2012 Election Thread

[twatts]

Also, Romney was talking about private companies competing with Medicare for seniors. It sounds like a good idea.

Mittens said that if you were a senior and weren't happy with your current Private Insurer, you could just get a new one...  But what Private Insurer is going to pick-up an elderly person who may not have medical expenses now, but will definitely have them in the future???  Mitt offers a false choice. 

T

[Hicks]

http://factcheck.org/2012/10/dubious-denver-debate-declarations/

not to mention a couple other things Obama didn't say about ACA
-it ends the donut hole
-preventative care is covered without copay

Regarding pre-conditions, Romney's plan reverts to the prior law - If you change jobs or insurance, you are covered as long as your insurance is not interrupted for > 90 days. If you never had insurance, or had it interrupted > 90 days, you are SOL.

Also, Romney was talking about private companies competing with Medicare for seniors. It sounds like a good idea. I thought it was a good idea when they started doing in in MA and NH in the mid 90s. All the major players had senior's plans.
None of them do now - none of them could compete with Medicare for price / coverage.


All of our arguments are well and good, but the Prez should have brought these points up himself last night.
I've never seen him look so bad

True neglecting to point out just how badly Romney was lying is practically aiding and abetting.

Obama clearly lost the debate, but I do think it remains to be seen if Romney really won anything.

[Hicks]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/sasha-obama-asks-father-why-he-was-acting-like-suc,29795/

DENVER—Following last night's nationally televised presidential debate, President Barack Obama's 11-year-old daughter Sasha reportedly asked her father why he was "acting like such a goddamned pussy up there." "Daddy, how come you were being such a little bitch?" asked the sixth-grader, who told the president she was "genuinely worried" that maybe somebody had "cut Daddy's balls off" right before he took the stage. "What happened, Dad? Were you on your period or something? Maybe the next time you're in front of the entire country for an hour and a half you should try not letting another man spank you on the ass like that." Sources added that Obama's youngest daughter then offered to help the president go "look for [his] dick, because apparently it's gone missing."

[sls.stormyrider]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/sasha-obama-asks-father-why-he-was-acting-like-suc,29795/
Sources added that Obama’s youngest daughter then offered to help the president go “look for [his] dick, because apparently it’s gone missing.”

sometimes the onion writes things that are, in fact, true

you know that Michelle didn't give him that special anniversary gift after that performance.


another crazy claim was on green energy
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/90-billion-for-green-energy-a-closer-look/

Three times in Wednesday night's debate, Mitt Romney said that President Obama had plowed $90 billion of federal money into green energy. "Now, I like green energy as well, but that's about 50 years' worth of what oil and gas receives,'' he said. "Ninety billion — that — that would have — that would have hired two million teachers,'' he said.

Is $90 billion accurate?

As we reported in August when Mr. Romney first raised the figure, sort of. The $90 billion is a real number drawn from the 2009 stimulus package, but it wasn't all spent, as Mr. Romney said, and a lot of the green energy spending that went out the door on Mr. Obama's watch was authorized during the Bush administration.

The biggest component of the $90 billion was $29 billion for energy efficiency, of which $5 billion involved improvements in the homes and apartments of low-income households. There was also $18 billion for fast trains and $21 billion for wind farms, solar panels and other renewable energy. Supporters point out that much of the energy spending drew in private capital.

Mr. Romney also said, "I think about half of them, of the ones have been invested in, they've gone out of business." One, Solyndra, a maker of solar equipment, went under and took the government's $528 million with it. (The Solyndra grant process began during the Bush administration, however, as my colleague John Mr. Broder noted.) Others went bankrupt, but the government recovered some of the stimulus money. The defaults were far less than Congress had allocated to cover losses, and far, far less than half of the ventures, although some others may yet fail.

As Mr. Broder also pointed out, Mr. Romney asserted that all the increase in oil and gas production during Mr. Obama's term occurred on private lands, but federal statistics contradict this.

Environmentalists and others were quick to point out that the debate was also noteworthy for what was not said; there was no mention of global warming or climate change in general.

[emay]

Prob posted already but

Romenys 10 most Baseless Claims

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/04/mitt-romney-inaccuracies-_n_1939337.html?icid=maing-grid10%7Chtmlws-main-bb%7Cdl1%7Csec1_lnk3&pLid=215506&utm_hp_ref=fb&src=sp&comm_ref=false#slide=1601088

[runawayjimbo]

I mean, I would like to respond to all the above but I just don't have it in me tonight (oh don't worry, I'll weigh in on some of them). The instantaneous and ubiquitous outrage tells me pretty much everything I need to know about how the left felt about last night. "It was Jim Lehrer's fault" (personally I thought he was as good as a moderator could be; it was easily the most dialogue driven debate I can remember). "Romney lies" (I'll get to some of my favorites). "Debates don't really matter anyway." And of course, my personal favorite, Al Gore's "well Obama obviously had altitude sickness."

Also, there's been a lot of talk of Romney's lack of specifics, but last night (and quite often) Obama promised to cut Medicare by being "balanced" and "reasonable". He said they were "looking at" how best to present Simpson-Bowles to Congress (after sitting on it since the committee failed to force a Congressional debate on it; BTW, the Simpson-Bowles tax plan, the left's "fair and balanced" approach to deficit reduction, looks remarkably like Romney's). And I've seen far more headlines detailing Romney's lies than Obama's; does that mean Obama was entirely truthful while Romney is a scum sucking snake oil salesman? (hint: he is, but surely someone should recognize the  truthiness in Obama's statements as well).

In the end (!!!), I don't believe last night changed the outcome of the election, but it did change the trajectory of the race. But more importantly is the economy, starting with tomorrow's job numbers (Obama was briefed on them this afternoon; wonder if that made him feel better or was salt on the wounds).

But to a couple of my favorite "lies":

-- The $5T tax cut & the myth of the $2,000 middle class tax hike - I'm glad to see FactCheck called Obama's BS on this one. I'm really not sure why Obama decided to mention this one (over and over and over). Pretty blatantly untrue. You wanna say Romney doesn't make up the revenue, that's a different story. It's still debatable (he has recently started floating the idea of capping deductions which overwhelmingly benefit high incomes), but at least it's not patently untrue.
-- Obama didn't double the deficit - This was interesting and "debunked" on both FactCheck and HuffPo. The reason this is so ridiculous to me is because both organizations completely miss the point Romney was making. FactCheck (but not HuffPo, shockingly) acknowledges Obama's famous (broken) promise to cut the deficit in half by the end of his first term (hard to deny given it was in his first SOTU). But then they both say he didn't double the deficit because FY09 ended $1.2-1.4T in the hole, roughly the same as this year. But you don't compare deficits from different years (you'd need to look at the cumulative deficits, i.e., the debt, for that). Romney was comparing Obama's projected FY12 deficit to reality, a very typical actual-vs-expected analysis. And by Obama's own calculation, the FY12 deficit of $557B is...hang on, let me get a calculator...oh yeah, roughly doubled by the current $1.2T. You could say they forecast wasn't accurate. You could say (as Obama often does) "we didn't understand the depths of the recession." Both of those things may be true, but they don't really inspire a lot of confidence in the administration's ability to lead us out of a mess they don't understand.
-- Medicare "cuts" - I've mentioned this ad nauseum, but IMO everybody is guilty of lying on this point.

not to mention a couple other things Obama didn't say about ACA
-it ends the donut hole
-preventative care is covered without copay

These thing sound good but of course, but we might want to think about paying for them at some point. Just sayin'.

Mittens said that if you were a senior and weren't happy with your current Private Insurer, you could just get a new one...  But what Private Insurer is going to pick-up an elderly person who may not have medical expenses now, but will definitely have them in the future???  Mitt offers a false choice. 

Agreed, private insurers would certainly not offer coverage now to seniors because of both the manipulation of market prices through the gov't oligopoly on total healthcare spending as well as the now stringent regulations detailing how insurers can or cannot underwrite their insureds. But were it not for this intervention, the senior market could be a very profitable block of business for insurers. Property insurers LOVE offering policies to homeowners in coastal FL or sitting on the San Andreas fault because they (most reasonably) are allowed to charge those customers more for the expected value of potential loses. If insurers could underwrite their business, there would be plenty of carriers willing to offer coverage. But as long as the senior market is distorted by Medicare and overly burdensome oversight, you're right, no one company ever would venture into that market and competition can never be established as a cost controlling measure (in part for the reasons sls outlines above).

another crazy claim was on green energy
http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/04/90-billion-for-green-energy-a-closer-look/

C'mon, sls. Of course you know it doesn't matter what was actually spent but what was guaranteed (although by their tally I get $68B of the $90B, not exactly a tremendous "savings"). Because if the gov't offers a line of credit to green energy companies, they have to have that money available if people want to draw on it. Like any budget, the money is allocated once promised and then if it never goes out the door it can be credited back at a later date but the money is still allocated (i.e., spent in the eyes of the gov't). That means they have to raise it through taxes or (more likely) borrow it; either way, there is an opportunity cost to that guarantee that actually exceeds the $90B figure because they are taking it out of the productive sectors of the economy and that is not a good "investment" in times of recession/anemic recovery (and let's not forget the interest paid on the borrowed money).

[runawayjimbo]

114k jobs, almost exactly as expected (115k). Unemployment rate falls to 7.8% from 8.1% (8.2% expected). Like in previous months, however, this is most likely driven almost exclusively by people leaving the labor force.

Pretty anti-climactic. Both sides will use it to say "See, the other guy is wrong." Probably a win for Obama's run out the clock strategy.

[VDB]

I had to DVR the debate Wednesday and watched it last night. I agree with the broad consensus that Mitt came out of this looking better than Obama... not sure what BO's problem was... bored? Tired? He almost seemed like he didn't want to be there. Usually BO is much more on point than that.

Still, whereas Romney exhibited passion and energy, I'm not going to say he completely blew Obama out of the water -- it's not as if Obama was just completely steamrolled and knocked around all night. His attitude seemed to be more "yawn... you're wrong, let me explain why" and simply less "fired up! ready to go!"

I found it pretty annoying how the candidates would challenge each other on dubious or vague claims the other was making, and the response was simply to keep making them using the same words as before. Came off as just the usual prevarications we always hear.

And how about Romney going out of his way to sound like a nonthreatening centrist? Who is this guy and what has he done with primary-season Romney? Not looking for a tax cut? Praising parts of Dodd-Frank or aspects of Obamacare? Espousing the greatness of regulations and investment in public education? Obama really needs/needed to hold Romney more accountable for the far-right positions he staked out during the primaries, e.g. on social issues or immigration or those other red-meat topics where he had to outflank the Rick Perry's and Rick Santorum's of the world. I'd love to see Romney up there squirming his way through a conversation about how his positions on gay rights or abortion have drifted so far since he no longer had to be accountable to Massachusetts voters.

[PIE-GUY]

I don't really understand how Romney's getting away with his whole "I'm proud of what we did in Massachusetts. It was right for our state. It's not right for the whole country. It should be up to each state to come up with it's own plan."

Well, in Texas coming up with our own plan literally leaves millions of children with no care at all. Sweet. Thanks.

[twatts]

Obama really needs/needed to hold Romney more accountable for the far-right positions he staked out during the primaries,

As my wife pointed out last night, its hard to argue with someone that constantly changes their position, or in Mitt's case, out-right denies his position.

Terry

[VDB]

I don't really understand how Romney's getting away with his whole "I'm proud of what we did in Massachusetts. It was right for our state. It's not right for the whole country. It should be up to each state to come up with it's own plan."

Well, in Texas coming up with our own plan literally leaves millions of children with no care at all. Sweet. Thanks.

It's another great opportunity for Obama to press him. You can't simultaneously say that "the government cannot force you to buy insurance or 'take over' health care" and then "but it's OK if state governments do it." Romney is trying to have it both ways -- frame Obamacare as both a fundamental affront to the liberties of the people and their right to be free of government intervention, and also a state's rights issue. It can only be one or the other, not both.

[twatts]

I don't really understand how Romney's getting away with his whole "I'm proud of what we did in Massachusetts. It was right for our state. It's not right for the whole country. It should be up to each state to come up with it's own plan."

Well, in Texas coming up with our own plan literally leaves millions of children with no care at all. Sweet. Thanks.

It's another great opportunity for Obama to press him. You can't simultaneously say that "the government cannot force you to buy insurance or 'take over' health care" and then "but it's OK if state governments do it." Romney is trying to have it both ways -- frame Obamacare as both a fundamental affront to the liberties of the people and their right to be free of government intervention, and also a state's rights issue. It can only be one or the other, not both.

Giving States more control over Welfare (like giving them a choice whether to keep Workfare) is seen as "not requiring people" to work for welfare...

T

[Hicks]

114k jobs, almost exactly as expected (115k). Unemployment rate falls to 7.8% from 8.1% (8.2% expected). Like in previous months, however, this is most likely driven almost exclusively by people leaving the labor force.

Pretty anti-climactic. Both sides will use it to say "See, the other guy is wrong." Probably a win for Obama's run out the clock strategy.

"Unemployment under 8% for the first time in three years."

Even you have to admit that's a pretty killer soundbite for Obama to hang his hat on.

[Hicks]

"No props, notes, charts, diagrams or other writings can be used by the candidates; however, they can take notes on the type of paper of their choosing."

[Undermind]

Obama really needs/needed to hold Romney more accountable for the far-right positions he staked out during the primaries,

As my wife pointed out last night, its hard to argue with someone that constantly changes their position, or in Mitt's case, out-right denies his position.

Terry

  That's a good point!