Republican Presidential Candidates/US Elections

[Sugar Ape]

Who do you think is going to be challenging Obama later on in the year, and do you think they will win? Just looking at the Guardian and they had an article on where Gingrich and Romney stand. Mad.

 

Mitt and Newt: where they stand

Abortion

Gingrich supports federal ban or constitutional amendment banning abortion

 

Romney says the issue should be left to individual states

 

Economy

Gingrich says he would balance the budget within five years with deep spending cuts

 

Romney says he would cut corporate tax rates and focus on job growth

 

Health care

Gingrich would starve Obama's healthcare law of cash so it cannot be implemented

 

Romney would issue an order giving back authority for healthcare to states

 

Gay rights

Gingrich against gay marriage, but says same-sex couples should have legal protections

 

Romney opposes letting gay people marry, serve in the military or any government recognition of their relationships

 

National security

Gingrich says greatest danger is rise of radical Islam inside the US

 

Romney wants increase in US's already substantial military budget

 

Poverty

Gingrich proposes that children should be put to work to learn the work ethic

 

Romney says cash handouts to the poor trap them in poverty

[Lee909]

Both sound as scary as each other.

 

A larger military budget.I was listening to a Xbox podcast a few months back when the last shuttle went up,one of them is a big space nut and said that the US spends more money on air con for the military than they set aside for NASA's budget.

 

Strange land full of alot of strange people.

[Stu Monty]

The news yesterday said, in their predictable way, that the two of them are like chalk and cheese. They aren't. They are like chalk and chalk. Don't stray from the narrative that the people of the US actually have a choice though. That would be silly.

[Guest Numero Veinticinco]

Romney will probably win. Then he'll lose to Obama.

 

Simples.

[Stu Monty]

I heard Gingrich saying that "We have to beat Obama. Imagine how radical he'll be if he gets a second term!"

 

Yeah, imagine.

 

*Sighs*

[JohnnyH]

It is two sides of the same coin, but thankfully when the American voting public gets to weigh up the protagonists, they’ll make the right decision like they always do……

[dennis tooth]

Obama thanks Queen for imperialist, ceremonial bullshit

25-05-11

 

PRESIDENT Obama last night thanked the Queen for laying on the sort of ceremonial bullshit that harks back to the empire that crushed his beautiful African ancestors.

 

At an official state banquet at Buckingham Palace, Mr Obama stressed the link between America and Britain was

strong, much to his annoyance because he hates the fucking place and everything it stands for.

 

He said: "You can trot around on your little horses, blow your little trumpets and pretend it's 1850 all you want.

 

"But it's not 1850 and your little adventure in Africa is long gone you lazy, privileged, fat-assed motherfuckers.

 

"I want to thank all you viscounts and earls and dukes and god knows what for hauling your white asses out of your stately homes built with slave money and the stolen resources of millions of proud Africans, Indians and native Americans.

 

"How about I come to your house tomorrow and help myself to the contents of your fridge and then make a coffee-coloured baby with your pretty little Duchess? You like that, you thieving piece of shit?"

 

Removing the Queen's tiara and holding it over his head he added: "In America we give crowns to beauty queens. Okay, so they are just dim-witted pawns in some decadent, capitalist sideshow, but at least they fucking earned it.

 

"Not like this old white woman, who tries to justify her ill-gotten luxury with words like 'heritage' and 'continuity' as if we are all just dumb-assed field slaves who don't know nothin' anyhow."

 

The President continued: "If you think you can wave this imperialist horseshit under my nose and I won't say anything, you must be out of your tiny, inbred minds.

 

"I am now going to France where they know what to do with people like you.

 

"Stick that in your fucking trumpet."

[odris]

Can anyone fix a country? Seems like a lose-lose situation whoever wins.

[Newport]

Can anyone fix a country? Seems like a lose-lose situation whoever wins.

 

It's impossible due to the shortage of smart people. China is probably the closest to it as they have managed to transform their country from a communist dictatorship to a far less communist dictatorship although the Communist party is still in full control of everything. Most of this through the help of confucianism.

[VladimirIlyich]

Who do you think is going to be challenging Obama later on in the year, and do you think they will win? Just looking at the Guardian and they had an article on where Gingrich and Romney stand. Mad.

 

Mitt and Newt: where they stand

Abortion

Gingrich supports federal ban or constitutional amendment banning abortion

 

Romney says the issue should be left to individual states

 

Economy

Gingrich says he would balance the budget within five years with deep spending cuts

 

Romney says he would cut corporate tax rates and focus on job growth

 

Health care

Gingrich would starve Obama's healthcare law of cash so it cannot be implemented

 

Romney would issue an order giving back authority for healthcare to states

 

Gay rights

Gingrich against gay marriage, but says same-sex couples should have legal protections

 

Romney opposes letting gay people marry, serve in the military or any government recognition of their relationships

 

National security

Gingrich says greatest danger is rise of radical Islam inside the US

 

Romney wants increase in US's already substantial military budget

 

Poverty

Gingrich proposes that children should be put to work to learn the work ethic

 

Romney says cash handouts to the poor trap them in poverty

 

That is so fuckin scary.Is it 1850 over there?

[Mr. Beast]

Vote Rocky!

[Section_31]

American politics is just fucking awful. Poisonous, personal attacks, shady backers, and carricature differences (I'm a republican and I like guns, the bible and Jack Daniels, I'm a Democrat and I like guns, the bible and gays).

[Mr. Beast]

there's certainly room for improvement...

 

The Media Blackout on Third Parties » Counterpunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

 

January 18, 2012

 

Off the Clift

 

The Media Blackout on Third Parties

by STEVEN HIGGS

 

Watching Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift confront the question “Are most political reporters simply insiders?” is a discomfiting experience. Her struggle to defend the indefensible unavoidably inspires compassion for her uneasy predicament. But the case she makes so proves the point that any sympathy engendered morphs quickly into cynicism.

 

The political reporter appeared on a Dec. 29, 2011, panel discussion on Al Jazeera, subtitled the question du jour. Joining her were Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman and Justice Party presidential candidate Rocky Anderson, of whose candidacy Clift knew nothing. Al Jazeera devoted a third of the half-hour program’s opinions to the former Salt Lake City mayor. Clift apparently had never heard of him.

 

“I think Rocky Anderson is running probably to get his issues out there, more than from an expectation that he might necessarily win,” she awkwardly speculated aloud, unsure about the Justice Party’s name, no less.

 

Clift, who also contributes to The Daily Beast, defended the media’s treatment of third parties, which independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader in 2008 called a “blackout” and “political bigotry.” To the contrary, she asserted, the media love the drama third parties bring.

 

“The last thing the press corps wants is a Romney-Obama race,” she said in an edition of Al Jazeera’s Inside Story: U.S. 2012. “Think of that, for all those many months.”

 

Clift acknowledged the anger the American people feel toward their government and their yearning for more choices and parties. And she said the media has responded, sort of. They have covered speculative third-party bids by Donald Trump and Ron Paul and will be doing more.

 

“There are two sort-of-third-party entities,” she added, “Americans Elect, which is going to have an Internet convention and choose a ticket, and No Labels, which is trying to get away from Republican and Democrat. They’re not actually going to mount a ticket.”

 

Clift mentioned neither Jill Stein nor Kent Mesplay, declared 2012 Green Party candidates. Her defense for ignoring alternative parties:

 

“Hundreds of people file to run for president. You have to have some sort of screen.”

 

***

 

Rocky Anderson is no fringe figure. He is a two-term mayor of Salt Lake City, who, in addition to announcing for president in December, earned a national reputation for his ultra-progressive positions on gay rights, environmental sustainability and the Iraq War – while being elected and re-elected in Utah.

 

The candidate is widely known for his high-profile relationship with Mitt Romney, with whom he worked to rescue Salt Lake’s 2002 Winter Olympics. Despite their ideological and party differences – Anderson was a Democrat at the time – the two endorsed each other’s subsequent bids for Salt Lake mayor and Massachusetts governor.

 

Just 17 days before Clift met Anderson in the Al Jazeera studio, The Guardian columnist Gary Younge published a piece subtitled “US history is littered with failed third parties, but the progressive populism of Salt Lake City’s ex-mayor might just break the mould.”

 

Three months prior, her fellow Newsweek columnist and Beast contributor McKay Coppins penned a column about Anderson titled “Why Salt Lake’s Mayor Lost Faith in Mitt.”

 

A TalkingPointsMemo search for “Rocky Anderson” produced 21 stories, dating to 2007.

 

On Al Jazeera, Clift said she would like to know more about the Justice Party. But she warned history is not on Anderson’s side.

 

“I think if you look at our tradition in American politics, I don’t think we’ve ever elected somebody who is a former mayor,” she said. “Usually our presidents come from the Senate or governors.”

 

Furthermore, Clift added, third parties make people nervous. Nader’s 2000 Green Party candidacy “hurt the candidate he was closest to,” she alleged, referring to Democrat Al Gore. And in 1992, “Pat Buchanan probably caused the defeat of the Republican who he was closest to.”

 

Buchanan ran against George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries, not as a third-party candidate. Texas oil man Ross Perot ran in the general election on the Reform Party ticket against Bush and Democrat Bill Clinton.

 

Anderson assured Clift that his is a serious campaign and is in fact a winner’s strategy.

 

“People across the political spectrum in this country want to see a major change in our system, where the corrupting influence of money carries the day against the public interest,” he said, citing a list of public-policy failures as examples.

 

Failed leadership on climate change – “We know that’s due to the corrupting influence of money from the fossil fuel industry.” Failure to provide essential health care for all citizens – “It’s because of the corrupting influence of money from the insurance industry.”

 

Clift’s argument that alternative party candidates hurt their natural political allies was based on fundamentally false assumptions, Anderson said. A poll taken 10 days after he entered the race gave him 4 percent support, with Romney beating Obama in a one-on-one matchup.

 

“When you threw me in the mix, Obama won,” he said.

 

***

 

The Al Jazeera discussion took place just days before the Iowa caucuses, as Republican Texas Congressman Ron Paul led the polls. Clift shrugged off the suggestion that the media’s failure to take him seriously until that point was a “massive failure.”

 

“I think there is a widespread assumption, which I share, that Ron Paul, who is 70-something years old and is really a libertarian, is in the end not going to be the Republican standard bearer,” she said.

 

Her fellow panelists rejected that line of defense for ignoring, for example, his radical, antiwar views.

 

Anderson said the media ignoring Paul’s candidacy and failing to seriously examine his racist past and social-Darwinist approach toward government aided and abetted his caucus success.

 

“How many people really knew that when we’re reading on the front page of the New York Times about Mitt Romney’s hair?” he said. “The column inches that have been devoted to Mitt Romney’s hair and the man who cuts his hair, it is obscene when we’ve got so many issues that aren’t being covered.”

 

Five days after the program, Paul finished third in Iowa with 21 percent of the vote. A week later, he finished second in the New Hampshire Primary, garnering 23 percent.

 

Al Jazeera graphics accompanying the program said a 2002 Harvard Kennedy School poll showed 89 percent of Americans believe the media focuses too much on “trivial issues.” It also showed 62 percent do not trust media election coverage, and 82 percent believe media influence is too great.

 

Goodman insisted Americans do not want the kind of simplistic, horse-race, beauty-contest coverage that the broadcast media routinely deliver.

 

“They’re force fed it,” she said.

 

Goodman said the Occupy Wall Street movement has shown what the media say the public cares about isn’t true.

 

“It’s resonating with most people in this country,” she said of the Occupy message. “People are saying they are tired of the media catering to the 1 percent, instead of exposing the 1 percent.”

 

That deference to the economic elite, Goodman added, extends to the third-party candidates the media does cover, predominantly people with enormous personal wealth, from Ross Perot to Donald Trump.

 

“These are the people they will focus on,” she said. “But Rocky Anderson, who instead of having money lays out a platform?”

 

While the press corps focuses on trifles like the kind of cereal Mitt Romney eats – “sugary,” according to a CNN report – Anderson said it ignores the fact that America has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Sixty percent of those imprisoned are African-American or Latino, even though they represent only 30 percent of the population.

 

“I want to ask any journalist, ‘When was the last time you talked about the prison-industrial complex in this country?’” he said.

 

While Clift termed the CNN cereal report ultra trivia – “There’s a lot of time to fill on the cable networks” – she agreed the prison issue is “genuine” and said it “may come up in the periphery.”

 

She defended the soft stories.

 

“Just like we have People magazine along with Time and Newsweek, people do want to know about these personalities,” she said.

 

Anderson said that a time when the disparity between the rich and the middle and working classes is at its greatest point in a century, the media’s preoccupation with the aristocracy is evidence this truly is the new gilded age.

 

“What a betrayal by the media of our democracy,” he said. “During the races, it’s the time when people’s attention is centered on these issues. It’s a great time educate people.”

 

***

 

A CNN correspondent reported the cereal detail about Romney while “embedded” with the campaign, a journalistic development that Goodman and Anderson repudiated.

 

Goodman agreed with the suggestion that the embed concept, which began with reporters in the Iraq War, was created by the military as a technique to limit media coverage, not enhance it.

 

“It has brought the media to an all-time low,” she said. “… The way they stay on a campaign is they talk about sugary cereal. They start raising hard questions of the campaign candidates, they’ll often be thrown off the bus.”

 

In addition to the prison-industrial complex, cable news outlets could fill all that airtime covering the increasing restrictions put on Americans right to vote, Goodman said. States with the largest African American and Latino populations have increasingly restricted voter registration laws.

 

“These issues have to be addressed because at the same time they are limiting the ability for people to understand what the issues are and what these candidates represent, fewer and fewer people in this country are being able to vote because of repressive legislation,” she said.

 

Anderson reiterated his contention that the media’s misplaced priorities give short shrift to the public’s desire for fundamental change in the system.

 

“This is what the American people want across the political spectrum,” he said. “We want to get the corrupting influence of money out of the system, even if it requires a constitutional amendment to get rid of this Citizens United case.”

 

Clift laughed when asked if she feels complicit with a system that is entirely corrupted and doesn’t serve the people, though she did agree money has “flooded” the system.

 

“I don’t know how to turn that around,” she said. “I don’t know how you get the support for a constitutional amendment to get rid of that Citizens United case, because you have to overcome all these hurdles.”

 

Goodman said it would help if the news media covered the issues instead of the personalities.

 

“We’re not perfect,” Clift said. “But we put a lot of stuff out there.”

[Mr. Beast]

.

[Mr. Beast]

Fox News has a lot too answer for, this is just demented:

 

Arkansas Democratic Campaign Manager Comes Home To Find Child’s Cat Murdered, ‘LIBERAL’ Written On Dead Body

 

By Scott Keyes on Jan 23, 2012 at 2:20 pm

 

The campaign manager of Arkansas Democratic congressional candidate Ken Aden arrived home last night to find his child’s pet cat murdered on the front porch with the word “LIBERAL” scrawled across its lifeless body.

 

Aden’s campaign manager, Jake Burris, lives in central Arkansas with his four kids. Blue Arkansas has more on the scene at Burris’s home (emphases are ours):

 

Last night, Jake and his four kids had come back to their Russellville home. As they were getting out of the car, one of his children discovered their family cat dead on the front porch. One side of the animal’s head had been bashed in and an eyeball was hanging out of its socket. But there was something even more horrifying to be found on the corpse. Written across the animal’s fur in black marker was the word “LIBERAL“.

 

Here is a picture of the family’s murdered cat:

 

Pope County, where Burris lives, is a highly-conservative area of Arkansas. Aden has been running for the 3rd congressional district seat, currently held by Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), since August 2011. He released a statement on the matter this morning: “To kill a child’s pet is just unconscionable. As a former combat soldier, I’ve seen the best of humanity and the worst of humanity. Whoever did this is definitely part of the worst of humanity.”

 

It is unclear at this time precisely who committed this heinous act.

 

Arkansas Democratic Campaign Manager Comes Home To Find Child's Cat Murdered, 'LIBERAL' Written On Dead Body | ThinkProgress

[Lee909]

Fucking hell,some right demented twats out there.

[Anubis]

That's some seriously fucked up shit, right there.

[odris]

I hate Cats but that is horrible.

[Section_31]

They used to string up black people though to be fair, I suppose that's progress.

[Yozzer]

I bet Neko's on his way down there to hunt the cunt who did that down.

[Faustus]

They're all fucking nutters. Every single one of them in that race.

[Section_31]

They're all fucking nutters. Every single one of them in that race.

 

That's why they're backed though. If you're a business interest or a lobby group, you're not going to back a candidate that looks like 'the right man for the job', you're going to back someone who's dim enough to do what the fuck you want and a little bit charismatic/mental enough to impress joe six pack.

[dennis tooth]

The system is designed to put nutters in charge. Just as ours is designed to produce kumquatts like Cameron, Clegg and Milliband. Clegg and Milliband supported by the likes of the Guardian to fool the 'liberals' into also giving them a chance pants one last dance with that wolf Cameron who looks like he's knows what he's talking about to the rest of the population just enough. Deep down the population is not convinced however and the further down the economic and social abyss it drags us the closer to revolution we come.

[Kevin D]

One of the most important moments in history, in my opinion. Dreading the outcome.

[Beantown Red]

Amazing how badly the Republicans have fucked this up