2012 Election Thread

[gah]

I'm not sure we have a sign or word even for someone that posts 5 times in a row. I'll just post this and save you from the double trifecta, or maybe triple double. Yeah, that works out to 6. That would've been bad. You're welcome.

[sls.stormyrider]

ok - Christie's "supposed" success.

so moving on to tonight. Ryan's speech was a lot of things - mentioning specifics was not one of them.

where I agree with Ryan (and where I'm disappointed with Obama) - Obama's leadership is questionable. Sure, the GOP was very effective in blocking Obama, even in things they liked. But, Obama gave too much lattitude to Reid and Pelosi, imo. The biggest problem I have is that he got the bipartisan commission going, and then did not publicly support them. Privately, he was negotiating with Boehner on those principles but did not publicly try to convince anyone or twist anyone's arms.
I'm not in favor of Ryan's plan for the deficit. Unfortunately, I can't comment on Obama's. If someone can post a link, I'd appreciate it.

[runawayjimbo]

ok - Christie's "supposed" success.

:hereitisyousentimentalbastard

so moving on to tonight. Ryan's speech was a lot of things - mentioning specifics was not one of them.

:hereitisyousentimentalbastard :hereitisyousentimentalbastard (although have the conventions ever been anything but platitudes and rhetoric?)

Overall it seemed kinda awkward to me. But he ended on a high note so I'm sure they'll eat it up.

where I agree with Ryan (and where I'm disappointed with Obama) - Obama's leadership is questionable. Sure, the GOP was very effective in blocking Obama, even in things they liked. But, Obama gave too much lattitude to Reid and Pelosi, imo. The biggest problem I have is that he got the bipartisan commission going, and then did not publicly support them. Privately, he was negotiating with Boehner on those principles but did not publicly try to convince anyone or twist anyone's arms.
I'm not in favor of Ryan's plan for the deficit. Unfortunately, I can't comment on Obama's. If someone can post a link, I'd appreciate it.

Here you go. And did you miss my question on what the ObamaCare Medicare cuts reductions in the growth of spending will do to providers?

[runawayjimbo]

First of all, +k for the rant(s), poster.

I didn't expect Obama to be able to bring that number down almost until his first term was up anyways. My perspective on what Obama inherited, is something that was just in the beginnings of what was going to be a very long and dragged out recession of the magnitude that you see being played out.

Why is that exactly? In the 11 post-war recessions before this one, it took 23.5 months on average to get total jobs back to the pre-recession level (sorry, Hicks, the Fed data only goes back to 1939 although per the NBER we were not technically in a recession between June 1938 and February 1945). We are at an unprecedented 56 months and counting and we are still 5M jobs below than the January 2008 peak. And I understand "this time was different!" and "the obstructionist GOP blocks everything he wants to do!" and that's all well and good. But it doesn't change the fact that we are still witnessing the slowest recovery in history and while that is by no means exclusively (or even predominantly) Obama's fault, it does prove to me that his first term was devoid of leadership.

The fact is, he made a conscious political decision to spend the first 2 yrs of his presidency fighting for healthcare. He recognized that he may only have a Democratically controlled House and Senate for 2 yrs so he decided to focus exclusively on this (it certainly wasn't on passing a budget, which hasn't happened throughout his term). I interpret this decision to mean that he believed the economy would recover by the time his first term was up (since, as I noted above, that's what had always happened to this point) so healthcare was the priority. It turns out that political calulcation may cost him a second term.

Now, I know what some of you may be thinking: "jimbo, you don't believe gov't can create jobs so why would it matter if Obama focused on jobs or not?" And you'd be right, I don't believe gov't can create jobs any more than I believe Mitt Romney would repeal ObamaCare. But there were 2 problems I had with the decision to push through ObamaCare (well, a lot more than two actually but as it pertains to the jobs argument). First, the increased requirements and regulation is absolutely an impediment to growth, (disclaimer: the Chamber of Commerce is essentially a political arm of the GOP, but they can't fake the numbers this lopsided done by an independent pollster). Second, it prevented fixing the structural reforms - how we finance our entitlement system, the overcomplicated tax code, the proper incentives for business to invest and grow - that would have (IMO) fostered a much stronger recovery. Then he could have coasted to  re-election with the trust of the people to do whatever the hell he wanted regardless of Congress (and a big victory would have had down ballot effects as well). Instead, like he so often does, he led from behind.

The fact that about 4 million houses went into foreclosure almost by the time his first year in office was up, then close to another 3 million houses were eventually foreclosed upon, and that about 16 million more homeowners found themselves in a home that lost approximately  35% - 40% of it's value, should be a major indicator of just how bad the debacle that the Republican led House (05'-07'), the Republican led Senate (05'-07'), and the Republican President (01'-09'), really handed off to Obama.

Three things: (1) what does a person's home value have to do with jobs? and (b) are you seriously trying to tell me the housing crisis was created in 2 yrs (even though most of the subprime debt was already on the banks' books by 2005)? and (iii) the ' comes before the abbreviated year, as in '05-'07 :wink:

The simple fact is everyone is to blame for the housing crash: the Fed for keeping interest rates too low for too long (going back to Greenspan and exasperated by the Bernank); Republicans AND Democrats who for years purposefully manipulated the housing market through price distorting measures such as the mortgage deduction and mandates on Fannie and Freddie for how much of their book had to consist of loans to low income families (primarily Dems pushing that one, BTW); academics like Krugman who said "Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble" because that's the only thing they know how to do; the banks who fueled the mania by packaging and repackaging loans to sell a piece of shit wrapped in a pretty bow to unsuspecting investors; supposedly sophisticated investors who kept buying these shitty vehicles without questioning once why they were able to get a higher yield on AAA rated securities; the rating agencies who were so goddamn dumb they just let the banks tell them what the rating should be in a tremendous conflict of interest (rating agencies get paid by the companies selling the debt, not by the investors, so if the agencies want more business they have to appease their clients; how fucking stupid is that?); mortgage brokers who didn't give a shit about lending standards because they could turn around and sell them to Fannie/Freddie without thinking twice about the quality of the applicant. But perhaps the most complicit culprit (and the one who gets the biggest pass, IMO) is the American public. We overleveraged ourselves so many times over on the same flawed assumption the banks used: that housing prices would never go down. And please, PLEASE, don't come back saying "predatory lending" because while I don't disagree that it happened, it was nowhere near the scale that would lead to the widescale foreclosures that we saw (I think I saw an estimate of loans considered "predatory" as under 10% somewhere but I could totally be making that up because I don't even know how you would go about measuring that). In the end ( ::winknudge:: ), the public took on too much debt and the system collapsed. Boy, am I glad we're not still repeating our mistakes...

Job loses from the beginning of 2008 until the spring of 2009 already had past the 5 million mark. The TARP bailout didn't stop a thing, except a possible catastrophic market crash. It's beyond ridiculous to think that any President was going to take office, and then proceed to pull a magic wand out of his ass, and bring the economy back in less than 4 years. The republicans are always asking for Obama to take responsibility, but as far as I am concerned, this is still mostly their responsibility.

This is the thing about your post that I struggle with the most: I just don't understand why it should matter who is at fault (especially when both parties are equally guilty). As I said above, I think this entire premise (that it was all the GOP's fault to begin with) is completely flawed but that really doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is who is trying to make it better (hint: it's neither). Obviously he walked in to a difficult situation. Yes, external events have hampered global growth. So what? He's the president, not the night manager at Bob's Big Boy. Bush had 9/11, Clinton had a massive recession himself, FDR is widely considered a great president (not be me, but by people) and he had polio fercrissakes (and something else, I forget). In 4 yrs, I don't know that I've seen any leadership or accountability out of Obama, so to me, "not my fault" is not a legitmiate answer.

I'm not sure people would care if it just felt like we were moving in the right direction. But people don't believe we are getting better. And the only reason this election is even remotely close is because the Republicans are a bunch of unlikeable dicks (as evidenced by their current nominee).

George W. Bush brought it up to about 88%, and this was without putting either of the two wars on the books.

To be clear, when they say "didn't put it on the books" it means it wasn't accounted for in the budget. But planes and tanks and guns are expensive and I don't think Lockheed Martin takes an IOU (and even if they did that would still count as debt). So the 88% includes the money spent (but not accounted for) on 2 wars that we are never going to fully remove ourselves from.

Our country experienced great growth with a very high tax rate through the 50's & 60's, and at the same time the country had some of the strongest regulations in place.

The reason for the post-war boom was not because we were smarter or worked harder (LOL) or because we had higher taxes or better regulations. It was because we were the only major nation not rebuilding from a global conflict. And to a point Hicks often makes, manufacturing capital is real and thus the growth is inherently more stable (unlike today's finacial inventions by rogue physicists jerking themselves off with more and more complex schemes). But IMO we should just admit what we already know - that manufacturing will never fully come back. So we shouldn't be fighting to bring those jobs back, we should be looking to create new industries and services that will drive growth into the next phase of human history (space travel? nanotech robots to eradicate cancer? teleporters? go wild).

The deregulation assault, which started under the Reagan administration, and continued until Clinton signed the Gramm(R)-Leach(R)-Bliley(R) Act of 1999,

Who signed?

which overturned the Glass-Stegall of 1932

Steagall :wink:

brought us right back to ruins. But yet the Republicans are still touting that regulations are the problem, without ever offering up any type of other hardcore reforms, such as ending the Federal Reserve

See, this is where I get lost: if the Fed kept us safe from bubbles and bank failures through the '60s, why would you want to end it? I mean, if deregulation was the problem, why would you want to engage in the ultimate financial dergulation? Unless you think something happened in, oh I don't know, let's say 1971 that changed the way credit was created.

while at the same time instilling other regulations, to bring down the size of these banks, so that if they invest badly again, we can let them fail, without being threatened by a huge maket crash, wiping out the entire economy and a ton of retirement funds.

I'm sure we part ways on how to do it, but I agree banks should be smaller.

As for the inflation part, nice job, but I just don't belive you know more about inflation than the honorable Paul R Krugman, Ph.D (a Nobel laureate, BTW). If Prof. Krugman says we're in need of more inflation, than I have to assume he's telling the truth.

I mean, come on...gas, Phish tix, healthcare? Nobody's buying that shit. People buy HD TVs and refrigerators, and the prices on those things have been going down to Chinatown.

And the other question I want to raise when you look at this is, when you are out and about hanging with your friends at bars or even at Phish shows. If you were to survey 20 people, how many do you think would say they earn more or less than 35,000/year... My estimation is probably less than 10 earn that much or more..

Well, according to your link, median income is around $49,445, so I'd suggest in a random sample of 20 people, more than 10 people would make $35k or more. At Phish shows not so much.

[rowjimmy]

Fox News calls out Ryan for being full of shit:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/

(Link courtesy John Perry Barlow)

[sls.stormyrider]

^^^
awesome


btw, when Ryan blasted Obamacare last night, they panned to the audience. Everyone was standing up and cheering.

except



Ann Romney, who sat there quietly.

[aphineday]

^^^
awesome


btw, when Ryan blasted Obamacare last night, they panned to the audience. Everyone was standing up and cheering.

except



Ann Romney, who sat there quietly.

If I was in Obama's shoes, I'd start referring to it as "Obamney Care", and thank him incessantly for all of the inspiration.
I'm not even kidding, Mitchell did a good job in Massachusetts, and he should be given credit where credit is due.

Fox News calls out Ryan for being full of shit:
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2012/08/30/paul-ryans-speech-in-three-words/

(Link courtesy John Perry Barlow)

I promise you this speech was one of the nails in the coffin for Mitt Romney. Almost every fact Ryan attempted to state was a blatant lie or at the very least an embellishment of the truth.
Obama will hit him, and hit him hard with that.

[twatts]

http://week4paug.net/index.php?topic=19639.msg669203#msg669203

[rowjimmy]

http://week4paug.net/index.php?topic=19639.msg669203#msg669203

Beat ya by three hours.

[runawayjimbo]

This Clint Eastwood "speech" the most depressingly awkward thing I've seen since Ryan last night. It's like a good episode of Louie.

Rubio reminds everyone he's from Cuba. Then makes a "Latinos live in a house with like 50 people" joke. Great TV.

[twatts]

This Clint Eastwood "speech" the most depressingly awkward thing I've seen since Ryan last night. It's like a good episode of Louie.

Rubio reminds everyone he's from Cuba. Then makes a "Latinos live in a house with like 50 people" joke. Great TV.

I love "hating" you...  You want to kill 'em all!  LOL!  I know another Philly Steaker that talks the same talk...  Maybe its the water!?!  LOL!

Terry

[runawayjimbo]

I guess it was a good speech by Romney but it's hard to listen to a guy when you can't believe a word he says.

Also, Christie reminds everyone that Romney cried ("he got emotional"...you know, cause people think he's a robot). What would Republicans say if the Democratic nominee cried during his acceptance speech?

New Taibbi for Hicks (et al). This is just the intro.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital
How the GOP presidential candidate and his private equity firm staged an epic wealth grab, destroyed jobs – and stuck others with the bill
by: Matt Taibbi

The great criticism of Mitt Romney, from both sides of the aisle, has always been that he doesn't stand for anything. He's a flip-flopper, they say, a lightweight, a cardboard opportunist who'll say anything to get elected.

The critics couldn't be more wrong. Mitt Romney is no tissue-paper man. He's closer to being a revolutionary, a backward-world version of Che or Trotsky, with tweezed nostrils instead of a beard, a half-Windsor instead of a leather jerkin. His legendary flip-flops aren't the lies of a bumbling opportunist – they're the confident prevarications of a man untroubled by misleading the nonbeliever in pursuit of a single, all-consuming goal. Romney has a vision, and he's trying for something big: We've just been too slow to sort out what it is, just as we've been slow to grasp the roots of the radical economic changes that have swept the country in the last generation.

The incredible untold story of the 2012 election so far is that Romney's run has been a shimmering pearl of perfect political hypocrisy, which he's somehow managed to keep hidden, even with thousands of cameras following his every move. And the drama of this rhetorical high-wire act was ratcheted up even further when Romney chose his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – like himself, a self-righteously anal, thin-lipped, Whitest Kids U Know penny pincher who'd be honored to tell Oliver Twist there's no more soup left. By selecting Ryan, Romney, the hard-charging, chameleonic champion of a disgraced-yet-defiant Wall Street, officially succeeded in moving the battle lines in the 2012 presidential race.

Like John McCain four years before, Romney desperately needed a vice-presidential pick that would change the game. But where McCain bet on a combustive mix of clueless novelty and suburban sexual tension named Sarah Palin, Romney bet on an idea. He said as much when he unveiled his choice of Ryan, the author of a hair-raising budget-cutting plan best known for its willingness to slash the sacred cows of Medicare and Medicaid. "Paul Ryan has become an intellectual leader of the Republican Party," Romney told frenzied Republican supporters in Norfolk, Virginia, standing before the reliably jingoistic backdrop of a floating warship. "He understands the fiscal challenges facing America: our exploding deficits and crushing debt."

Debt, debt, debt. If the Republican Party had a James Carville, this is what he would have said to win Mitt over, in whatever late-night war room session led to the Ryan pick: "It's the debt, stupid." This is the way to defeat Barack Obama: to recast the race as a jeremiad against debt, something just about everybody who's ever gotten a bill in the mail hates on a primal level.

Last May, in a much-touted speech in Iowa, Romney used language that was literally inflammatory to describe America's federal borrowing. "A prairie fire of debt is sweeping across Iowa and our nation," he declared. "Every day we fail to act, that fire gets closer to the homes and children we love." Our collective debt is no ordinary problem: According to Mitt, it's going to burn our children alive.

And this is where we get to the hypocrisy at the heart of Mitt Romney. Everyone knows that he is fantastically rich, having scored great success, the legend goes, as a "turnaround specialist," a shrewd financial operator who revived moribund companies as a high-priced consultant for a storied Wall Street private equity firm. But what most voters don't know is the way Mitt Romney actually made his fortune: by borrowing vast sums of money that other people were forced to pay back. This is the plain, stark reality that has somehow eluded America's top political journalists for two consecutive presidential campaigns: Mitt Romney is one of the greatest and most irresponsible debt creators of all time. In the past few decades, in fact, Romney has piled more debt onto more unsuspecting companies, written more gigantic checks that other people have to cover, than perhaps all but a handful of people on planet Earth.

By making debt the centerpiece of his campaign, Romney was making a calculated bluff of historic dimensions – placing a massive all-in bet on the rank incompetence of the American press corps. The result has been a brilliant comedy: A man makes a $250 million fortune loading up companies with debt and then extracting million-dollar fees from those same companies, in exchange for the generous service of telling them who needs to be fired in order to finance the debt payments he saddled them with in the first place. That same man then runs for president riding an image of children roasting on flames of debt, choosing as his running mate perhaps the only politician in America more pompous and self-righteous on the subject of the evils of borrowed money than the candidate himself. If Romney pulls off this whopper, you'll have to tip your hat to him: No one in history has ever successfully run for president riding this big of a lie. It's almost enough to make you think he really is qualified for the White House.

The unlikeliness of Romney's gambit isn't simply a reflection of his own artlessly unapologetic mindset – it stands as an emblem for the resiliency of the entire sociopathic Wall Street set he represents. Four years ago, the Mitt Romneys of the world nearly destroyed the global economy with their greed, shortsightedness and – most notably – wildly irresponsible use of debt in pursuit of personal profit. The sight was so disgusting that people everywhere were ready to drop an H-bomb on Lower Manhattan and bayonet the survivors. But today that same insane greed ethos, that same belief in the lunatic pursuit of instant borrowed millions – it's dusted itself off, it's had a shave and a shoeshine, and it's back out there running for president.

Mitt Romney, it turns out, is the perfect frontman for Wall Street's greed revolution. He's not a two-bit, shifty-eyed huckster like Lloyd Blankfein. He's not a sighing, eye-rolling, arrogant jerkwad like Jamie Dimon. But Mitt believes the same things those guys believe: He's been right with them on the front lines of the financialization revolution, a decades-long campaign in which the old, simple, let's-make-stuff-and-sell-it manufacturing economy was replaced with a new, highly complex, let's-take-stuff-and-trash-it financial economy. Instead of cars and airplanes, we built swaps, CDOs and other toxic financial products. Instead of building new companies from the ground up, we took out massive bank loans and used them to acquire existing firms, liquidating every asset in sight and leaving the target companies holding the note. The new borrow-and-conquer economy was morally sanctified by an almost religious faith in the grossly euphemistic concept of "creative destruction," and amounted to a total abdication of collective responsibility by America's rich, whose new thing was making assloads of money in ever-shorter campaigns of economic conquest, sending the proceeds offshore, and shrugging as the great towns and factories their parents and grandparents built were shuttered and boarded up, crushed by a true prairie fire of debt.

Mitt Romney – a man whose own father built cars and nurtured communities, and was one of the old-school industrial anachronisms pushed aside by the new generation's wealth grab – has emerged now to sell this make-nothing, take-everything, screw-everyone ethos to the world. He's Gordon Gekko, but a new and improved version, with better PR – and a bigger goal. A takeover artist all his life, Romney is now trying to take over America itself. And if his own history is any guide, we'll all end up paying for the acquisition.

...

[runawayjimbo]

This Clint Eastwood "speech" the most depressingly awkward thing I've seen since Ryan last night. It's like a good episode of Louie.

Rubio reminds everyone he's from Cuba. Then makes a "Latinos live in a house with like 50 people" joke. Great TV.

I love "hating" you...  You want to kill 'em all!  LOL!  I know another Philly Steaker that talks the same talk...  Maybe its the water!?!  LOL!

Terry

Ahhh, dude, if you come to Philly, it's best you don't drink the water.

[runawayjimbo]

Penn Jillette is the shit

[twatts]

This Clint Eastwood "speech" the most depressingly awkward thing I've seen since Ryan last night. It's like a good episode of Louie.

Rubio reminds everyone he's from Cuba. Then makes a "Latinos live in a house with like 50 people" joke. Great TV.

I love "hating" you...  You want to kill 'em all!  LOL!  I know another Philly Steaker that talks the same talk...  Maybe its the water!?!  LOL!

Terry

Ahhh, dude, if you come to Philly, it's best you don't drink the water.

The one time I was in Philly, it was harrowing...  But it was a fun show (camden 99)...  I remember good cheese steaks, tho I was just following along and didn't know anything...  virgin...

Next time I'll stick to beers!  You're buying!  LOL!

Terry