2012 U.S. Presidential Election

[Xiahou]

Obama says he doesn't consider Egypt an ally, NBC's chief foreign correspondent is stunned...


So, is it unfair then for Romney to assert that the Obama administration mishandled/misjudged the fallout of Mubarak's ouster? Under what metric could we call this a positive outcome for the US?

[Lemur]

Under what metric could we call this a positive outcome for the US?

On the face of it, none. I cannot imagine why this would be worth saying, and am slightly shocked.

I guess Obama didn't want to leave Governor Romney all alone in the let's-say-something-stupid-about-foreign-affairs game. But this appears to be worse; Romney is just a candidate, and can be as stupid as he pleases. This is the PotUS. I'm not going to rush in and declare a debacle, but it does not look good at first blush.

[Lemur]

This can only end in glorious, unintended comedy

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an informal advisor to Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, said on Thursday he and his fellow members of a state board were considering removing President Barack Obama from the Kansas ballot this November.

Kobach is part of the State Objections Board along with Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, all Republicans. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that on Thursday the board agreed to consider whether to take Obama off the ballot because they said they lacked sufficient evidence about his birth certificate.

“I don’t think it’s a frivolous objection,” Kobach said, according to the Capital-Journal. “I do think the factual record could be supplemented.”

[rvg]

Kobach is part of the State Objections Board along with Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer, all Republicans. The Topeka Capital-Journal reported that on Thursday the board agreed to consider whether to take Obama off the ballot because they said they lacked sufficient evidence about his birth certificate.

I would love to see them try. Really, I would. Excellent pro-Obama PR.

[The Lurker Below]

Leaning Obama (but not a sure thing yet): ME, MI, MN, NH, PA totalling 54 electoral votes.

wait a moment. i thought i'd seen some video of a PA leader talking about how the voter fraud legislation took care of putting PA in the Romney column. has that been overturned? something changed?

[Crazed Rabbit]

So, regarding bank loans and the government:

Banks have been widely castigated for causing the housing bust by lending too much to borrowers who couldn't repay, but now Eric Holder's Department of Justice has taken its antidiscrimination campaign to new lengths by whacking a bank for having been too prudent.

In a complaint filed Wednesday and settled the same day, Justice claimed that California-based Luther Burbank Savings violated the 1968 Fair Housing Act and 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act by setting a policy that had a “disparate impact” on minorities. Between 2006 and mid-2011, 5.2% of Luther’s single-family residential mortgage loans went to African-Americans and Hispanics, compared to an average of 41.7% for other lenders in the area. The complaint doesn’t cite evidence of intentional discrimination because there wasn’t any.

...

Luther Burbank wasn’t a fly-by-night operator that marketed those loans to any and all. The bank insisted on a minimum $400,000 loan amount and made loans with an average 680 FICO score and 67% loan-to-value. Over the period that Justice examined, Luther Burbank foreclosed on a mere 11 borrowers out of 629 loans outstanding—a loss ratio of 1.75%. In a normal world, Luther Burbank would get a medal from regulators for its risk management, having chosen borrowers even at the height of the housing mania who could meet their monthly payments.

But Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Thomas Perez has a different priority: He wants banks to meet lending quotas to minorities—regardless of whether those borrowers can afford the loans. Many minority borrowers have low incomes that make them riskier lending bets. Is that a bank’s fault?

Luther Burbank admitted no guilt and said it settled to avoid costly litigation, which makes sense for a small, local lender that has to worry about its reputational risk. The bank has agreed to ratchet down its minimum loan to $20,000 and will now commit $2.2 million to a “special financing program” for “qualified borrowers,” payouts for local community groups, and “consumer education programs.” Justice has the final say on who gets that money.

Marvelous.

CR

[Major Robert Dump]

Romney just shot himself in the foot with the leakage of his fundraiser video, about how the 47% of americans who pay no taxes are Obama voters whom he does not care about reaching out to. What an idiot. This guy has no policy, all he has is rhetoric.

[a completely inoffensive name]

Watch to see how Romney followers will defend his statements. "But, they don't pay income tax, they shouldn't even vote!"

[Major Robert Dump]

The statement is patently incorrect.

First, several of the top 10 states in the no-federal taxes bracket are Republican.

Second, people who use legal credits and deductions, who take their taxable income down to zero and get a full refund, are included in that 47%. This includes self employed people, and people will fairly high gross incomes before business expenses, itemized deductions and home/energy/medical credits..... the same credits Romney claims I am sure

Third, the 47% include senior citizens

Fourth, hsi statement presupposes that all people who pay federal taxes did not or will not vote for Obama, and that people who do pay taxes will vote Republican/Romney. Both of these are untrue.

Bascially, he just isolated a relatively decent chunk of his own voting bloc: poor and middle class crackers.

[Xiahou]

Romney just shot himself in the foot with the leakage of his fundraiser video, about how the 47% of americans who pay no taxes are Obama voters whom he does not care about reaching out to. What an idiot. This guy has no policy, all he has is rhetoric.

Almost as dumb as calling voters bitter people who cling to guns and religion.

The people who will be most offended by that weren't going to vote for him anyway(GOP voters who that may apply to will largely shrug it off). Romney is generally winning among independents- this election will be about turnout.

So, regarding bank loans and the government:

Huh, it's almost like the government was/is incentivizing bad loans. Weird, right?

[Major Robert Dump]

Yes, but we are less than 2 months from the election. Romney has yet to go into great detail about what he plans to do. At least with Obama, we know America will be destroyed. With Romney, it is still in question.....

I also tend to think, or at least hope, that with issues like gunbortionigion, people realize that these things take a long time to change through lawmaking and the subsequenst court process. There have been no major gun laws in decades, not have there been significant abortion or religion laws. Taxes and economic policies, on the other hand, come and go a little more quickly.

I happen to be of the camp that the incumbent should always go unless he is totally awesome to the max, and I have not thought that about a president since GHB, which shows what I know. Quite frankly I have no stake in this election, and don't plan on voting. I just like to sit back and throw stones and say I told you so. I welcome Anarchy, and Ron Paul was the last great hope for that. Maybe next election, Kinky Friedman will run again.....

[Lemur]

Romney is generally winning among independents

I'd love to see a source for that; polling this week seems to favor 44.

-edit-

Governor Romney is sufficiently concerned about the vids that he called a 10 p.m. presser on a Monday, which is not something you do if you think it's a pile of nothing.

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Romney just shot himself in the foot with the leakage of his fundraiser video, about how the 47% of americans who pay no taxes are Obama voters whom he does not care about reaching out to. What an idiot. This guy has no policy, all he has is rhetoric.

That isn't what the video is about. He's talking about how almost everyone is set already and decided on who they are going to vote for and there's a few percent in the middle, and then he goes into the Republican theme about the main difference between the two parties being small government, free enterprise, you did build that, and big government, you didn't build that, you're entitled to such and such. It's not a statistical analysis of people who don't pay income tax. He sounds a bit like he's apologizing for why he isn't being super conservative and is reaching out to the center. Yes you get rhetoric at a fundraiser speech. The only place I worry about him having no policy is foreign policy.

******

I'm curious what people think of the Electoral College this time around. I'd always considered objections to it to be silly, especially the nonsense about "gore would have won" and "one man one vote".

But I'm not convinced anymore that the focus on swing states instead of rallying the base is good for the country. It seems like what happens is that the focus is on swing voters who are too often swung by nonsense.

[Lemur]

Worth noting that no less a theocon than Ramesh Ponnuru tried to warn conservatives off the 47% talking point a year ago.

[W]orrying too much about this number will lead conservatives down an intellectual and political dead end. According to the Tax Policy Center, provisions of the tax code that exempt subsistence levels of income from income taxes -- the standard deduction, personal exemption, and dependent exemption -- are the reason for about half of the tax filers who owe no income tax. Another large group of filers pays no income tax because its members are elderly and benefit from such features of the code as the non-taxation of some Social Security benefits. The tax credit for children and the earned-income tax credit, an effort to boost the pay of low-income workers, wipe out income-tax liability for other taxpayers. Those credits are "refundable," meaning that beneficiaries can get money on top of paying no income tax. Other provisions of the code account for the rest of the 47 percent: education credits, the non-taxation of welfare payments, itemized deductions, and so on.

Also note that the non-payors of income tax are much more common in red states than blue.



Link to data here.

-edit-

Gah, we're talking about the videos, but nobody bothered to link. SHOW YOUR WORK!

Link to the original article containing the vids.

[Fisherking]

Come on people!

You still act like this is going to make a difference. You are only voting for the face man.

Obama will win this one and in 4 years you can have a Republican. Maybe Jeb Bush. It’s not going to make any more difference in what is really happening than Obama did.

Liberal Obama bailed out Wall Street. The country is massively in debt. The Surveillance State is growing every day. After the election the real powers will continue to run government just as they have for such a long time. The face man will take heat on something and make point on others. Gas prices will go up and real earnings will go down. Congress will continue to vote on legislation without reading it and Corporate interests will continue to be served.

These guys are bought and paid for already. The difference is group A calls themselves by one name and group B by another. It works great! When you get fed up with one group you elect the other. Meanwhile it is business as usual and their everyone is happy, right?

Until such time as you elect people who will server the people and the founding documents and not the corporate interests nothing is going to change.

[Lemur]

Until such time as you elect people who will server the people and the founding documents and not the corporate interests nothing is going to change.

Do you have a party or candidate in mind when you say this?

[Hax]

So you're saying...Ron Paul, basically?

[Major Robert Dump]

I welcome anarchy.

[Fisherking]

Do you have a party or candidate in mind when you say this?

Not a one

[Xiahou]

I'd love to see a source for that; polling this week seems to favor 44.

Seriously?

Show me a reputable poll where Obama is leading among independents. As for one's showing Romney leading independents, it's pretty much take your pick. Here's the NYT/CBS poll from Friday....
Independents: 50/44 for Romney.

[Lemur]

Thank you for the reference, @Xiahou! That poll was conducted from September 8–12, and a little bit of stuff (Libya, 47% video) has happened since then.

It certainly looks like the game is changing, and I will be curious to see polling from the 17th on. Should be instructive in one way or another (in other words, the last two unforced errors had no effect, or they did, or something else entirely).

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy. If you wanted the crudest but most effective weapon against the demonization of America that fuels Islamist ideology, Obama’s face gets close. It proves them wrong about what America is in ways no words can.

Oh, the heady days of yester-year.

[Major Robert Dump]

Thats is assuming they even know who is president or care...

[Sasaki Kojiro]

Indeed, 86 percent of Democrats approve of Obama on foreign policy, compared with just 10 percent of Republicans. Yet in August, nearly twice as many Republicans -- 19 percent -- approved.

Still, in the current NBC/WSJ poll, only 41 percent of independents approve of Obama's foreign-policy handling, versus 53 percent who did so last month.

Hmm. Makes me wonder if that attempt at creating a scandal over romney "politicizing" the cairo deal really was media desperation after all. Though I suppose they actually believed it.

[rvg]

Hmm. Makes me wonder if that attempt at creating a scandal over romney "politicizing" the cairo deal really was media desperation after all. Though I suppose they actually believed it.

State Department (particularly our embassy in Cairo) really dropped the ball on the latest crisis. Obama's response was adequate, his administration's response was not.

[PanzerJaeger]

Mitt Romney was, of course, essentially correct. There is a whole portion of the population who coast through school with C’s. They party and drink their way through college (if they make it that far), finishing with some worthless communications or philosophy degree and no real skills. They put in the bare minimum effort required at some dead end job just to have enough money to support their social life. They have to have the latest Apple product, regardless of how empty their savings account is. Then they wake up at 45 and wonder why they have become such losers. They are entitled to their own interpretation of a ‘middle class lifestyle’ (whatever that is) and it is the government’s/successful people’s fault that they do not have it. It is always easier to blame personal failure on uncontrollable factors than personal decisions. The constant, monotonous droning on about the nameless, faceless ‘system’ and how it is rigged against the common man is just the latest incarnation of this phenomenon. At their core, people are either victims or fighters.

Just as with Reagan’s ‘welfare queen’ comment, Romney’s 47% will be held up by the media literati as proof of his heartlessness. However, those of us who live in the real world know all too well that he was tapping into a vein of truth. Welfare queens do exist, and they are legion. I used to evict them nearly every day. They were the people that ‘struggle’ to hold down a menial job in food service while caring for their three babies by three different men. The government paid for their food, diapers, and most of their rent, but they still couldn’t come up with the $50 a month their case worker asked them to pay to teach them ‘responsibility’. It never failed, though, that as they waited in my office to recount their sob story about how hard life had been for them, they would be texting on their iPhones. And when I told them to tell it to someone who gave a **** (in the nicest, most professional manner possible), they invariably gamed the system to live rent free for as long as possible. The truth is that these people are worthless dregs; their only value to the greater economy being raw consumption. It is high time that they are called out, instead of made to believe that their circumstances dictate their condition.

The realist in me sees this as very damaging and potentially fatal for the Romney campaign. However, my more optimistic side hopes that this may not be so bad. If you think about it, the people who will be offended by this are not going to vote for Romney anyway. Further, the comment will likely endear him to many Republicans. So we are left with the ~6% of people still undecided. Their interpretation of these remarks will likely be split somewhere down the middle – some agreeing with Romney’s fundamental characterization of the electorate and some not. So, essentially, this whole ‘scandal’ could be a wash, and may even help Romney with his ‘vision problem’. It certainly draws a sharp contrast with Obama’s view.

[Strike For The South]

Horseshit

Some people are born on 3rd base thinking they hit a triple.

Panzer, I like you, I would love to share a beer with you, but sometimes I want to hug you very tightly, this is one of those times

[PanzerJaeger]

Horseshit

Some people are born on 3rd base thinking they hit a triple.

Panzer, I like you, I would love to share a beer with you, but sometimes I want to hug you very tightly, this is one of those times

Simply by virtue of being born in America, one starts on third base. I have little sympathy for people who can't make it to home, especially when people who truly begin life in dire straights manage to overcome incredible barriers to make it here and achieve success every day.

I will take that hug, though.

[Strike For The South]

Simply by virtue of being born in America, one starts on third base. I have little sympathy for people who can't make it to home, especially when people who truly begin life in dire straights manage to overcome incredible barriers to make it here and achieve success every day.

I will take that hug, though.

It's all relative.

As someone who went to (and will be continuing) school with the the MBA grads and as someone who worked with the supposed 99%. I can tell you, Americans are very similar.

[Lemur]

Crucial thing, PJ, is that it's fine for you, a private citizen, to have contempt for a majority of fellow citizens. Hell, it's fine for all of us. We can openly loathe our fellow Americans. No repercussions, except people might call us things like "jerk."

For a national political candidate to express contempt for approx half the nation? Very different.

-edit-

I had to check for confirmation on this one, since it sounded suspiciously Onion-like. Romney campaign posts and then removes video titled "Mitt Doesn't Disdain the Poor."