wars, over 10,000 Americans killed in the 9-11 attacks and both wars and tens of thousands wounded, major debit, economic recession, high unemployment. So simply asked are we better off with our the Obama administration in office hell "YES"!!!!!!!
Please keeping the USA moving forward - don't repeat history vote for Obama/Biden 2012!!!!!
Hey Dennis...
They must have done that this morning after I looked. Looks like RCP considers any margin of 5% or less to be a tossup. I think the President still holds an advantage in those states, but clearly, Romney has made it closer. The next Presidential debate is going to be huge. I don't see the VP debate moving the needle a whole lot in either direction unless someone makes a HUGE error.
Democrats, dont worry, Romney is not going anywhere, and thats for sure folks!
Come the day after election, Barack Obama will still be the United States President.
I am an independent who is voting Democrat for the first time ever, and I just voted for the President because he is the guy that could get things fixed in Washington.
We need to give him another chance.
My aging folks just voted too for Obama, and there is no one who is more conservertive than they are, believe me on that...they have been married 67 years, and all of them Republican years.
But the truth is, the Republican party is all talk, nothing more nothing less.
I would not want my folks going across State lines to buy cheap insurance. Aint nothing like cheap insurance these days.
Romney is in the pockets of insurance companies, he is used to making profits from struggling Americans, no matter what inccome bracket you are in.
I would not want my aging folks to be left at the mercy of Insurance companies.
For you folks with aging parents you know what I am talking about. They (Health insurance folks) have no mercy, matter of fact I am surprised why they are not regarded as the chief cause of death to many cenior citizens!!!
And to be honest folks, the more honest person in this Presidential elections is non other than the President.
Vote for this guy, vote your conscience. Vote for Barack Obama to keep movin this good ol country of ours in the right direction.
Obama 2012.
They call me Doc from Horse Country, and I approve this message
Frank,
Most polls have a margin of error of +/-4% (on average) so
that puts any lead of less than 5% inside the margin, thus Tossup.
It is a virtual tie (less than 1% lead) in 4 of the 11 Tossup
states and Obama leads in 5 of the other 7
Hey Grimey
Can you spell
R-A-U-L?
Nate Silver's a very smart man and the best prognosticator around. I see Romney/Ryan strategy of shifting positions to target undecided voters as being a very risky one.
Hopefully, Biden will expose these shifts and suddenly, these swing voters will say to themselves "Wow, Romney/Ryan just flip-flop away. What do they really believe? I can't trust someone to be President/VP when I can't even be sure where they stand on this issues I care about."
Once Romney/ Ryan have to stick with a position after Biden debate, Obama can nail Romney on policy which will no longer be a moving target.
I believe Dems have a great chance of a landslide this election. Americans don't trust deceptive people and Romney and Ryan are the most deceptive I have ever seen at this level. They must be exposed.
OBAMA/ BIDEN 2012.......For America's Future
DocHolliday - Who ya crapin? I see Axelrod has a new moniker!
Fact Check of the Day:
Many Romney ads are saying that Obama will raise taxes on the middle class by $4000 dollars.
Factcheck.org says that is "Nonsense".
"The American Enterprise Institute, which conducted the study, is described in one of Romney’s ads as “nonpartisan” and “independent.” In fact, it is a conservative, pro-business think tank whose leaders include former Vice President Dick Cheney and whose academic advisers include Romney’s chief economic adviser, R. Glenn Hubbard. Three of its board members — including its chairman — gave nearly $1.7 million in combined contributions to the pro-Romney super PAC Restore Our Future."
Here is the link to read more: http://factcheck.org/2012/10/romneys-4000-tax-tale/
Eric - most analysts looking at both plans (I use the term loosely, since Romney refuses to reveal specifics) say that Romney's vague idea of cutting income, increasing spending while not widening the deficit is not possible.
This is not Bain Capital. You can't just sell of the assets, lay off the people, pillage the retirement accounts and skip off to find another company to plunder.
This is our country, and we are recovering from Bush. The last thing we need is more of the same Voodoo Economics.
Vote against the Coporate structure on Wall Street who has treated us (middle class) like sh#t for the last 12 years (at the very least). They need to earn our respect to profit within this great country. It isn't a Serf system of only landowners and peasants with no in between socio economic classes. This country is a place where you can get ahead with hard work if we're in this together !!! Vote for Obama !!!
4 more for 44 !!!!!
I see the usual robots for Barry are still at it...same song...53351 verse of total and complete useless retoric and wow even in BOLD type, that will sway anyone for sure.
At 65 all I know is 4 more years of the movement to socialism will still be a disaster, it was when it started and it will be when it finishes. You people's lame attempts to parrot the same old tired talking points are still that....bull@!$%#.
Romney Ryan 2012
Very funny Alan. ;-)
Hey...either way, I'm proud of my Orioles and their minuscule payroll hanging with the big, bad Yankees.
@Grimey
I thought you had it last night. So what is it tonight? Game 4 or the VP Debate?
A vote for R & R would turn America into a Asia dumping ground and put the U.S. Auto industry into bankruptcy, just what Ohio needs, another "W" !!!
A note to Romney from Ohioans - we don't trust you Mitt !!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Buckeyes say Romney would give Ohio a Black-eye !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Alan...the way the games have been going between our teams, I probably don't need to tune in until the 9th inning!!! LOL! Honestly though, will probably DVR the debate. Postseason baseball is too rare to miss for me!! :-)
I honestly think the Orioles players are showing the stress of postseason inexperience. Our closer has fallen apart and our 3-4-5 hitters have been terrible. Can't fault the starting pitching though.
Frank, That is one thing we can agree on ! I have been a long-suffering Oriole fan for a long, long time. Whether they get past the Yankees or not, their improvement under Buck Showalter this year has been exciting. Go Birds !!
Hey jim#'s:
The thing that gives me hope is the relative youth of the team (Thome notwithstanding). Adam Jones is 27, Weiters is 26, Machado is 20, Markakis is 28, Bundy is the top pitching prospect in baseball, and our staff has some young arms.
Would you like to bet on that?
All the retoric in the world will not clear this presiden't record for the last (4) years regardless of where you get it. The experiment is over and Romney will win by 5-7 percent and at least 100 electorial votes. Be sure and write that down because I will be reminding you later on.
Here's a suggestion.....Instead of spouting off the sound bites you stole from the Rachel Maddow show, just try clearing your throat for all the "crow" you'll be eating in November.
Again.... bon appetit!!
BLUE States is for Peace & Prosperity and Red States are for Blood & Wars !!!
Just what is the President's record?
7.8% unemployment and dropping. That means it is back to where it was the day he was sworn in after falling to 10%. Can you say Great Recession?
National debt is down to where it was in 2006. Who was running the country in 2006? Who was running up the debt then and demanding more?
In the meantime what have the republicons done? Nothing.
111th Senate Breaks A Filibuster Record | TPMDC
National debt is down to where it was in 2006 ???????????????????????
Milking it, I am not sure what you are smoking there genius, but it sure as hell isn't a Marlboro !! Do you LIE often, or is today a special event ?
National debt under Obama's "reign" has risen $5.2 trillion plus ... and counting !
The big bang was the great creator of Romney's bird brain, was that a Mormon thing ?????????????????????????????
Rasmussen Reports has Romney 1 point over Obama in critical swing States. One week ago Obama was 6 points ahead of Romney. The trend is clear, Romney has picked up 7 points in 7 days in critical swing States. MSNBC referred to the gain by Romney as a "marginal" increase. 7 points in 7 days is hardly "marginal".
Tonight will put Romney ahead of Obama if Ryan does well against Biden. That shouldn't be too difficult.
It is true jim.
U.S. Downgrade Seen as Upgrade as U.S. Debt Dissolved
U.S. debt has shrunk to a six-year low relative to the size of the economy as homeowners, cities and companies cut borrowing, undermining rating companies’ downgrading of the nation’s credit rating.
Enlarge image
Reduced borrowing means there is less competition for the U.S. Treasury Department as it sells debt to fund spending programs to help the nation recover from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
5:18
Oct. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Carlo Cottarelli, director of the International Monetary Fund's fiscal affairs department, talks about the global economy, U.S. deficit and Europe's debt crisis. Cottarelli speaks with Sara Eisen in Tokyo on Bloomberg Television's "Surveillance." (Source: Bloomberg)
Total indebtedness including that of federal and state governments and consumers has fallen to 3.29 times gross domestic product, the least since 2006, from a peak of 3.59 four years ago, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Private- sector borrowing is down by $4 trillion to $40.2 trillion.
Here is the link to the full story.
U.S. Downgrade Seen as Upgrade as U.S. Debt Dissolved - Bloomberg
Well, Frank, I'd enjoy the performance of your starting pitchers while you can; with Buck Showalter managing the team, next year will be painful for them. I do mean that literally.
The man blew out both Jimmy Keye's and Scott Kaminicki's arms when he was with the Yankees. There was a quote in my state newspaper that he thought they should pitch through pain- he actually compared them to Scott Stevens, who was skating with a special boot because he had a fractured bone in his foot!
I argued about him with my husband's best friend, who thought Showalter got a bad deal getting dumped by the Yankees; he called me two nights later, watching a game in Seattle, where Showalter had the pitcher still in after 136 pitches.
I wouldn't let this guy on the same side of the stands as the bullpen, let alone let him manage my team.
Selling U.S. debt is good as long as we don't buy the debt ourselves through printing more money. Monetizing our debt would be a bad thing in my opinion since it would lower the value of the dollar even more than it already has.
Romney & Netanyahu are beating the War-drums for World War Three, two Loose Cannon's !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
God if you all had jobs oh sorry my bad you are pro Obama bloggers how that 6.75 an hour working out for you I hope he/obama is a least giving a free cell phone
Romney is gaining I believe because the % of people actually paying attention is increasing. I believe 100% that the turnout for Obama this time will fall far short of his last election. The excitement is just not there. Last time when I showed up to vote the lines were out the door and there were people there who I had never seen there before. Very unusual having voted there for over 20 years. I will bet that is not the case this time. The state of things is catching up with the President. All the scare tactics by posters here and on the news shows may not be enough to counter the bad state of our economy and our issues around the world. It appears the President has dug himself a hole he "may" not be able to climb out of.
There are so many Left Wing Liberal Democrat Liars on this Post. Problem is all the intelligent, educated, American Citizens are voting for Romney and Ryan.
Romney kicked Obama Ass on Substance, Knowledge, Experience and Superior Executive Ability and love of the USA. Obama is a Fraud./
Ryan will send Baghdad Biden packing.
Chemical Axelrod is running around lying his a s s off. Not a word of truth in anything Chemical Axelrod says.
Obama is being exposed for what he is. A FRAUD. Like all SCAMS it all falls apart. Just like Sandusky, Obama will get be exposed and sentenced. Jail is the only place Obama is heading.
For all of you liberal "factcheck" freaks; do you know who owns and/or operates this group, yes the Annenberg Group. Below is taken straight from their website:
A review of board minutes and records by CNN show Obama crossed paths repeatedly with Ayers at board meetings of the Annenberg Challenge Project.
The Annenberg Foundation gave the project a $50 million grant to match local private funds to improve schools, and Ayers fought to bring the grant to Chicago, according to participants and project records.
The project's organizing committee asked Obama to serve as the board chairman in 1995. Annenberg Project Executive Director Ken Rollings said Ayers was not a member of that ad hoc group when the decision was made.
For seven years, Ayers and Obama -- among many others -- worked on funding for education projects, including some projects advocated by Ayers.
Not biased at all right?
The Whig Party candidate, Zachary Taylor, won the presidential election of 1848. The Democratic candidate, Lewis Cass, is forgotten. Martin Van Buren, a former president and the Free Soil Party candidate, placed third.
The Republican Party did not exist in 1848. There had been a different party called "Republican" or "Democratic-Republican" from about 1790 to about 1836, but that party's story will be covered separately.
The exact founding of the Republican Party is disputed, but aspects of the party were in existence around 1852 and its founding convention was on July 6, 1854 at Jackson, Michigan., In the fall of 1854 it elected 40 members to the U.S. House of Representatives (more if you count representatives co-nominated by the American and Republican parties). By the elections of 1856 it had gone from third party status to being the main rival of the Democrats.
What happened between 1848 and 1854 that could create a full-blown political party in so short a time? There were two main causes: the slavery issue and the rise and fall of the American Party, mistakenly called the Know-Nothing Party. Like the Republican Party, the American Party came into existence quickly and elected a large number of officials; it had the most members of any political party in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1854.
The Whigs, the number 2 party since the 1820's, had been formed in opposition to the Democrats as led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. The party was not formed around any particular principles. Led originally by Henry Clay, it was a loose coalition of men who sought office for any of a number of reason. In the north it included abolitionists and people opposed to the expansion of slave territories, and those favoring protective, high tariffs (customs duties); in the south it favored slavery and lower tariffs. This worked fine until about 1850, but the renewed struggle over extending slavery to new western states and territories demanded that men chose sides. The southern Whigs deserted the party to join the Democrats, who were clearly the party of slavery. The northern Whigs mostly hopped on the American Party on their way to becoming Republicans.
But the core of the Republican Party appears to have evolved from the Free Soil Party. It had grown out of the free soil movement, which stood against extensions of slavery. The failure of the Whigs to take a stand, as a national party, against extending slavery left a political opening which the Free Soil Party filled. They also attracted anti-slavery northern Democrats. An important part of their platform was free homesteads for settlers from federal lands. Their slogan was "Free soil, free speech, free labor, and free men." Though they did not, as a party, advocate abolishing slavery in the southern states, their party was closest to an abolitionist view. In 1848 their presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, ran a distant third but received 291,623 votes. They sent two Senators and fourteen Representatives to Congress. In 1852 they ran John P. Hale for president, but received only 155,825 votes. Around 1852 they merged into the Republican Party.
The American Party was formed primarily as an anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic group. Its recruits came mostly from the Whig Party, though many Democrats joined as well. Founded as a secret organization, so secret they came to be called "Know Nothings," they did not come out as the American Party until after their great successes in local and congressional elections of 1854. In 1856 Millard Filmore was their presidential candidate, gaining 8974,534 votes, one of the best third-party showings in U.S. history. But they were divided by the slavery issue, and by 1858 most American Party adherents in the north merged into the Republican Party, while in the south they rejoined the Democrats.
Though not a separate party, the abolitionists were an important component in creating the Republican Party. The idea of abolishing slavery was old; it had been declared abolished in Great Britain by the Somerset Decision of 1771, which helped precipitate the American Revolution. The abolition of slavery in all British colonies in 1833 also put Americans on a low moral footing. The debates about extending slavery to the western territories and new states made everyone in America aware of the abolitionist stance.
Steps to Civil War
Five great events mark the U.S.'s progress towards the Civil War: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Dred Scott Decision, and the election of the first Republican President.
The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Maine to be admitted to the union as a free state and Missouri to be admitted as a slave state. Most of the remaining Louisiana Territory - actually the land of sovereign native Indian nations - that the nation's leaders planned to annex was declared to be free. It seemed that this would stop the spread of slavery. But the annexation of Texas in 1845 and then northern Mexico (now the U.S.'s southwestern states) in 1848 changed the political equation.
California was the most populous of the conquered lands and applied in 1849 to become a free state. That would give free states a majority in the Senate as well as the House; slavers feared it was the first step to political defeat. A fierce debate ensued in Congress in 1850, with compromise as the result. California was admitted as a free state, but New Mexico and Utah were to decide for themselves if they wanted to allow slavery. In the District of Columbia the slave trade, but not slavery itself, was outlawed. And the most stringent Fugitive Slave Act ever was enacted.
The Fugitive Slave Act was very offensive to citizens in free states. Many people in the northern states who were not set on abolishing slavery in the south felt that if a slave escaped to a free state, they became free. It was a matter of states' rights and people's rights. Many of these citizens were driven into the abolitionist camp by the sight of escaped slaves being re-captured and by the prosecution of those who ran the Underground Railroad. They also lost interest in the Whig Party, which endorsed the Act along with the Democratic Party. This lead to the creation of the Free Soil Party, and eventually to the creation of the Republican Party
Kansas and Nebraska were the next Indian lands to be turned into states; they were to be free states under the Compromise of 1850. But in 1854 Stephen A. Douglas, a leading Democrat, proposed that instead the citizens in those territories be allowed to choose for themselves whether to be free or slave states. The pro-slavery Democrats had the votes to put the plan, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, through. The Whigs and the new American Party did nothing to stop it.
The abolitionists, free soilers, and those who wanted no extensions to slave territories (though they were willing, for the sake of keeping southern states in the Union, to allow slavery to continue where it already existed), needed a new party. They chose not to try to reform the Democrats, Whigs, or American Party. The Republican Party was born alive and kicking in 1854.
But, like the American Party and the Whigs, the Republican Party might have disappeared quickly if it had not been for the ongoing debate (and in Kansas, what amounted to a civil war) over slavery. The final straw that tipped the northern states against the long tradition of Democratic Party power was the Dred Scott Decision. It is important to recall that the American Constitution legalized slavery at the time the British Parliament was debating abolishing the slave trade. It was individual states that outlawed slavery. Since state-rights was an accepted political doctrine until the Civil War, for the most part this going-against the pro-slavery Constitution had been tolerated by the slavers who controlled southern state governments.
Dred Scott hoped that the result of his case would be like the Somerset decision had been in England. It would make clear that stepping onto free soil made you a free man. But the Supreme Court, dominated by Democratic Party appointees, declared that Dred Scott remained the private property of his owners. They went further, implying that no state had the right to deny a citizen the right to put his private property, including slaves, anywhere he saw fit. The Dred Scott decision was handed down in 1857. Republican Party candidates for local office and the House of Representatives dominated the elections in northern states in 1858.
Presidential Elections of 1856 and 1860
In 1856 the Republican Party overtook the Whig Party to become the great rival of the Democratic Party. But it was not simply a reformed and renamed Whig Party. The Whigs had been a national party; the Republicans were almost all in the non-slave states. The Whig Party had been political largely in the sense that it was a grouping of people who sought government offices; the Republican Party was a party of principles, a party that took positions on a variety of issues and promised to change the laws of the land in fundamental ways.
The Democrats nominated James Buchanan for president in 1856. The Republicans nominated John C. Fremont, who used the "free soil, free labor, free speech, free men" slogan for his campaign. The American Party and the Whigs both nominated ex-president Millard Fillmore. Buchanan won well less than half the popular vote, but took a large majority in the Electoral Collage (1,838,169 and 174). Fremont received the second largest number of citizen votes and votes in the Electoral College (1,341, 264 and 114). Fillmore placed third with a substantial number of popular votes but won only Maryland (874,534 and 8).
The congressional elections of 1858 were heavily influenced by popular reaction to the Dred Scott decision. The American Party and Whigs continued their declines. The Democrats, though still a national party, were increasingly identified with slavery. The Republicans continued to strengthen their role in free-state politics.
The presidential election of 1860 is one of the most interesting in American history. The Whig-American-Republican grouping had lost the presidency in 1856 because their vote was divided. Yet the Democrats divided their vote in 1860. The reason was simple: the voters had become passionate about the issue of slavery. In fact, with slavers fighting anti-slavery militias in Kansas, and John Brown having conducted his anti-slavery raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, they were doing more than just voting about the issue. The Republicans were all against slavery, though a large majority of the party were willing to allow it to continue to exist in the southern slave states if its expansion was stopped and slaves became free when they stepped on free state soil (reversing the Dred Scott decision). The Democrats divided into two factions, basically southern and northern factions. Stephen Douglas was the mainstream, northern Democrat; his position was to let each state decide whether to allow slavery or not. That was not good enough for the more radical slave masters, who nominated John Breckinridge on a platform of extending slavery. The remnants of the southern Whig and American parties merged into yet another party, the Constitutional Union Party. Nominating John Bell, they emphasized the need to preserve the union, going to great lengths to take no stand on slavery or its extension.
While the Constitutional Union Party candidate split off some votes that might otherwise have gone to Lincoln, the Democrat vote was much more closely divided. As a result, though he only received 40% of the popular vote (1,866,452), Abraham Lincoln received 180 Electoral College votes, compared to 123 total for the other 3 candidates. All of Lincoln's Electoral College votes came from free states, that is, from northern states plus California and Oregon.
Civil War
Passion often makes for bad judgment, and the slavers proceeded to make a series of mistakes that forced Lincoln and the Republicans to abolish slavery.
When 1861 dawned, with Lincoln soon to be inaugurated, the slavers actually still held the political upper hand. The majority of Supreme Court justices were pro-slavery. Republicans did not have a majority in either house of Congress. To abolish slavery would require a constitutional amendment, which could be blocked by one-quarter of the states; slavers controlled almost one half of the states.
Yet before Abraham Lincoln had been inaugurated on March 4, 1861, 7 states announced they had seceded from the U.S. They joined together as the Confederate States of America, under the leadership of a leading member of the Democratic Party, Jefferson Davis.
Aside from the slavery issue, leading southern businessmen and politicians feared the Republicans for another reason. Some Republican politicians, including Lincoln, a former lawyer for the railroads, were backed by northern businessmen, in particular the owners of railroad and manufacturing corporations. Cotton growers feared higher protective tariffs on imported manufactured goods; the south was already deeply indebted to northern bankers and merchants.
Another mistake of the southerners was not taking the matter to the Supreme Court. It is very possible that the Supreme Court, with 5 southern members on it, would have ruled that states have a right to secede. But to admit that the Supreme Court had any jurisdiction over them was as galling to the southern secessionists as it was to the northern abolitionists who evaded the Fugitive Slave laws and Dred Scott ruling.
Not content to rule over a greatly diminished United States, the Republican Party and others who opposed secession (many northern Democrats were pro-slavery but anti-secession) forced a civil war upon the nation. There were two important effects of the Civil War upon the Republican Party (aside from the lasting effects of winning the war).
First, it became the party of Big Government and high taxes. It favored a centralized national government over state and local governance. The Republican war effort required high taxes to pay for men and their supplies, and that supported the industrialization process that went along with war. It became closely tied to northern manufacturing interests, which included a greatly enlarged class of millionaires created by war profiteering. Second, it took on the virtuous role of favoring the abolition of slavery and the improvement of the lives of economically deprived citizens, both Negro and those of European descent. This role is highlighted by the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided free land to western settlers.
These two roles corresponded to two ‘wings" of the party, the moderate wing and the Radical Republicans.
It was the Radical Republicans who supported the Confiscation Act (freeing the slaves of soldiers fighting the union), the Emancipation Proclamation, which was intended to abolish slavery in the confederate states, and the 13th Amendment, which did abolish slavery in the re-united states. They also pushed for the established the Freedmen's Bureau.
The Negro Wing of the Republican Party
In order to remain President in a war-weary nation, in the 1864 contest the Republicans had combined with pro-union, pro-war Democrats into the Union Party. Lincoln had taken Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, as his Vice-Presidential running mate. When Lincoln was assassinated the country suddenly had a Democrat for president and a Republican Congress led by the Radical Republicans. They denied the now-defeated southern former-slavers the right to sit in Congress; set up the Committee on Reconstruction to rule the southern states; and fought with President Johnson to the point of attempting to impeach him.
In 1866 and 1868 Negro voters helped elect Republican congresses and a new Republican President, Ulysses S. Grant. Radical Republican control of Congress resulted in all male Americans, regardless of their origins or skin color, receiving the right to vote upon passage of the 15th Amendment in 1870. The former slave states also remained under military occupation until new state constitutions, written to the liking of Radical Republicans, were in place.
White southerners, with few exceptions, became even more solidly identified with the Democratic Party. Many could not run for office or vote because of their records as traitors. Freed slaves, with few exceptions, joined the Republican Party, giving it a presence in the south for the first time. Many Negroes were elected to local and state offices. For the ex-slavers the situation was intolerable, and the solution was terrorism.
The Ku Klux Klan was the terrorist wing of the southern Democratic Party. In locality after locality, then state after state, former slaves were scared away from voting, and then from even being registered to vote. Until the Great Depression most black Americans would be Republicans; in the South they would constitute most of the Republican Party. However, after 1876 few black Americans were able to vote in the southern states. As a result black politicians could not be elected to office; in the South no Republicans could be elected to office at all; and the influence of blacks within the national party was minimal.
Wall Street Republicans
Starting with the civil war and accelerating into the 20th century the United States economy was rapidly industrialized. Even the agricultural economy was being mechanized, so that fewer people's labor sufficed to grow and harvest bountiful crops of wheat and corn. Displaced farmers migrated to the towns and cities. Even food came to be processed in great factories. Corporations were the main form of organization of the large-scale business that grew during this period. Much of politics of the era consisted of struggles between the wealthy, who owned stock in the corporations, and those who labored for wages, ran smaller businesses, or continued to farm on a small scale. Since the Republican Party both dominated the national government and dominated the northern state governments where manufacturing was concentrated, controlling the party was important to the men of great wealth. By using their wealth to support the campaigns of politicians, who in turn used all their power to help their donors, wealthy Americans came to dominate the Republican Party. Radical Republicans lost elections to business-sponsored candidates, and the business of the Republican Party came to be protecting corporate interests. After this point we may refer to the controlling elite of the Republican Party as Wall Street Republicans.
In 1872 a group of anti-corruption minded Republicans formed the Liberal Republican party and nominated newspaper editor Horace Greeley as their presidential candidate. The Democrats, eager to rebuild their party, decided to nominate Greeley as well. But with Grant still a war hero, the Democrats still the party of treason, and many black Americans still able to vote, it was any easy victory for Grant. Two demands of the Liberal Republicans were adopted by the mainstream Republicans. Except for 500 ex-confederate leaders, former rebels had their voting rights, and their right to run for office, restored. Civil service reform was also attempted.
The Presidential election of 1876 provides a good view of the changing social and political landscape. The Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, the Republicans Rutherford B. Hayes. The Klan had done its job: the Democrats swept the southern states excepting two remaining under military governance, South Carolina and Louisiana, plus Florida, then a sparsely populated state with only 4 electoral votes. The winner was disputed in those three states. After much bargaining Hayes was given the Presidency, but only after he promised to pull the remaining federal troops out of the South and, effectively, to do nothing about the disenfranchisement of black voters by the Democratic Party.
Despite more charges of corruption and economic hard times, the Republicans were able to hold onto majorities in Congress until the mid-term elections of 1882. The Democrat's combination of having a Protestant, white-racist wing in the south and a Catholic, immigrant-based, urban wing in the North, was proving to be too powerful for the Republicans. In 1884 the Republican presidential candidate James G. Blaine lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland in another close election. But for wealthy men and their corporations, this was not a problem; they controlled both parties quite effectively. The Supreme Court was filled with former corporate lawyers; it could be relied on to overrule state legislature or even a Congress that went against corporate wishes. With both parties dominated by business, a new movement arose. The Farmers Alliance, the Populist Party, labor unions, anarchism, and socialism all were important components of American politics in the late 1880's.
It is important to note that the average Republican voter of the era was not rich, corrupt, or mean-spirited. Most Republicans were farmers, tradesmen, or factory workers who had fought with the Union during the Civil War. They believed in hard work and honest business dealings; they were assets to their communities. Often they voted Republican because the only other choice was to vote Democrat. When offered an honest politician to vote for, or a Progressive Republican candidate, they usually availed themselves to the opportunity. Corporate domination of the Republican Party was carried out in backrooms and by creating a party machine that would see that corporate-friendly candidates were nominated.
Sugar, Hanna, McKinley and War
Many businessmen had great influence in politics at the end of the 19th century, but most were content with high tariffs (customs taxes on imported manufactured goods) and freedom from regulations. The Sugar Trust, however, took control of United States politics for profit to a new level: it required war, and it got war.
A prelude to the main show was provided by Hawaii, where a treaty had granted U.S. rights to a naval base in Pearl harbor in 1887. In 1893, aided by U.S. troops, American sugar cane growers overthrew the native government and asked for Hawaii to be annexed to the United States. But by the time a bill for that was ready in the U.S. Senate, Grover Cleveland had been elected President. He sent a commission to Hawaii that found most Hawaiians wanted to remain independent. No further action was taken until after a much bigger sugar fight.
Sugar magnate Henry Havemeyer had a few problems even after he became fabulously rich and the controlling person in the Sugar Trust. His factories turned raw cane sugar into the crystal white powder that had been a mainstay of world trade for centuries. Not only was very little sugar cane grown in the U.S. (mostly in Louisiana), but some U.S. farmers wanted to grow and refine sugar beets to compete with cane. What the Sugar Trust needed was cheap, untaxed imports of raw sugar, but very high tariffs on competing imported refined sugar. Congress was willing to go along (Havemeyer had perfected the stock-tip bribe: Senators could get rich quick by simply buying and selling sugar trust stock on Havemeyer's instructions) on the high tariffs for imported refined sugar, but Louisiana Senators vigorously opposed low tariffs on raw sugar.
Various interests in the U.S. had long coveted Cuba and other islands in Spain's American empire. Havemeyer determined to buy himself a President and a war. While it is well known that Mark Hanna raised vast sums of money to insure William McKinley triumphed over Democrat William Jennings Bryan in the 1896 Presidential election, the role of the Sugar Trust in that election has been overlooked. McKinley owed Havemeyer a war; many American expansionists like Theodore Roosevelt wanted a war anyway. Delay was necessary only because Havemeyer needed to have Citibank buy up sugar plantations in Cuba and Puerto Rico that would become vastly more valuable after the war. Forget the explosion of the Maine: America was going to war regardless. McKinley made demands of the Spanish, had them met fully, and then made even more aggressive demands that no nation would find acceptable.
On April 11, 1898 McKinley asked Congress to declare war, and Democrats and Republicans alike were happy to do it. Spain had already lost the Philippines, excepting Manila, to native rebels, and was barely holding its own against Cuban rebels. On August 12, 1998, the Spanish signed an armistice. 500 Americans had died in battle, while 5000 had died of tropical diseases.
In the Philippines the defeat of the Spanish started an even greater war: one against the Filipino people themselves. They fought guerrilla style; probably 1,000,000 died, many of them civilians; and 4,324 American soldiers were killed. In 1901 the Filipino leader, Emilio Aguinaldo, was captured. Most sugar plantations had new American owners. In 1942 the Japanese "liberated" the Philippines from the United States; in 1946, after driving out the Japanese, the U.S. finally allowed the Philippines to become an independent nation.
Teddy Roosevelt and the Progressives
The heritage of the Radical and Liberal Republicans was partly buried by the rise of the powerful, corporate and increasingly conservative business wing of the party. But the same economic, technical and cultural changes that affected the entire nation affected the ordinary Republican citizens who often had much input into local politics even when corrupt men occupied higher office.
As the 20th century dawned the reform movement became a tidal wave. A number of streams of citizens' demands came together and fed into each other. Even some demands of socialists gained an audience among Republicans who had felt the brunt of the predatory tactics of the gigantic business corporations. Writers, including the muckrakers, novelists writing books like Frank Norris's The Octopus about Republican farmers being crushed by Republican railroad barons, and non-fiction like Thorstein Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class, had a notable influence on the Republican faithful. The financial panic of 1907 also undermined people's belief in the infallibility of the free market.
Anger at the patent drug industry, the alcohol industry, and the food industry was widespread. Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, had become President in 1901 when President McKinley was assassinated. Though he had been a promoter of the Spanish-American and then the Philippine-American wars, and was from a very wealthy family, Roosevelt had shown concern for the plight of the poor when serving as New York police commissioner. During Roosevelt's presidency the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act were passed in 1906. The conservation on national forests had started under Republican President Harrison in 1891; but Roosevelt pushed hard on this issue. He placed some 125 million acres in federal reserves, about 3 times the total of all of his predecessors.
While the reformers, known as the Progressive Movement, could be found in both political parties (and in third parties), they had more influence, during this period, in the Republican Party. In addition to Roosevelt, well-known Progressive Republicans included governor Robert ("Fighting Bob") La Follette of Wisconsin, California's governor Hiram Johnson, and governor Charles Evans Hughs of New York State. Issues like getting the right of women to vote cut across party lines, with suffragettes in Republican states working within the Republican Party.
In 1911 the National Progressive Republican league was formed to oust President Taft and get a progressive in the White House. Roosevelt decided to head the progressives and won most of the Republican primaries in 1912. But Taft controlled a majority of delegates to the nominating convention and received the nomination.
The Progressives thought Teddy could beat both the Republicans and the Democrats, so they split and formed the Progressive Party. The Democrats nominated the racist, but otherwise posing as progressive, Woodrow Wilson. Of course Wilson won and the Republicans would not regain the Presidency until 1920.
Roaring Back in the 20's
The 1920's were a critical period for the Republican Party. While the party would contain a progressive or liberal wing until the 1970's, during the 1920's the Wall Street wing gained an ascendency which it never lost. Partly this was because of President Wilson's performance in office, which led to a landslide in 1920 for Republican presidential candidate Warren G. Harding over Democrat nominee James M. Cox. It was the first presidential election in which women could vote, and they voted Republican.
After a postwar recession the American economy continued the process of rapid industrialization. The European industrial powers had worn themselves out, but America had entered the war only after selling them vast amounts of arms and food. Because the U.S. had spent relatively little on the war, its taxes were relatively low, and manufacturers had a global competitive advantage. Harding appointed men who believed businesses needed no regulation to the agencies that were supposed to regulate business. An ardent anti-conservationist, Albert Fall, was appointed Secretary of Interior.
At the same time businessmen were terrified of the Communist revolution that had taken place in Russia (with failed attempts in several other countries). Conservative groups labeled anyone demanding any reform a communist. Of course there were actual communists, belonging to the American Communist Party, which took orders from Moscow, but most progressives wanted reforms through democratic change, not a dictatorship created by a bloody revolution.
While the economy grew, the stock market ran wild. Taxes on the rich were reduced by two-thirds by the sympathetic Republican Congress. Tariff's on imported goods were greatly increased, supporting prices American manufacturers could charge at the expense of farmers and consumers. Scandals were plentiful, notably the Teapot Dome scandal. Meanwhile organized businessmen made black-market profits selling alcohol to the thirsty, a business made possible by the passage of the Prohibition amendment in 1919.
Harding died in office of natural causes and was succeeded by Calvin Coolidge. Republicans had another fling with Progressive ideas in the 1924 election, when some split again from the main party and nominated Bob La Follette for President. Calvin Coolidge led the main party ticket. The Democrats nominated a conservative Wall Street lawyer, John W. Davis. This time the Republican split did not prevent a Republican landslide. But Cal only served one term. The Republican nominee in 1928 was Herbert Hoover.
It is difficult to imagine now how popular Herbert Hoover was in 1928. He and the Republicans were so popular it looked as if the Democratic Party might cease to exist. He had become famous during World War I for getting food to the starving in Belgium. He had a good record as Secretary of Commerce; a little too good for the crooked politicians and their businessmen friends. The Democrats nominated Al Smith, who was devoted to making alcohol legal again. That and his Catholicism made him unpopular even in the "solid South" where the Klan, the backbone of the Democratic Party, was almost as anti-Catholic as it was anti-Negro.
Hoover received 21,391,381 votes to Smith's 15,016,443. Smith carried only the 5 solidest states of the Solid South. Hoover was sworn in as President on March 4, 1929. No one knew it then, but the stock market had already peaked.
The Great Depression and a Half-century in the Minority
The exodus of farmers, especially tenant farmers and laborers, for factory jobs continued during the 1920s. Agriculture had not prospered with the rest of the economy during the 1920's. Hoover tried to help by signing the Agricultural Marketing Act in June of 1929. It established a Farm Board that hoped to raise prices of agricultural products. But farmer's unsold surpluses were so large that it never achieved its goals.
By October of 1929 the stock market was down noticeably, though the economy itself was still going strong. Savvy investors like Joseph Kennedy were selling their stocks for cash. Confidence in quick paper stock profits began to wain, and then everyone wanted the paper profits they had accumulated in the 1920's converted to cash on the same day, October 29, 1929. Many speculators had borrowed money to play the market; they were forced to sell their stocks to cover the debts in their margin accounts.
The beloved free-market religion of the most ardent business Republican's had failed (the truest believers blamed the failure on government meddling, the very Devil in their world view). Suddenly realizing they were much poorer, stock speculators cut back on spending. Banks, panicking, called in loans. Demand for goods and services fell, businesses laid off workers, and consumption fell even further.
Herbert Hoover was President when it happened, and Herbert Hoover continued as President until the beginning of 1933. Though Hoover tried various measures, often Congress failed to support him (Republicans because they did not believe in government meddling in business, Democrats because they were delighted to see the nation blame Republicans for the problems). Among the measures tried by Hoover were public projects like the Boulder Dam, creation of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, and the Norris-La Guardia Act that essentially legalized organizing labor unions.
The Democrats won the Congressional (and state and local) elections of 1930, then the Presidency in 1932. In a few short years the Republicans had gone from being the majority party to the minority party.
It is important to note that progressive "liberal" Republicans gained many important positions, notably in Congress, during the Depression years. Many of the acts that are now associated with the Democratic Party, such as Social Security, were in fact passed with broad support from both parties.
Not only would the "business" wing of the Republican Party need decades to see their party have an equal footing with the Democrats, but they would have to work together with a liberal/Progressive wing that had far more influence inside the party.
Towards the end of World War II and during Truman's presidency in particular the Republican Party gained mainly through some voters' irritation at the party in power. In 1946, for instance, the Republicans briefly had a majority in Congress. This success was capped with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower as President in 1952. But the former WWII commander was much more popular than the party he headed. Eisenhower won by a landslide, but the Republicans barely managed majorities in Congress. An important change took place in the South, however. Florida, Texas and Tennessee went for Eisenhower; the Republican Party began to acquire the southern constituency it would turn to for success after the 1960's.
Eisenhower's Republicans were content to undo what they saw as the most excessive New Deal legacies, such as wage and price controls, but left such programs as Social Security intact. They favored less government-held electricity creation and allowed corporations to begin building nuclear power plants. The economy was again expanding of its own accord, pumped up by a rising birth rate (the baby boom), exports (again, Europe lay prostrate), and pent-up demand from WWII and Korean War era rationing. America still liked Ike in 1956, but the Democrats still held their own in Congress.
Richard Nixon was Ike's Vice-Presidential running mate in 1956 and played an important role within the administration. He was fiercely patriotic and anti-communist, but also adamant that black Americans in the South should be treated as full citizens. In 1954 the Supreme Court, mainly appointed during the New Deal years, declared segregated (by race) schools to be illegal, even if the schools were truly "separate but equal." Southern Democrats and the Klan opposed, sometimes with violence, the integration of southern public schools. In one incident Eisenhower, at Nixon's urging, had to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, where Democratic governor Faubus tried to prevent the enrollment of "Negro" (the term used in that era) children. The Civil Rights bill of 1957, the first since Reconstruction, was passed with support from Republicans and northern Democrats.
In 1960, allegedly using massive fraud in Illinois, the Democrats won back the presidency by a hair. During the 1960's the Republicans struggled to remain relevant. Blacks enrolling to vote in the formerly segregated southern states forgot that the Republicans were the party of Lincoln and the Democrats were the party of Lynching. African-Americans would be the most reliable component of the Democratic party for the remaining decades of the 20th century, and they tipped the scales strongly against the Republicans.
Nixon and Revival
After Vice-President Richard Nixon lost his bid for the Presidency in 1960, what then passed as the ultra-conservative wing gained control of the party. They nominated Barry Goldwater for President in 1964; Lyndon Johnson, who had become President after Kennedy was assassinated, crushed Goldwater in the polls. But Johnson had fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident and involved the U.S. in a new land war in Asia, in Vietnam. He lost the support of anti-war Democrats, then decided not to run in 1968.
The Republicans next moved back to a centrist, Richard M. Nixon, for their Presidential nominee. The Democrats nominated another centrist, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice-President. The Democrats under Johnson had extended the New Deal to include what were called Great Society social welfare programs, also known as the War on Poverty. Nixon held to the traditional Republican belief that the only viable way out of poverty was hard work; programs appropriate in a Great Depression were not needed in the booming economy of 1960's America. Enough working class and middle class Americans agreed with him to elect him President. But the country was still Democratic; both houses of Congress had Democratic majorities, so Nixon had to gain some votes from Democratic congressmen to get his ideas enacted.
Richard Nixon had several remarkable achievements in office. In foreign policy Nixon recognized that Communism was not monolithic. By forging an alliance with Communist China he accelerated the breakup of the communist block countries and helped China regain its status as a great civilization. In domestic policy Nixon realized that the world had changed and that certain reforms had to be put into place to deal with those changes. Notably he signed into law the creation of an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In politics Nixon was able to see how the Republican Party might become a majority party again. As the more conservative of the two parties, and in particular the party favoring more individual initiative and less taxes, it was natural that it should find a way to break up the Democratic Party's monopoly in the southern states. The 1972 presidential election would demonstrate that strategy could work.
The War in Vietnam was the biggest issue in the 1972 election. The Democrats nominated George McGovern, who wished to withdraw from Vietnam and was very much in favor of extending New Deal and Great Society programs. The more conservative Democratic Party bosses, though temporarily unable to boss the grassroots around, nevertheless undermined McGovern's campaign. The new black voters for McGovern were counter-weighted by white, conservative, working and middle-class voters, especially in the south, voting Republican for the first time. Nixon won every state but Massachusetts, but the Democrats still held control of Congress.
There may have been an element of racism in the South when white voters began voting for Republican candidates, and later even changed their party registration. After all, blacks were now Democrats. But the main reason white voters switched was because most had little desire, themselves, for social welfare programs. Religion played a role too; the Republican Party was traditionally Protestant, as were white southern voters. These southern voters were also very anti-communist; the Democrats, and McGovern in particular, appeared to be soft on Communism.
But Richard Nixon had made a serious error in judgment on two points. Despite his great achievements, Watergate and the Vietnam War would destroy his reputation. In Vietnam he underestimated how badly the Vietnamese wanted to be free from American domination. No matter how much he threatened, no matter what horrible weapons he unleashed on the people of Vietnam, they continued to fight. Expanding the war into Cambodia backfired, strengthening the Cambodian Communists. Finally Nixon had to negotiate a withdrawal of American troops; after a face-saving period of time, the Communists took control of all of Vietnam. As a result Nixon lost the support of the militarists, who blamed him for losing a war, and of the pacifists, who blamed him for prosecuting it before losing it.
His second great error was unleashing his "dirty tricks" team on the Democrats. In retrospect he would have won the 1972 election easily by simply running an honest campaign. But the dirty-tricks gang was caught burglering the offices of the Democrats in the Watergate Hotel. Nixon tried to cover up his role in the affair, but a committee of Congress kept investigating until Nixon was compelled to resign to avoid impeachment. Since Vice-President Agnew had resigned due to a scandal in 1973, the new Vice-President, Gerald Ford, became the new President of the United States.
The Watergate scandal and disillusionment after the loss of the war in Vietnam temporarily stopped the Republican party's growth. Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a pardon, but the voters would not pardon Gerald when he ran for President in 1976. The Democrats, worried about their eroding base in the South, nominated a moderate Georgia former governor, Jimmy Carter, and regained the White House.
Reagan and Resurgence
But in the 1976, 1978, and 1980 elections the tendency of the country to realign around the parties on a new basis continued, with the results most visible in the south, where many formerly Democratic voters and elected politicians switched to being Republicans. The conservative wing of the Democratic party was weakened by these defections to the Republicans.
Since the Great Depression the only way the Republicans had been able to get a President elected was by choosing a moderate candidate like Eisenhower or Nixon. That was about to change. The Goldwater Republicans had never given up. As memories of the Depression evaporated, and the results of the 60's drug culture became apparent, their appeal to conservative values and free-market ideology gained ground in the party and with voters. Republicans nominated ultra-conservative former movie actor (and former Governor of California) Ronald Reagan for President in 1980. Jimmy Carter ran for a second term. His defeat is usually attributed to an economic recession, post-Vietnam bad feelings, and the fall of an American puppet, the Shaw of Iran. During the election campaign the revolutionaries in Iran held U.S. consulate members hostage. Carter appeared to be weak and ineffective in dealing with the situation.
From 1932 until 1980 American politics were dominated by the Democratic Party and the idea that the main purpose of government is social welfare and economic expansion through increasing the incomes (and spending) of the working class. Since 1980 (up until this essay is being written in 2005) politics has been dominated by the Republican Party and the idea that the main purposes of government is providing order and economic expansion through increasing the profits of business enterprises. Generally, voters have been happy with economic expansion no matter what the cause (and unhappy with stagnation or decline).
It was called the Reagan Revolution but in fact the Reagan era kept most of the New Deal and Great Society programs, though some were scaled back. It was in foreign policy that Reagan made the most dramatic changes. He escalated the cold war, not by an actual attack, but by increasing military spending to a degree that the Communist block countries could not match. He also found methods, some of them of questionable legality, to undermine socialist and left wing governments, in particular that of Nicaragua. These strategies cumulated (after Reagan left office) in the breaking away of the Eastern European states from Soviet dominance starting with Poland. A regime change in Russia and the breakup of the Soviet union followed.
While domestic policies ended the Reagan era little changed, the positive experience of having an expanding economy and victory over communism greatly strengthened not only the credibility of the Republican Party with American voters, but also the dominance of the conservative wing within the Republican Party.
The Christian Right and Newt Gingrich
In 1988 in the Republican presidential primaries television evangelist Pat Robertson began as a strong contender but withdrew from the race after his claim to have been in combat as a marine in the Korean War was shown to be false. George Bush, Reagan's Vice-President, became the Republican nominee and then President of the United States. He one-term presidency was characterized by a war against Iraq following the Iraq invasion of Kuwait, an oil-rich kingdom on the Persian Gulf.
Despite its Presidential victories in 1980, 1984, and 1988, the Republican Party was still far behind the Democrats in registered voters. To the extent that the two parties were a reflection of economic classes (with a majority of welfare and working class families registered Democrat, a majority of upper-middle and upper class families registered Republican, and the lower-middle to middle-middle class up for grabs), the Republicans were in a corner. Pressing policies like deregulation, lower corporate taxes, and a lower inheritance tax, all highly desired by the dominant Wall Street clique within the party, might have eroded what support they did have among the less wealthy voters.
It was clear to party strategists, which is to say Wall Street Republicans, that they needed to find a way to get votes from people whose economic needs they did not serve. Their success in breaking up the Solid South, the bastion of the Democratic Party until the 1970s, pointed the way. They would take advantage of non-economic, cultural issues to bring into the Party a huge group of voters who were not motivated, or not very motivated, by Republican economic policies.
The target group was fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. Though found everywhere in the nation, these individuals were most prevalent in the former Confederate states. They included some, but not all, Southern Baptists. Politically they had often been apathetic, with low voter turn outs for elections. But that was changing. A set of issues was chosen that would appeal to them, and with the financial backing of Wall Street republicans, a new set of political and religious leaders emerged. Pat Robertson has already been mentioned; other leaders included Reverend Jerry Falwell, founder of Moral Majority, and Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. The issues that mobilized this movement were demands to make abortions (and even birth control) illegal; to allow or enforce prayer in public schools; and to make the Bible a basis for law.
While this new Religious Right, as it was called, helped elect President Bush in 1988, the alliance was insufficient to give him a victory in 1992. For eight years Democrat Bill Clinton would sit in the White House, but he was under siege from the Republicans, who gained majorities in the House of Representatives starting in 1994. This was the heyday of radio commentator Rush Limbaugh, who managed to direct people's anger against Bill Clinton, his first lady, Hillary, and all things "Liberal." Rush's show, spiked with humor at Democrats' expense, was the most popular show on radio. The Republican representatives in Congress were led by Newt Gingrich, who in the 1994 campaigns introduced the Contract with America. This avoided some big, divisive issues like school prayer and gun control. Instead it focused on reforming how Congress operated, tax cuts, tort (lawsuit) reform, and welfare reform (decreasing payments and eligibility).
Moments of Triumph: George W. Bush and the 2000 and 2004 elections
Despite having, or perhaps because of having, Bill Clinton in the White House, the period between 1992 and 2000 saw solid gains for the Republicans in Congress and at the local level. Focusing on cultural issues and promises to cut taxes was paying off.
The Democrats nominated Bill Clinton's Vice-President, Al Gore, for the Presidency in 2000. After a fierce primary struggle George W. Bush, one of the sons of former President George Bush and recently governor of Texas, won the Republican nomination. The Bush family had ties to Wall Street and in particular the petrochemical industry, but so did the Gore family. With little to distinguish the two candidates, and with the Christian Right as campaign foot soldiers, George W. Bush squeaked to a victory. The election was so close that a dispute arose over who had won in the state of Florida, where Jeb Bush, George's brother, was governor. Whoever won in the state would receive its Electoral College votes and win the Presidency. After a lengthy legal dispute the Supreme Court of the United States, voting 5 to 4 on strictly partisan lines, decided in Bush's favor.
With many American's wondering if George W. Bush had fairly won the election, Bush set about his agenda. The Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the Supreme Court; it was the first time since 1928 that Republicans controlled all the branches of government. Before President Bush could do much to implement his agenda, however, the Al Quada attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon took place on September 1, 2001. The stock market, overheated because the Federal Reserve had kept interest rates too low during the boom (sometimes called the Internet Bubble) of the late 1990's, plummeted, and the rest of the economy quickly followed.
The Republicans had come to be in charge just in time for another disaster that might make them look like Herbert Hoovers and lead to decades of Democratic Party rule. But George W. Bush was no Hoover. He responded vigorously to the Al Quada attack by invading Afghanistan. He secured a future supply of oil for the United States by invading Iraq after falsely claiming Iraq was attempting to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Rather than increasing social programs to help the country out of the recession, he pushed through tax cuts (that had been planned by Republicans for decades) that favored large businesses, heirs to fortunes, upper-middle class and upper class Americans. While this created a huge federal deficit, it did help revive the economy when combined with the Federal Reserve's lowering of interest rates.
The American voters rewarded George W. Bush and the Republicans by returning them to office in the 2004 elections (Bush's own victory was narrow; he received 62 million votes to Democrat John Kerry's 59 million). This is particularly remarkable given the both the poor performance of the American economy during his first term and the deterioration of employee and small business incomes. Many of the better paying jobs were moved overseas, and the destruction of small, independently owned retailers was particularly fast in this period.
At the time of the writing of this pamphlet, George W. Bush is President of the United States, the Republicans control a majority of the states, both Houses of Congress, and the Supreme Court. Agree with them or not, that is a major accomplishment for a political party.
At the same time, the Wall Street Republicans appear to be losing control of the party to the religious Republicans. So far the religious Republicans have supported the Wall Street program of reducing taxes on the rich (the capital gains tax, dividend tax, estate tax, and upper-income bracket taxes). But the anger of lower-class Republican voters is fueled as much by economic failure as by cultural values. There is a great potential for backlash against Wall Street, which was given its wish-list. In contrast the promises to make the cultural changes that motivated lower-class citizens to vote with the Republicans have not been met.
The triumph of the religious Republicans within the party might jeopardize the allegiance of the moderate Republicans who are not homosexual bashers or believers in the rapture; who might actually believe that women have a right to contraceptives, abortion, and divorce; or who realize that the same science that makes NASCAR racers run and allows people to watch the races on TV also is absolutely certain that species evolved through mutations and natural selection. Just as American's demanded Prohibition and then revolted against it when they got it, actually banning abortion, contraception, and divorce; forcing every child in America to pray in school from the Evangelical prayer-book; and returning the TV to a 1950's-style sexual innocence, would almost certainly drive voters to elect less puritanical politicians. Which party might come out ahead in that backlash would depend on how the various parties position themselves.
Really? You lost me at hello.
One more time "PLEASE" !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Due to the fact that gas prices have more than doubled since Obama took office, the hot air that he is going to lower them is now twice as cheap......YIPEEEE!!!
BARRY/BIDEN/BIG BIRD 2012 - Big night for Joey "Gaffe".......
...and yet the GOP still refuses to acknowledge why energy prices were so low 4 years ago.
You don't suppose that has something to do Barry's energy policies the last 4 years do you?
Energey prices were so low 4 years ago because of President Obama's energy policy? Is that what you're saying?
bucsdad The President has no control over gas prices. That was taught in school. You wear you dunce hat well. We are producing more fuel than ever. Why don't you blame oil speculation? Thats where the problem is. The people who speculate should have to take delivery of the product before they could sell is again!
Obama and other prominent Democrats think otherwise:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQb_4hXLx2Q
Smitty -- How many links do you want to the left and media blaming President Bush for rising gas prices under his tenure? Get real and accept the blame for once. Real leaders, genuine leaders accept responsibility for the bad and the good under their tenure.
Hey Smitty....according to you LIB TARDS when Bush was president he had control of gas prices.....what changed? The cap on Barry is just fine. I think you need to adjust that propeller on your "beanie cap"....it's effecting your view of REALITY.
Ben,
Then perhaps you can explain why energy prices were so low 4 years ago given your statement.
How does the President affect gas prices? Much of the cost is that nasty system that rich people have to make free money with little risk, no work, and no jobs created.....commodity trading...which has the lowest tax rate now and the President would like to bring that rate up to normal.
Oh Oh the 3 stooges are ganging up on me. See bucsdad can't spell liberal. The best part here is the 3 stooges know I'm right.
bucsdad,
Just another gloom and doom poster.
Here in the heartland, our unemploymnet rate is 5.9%. Seeing signs for Christmas jobs in the malls. House sales have picked up. Increase of 12% in median price sale of homes. Shortsales and forecolsures are the lowest in four years. Interest rate are at historic lows.
And MN has Obama 53% to Romney43%. Put us in the blue clomun.
Obama/Biden 2012
@DaNoid -- Please provide me an example(s) of what you mean. I must admit I am not clear.
Ben your never clear.
Please answer the question Smitty. Were Obama, Hillary, Babs Boxer, Pelosi, et al., all wrong about Bush being responsible for high gas prices?
Again, the irony.
I remember gas prices being $4.00 per gallon in Summer 2008. They are less than that now here in PA.
The price of gas four years ago was similar to what it is now. That is right gas was near $3.5 down from a high of $4 plus in the summer of 2008. In addition the cost of gas most unfair minded people quote that Obama raised is based on the price when he was inagurated in Jan 2009. By then since the global economy was staggering from a near fatal economic blow, prices had fallen to near $2. The price was so low in Jan 2009 because there was a lack of demand as people feared a global depression. It is economics when the economy has weak demand prices are low. So everyone should stop trying to blame Obama's policies for a doubling of gas prices, because it is not true.
_____________
By Ben Rooney, CNNMoney.com staff writer
October 7, 2008: 5:36 AM ET
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- If there's one bright spot in a bad economy, it's that gasoline prices have fallen, and they're expected to drop even further.
As the global economy falters, demand for oil has dropped. And since the price of oil makes up about half of the cost of a gallon of gas, analysts see more relief ahead at the pump.
"We ought to see prices drop pretty quickly," said American Automobile Association spokesman Geoff Sundstrom. "We're well on our way to $3 gas within the next week or two."
The national average price for a gallon of regular, unleaded gasoline fell 2.4 cents to $3.480 from $3.504, according to a daily survey released Tuesday by AAA. That's down 18% from an all-time high of $4.114 a gallon hit on July 17.
Hey North Star....
More like "LA LA land"....however, I'm ecstatic that you have seen signs of improvement. The fact is there are too many people suffering in this country and its nice to see some glimmers of hope. But, its also NAIVE to think this country is ANY where it needs to be under Barry. By ANY measure those are the facts. I could site some of the more "salient" facts around that but folks like you wouldn't buy them anyway. Let's face it, OBAMA has lied about HOPE and CHANGE and has been an ineffective leader for the vast majority of people in this country. If he had done half of what he promised...I'd be first in line to vote for him. He hasn't, simple as that.
But, if you are DUMB enough to buy his crap a second time around...have at it. I suspect there are a lot of people out there that don't feel the same way.
Hey, why don't you send that news clipping to the folks in Souther Cal and see how they feel about it? I'm sure your ill-conceived defense of Obama and his failed energy policies will lift their spirits. Unfortunately, they can't spend that "hot air" at the pump.
joanna smith1 Yes they were wrong. Does that make you feel better? So are the republican/tea party folks going to admit their wrong to blame the President about high gas prices. Now that would be really be ironic.
The babble I see here about energy policies and costs during President Obama's administration is as good an example of right-wing (lack of) thought process as one can find. Out of one side of their mouths comes the claim that Obama has no energy policy, and in the same breath, out of the other side of their mouth comes the claim that his policies have caused gas prices to double, triple, quadruple (pick a number) during his term.
That kind of "what ever it takes" hypocrisy goes to the core of why Romney will lose in a few weeks - most Americans just don't like what they're seeing and hearing from the right. They're sick of the kinds of people the righties are showing themselves to be. No matter what the issue, jerks like Joe in Albany, the self-appointed spokesman on everything, and who finds himself the funniest man on the internet, manage to twist and shout, regardless if their rants have any truth or reason in them. As an aside, Joey's H and A keys must be just about worn out, and the L's and O's are close behind. Anyway, it's becoming clear that this election will be determined to a large extent by how much most Americans don't want to be associated with people like you guys. If you think that's not so, then explain why the precipitous drop in the number of people who identify themselves as Republicans. Check out PEW Researches report on this. So it's not so much that voters don't like positions taken by the right, it's that they just don't like YOU!
bucsdad,
It is the old glass half empty or half full.
I am a optimist. The economy is trending in the right direction. Sure it is a slow recovery. The financial meltdown in 2007-2008 will take ten years to get back to full recovery .
Both you and I have weathered the worst. I think consumers have alot of pent up demand for durable good. Consumer spending is about 70% of our economy.
I am voting for Obama because he did bring change. The heath care law will for the first time in our history tackles the uninsured in our country. It has already had a positive effect as others today on this thread have posted.
Romney is nothing but a trickle down 1%er who for sure does not understand the life of middle class folks who do struggle and work hard everyday .
We both will see the election returns in November. I am optimist that Obama will win. You are for the other guy. But we both want our government to work for all of its citizens.
The truth is the gas price was OVER $4 four years ago. There are moves the president can make to lower gas prices such as releasing the emergency reserves. But lowering gas prices will not address the major issue of being tethered to mid east oil. Only moving to a balanced approach to produce energy will do that. President Obama's policy does exactly that. As more wind and sun power comes on line you may see a lowering of fuel prices.
Anybody else here old enough to remember when gas was 19 cents a gallon?
And a question, why are the republican congress people blocking taking the oil subsidies away from the oil companies. Why are we still giving them money so they can gouge us at the pump?
the problem with most republican's memories is that their reproductive appendages are generally longer (and that ain't sayin' much either). Gasoline prices as Dubya's administration was winding down in the summer of '08 was over $4 a gallon in most states. A quote from Media Matters, concerning such reads "Following GOP strategy, Fox News is again blaming the Obama administration for rising gasoline prices -- a claim that has been repeatedly debunked by energy analysts. But back in the summer of 2008, when the average U.S. gasoline price hit a record high of $4.11, Fox said that "no President has the power to increase or to lower gas prices."
So you see, even Faux News spews declares the White House inhabitants have very little to do with prices at the pumps. Get over your lies and inability to remember what life was really like in the recent yesteryears Republicants!
da noid - energy prices were cheaper 4 years ago cause barry wasn't in office, libtard
ROBMEHOOD is Water-boarding Lies into his supporters Empty heads for Votes !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Do you know that America is a gasoline EXPORTER now? If you want to blame someone for high gas prices blame Big Oil and Wall Street.
US Gas Prices, Oil Price & the Shocking Truth
I think the Gas Prices are Rigged by the 1% !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
California 479 right now wast 4.99 oh but wait Obama said in 2023 cars will get doulble the milage oh boy I cant wait until then I will just eat chicken broth soup.
Hey North Star....I appreciate your sincerity. It's rare on these boards. I am not in favor of a total repeal of Healthcare reform. Although its not perfect (and it isn't, I'm in the healthcare industry) it took too long to pass it. On the other hand, I think the media has done an outstanding job of "demonizing" Mitt Romney. I went to college in Salt Lake, I know those of the LDS faith to be patriotic, hardworking, honest, family people. I believe that Romney will return prosperity to this country and as result, we will all benefit. I also believe that if Obama could have done that he would have done it by now. I think he has just plain run out ideas and as result he and his campaign has had to resort to personal attacks on the opposition instead of "touting" a record of success. Very disappointing indeed... I know I'm not going to convince anyone on this board around that....I think most of these folks are too far gone. And, they are entitled to vote how they like.....I agree you though, I think we all want the same thing for this country. Or, at least, I hope so.....
It funny how the sides of who' to blame for the high price of gas has flipped during this election cycle. 4 years ago it was Bush and his oil buddies who were getting rich on the profits from gas being high. Now the libs have changed horses mid stream and say the President has no control over gas prices. Of course the Reps. are saying the opposite. The truth is with oil being a world product we have to have a long term approach to oil and energy. Although clean energy has a place it is still a world run on oil based products and will be for the near future. Tapping our own oil resourses will have a long term effect but not so much on the price of gas but more by keeping those dollars here at home instead of sending them to the middle east. By the way those people hate us for the most part.
Wall Street bankers are justifying lofty oil “speculations” by claiming that the Middle East is under a growing threat of war, which could in turn damage the world’s oil supply and increase global demand (the reason for not lowering 2012 gas prices). While it is impossible to prove the true motivation behind the Wall Street oil speculation analysis going into this Summer, Wall Street bankers are making increased profit margins for themselves as a result of these sky high oil prices, which are in turn thrust upon American consumers.
California is responsible for their gas prices now. They need look no further than their own mirrors to see who caused it. If any of you whining about California gas prices had half a brain you would know that already. Ironic though, those whining the loudest are the very ones always pissing and moaning about California. Now all of a sudden you dimwits are sympathetic? And Rayray, if you are saying you live in Cali and can't afford the gas, well may I suggest you move or better yet, how about you pay attention to what it is being voted on in your own state. I know that asking a lot from someone who tends to whine just for the sake of whining but give it a try. You never know, you might actually learn something.
In preparation for tonight's debate...
6 Ways Joe Biden Can Win The VP Debate
6 Ways Paul Ryan Can Win The VP Debate
I’m hoping that tonight ole Joe spanks lyan Ryan hard and sends a message to his boss Willard that the President is coming for him during round 2
Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, please kick these two POS in the balls for we the people.
The best way Biden can win tonight's debate? Every time Ryan opens his mouth, just say "It Ain't So!", Joe!
P.S. - Don't forget to bring plenty of
lielye soap!Biden will look like a lost puppy tonight.
Empty chair Obama and empty suit Biden... tonight should be a "Big Fing Deal" in highlighting the ignorance of anyone willing to support these failures.
Neither V-P Joe Biden nor President Obama can be considered good debaters, but they are both good, honest men. You can't say that about the other side.
Tommy Biden will look like a lost puppy tonight.
Come back tomorrow and we can talk about it than. I know you will be back if he wins. But will you be back if he loses? Thats the question all America wants to know.
Amaze
That's one of the biggest mis-truths on this board.They have no honesty between them. Job1 Biden will get his head handed to him tonight and you will still say he won. You think Obama won the last debate so your opinion counts for nothing. Honesty and integrity are traits the President and Vice President and their followers know nothing about. You can keep spinning it anyway you like but they can't stand on their record. No accomplishments at all. Just Failure all around.
Yes Smitty, I will be back no matter who wins tonight.
Joe Biden's challenge is to recite Ryan/Romney previous position in a simple, short statement. Then, attack their current position. Joe's strength is keeping it simple, so most American voters can understand.
"There you go again" line could be used each time Ryan recites a new position on an issue. I'm sure the speechwriters or Biden or Obama can come up with a good line here.
It should be fun. I am very hopeful Biden will expose Ryan/Romney for what they are "political opportunists just flip-flopping away".
OBAMA/BIDEN 2012
tommy I will be back no matter who wins tonight.
Cool
Well, based on today's spirited political debate;
Apparently both sides are liars, and both sides are intellectually challenged for believing their own lies...
------------------------------------------------------------------
Thomas Jefferson Johnson: Terry, tell me something. With all this money coming in from both sides, how does anything ever get done?
Terry Corrigan: It doesn't. That's the genius of the system!
From "The Distinguished Gentleman"
R & R Remind me of Laure & Hardy !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
1 duck tape
2 duck tape
3 duck tape
4 duck tape
5 duck tape
6 duck tape
rukidding47....no, I don't think President Obama "won" that last debate, hell I think he also "lost" his debates with Hillary Clinton in that he seems too reluctant to attack, both were very civil and basically honest. Obama's debates with McCain were very civil and both were basically honest men too. Actually, I wish Americans were less concerned with declaring winners and losers in debates and more with looking at substance, consistency, and honesty.
Romney changed ALL his past positions, re-inventing himself again,...and lied effortlessly and often and was very good at it. In my opinion, Mitt presented himself better, looked rested, and well-rehearsed, confident. ...but he had no concern for the truth, so it was much easier for him.
http://i.imgur.com/TALVv.gif
Well, from yesterday's comments, I see that the Republicans' expectations for tonight's debate have been suitably lowered. Let's see.....Romney claims that poor little Paul Ryan hasn't debated anyone since high school - check. (Though since Joe Biden's last debate was against Sarah Palin, who couldn't make it past the third round of "Who's Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?", I'm not sure how much that one really counts). People who repeat long lists of "Biden-isms" one day suddenly decide he's a seasoned, experience debater the next - check. Martha Raddatz is totally in the tank for the Democrats - check. And of course, "Nobody decides their vote on the basis of the VP debate anyway" - check.
Then again, I also noticed yesterday that our friend Spanky has joined the chorus first started by JoAnnaSmith1 with her oft-repeated mantra that they on the right only see their leaders as "(somewhat) useful idiots" anyway.
Talk about "low expectations".
Personally, I think America deserves better than that.
Obama / Give him hell, Joe! 2012
JoAnne,
Safe to say they got their money's worth with those two!
fisty - "Safe to say they got their money's worth with those two"
Funny, that's how Mexico and China feel about Obama and Biden.
A Big Bird in the hand is worth two flip floppers hiding over there in the Bush.
JoAnne--I think the Republicans are so morally bankrupt that they think everyone else is too. This is why they see voter fraud everywhere---because they do it. And they accuse Martha Raddatz of unprofessionalism because they would be. Never mind that the debate hasn't even happened yet and that the President was friends with her EX-HUSBAND---that doesn't fit the narrative so they don't say it.
Bubble Burst
From the article above:
Now that the dust has settled, it’s back to reality for the Governor.
I have been saying this since August. This election is different from past elections in that the majority of Americans have made up their minds already.
This latest poll proves that.
There are NO undecided voters left.
After “Jolting” Joe Biden schools the Congressman tonight on what it takes to be a leader, and then next week, President Obama cleans the Governor’s clock, the Rovian “cooked” poles will favor the President once again for the rest of the race.
My assessment of tonight’s debate is to look for the Congressman to play the “sweet, blue-eyed innocent victim” to try to get the sympathy vote.
Tea Partiers LOVE to play the part of the victim.
Salud
Romney is like a Snake Oil Salesman running his mouth !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Yes a snake oil salesman that want to put you back 2 work and help america get back on track.
Debat or No debate, The aristocrat/elitist republicanCrimeCartelSoldiers MittTaxPittanceRommel and his PARTNER IN CRIME EddiMunster are preying on you Naive and "Hoping for a BIG turnaround" voters. The turnaround IS happening with Prez O NOW. DO NOT Trust, Under ANY Circumstances, Rommel and EddiMunster aka Lyin'Ryan. THEY ARE LYING TO YOU RIGHT NOW. Here is a very helpful link:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og35U0d6WKY&feature=player_detailpage
I find the PEW poll numbers odd to say the least and especially when it comes to Biden. Gaffes aside, I do not see how this man can have such 'skewed' unfavorability ratings. Any explanations from the Cousins? Please keep it smart, you might be graded.
Go Joe Biden. Time for a Home Run.
OBAMA IN 2012.
Or maybe two, like my favorite Yankee today, Raul Ibanez.
That would also be former Phillie Raul Ibanez, RTFS. Sigh.....just one more reason why the Fightin's are nowhere to be seen in the playoffs this year. Heard the play-by-play a couple of times on the radio this morning - sounds like it was really exciting!
@California Tom,
How are all of those liberal policies working for you out in California?
High gas prices check. Check
High unemployment. Check
The state and seveal municipalities going/already broke. Check
High rate of housing foreclosures. Check
My question for you is as follows. Liberal policies are obviously not working in your state. Are you just trying to make the rest of the nation as miserable as the state of California?
Tom - Time to watch your emperors new clothes disappear a little more. Putting Obama and Biden in non-scripted speaking engagements is the best way to dispell the media fantasy that has been pushed on America.
Joe Biden couldn't hit a home run if he was playing T-ball !
3 pitch strike out
How about that county in Alabama that is bankrupt?
Bankrupt Alabama county OKs budget with skipped bond payments | Reuters
California is doing ok, with the most jobs added in the nation.
Joe Binden is a ding bat win what?
"Joe Binden is a ding bat win what?"
Please tell me that people like this aren't registered to vote.....
mILKING IT, It seems that Alabama county you referred to now has a bunch of former county commissioners in prison for accepting bribes and kickbacks !
I guess Chicago style politics does not work to well in the South !! Maybe they need some Obama bucks or can tell him they are working on a new "green" sewer project for a handout ! LOL !!
miklkit: You obviously are not from Cali or you wouldn't have made that comment. This state is so blue it's blue. The idiot Governor Brown is a crook along with Finstein & Boxer (yes, they're still alive). When you count the jobs added to the nations total it means nothing to the state when your population is 40 million compared to the 42 other states with 10 mil and less. Besides, there are also millions of illegals unaccounted for as well. California's issues are what happens when you have a Democratic run government. Let's not let that continue happening to America!!
R/R 2012 to help America endure!!
As always you democraps don't have the full story. One large state has not reported and when they do these numbers will be adjusted up.
Another out right lie by this administration..Grabby on nothing..
Just wait until they get the tax bill in 2013. Talk about sticker shock for the middle class!
Taxes down, unemployment down, housing prices up, foreclosures down, federal spending down - what more do people want after the worst economic disaster in 83 years?
Not this: no plan, no disclosure, no transparency, no tax return, no specifics, no connection with the middle class - NO THANKS, WRONGME!!
Nashville_fan -
I think our friends on the right side of the aisle heads exploded from all the facts you posted.
Salud
Excellent job Nashville_Fan!
Job claims falls, but number's are incomplete. There is a large state's numbers missing from this report. Unfortunately they don't specify that in the report nor can we find out which state's numbers are missing.
Has anyone see this report?
Correction -Has anyone seen this report?
FYI - CNNMoney.com
Even it it where true they are part time job for xmaz at min wage we had the same bump last year.
How would you know that, we dont know what state its from. They are guessing its California.
thetotas:
Apparently I have you on ignore, so I have no idea what you said, but thanks for stopping by just the same! :o)
thetotas...
Most analysts are guessing it is California. Business Insider had a good article on the under-reporting from the "large state". It wasn't completely excluded...just under-reported. Their best guess is by 15-25k. What this means is that that 15-25k SHOULD be included in next week's numbers. So next week, the roles will likely be reversed.
http://www.businessinsider.com/what-happened-with-jobless-claims-2012-10
(Disclaimer: I don't have a clue as to any partisan leanings of this sight...just did a search and found the article. But CNBC and Wall Street Journal are reporting something similar)
Grimey,
Thanks for the link.
Nashville,
?
Nashville......your copy & pasting of various independent sites stories/opinions are just that. We all know how this administration cooks the books and controls/bullies the media. Just like the various polls, widely different numbers reported. Good try though but it's been done on here too many times.
R/R 2012 it's inevitable because it's what we need to restore AMERICAN values!!
Actually unoitall, what we know is you can't back up what you say with facts, so instead, you make stuff up.
Yes, Mitt Romney is definitely the candidate for you.
There's another lie from Nash...Name one post from me with info and no fact link. .. And Mitt IS the candidate for many great reasons. I hope when barry loses you're rioting in my neighborhood!! We are all ready for population control!!!
Oh, here's one of many "cook the books" strategies used by your messiah. http://www.reagancoalition.com/articles/2012/20121003002-obama-layoff.html
You are dismissed! NEXT!!
R/R 2012
You know unoitall . . . some of your post sounds so familiar . . . re-reg maybe?
lol
Paul Ryan says his abortion stance is unchanged, matches Romney's
Mitt Romney and his running mate Paul Ryan were scrambling on Wednesday to present a coherent position on abortion amid accusations from Democrats that the Republican presidential candidate had hidden his true beliefs in an attempt to appeal to moderate voters.
"Mitt Romney is proudly pro-life, and he will be a pro-life president," said his spokeswoman Andrea Saul in a statement.
But on Wednesday, an intervention by Ryan during a campaign stop deepened the confusion. Asked by reporters about the differences between him and Romney on the issue, Ryan, who is against abortion in all cases, including rape, incest and where the mother's life is in danger, said: "Our position is unified. Our position is consistent and hasn't changed."
As the controversy escalated, Romney himself sought to draw a line under it.
He told reporters in Ohio: "I think I've said time and again that I'm a pro-life candidate and I'll be a pro-life president. The actions I'll take immediately is to remove funding for Planned Parenthood. It will not be part of my budget. And also I've indicated that I will reverse the Mexico City position of the president. I will reinstate the Mexico City policy which keeps us from using foreign aid for abortions overseas."
Romney's anti-abortion views are less extreme than Ryan's. While he has stated that he supports the overturning of the Roe v Wade supreme court decision, he believes there should be exceptions to a ban on abortion.
Ryan, by contrast, has sponsored a series of bills that would either restrict abortion or access to contraception, or both. The
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/oct/10/romney-abortion-comments-ryan-differences
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Sure, (wink wink) Ryan is going to get whiplash trying to get up with Lyin MYTH Romney. LOL, LOL, LOL,
☺ ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺ ☺
Does anyone see any compatibility between these two stances? All I see is a lot of inarticulate jargon between multiple choice MYTH Romney and LYIN Ryan.
Notice, MYTH Romney and LYIN Ryan want to eliminate Planned Parenthood, a drop on the bucket, but don't want to eliminate tax breaks for the rich.
4 more 4 44
Obama/Biden 2012
Planned parenthood should never have been supported by the american taxpayer. This is going away along with lots of other hands outs that should not be supported by american taxpayer.
Hey Bev, still sporting that speech impediment? It is MITT, not myth. Now, go out today and see if you can get a job!
We don't deserve another 4 years of misery. Vote them all out:Republicans and Democrats. Let the politicians know there is no job security for people who don't want to compromise with the other party for the peoples sake.
We really need to get rid of all lobbyists from Washington and let the elected representatives make the hard choices themselves and not be a lapdog for the Corporations who continue to pollute our environment
God Bless America. May we overcome greedy politicians who don't care for the people who elected them and I am talking both parties.
Ok, how about that steaming pile of Mitt?
533 lies in 30 weeks.
Then 27 lies in 38 minutes.
Nobody likes a liar.
Mitt Romney tells 533 lies in 30 weeks, Steve Benen documents them
At Last Night's Debate: Romney Told 27 Myths In 38 Minutes | ThinkProgress