Election 2012- Post Mortem

[SnyderShrugged]

Really. If they gave Paulers some significant bones; odds are they would've lost a part of the base.

No- Paulers should went third party so their movement could build to become an eventual third force in American politics.

I disagree, With small "bones" most would have stayed. Think things like audit the fed, department elimination, and sound money as a start. None of those would drive a common GOP'er away, yet would have gone miles in attracting liberty movement members

[FanboyOf91]

What's funny; I think Romney won less votes than Mccain did.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008

59,934,814

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2012 (yeah yeah, I know it's not official)

57,552,775

[Larry]

The above reasons were my main motivations to vote and as far as I'm concerned justice has been served. Last night was a referendum on the way the Republican party goes about its business and it was thoroughly rejected by people like me who are fed up with their bull****. Now it's time for them to take a long look in the mirror and grow the **** up. Lead, follow, or get the hell out of the way.

Disagree.

What percentage of the GOP House got reelected, 90%? 95%?

Somehow, I don't think that they think that their actions of the last two years have been punished by the voters. They think they've been validated.

---------- Post added November-7th-2012 at 03:54 PM ----------

I disagree, With small "bones" most would have stayed. Think things like audit the fed, department elimination, and sound money as a start.

Yeah, you're right.

Trying to paint the Fed as a boogyman, eliminating a few entire government agencies, and the gold standard would really have got the GOP more votes.

[SnyderShrugged]

Disagree.

What percentage of the GOP House got reelected, 90%? 95%?

Somehow, I don't think that they think that their actions of the last two years have been punished by the voters. They think they've been validated.

---------- Post added November-7th-2012 at 03:54 PM ----------

Yeah, you're right.

Trying to paint the Fed as a boogyman, eliminating a few entire government agencies, and the gold standard would really have got the GOP more votes.

Glad you agree, despite the unneeded snark. Yes, going the route I said (not what you made up) would have potentially brought in more votes.

You understand I didnt say either the first nor the third points you just claimed, I hope. Thanks for simply making up things to support your strange point. Carry on.

[visionary]

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/11/07/king-says-hes-an-independent-not-a-stunt/

King says he's an independent, not a 'stunt'

Angus King, the Maine independent who has won election to the U.S. Senate, said on CNN Wednesday he represents a serious attempt to bring bi-partisanship to Washington.

"I ran on the platform of trying to call them as I see them, not be locked into a party position one way or the other," he said on CNN's "Newsroom." "But on the other hand, it isn't a stunt - I'm not going down there just to plant the flag and not get anything done."

King said he would support a model similar to the one proposed by the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction panel convened by President Barack Obama, whose recommendations the president did not actively pursue.

King said in the interview he looks to meet with the chamber's top Democrat and Republican before deciding with which party he will caucus.

"There are really two criteria that I've honed it down to, and one is the extent I can maintain my independence and the second is how effective I can be on behalf of Maine," he said.

[Larry]

Yahoo: Top Republican: will work with Obama to avoid fiscal cliff

Here's hoping that I'm wrong.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Top U.S. Republican John Boehner said on Wednesday that Washington should find a short-term solution to avoid the fiscal cliff and then work on a substantive debt reduction plan in 2013.

The White House and lawmakers have less than two months to deal with the fiscal cliff or $600 billion worth of spending cuts and tax increases due to go into effect at the end of the year.

"We won't solve the problem of our fiscal imbalance overnight," Boehner said after President Barack Obama won a second term in the White House and Republicans won enough seats to maintain control in the House.

(Not much) more at the link.

--------

Remembering once reading a story.

A scientist working in his lab, accidentally ingests a fatal poison, for which there is no antidote.

Wondering what his fate will be, he goes to his bookshelf, and pulls down highly regarded book on poisons. A book, recognized as one of the reference books of the field, which the scientist, himself, had written.

Consulting the book, he observes that he has ingested 3 times the lethal dose for a person of his weight.

He then pulls down a second, equally respected, reference book. According to this, other reference, he has only consumed half of a lethal dose.

So, he sits down, to wait. Hoping that he was wrong.

[ArmchairRedskin]

Here’s Video Evidence of Why Everyone Thought Diane Sawyer Was ****faced On Air Last Night

Note: Profanity filter has put in asterisks to replace a word in the URL, so copy and paste it and restore it to the intended word to get the link to work.

http://i.imgur.com/BiOYW.jpg

That's pretty funny, Not near as funny as the .gif down further on that page, though.

[s0crates]

I feel especially patriotic today.

[HogNose]

Cheer Up, Republicans

You’re going to have a moderate Republican president for the next four years: Barack Obama.

http://mobile.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/11/obama_the_moderate_republican_what_the_2012_election_should_teach_the_gop.html

Dear Republicans,

Sorry about the election. I know how much it hurts when your presidential candidate loses. I’ve been there many times. You’re crestfallen. You can’t believe the public voted for that idiot. You fear for your country.

Cheer up. The guy we just re-elected is a moderate Republican.

I know how stupid that sounds. Barack Obama is the head of the Democratic Party. For five years, conservative politicians and media told you he was a raving socialist. In the heat of the campaign, when you’re trying to beat the guy, it’s hard to let go of that image of him, just as it’s hard for Democrats to see past the caricatures of Mitt Romney. But now that the campaign is over and you’re staring at a second Obama term, the falsity of the propaganda may come as a relief. By and large, Obama’s instincts are the instincts of a moderate Republican. His policies are the policies of a moderate Republican. He stands where the GOP used to stand and will someday stand again.

Yes, Obama began his presidency with bailouts, stimulus, and borrowing. You know who started the bailouts? George W. Bush. Bush knew that under these exceptionally dire circumstances, bailouts had to be done. Stimulus had to be done, too, since the economy had frozen up. A third of the stimulus was tax cuts. Once the economy began to revive, Obama offered a $4-trillion debt reduction framework that would have cut $3 to $6 of spending for every $1 in tax hikes. That’s a higher ratio of cuts to hikes than Republican voters, in a Gallup poll, said they preferred. It’s way more conservative than the ratio George H. W. Bush accepted in 1990. In last year’s debt-ceiling talks, Obama offered cuts to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid in exchange for revenue that didn’t even come from higher tax rates. Now he’s proposing to lower corporate tax rates, and Republicans are whining that he hacked $716 billion out of Medicare. Some socialist.

Yes, Obama imposed an individual mandate to buy health insurance. You know who else did that? Romney. You know where the idea came from? The Heritage Foundation. Personal responsibility—insisting that people carry private insurance so we don’t have to bail them out in emergency rooms and hospitals—was a Republican idea. Same with Wall Street reform: There’s nothing conservative about letting financial institutions gamble with other people’s money in ways that would force us to bail them out again. Even Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal echoed the market-based emissions-control policies of the 1990 Bush administration and the 2008 McCain campaign. And last year, when the EPA proposed a new air-pollution limit, Obama ticked off environmentalists by killing it on the grounds that it might jeopardize the recovery.

Remember how Democrats ridiculed George W. Bush’s troop surge in Iraq? Obama copied it in Afghanistan. He escalated the drone program, killing off al-Qaida’s leaders. He sent SEAL Team 6 into Pakistan to get Osama Bin Laden. He teamed up with NATO to take down Muammar Qaddafi. He reneged on his pledge to close Guantanamo Bay. He put together a globally enforced regime of sanctions that is bringing Iran’s economy to its knees. That’s why Romney had nothing to say in last month’s foreign policy debate. No sensible Republican president would have done things differently.

Obama’s no right-winger. You might have serious issues with his Supreme Court justices or his moves on immigration or the Bush tax cuts. But you probably would have had similar issues with Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, or Gerald Ford. Obama’s in the same mold as those guys. So don’t despair. Your country didn’t vote for a socialist tonight. It voted for the candidate of traditional Republican moderation. What should gall you, haunt you, and goad you to think about the future of your party is that that candidate wasn’t yours.

[Elessar78]

I'm not being a partisan here but listening to Boehner today was just more of the same except he prefaced it with something like willing to work with the other side to find "new revenue" (get real, where does revenue magically come from?). To which he pulled it all back by saying that he won't explore anything that will raise taxes (for the rich) and that tax reform (essentially closing loopholes to raise taxes) and that a growing economy will fix everything.

It's crazy denial world he's living in. Yes we need the economy to grow but he's already taking the means to fix things off the table.

[twa]

(get real, where does revenue magically come from?)..

drill,baby,drill

enabling manufacturing and construction

even O sees the need to get the govt out of the way at times

[Larry]

I'm not being a partisan here but listening to Boehner today was just more of the same except he prefaced it with something like willing to work with the other side to find "new revenue" (get real, where does revenue magically come from?). To which he pulled it all back by saying that he won't explore anything that will raise taxes (for the rich) and that tax reform (essentially closing loopholes to raise taxes) and that a growing economy will fix everything.

It's crazy denial world he's living in. Yes we need the economy to grow but he's already taking the means to fix things off the table.

Oh. That old trick.

"I might be willing to consider tax increases, if the tax increases all of the tax increase goes to tax cuts, somewhere else. See how moderate and flexible I am?"

[Bishop Hammer]

Great, four more years of "its Bush's fault."

[nonniey]

Interesting and the very frustrating thing about this election is apparently if you just switched Romney and McCain with their votes McCain would have won this election. Who predicted turnout for both sides

collapsing?

[Elessar78]

drill,baby,drill

enabling manufacturing and construction

even O sees the need to get the govt out of the way at times

I won't argue too much about drilling because that could be source of revenue for us but it's not an immediate, short term source because our consumption and global consumption won't ramp up just cause supply ramps up.

Manufacturing sure, but again, if we're not making it already and the market isn't there for it not sure how that's an answer. Construction can boom again but we have a glut of houses already. I'd rather we start building stuff the rest of the world wants and needs and not an industry that artificially props the American economy up.

As has been said, Obama isn't the liberal the other side paints him to be. In many ways, he's over-corrected to avoid the characterization.

[Fergasun]

the final days of this election were like a team down by a field goal with 2 minutes to go, and a coach who insisted they were secretly ahead according to internal scoreboards, thus ordering the victory formation.

You made me ROFL so hard with that...

[spjunkies]

This is very interesting.

http://didmittromneywin.com/

[Corcaigh]

Interesting and the very frustrating thing about this election is apparently if you just switched Romney and McCain with their votes McCain would have won this election. Who predicted turnout for both sides

collapsing?

It would have been closer, but Obama in 2012 has already registered more votes than McCain in 2008.

[thebluefood]

Yahoo: Top Republican: will work with Obama to avoid fiscal cliff

Here's hoping that I'm wrong.

Along the same lines:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/boehner-opens-door-to-new-revenue-to-halt-debt/2012/11/07/2912c5ce-2919-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html?hpid=z1

[Fergasun]

What's funny is that the reason that push the Senate and re-elected Obama are the same reasons that we have largely the same GOP House. This is exactly the type of balance of power that our framers envisioned. (ok, well... how folks who worked to modify the 17th amendment envisioned it would happen?)

True but embarrasing post-election story. Was speaking with co-workers (one I just met today) about the election. One of them was complaining that "Obama only gives out free money in the cities" as they were talking about the above, how the cities are democratic, rural areas republican. In the same breath of conversation he was talking about getting dependent child care tax breaks and maxing out his FSA account. Also; government employee.

How are tax benefits that poor people will (most likely) never get to max out any different than whatever "handouts" he is talking about? I wanted to go off, but its this type of BS rhetoric that has made me turn against the GOP and republican supported rhetoric. It's one thing to have an honest policy debate and say "everyone should give up something" to accomplish Federal debt reform. But that's not what their goal has been for the past 2 years . Their goal is "our people shouldn't give up anything... oh and the clock will run out on you so I'll just give you the middle finger."

Why do folks on the right and far-right want to repeal the 17th amendment? GOP control 2/3rds of state legislatures.

If the GOP really believe their convictions, believes, etc. are right then I have no doubt they should simply shut down the government whenever the debt ceiling issue comes up. I am dead serious about this. Also, the states that are getting Federal money should not receive one cent more... because (by their claim) Federal debt is a hand-cuff (whether that's true or not is a debate for another thread...).

[PeterMP]

I'm not being a partisan here but listening to Boehner today was just more of the same except he prefaced it with something like willing to work with the other side to find "new revenue" (get real, where does revenue magically come from?). To which he pulled it all back by saying that he won't explore anything that will raise taxes (for the rich) and that tax reform (essentially closing loopholes to raise taxes) and that a growing economy will fix everything.

It's crazy denial world he's living in. Yes we need the economy to grow but he's already taking the means to fix things off the table.

In the past, he's talked about new revenue in terms of things like selling federal lands.

[Larry]

In the past, he's talked about new revenue in terms of things like selling federal lands.

Yeah, cause what we really need, to deal with our deficit, is one-time sales. (Which, as I understand it, typically sell for pennies on the dollar.)

But yeah, I've heard that one, too.

[twa]

Yeah, cause what we really need, to deal with our deficit, is one-time sales. (Which, as I understand it, typically sell for pennies on the dollar.)

But yeah, I've heard that one, too.

Moving valuable property into the tax base and allowing it to be productive is not just a one time benefit....the govt owns some prime property that brings in nothing.

[Jumbo]

It would be a bad idea for me to state my more "reactionary" thoughts on Boehner.

I guess it would be alright (if still extreme) to say Gitmo sounds good.

[ixcuincle]