Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

[lektrode]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

my summary of the 2012 election...

+1

[metalman]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Anybody see how the lady recapping the votes at the GOP convention is not saying Ron Paul's name or the votes he gets? How juvenile. If this is a close election and Ron Paul supporters all vote Libertarian or decide not to vote for Romney because of this treatment, somebody will be very sorry.

my summary of the 2012 election...

[cjppjc]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Anybody see how the lady recapping the votes at the GOP convention is not saying Ron Paul's name or the votes he gets? How juvenile. If this is a close election and Ron Paul supporters all vote Libertarian or decide not to vote for Romney because of this treatment, somebody will be very sorry.

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

NY Times deconstructs the GOP . . .

Main Streeters are the biggest bloc, a pragmatic, establishment-supporting wing of the party that has for years produced its presidential nominees. Although less ideological and less assertive on foreign policy than some elements in the G.O.P. herd, they are arguably the most loyal to the party and its most reliable voters. They are Republicans first, conservatives second. Main Streeters are looking for some degree of compromise on Capitol Hill to get things done; they are not so thrilled by purists.


Standard Bearers

Mitt Romney, John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, John McCain. Presidents Bush I and Bush II are standard-bearers emeritus.

Motivating Issues

• The economy
• Cut deficit, taxes, regulations
• Repeal Obamacare
• Gun owners’ rights
• Anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage
• Pro-energy subsidies

Tea Party:

The populist, more radical Tea Party wing has a deep mistrust of experts, elites and even the G.O.P. establishment. Sees issues in stark black and white; has no appetite for compromise. They are conservatives first, Republicans second.

Standard Bearers

Jim DeMint, Grover Norquist, Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin. Paul Ryan, though not in the House Tea Party Caucus, is nonetheless a rock star.

Motivating Issues

• The economy
• Slash deficit, taxes, regulations
• Repeal Obamacare
• GuAnti-abortion, anti-gay marriage
• Anti-environmental regulations
• Gun owners' rights
• Seal the border

Evangelicals:

One bloc, deeply rooted in religion, with two wings that see a decline in American values. Both care more about their conservative agenda than fealty to the G.O.P.

Standard Bearers

The White Evangelical wing, dominated by Southerners, is perhaps three-quarters of this bloc. Michele Bachmann, Tony Perkins and Mike Huckabee are standard-bearers. Rick Santorum leads the Conservative Catholic wing.

Motivating Issues

• The economy
• Anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage
• Creationist theories, God in public sphere
• Cut funds for Planned Parenthood
• Slash deficit, taxes, regulations
• Repeal Obamacare
• Gun owners’ rights

Libertarians:

The G.O.P.’s odd men out (two-thirds are male), Libertarians are not an easy fit in the party. Like Tea Party supporters, they are pro-business and anti-government, but less religious. They are more affluent and better educated than many Republicans.

Standard Bearers

Ron Paul has been the most visible leader; son Rand occupies the same political ground. But they want government regulation of some private conduct: both oppose almost all abortions; most libertarians do not. Gary Johnson, once a G.O.P. presidential hopeful, is now the Libertarian candidate.

Motivating Issues

• The economy
• Slash deficit, taxes, regulations
• Repeal Obamacare
• Gun owners’ rights
• Privacy rights; abortion rights
• Opposed to the drug war
• Opposed to Patriot Act
• Fiercely isolationist

Disaffected:

The most economically wounded bloc, so named by Pew for their skepticism toward both big business and government. The system, they believe, is rigged for the rich. Least loyal to the party, and least likely to vote.

Standard Bearers

They only lean Republican and thus lack similarly minded leaders. Voting for Democrats is unlikely but not impossible.

Motivating Issues

• The economy
• Wall Street greed
• Concentration of economic power
• Anti-immigration
• Pro-safety net

Endangered or Extinct:

Northeast moderates in Congress have dwindled to a handful of vestigial politicians like the retiring Senator Olympia Snowe as voters there have turned more Democratic. Even after the G.O.P. romped in the 2010 election, only 2 out of New England’s 22 House districts were in Republican hands.

National security voters Neoconservatives, advocates of a hawkish foreign policy, took a beating in 2006 amid broad opposition to the Iraq war. Their constituency has largely disappeared, but the agenda lives: Mitt Romney is offering an updated version to an electorate now less focused on foreign policy.

Liberals Hello? Anyone?

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Spinney's look at faux Republicans . . .


The Enablers

The Central Role of Faux Republicans in the Anatomy of Decline



by FRANKLIN C. SPINNEY
Gaeta, Italia.

Readers beware; what follows is a biased book review. The author Mike Lofgren (bio) is a very close friend of mine, and, as some of you may may already know, I have been flogging his important new book, The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted. Mike is a conservative of the now forgotten old school, more at home with the likes of Robert Taft, Eisenhower, and Lincoln than right wing ideologues like Newt Gingrich or plutocratic highway robbers like Mitt Romney.

Casual readers of Lofgren’s aptly titled bookmay well conclude that he is harder on Republicans than Democrats. In a technical sense this is true. Having served on the Republican staffs of the House and Senate Budget Committees, he was in a much better position to observe and understand their hijinks than those of the Democrats. So, it is not at all surprising that his book has more detail describing how the ideological Republican crazies created the current political-economic mess that is poisoning our culture and wrecking our economy. But it would be a great mistake to conclude that Mike is arguing that the Republicans are THE culprits. This book is about how the Republicans and Democrats worked together to sell out the middle class.

The author is a modest, unassuming individual, who at first glance would appear unlikely to write such a book. He never sought the kleig lights. He never hung out with the gucci shoe crowd to pave his way into high paying lobbying job on K Street. Lunch for Lofgren was not at the Prime Rib or Capital Hill Club, but a simple sandwich in a brown bag. This modesty of life style and demeanor hides a principled intellectual, who has the character to go where his reasoning and observation take him. And a pen in Lofgrens deft hands, combined with his deep understanding of political history and acid sense of humor, becomes a sharp, deeply penetrating harpoon aimed at the heart of his subject. In addition to harpooning the bloated degenerate Republican whale, Mike harpoons the Democrats by demonstrating subtly, yet persuasively, how their growing “uselessness” arose out of an enervating sense of entitlement to power.

That sense of entitlement mutated Democrats into what we in the Pentagon would call THE ENABLERS of Republicans. The Democratic enablers unwittingly played a crucial role in the demolition of the American dream, not unlike that played by infiltration troops in blitzkrieg. Infiltration troops soften up the front by wiggling through defenses to create holes and weak areas for the tanks to roar thru and reap chaos and destruction in the enemy’s rear area. Only in this case, the rear area being ruined is the American middle class and the role of tanks is taken up by the flow money supplied by the oligarchs who feather their nests by buying Democrats as well as Republicans in one seamless auction.

Put bluntly, to protect their sense hereditary entitlement to the power bequeathed by the coattails of FDR and the New Deal, the Democrats abandoned their progressive heritage and moved to Wall Street, Big Pharma, Defense, etc., insensibly becoming faux Republicans. If you doubt this, look at the enervating, quasi-neoliberal ramblings of the self-inflating Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) or the cynical triangulations and warmongerings of Messrs. Clinton and Obama. Their abdication of progressive principles gave Republican crazies more room to get even crazier, and together the faux Republicans and the real crazy Republicans reinforced each other to create a rightward shift in the American political dynamic that unleashed the evolution of a new gilded age, together with the re-emergence of a plutocracy that Russian oligarchs would envy. And this happened in a remarkably short time of 30 to 40 years.

In so doing, the Democrats sold out their constituency and colluded in the historic swindle that brought the great American middle class to the brink of impoverishment and debt peonage.

If you think collusion is too strong a term, I would urge you to think about Bill Clinton’s (the DLC’s choice for president in the 1992 election) collusion with Republicans in the nullification of the Depression era Glass-Steagle Act in 1999, which was one of the main deregulatory initiative that unleashed the excesses that led to the 2007-8 financial meltdown. Clinton, by the way, did not pick up his grips and retire to a modest house in Independence Missouri like Harry Truman; he chose instead to join the plutocratic elite where he is now well on his way to becoming a card-carrying member of the one-tenth of one-percent club of the mega rich. The bottom line: the Democrats’ sense of entitlement and the consequent corruption of their progressive principles has been a necessary, if not sufficient, cause of the of the current political-economic mess that is destroying what is left of the middle class in our good ole USA. It would be a great mistake to allow the hilariously disgusting Republican hijinks in Logren’s masterpiece brand it as an anti-Republican polemic and miss his main message.

Mike, of course, states clearly that his subject is how the madness of the Republicans and the uselessness of the Democrats reinforced each other over the last 30 to 40 years to hose the American People. It is the degenerate nature of this symbiotic relationship that is his and should be the Left’s call to arms.

I do not count on this happening. I expect the faux Republicans will try to exploit the embarrassment of riches in Mike’s book for a narrow short-term political advantage, in yet another demonstration of the hypocrisy that is a consequence losing mentality.

In closing, I ask readers to think the fact that this laudatory review of The Party Is Over appeared in Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, not some Democratic rag trying to get leverage in the coming Presidential election. That should be taken by the Left as an example to emulate. The real question in my mind is whether progressive counterparts to the American Conservative will use Mike’s call to arms to summon the curiosity and the courage to explore the ramifications of Lofgren’s subtler analysis of the “enablers” of decline.

Franklin “Chuck” Spinney is a former military analyst for the Pentagon and a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. He be reached at chuck_spinney@mac.com

[Bundi]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Anyone here read Romney's book? I have not and am wondering if any of these "excerpts" are accurate.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/12...rd-mitt-romney

I just finished reading the book that Republican presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, published in 2010: No Apology; The Case for American Greatness. Instead of providing an interpretation on whether Mitt Romney is suitable to be president, I wanted to give an opportunity to hear the candidate in his own voice.

What follows is a collection of some of the more interesting paragraphs from Mitt’s book -- republished word for word as Romney originally wrote them.

These are the five things about Romney that haven’t been told by the mainstream media:

1. Mitt Romney Has Fresh New Ideas (Half-Wide Cars):“I shared my own dream for a super-efficient commuter vehicle. It would be a lightweight, two-passenger car in which the occupants rode tandem – one behind the other instead of side by side. These much narrower vehicles would allow for the addition of more highway lanes at very little cost, reducing traffic and commuting times. I tried out my idea on Brian Schweitzer, Montana’s no-nonsense governor. “Mitt, you’d be real smart not to ever mention that again,” he said to me with a slight smile. “People will think you’ve lost it.” (Page 235)

2. Mitt Romney Believes in Peak Oil, and Government Intervention in Energy Markets:“In recent years, there’s been a view in Washington that we should simply “let the market work” by taking a hands-off approach, rather than adopt a proactive and comprehensive set of energy policies. That prescription is exactly the right one in most economic sectors, but it falls short when it comes to energy. And it ignores the fact that we have policies in place right now that distort how the energy markets function.”

“Our own policies interfere with free-market mechanisms. We subsidize domestic oil and gas production with generous tax breaks, penalize sugar-based ethanol from Brazil, and block investment in nuclear energy. Our navy assumes the prime responsibility for securing the oil routes from the Middle East, effectively subsidizing its cost. Thus, we don’t pay the full cost of Middle East oil, either at the oil-company level or at the pump.” (232)

“Market economists also identify a number of externalities – real costs that aren’t captured in the price of fuel – the most frequently cited of which are the health-care costs of pollution and the climate costs of greenhouse gases. There is a further externality: potentially leaving the next generation in the lurch by using so much oil and energy ourselves – domestic and imported – that our children face severe oil shortages, prohibitively expensive fuel, a crippled economy, and dominion of energy by Russia and other oil-rich states. No matter how you price it, oil is expensive to use; we should be encouraging our citizens to use less of it, our scientists to find alternatives for it, and our producers to find more of it here at home.”
“Many analysts predict that the world’s production of oil will peak in the next ten to twenty years, but oil expert Matt Simmons, author of Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, presents a compelling case that Middle Eastern oil production may have already reached its peak. Simmons bases his contention on his investigation into the highly secretive matter of the level of reserves in the Saudi oil fields. But whether the peak is already past or will be reached within a few years, world oil supply willdecline at some point, and no one predicts a corresponding decline in demand. If we want America to remain strong and wish to ensure that future generations have secure and prosperous lives, we must consider our current energy policies in the light of how these policies will affect our grandchildren.” (233)

3. Mitt Romney Talks a lot About Freedom, But he is Not a Libertarian:“We also need to increase our defense spending to at least 4% of GDP per year, including substantial and increasing support for missile defense... We are engaged in two hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and facing growing threats in almost every region of the world. Weakness invites challenges, acts of intimidation, acts of aggression, and sometimes war. Right now America is, based on its defense spending, well on the road to weakness.” (32)

“Some of the battles of the sixties still linger, however, as with the current push to legalize marijuana, which reflects the passion and zeal of those members of the pleasure-seeking generation that never grew up. Their arguments are elaborate but empty – a great nation has never been built on hedonism.” (261)

“The multiculturalism movement must be unmasked for the fraud that it is. There are superior cultures and ours is one of them. As David Landes observed, “Culture makes all the difference.” (262)

4. Mitt Romney Believes Human Activity is Contributing to Climate Change:“It’s impossible not to take a look at our current energy policies without considering the question of climate change. I believe that climate change is occurring – the reduction in the size of global ice caps is hard to ignore. I also believe that human activity is a contributing factor.” (227)

Romney hedges this statement in the next paragraph by saying he is “uncertain how much of the warming is attributable to man and how much is attributable to factors out of our control.” Three pages later, Mitt concludes his discussion of climate change saying that “Internationally, we should work to limit the increase in emissions in global green house gases, but in doing so, we shouldn’t put ourselves in a disadvantageous economic position that penalizes American jobs and economic growth.” (330)

5. Mitt Romney has Made Come Valiant Attempts to Understand Average Americans:“During my campaign for governor, I decided to spend a day every few weeks doing the jobs of other people in Massachusetts. Among other jobs, I cooked sausages at Fenway Park, worked on asphalt paving crew, stacked bales of hay on a farm, volunteered in an emergency room, served food at a nursing home, and worked as a child-care assistant. I’m often asked which was the hardest job – it’s child care, by a mile.”

“One day I gathered trash as a garbage collector. I stood on that little platform at the back of the truck, holding on as the driver navigated his way through the narrow streets of Boston. As we pulled up to traffic lights, I noticed that the shoppers and businesspeople who were standing only a few feet from me didn’t even see me. It was as if I was invisible. Perhaps it was because a lot of us don’t think garbage men are worthy of notice; I disagree – anyone who works that hard deserves our respect. - I wasn’t a particularly good garbage collector: at one point, after filling the trough at the back of the truck, I pulled the wrong hydraulic lever. Instead of pushing the load into the truck, I dumped it onto the street. Maybe the suits didn’t notice me, but the guys at the construction site sure did…” (251)

[cjppjc]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Or:

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/sideshow...204423536.html

Cat has been mayor of Alaska town for 15 years




National polls show that voters all over the country are losing faith in their elected leaders. But the 900 residents of Talkeetna, Alaska, say their mayor is doing a great job bringing in tourist dollars and has served in office for over a decade.

"He's good. He's probably the best we've ever had," resident Lauri Stec tellsKTUU. "He was just in the Alaska Magazine, and he's been featured in a few different things."

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

I tried to post the embed several times - like the election, No Dice!

[lektrode]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

+1 be true to oneself . . .

Obama is an enabler of the Financial Elite.Romney IS the Financial Elite.

+1

+2
(+.5 more for the bernanks cut)

the movie links = broke?

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

I'll be going third party.

+1 be true to oneself . . .

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/GIajeW6xPnI?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>


<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Ud3mMj0AZZk?rel=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Obama is an enabler of the Financial Elite.
Romney IS the Financial Elite.

+1

[BadJuju]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

I'll be going third party. I am thinking the Citizens Party is the platform I want to support.

[Raz]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Obama is an enabler of the Financial Elite.
Romney IS the Financial Elite.

About half the People are stupid enough to vote for Romney.
The other half *are stupid enough to* vote for Obama because they are still hoping he'll stop being Steppin' Fetchit for the Rich.
It's a toss up who actually wins . . . and what difference will it make? None.

I'm waiting for the stupid and the self-deluded to feel the pain and wake up. When that finally happens, then there might be someone worth voting for who has a chance of being elected.

After that minor *edit* I can now give this a BIG thumbs up!

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

review of the solitaire election game . . .

http://youtu.be/4KrOuGf_90w

[astonas]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

It's funny how sometimes a board game can provide such a great model for politics, which depends so heavily on game theory.

Nixon, in his book "On China" expanded more recently on Kissinger's famous description of the political thought process of China as a game of wei qi (Go).

This [cultural] contrast is reflected in the respective intellectual games favored by each civilization. China’s most enduring game is wei qi (pronounced roughly “way chee,” and often known in the West by a variation of its Japanese name, go). Wei qi translates as “a game of surrounding pieces”; it implies a concept of strategic encirclement. The board, a grid of nineteen-by-nineteen lines, begins empty. Each player has 180 pieces, or stones, at his disposal, each of equal value with the others. The players take turns placing stones at any point on the board, building up positions of strength while working to encircle and capture the opponent’s stones. Mutiple contests take place simultaneously in different regions of the board. The balance of forces shifts incrementally with each move, as the players implement strategic plans and react to each other’s initiatives. At the end of a well-played game, the board is filled by partially interlocking areas of strength. The margin is often slim, and to the untrained eye, the identity of the winner is not always immediately obvious.

He goes on to contrast this with the "western" way of thinking, which he links metaphorically to Chess.

Chess, on the other hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate,to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move without being destroyed. The vast majority of games end in a total victory achieved by attrition or, more rarely,a dramatic, skillful maneuver. The only other possibile outcome is a draw, meaning the abandonment of the hope for victory by both parties.

If Chess is about the decisive battle, wei qi is about the protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The wei qi player seeks relative advantage. In chess, the player always has the capability of the adversary in front of him; all the pieces are always full deployed. The wei qi player needs to assess not only the pieces on the board but the reinforcements the adversary is in a position to deploy. Chess teaches the Clausewitzianconcepts of “center of gravity” and the “decisive point”–the game usually beginning asa struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement. Where the skillful chess player aims to eliminate his opponent’s pieces in a series of head-on clashes, a talented wei qi player moves into “empty” spaces on the board, gradually mitigating the strategic potential of his opponent’s pieces. Chess produces single-mindedness;wei qi generates strategic flexibility.


A similar contrast exists in the case of China’s distinctive military theory. Its foundations were laid during a period of upheaval, when ruthless struggles between rival kingdoms decimated China’s population. Reacting to this slaughter (and seeking to emerge victorious from it), Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

On China, Chapter One, section Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War

He also cites and shows figures from a U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute paper, entitled “Learning from the Stones: A Go Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic Concept, Shi”.


It strikes me as interesting, however, that in the U.S. the intellectual elite may play chess, but the populace, when imagining a game, largely thinks first about Monopoly. I believe that there is something to learn from that fact.

Now, when I look upon the current struggle for next-cycle economic hegemony the China/US metaphor still seems to hold true. And more interestingly, when I turn from the Pacific theater to the Atlantic, I see further parallels.

German culture takes board games extremely seriously (board gaming with family and friends is practically synonymous with family values there, almost the way religion is in the US). Games are generally strategic, with little-to-no randomness, and without a mechanism to remove a player from the game. (This should sound familiar to those following the European crisis.) The best games are like Go in that they don't have a clear winner until the end. (Again, sound familiar?) It is about as far from "Monopoly" as you can get. Significantly, the games that families play together are constantly changing; it isn't so much that one spends years mastering Chess or Go, as one spends months learning the best way to approach the intricate combination of mechanisms employed in whatever popular strategy game was released that year.

Given all this, it is not surprising that a similar game exists for the German electoral system, which actually is extremely enlightening (both directly and through metaphor) for those who otherwise have little opportunity to gain insight into its extremely unusual rules. It is Die Macher (The Mighty/Makers) Even years after publication, and in spite of its extensive rules, and long play time, it remains the 33rd-ranked strategy game worldwide (out of several thousand).

Perhaps if more people internationally played such games, there would be less confusion about why Germany is being so "difficult" at the moment? If anyone in NW Oregon is interested, I'd love to find 3 others willing to play my own copy again. (Game runs at least 4 hours, generally 6 or more, pm me.)

pic59953_md.jpg

[don]

Re: Election 2012 - predictions, discussion?

Solitaire gaming: Swing States 2012

“The word politics comes from the Greek ‘poly,’ meaning many, and the English ‘ticks,’ which are blood-sucking insects.” – James Carville

Swing States 2012 is a solitaire game simulating a U.S. presidential election in a given year. You are a political strategist hired by the nominee to win the Presidential Election for either the Democratic Party (symbolized by a donkey) or the Republican Party (symbolized by an elephant).

You must make strategic decisions regarding fund-raising and expenditures, where to campaign and where to advertise, when and where to send the nominees and vital surrogates, how much time they should spend fund-raising, preparing for debates, conducting opposition research, and dealing with scandals that appear out of nowhere.

Number of Players: 1
Ages: 12 and up
Playing Time: approximately 40 minutes
Complexity: 4 on a 9 scale
Solitaire Suitability: 9 on a 9 scale
Scale: The player is a political strategist, and the play of one Game Turn equals about half a week of real time (i.e., the days between each party’s nominating convention in the late summer and the general election in early November).

Rules: http://victorypointgames.com/documents/SS_rules (booklet) v1-0.pdf


http://victorypointgames.com/details.php?prodId=210