There was a number of candidates running for president of the USA in 2012. I was not happy with any of them, though I don’t disapprove of them all equally.
I have been shocked at the outrageous lies being bandied around, e.g. Romney lied that Obama is the enemy of the auto industry when it was Obama’s idea to bail out Detroit. The government actually made money on the bail out when General Motors paid back the loan with interest. Romney lied that he, Romney, is the friend of the auto industry even though he voted against the bail out. Romney further lied that Jeep was outsourcing to China, which it was not and that the outsourcing was Obama’s doing, which is ridiculous. Obama is not even on the Jeep board of directors. Fact checkers point that almost everything you hear in ads is only partly true. It is classic dissembling and deception. Try listening to media outside the USA for more accurate, less biased view.
The Republicans have caught on how to exploit a weakness in human wetware. Science has discovered that people (not just Republicans) will almost always believe something so long as it reinforces what they already believe and will discount whatever conflicts with it. It does not matter how often a lie has been debunked or how solid the evidence for a truth is. In our pre-electronic times, this feature of the human brain helped filter out nonsense or the occasional lie. However, it cannot cope with an avalanche of electronically amplified mass deception (e.g. TV ad blitzes, fake computer-generated Internet posts, robocalls…)
All the Republicans (or anyone else) has to do is keep repeating the same lies over and over with electronic amplification so that each voter hears them thousands of times creating the illusion each lie is a commonly accepted fact, e.g. the lie that Obama has no birth certificate and no irrefutable supporting evidence proving he is an American citizen and that there is solid evidence that he is a citizen of Kenya.
Further, it is a lot easier to tell a convincing lie in a rehearsed ad, or in an ad voiced by a trained actor (professional liar) or on the Internet than in person. It is also a lot easier to propagate and saturate the planet with a lie and thus create an illusion about what popular opinion is. Money can be transformed into fake consensus.
What can you do to protect yourself from mass deception bombarding you from all directions (not just the Republicans)? You have to pay far more attention to the evidence for and against any statement and far less on how many people mindlessly claim they do or do not believe it. Also check with multiple fact-checking websites and check the checkers.
The swing states Ohio, Pennsylvania (Mitt said it was though nobody else did), Vermont and Nevada are all leading toward Obama. Florida is right on the edge 50:50, tell-tale evidence of hacks of the voting machines, a long-standing Rovian Florida tradition. Even though at the time of writing, Obama is 2% behind in the popular vote, none of the votes of the west coast have yet been tallied. They will go for Obama.
However, this is a Pyrrhic victory. Without a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate and House, the Republicans can continue their sabotage of the US economy by filibustering every single bill, creating gridlock, hoping to tar the Democratic candidate in 2016, likely Hillary Clinton. The right to filibuster is not law, but merely a tradition. There could well be a big fight over new rules to prevent its abuse.
Comedians are weeping and holding wakes in all major cities for what might have been.
Why this outcome?
Traditionally both winners an losers are gracious after an election. I don’t think that applies in this case. I don’t characterise the outcome as Obama’s win or Romney’s loss, but as a temporary setback for the forces of evil.
Why did women vote for Obama and men for Romney? Women know much better than men it takes a lot longer to clean up a mess (kitchen or financial) than to make it. Women blame the people who made the mess, not those who failed to clean it all up in a twinkling.
Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.
~ Mahatma Gandhi (1869-10-02 1948-01-30 age:78)
The graph above shows clearly how rapidly the Bush-Romney-Republican economic policies of tax cuts for the wealthy and merely hoping they would spend the money creating jobs rather than investing overseas and outsourcing for even more profit, destroys an entire economy. It also shows Obama’s traditional Keynesian policies are working steadily and are on target to get unemployment under control in about a year. Why take a risk with a known loser like Romney who even admits he plans to reuse George W. Bush’s economic policies that created the unemployment mess the first place. How stupid can people be to even consider Romney if unemployment is their big issue?
However, to me, global warming is the big issue. Survival takes priority over everything else in my book. There are no decent choices, though Obama is at least not actively denying the problem is real as Romney does.
Unfortunately, the candidates agree on a number of issues so you don’t get a choice:
He is not bloody minded enough. He is dealing with fiends, yet treats them as equals. He is a constitutional scholar and tries to run the presidency by the book. He needs to bully a little, like Lyndon Johnson, with favours and threats to get critical legislation passed. He does not appreciate his oratory power to do an end run around his enemies and go direct to the people for the leverage he needs. He has been unwilling to get the dirt on Supreme Court Justice John Roberts to impeach him. He has done nothing on global warming and just a token on alternative energy.
He dithered so long about don’t ask don’t tell. He campaigned as pro-gay then blocked gay marriage. He dithered about ending the Afghan and Iraq wars. He campaigned as a peace candidate then turned around and ramped up the Afghan war. However, he did wind down the Iraq war. He campaigned as a populist then underhandedly gave hundreds of billions to his wall street backers. His universal medical care plan was so watered down as a sop to Republicans that it missed most of the benefits and made it an easier target. He has not stopped Republicans from disenfranchising Democratic voters. He barely even condemned it. He has not even put a stop to crooked voting machines, which lose him the election. He is not someone you can trust. He is all big talk and little action, but at least he is not overtly hostile to the people the way his Republican competitors are.
His big problem was overselling himself. People expect him to fend off the entire Republican party single handed. The entire country needs to go to his aid if these major problems are to be licked. Most are doing nothing to help or are doing the best to interfere with progress.
Obama has had as incredible string of good fortune.
The question is not whether Obama is worthy to be president, but rather is America worthy to have Obama as president. I think not, but they may luck out and get him for a second term anyway.
There are serious problems, but Mitt Romney is ten times worse.
As of 2012-08-10, Obama was about 10 points ahead of Romney even though Romney had raised vastly more money. The economy was slowly on the way back up. Obama will be able to say, The economy may be recovering slowly, but if you stick with me it will recover. If you go with Romney, he will try to fix it with the economics George W. Bush used to create the mess in the first place. That is quite a longshot.
Poor old Obama. He is a bit like that girl condemned to weave a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Economies run on energy. They slow down when oil prices rise. They rev up when they drop. Most of the easy-to-extract oil is already used up. What is left is the expensive-to-extract offshore oil and the tar sands. Oil is now necessarily more expensive because it takes more energy to extract it. None of that has anything to do with Obama.
Unless there is some major breakthrough in energy technology, e.g. simple cheap fusion, or drastically more efficient energy use, energy prices cannot very well drop for quite a while.
His other problem is the Republicans have fought tooth and nail to block every single measure he has proposed since he took office, including ones designed to jump start the economy and create jobs. The irony is the Republicans are successfully blaming him for the lack of action they caused. Those charlatans claim they can repair the economy with tax cuts for the rich and deregulation, the same tools Bush used to deepen the recession in the first place.
As of 2012-09-10 Obama is about 5 points ahead, presumably mostly a bump from the convention and Bill Clinton’s polished endorsement. But more important, he is now raising more money than Romney.
Later the gap narrowed as the Republicans blitzed with unprecedented advertising spending.
One of the most common lies people tell about Obama is that he is a Muslim. He could not possibly be. How do I know? Muslims have to obey a large number of extremely strict rules. If they don’t comply, they would get themselves in very hot water. These things include:
Obama does none of these things. He can’t be a Muslim.
Here is my strategic argument for voting for Obama, even if you prefer Romney. A New York Times poll right before the election, says the Democrats lead the race for Congress, 48%-46%. The big problem over the last four years has been gridlock. The Republican congress and the president were at loggerheads. If Romney wins, and the Democrats take the house, the USA will have at least two more years of gridlock. If Obama wins and the Democrats take the house, government will be able to function reasonably normally again. So, ironically, a vote for Obama truly is a vote for change.
It is hard to take any of the Republican candidates seriously. They are all about as plausible candidates as the Three Stooges. However, Republicans like their candidates on the crazy side.
The most damning thing about Romney is he has no conscience. He will say whatever the room wants to hear. He will do whatever makes him personally the most money, even working for big tobacco.
Romney was governor of Massachusetts where he instituted a universal health care program. Obama used it as a basis for his own plan. Now Romney disavows his best work. He pretends to be a totally different person. He is incapable of taking any principled stand and sticking to it. He is a phony. He is a weathervane. Every day it becomes more and more obvious and he falls further and further back in the polls.
Romney has over $200 million accumulated wealth, yet he finagled the system to pay only 13.9% in taxes on income of $21.7 million for 2010. He has already royally ripped the people off and he is not even in office yet.
Romney has sold his soul to the corporations. He seems mild mannered, but then so did George W. Bush who later went on to start two illegal wars and build torture dungeons all over the world. He is allied with rapacious interests that are diametrically opposed to the interests of the average American.
He has an invisible friend whom he alleges gives him infallible advice.
He accepts all manner of money secretly from corporations. He is their spokesman. I am far more interested in the government looking out for individuals, so I consider him irrelevant other than that he might bombard idiots in the USA with sufficient commercials to convince them he has their interests at heart. He apparently has amnesia, since every time he is asked the same question, he gives a completely different answer.
He is famous for his flip flops. He is now claiming he will not repeal Obamacare after all, just some of it. He also claims he has abandoned the cornerstone of Republican fiscal policy, tax cuts for the rich. It is as though he flips a coin every time someone ask him a question. There will be different answers yet again if he makes it to office.
Romney presents himself as a stable, calm conventional businessman, but his LDS (Later Day Saints) religion makes him just a crazy as his competition. He believes that drinking coffee is wicked simply because it is pleasurable. He believes in ghosts, including ghosts of people have not been born yet. He believes Jesus travelled to North America prior to Columbus. He believes God is an animal with a body of flesh and bone. His religion did not accept black people until 1978. He chose to support that church even in the bad old days. He is a polytheist who believes there are multiple universes each with a god.
When people take advise from disembodied voices, especially when they imagine the voice is a god and doubly especially when they imagine the voice is infallible, I don’t think this sort of person should be entrusted with public office or the care of a child. (Remember Abraham and Isaac).
Romney touts his experience in industry. Industries are organised as dictatorships. The CEO (Chief Executive Officer) barks and everyone jumps. Politics requires a totally different skillset. You have to persuade, compromise, jawbone and arm-twist to get anything done. If you behave like a CEO, people will just laugh at you. Further, corporations already have too much influence in Washington. The last thing the country needs is someone who sees himself as their anointed representative. He famous in industry primarily for massively firing people and outsourcing, skills one would hope he would not use as president.
Romney brags that he has testicles as large as Rick Perry’s because he does not want Iran to have nuclear weapons. That puts him in the 99.9% majority of Americans, Canadians and Europeans. That is irrelevant. The question is what risks will he take attempting to wrest such weapons away from Iran. Is he willing to nuke Iran to get his way? Is he willing to rescind Bush’s axis-of-evil promise to annihilate Iran — the main reason Iran needs nukes?
Romney derides Obama for not ending the recession sooner, even when the Republicans did their best to block Obama’s every effort, purely for political reasons. They wanted to make him fail even though it made the entire country fail too. Romney wants everyone to believe he would have done better, but the only strategy he will admit to would be to have done nothing, which is what Bush did and which created the mess in the first place. He has such an ego and no ideas and no accomplishments to back it up.
Romney has flip flopped so much, nobody knows just what he would do as president. It looks as though he has no idea. He just wants to be president, go to banquets, have Hail to the Chief played when he enters a room, have photo ops and make his mother proud.
Romney is a major phony. He pretends to be an mild-mannered, ethical candidate, but in secret has Karl Rove spending laundered PAC money to, one-by-one, annihilate each of his components. The only reason Rick Santorum did so well was that Rove had not yet got around to his dirty tricks on him. Romney pretends he is an expert on job creation but his experience is just the opposite. When he managed Warner, he let destroyed 5 in 6 of the jobs. Romney’s claim that he would have been better at creating jobs than Obama is beyond ludicrous.
Romney beat Santorum by 8 votes. B.S.! Statistical ties like that are statistically highly improbable. Yet they seem to happen rather frequently whenever Karl Rove is hiding in the wings. It would be naïve to crack it up to co-incidence. Rove has been ballot stuffing again. They happen because ballot stuffers want to stuff the minimum number of ballots and still win. If they over do it, the results are too out of sync with polls and people get suspicious.
Romney’s message makes so sense. He claims had he been running things he would have done nothing and allowed business to pull itself out of the recession. How could that possibly have been more effective that what Obama did? Obama actually hired people.
Let us assume that everything in the Book of Mormon is literally true. That does not change the fact that anyone who would unquestioning believe such highly improbable tales is a gullible nitwit. A healthy skepticism is an absolute requirement for dealing with folks like Putin, Hu Jintao, Amadinejad or even Rupert Murdoch.
Romney is so politically clueless, it as almost as if he has mild Asperger’s syndrome. He said that corporations are people too which technically is correct, but it sounds to the average citizen as addled. Then he said he liked firing people, just what people like to hear from a guy promising abundant jobs.
I would have thought that by now Americans would have caught on, that if you want freedom of religion, you have to give others freedom of religion. If you don’t want others imposing their religion on you, you can’t forcefully impose your religion on them. Mitt Romney is thoroughly confused on this point. He claims Obama is interfering with his religious freedom by offering contraception and abortion services to the public, even though he and his spouse are free to do whatever they want. It is not as though Obama is making contraception or abortion mandatory. What Romney means is Obama is interfering with his attempts to impose his Mormon religion on others. If Mitt gets his way and makes contraception and abortion illegal, he will be imposing his whacko Mormon beliefs about soul-spirit possession of blastulas and their sacredness on rational people, who reject it as utter nonsense with not a shred of evidence to support it.
Mitt Romney wants to have a war with Iran. What on earth for? He needs to placate his backers who make billions from selling war materials. They are feeling restless with the winding down of the Iraq and Afghan wars. Mitt hopes to partly finance his war with the oil and uranium spoils from Iran. He knows the American people are war weary so he announced these plans in doubletalk, hoping the hawks will notice and the doves will not. He says that under his presidency, America will follow Israel’s lead without question.
Romney has three official positions on abortion: neutral, pro-life and pro-choice. Which one he avows on any given day depends on which string on his back his handlers pull to suit what the current audience wants to hear. He is counting on the fact people trust live promises more than videotaped ones.
I believe that abortion should be safe and legal in this country. I have since the time that my Mom took that position when she ran in 1970 as a U.S. Senate candidate. I believe that since Roe v. Wade has been the law for 20 years we should sustain and support it.
~ Mitt Romney (1947-03-12 age:71) 1994 in the United States Senatorial debate.
I’ve said time and again, I’m a pro-life candidate, I’ll be a pro-life president.
~ Mitt Romney (1947-03-12 age:71) 2012-10-12 in response to a question in Delaware, Ohio
Mitt Romney put out an ad [available at
] for his presidential campaign criticising Obama for not being sufficiently generous in
his General Motors bailout to also save all the dealerships. That is logical; Romney is
from Michigan. You’d think he would have supported a generous bailout. But he did
not. Romney was opposed to the bailout. In fact, he said, Let
Detroit go bankrupt. What the bleep? Romney seems to think there is no record of
what he said more than 24 hours ago, or that no one will believe
the record if he denies it. This attitude will never fly in international relations. Some
countries hold grudges for centuries.
Mitt Romney put out a second ad [available at
] where he says he knows what it’s like to wonder whether
you’re going to be able to make ends meet. He sits on a quarter of a billion
dollars. What could he have possibly have meant, that he would have to postpone razing
one of his three (some say six) homes or 16 properties to build
bigger? The same ad contains two other major lies.
On his visit to Israel Romney just drooled, embarrassing himself over and over. One of the funniest gaffes was his praise for Israel’s socialised medicine system, even more progressive than the scheme he implemented in Massachusetts and Obama’s.
On 2012-08-23 Romney announced that the USA was aiming for national energy independence by using Alberta Canada’s tar sands. I was unaware Canada was part of the USA.
Romney is an unusually bold and accomplished liar. He promotes policies to protect the rich, keeping them an exclusive club, by selling these policies as promoting mobility, when they do the exact opposite, keeping the rich, rich and the poor, poor to matter what they do.
The thing I find extremely strange is Christians supporting Romney. They don’t care that he believes nonsense completely different from what they do; so long as he believes some silly crap, he is ok. To them that is infinitely preferable to someone who believes only what is evident. It is as though the entire Republican party is high on LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide). Why would they choose a nutty Mormon as candidate when there were plenty of nutty Christians?
Romney made an unprincipled political bid by been beating the drums of war. He wants the USA to invade Iran. Such a war would be much more costly than the ones with Afghanistan and Iraq for a number of reasons:
Romney’s friend, Todd Akin, is causing him embarrassment that reminds me of Jimmy
Carter’s brother Billy. Akin is running for Senate in Missouri. On 2012-08-20 he put his foot in his mouth when he announced that women had an
inherent and unconscious ability unknown to science, but well known to the radical right,
to block pregnancy in the event of legitimate rape.
Apparently, what he meant by this strange phrase was a rape in which the woman truly
refused consent. He reasoning was, if a woman did get pregnant after a rape, she must
have consented and she must have filed a false report and therefore had no right to
abort the pregnancy. Romney, on recognising his association with Akin was hurting his
ratings with women, asked Akin to withdraw from the senate race. Akin refused.
In the 2012-10-03 debate, Mitt announced he wants tax breaks for the wealthy (ostensibly to create jobs) and utterly gut government spending: no medicare, no Medicaid, no Obamacare, no PBS (Public Broadcasting System). Throwing millions of people out of work. Military spending will increase by $2 trillion, even though the Pentagon says it does not need. Basically, he wants to renege on promises to people to pay them back for money they contributed.
I think he took uppers. He was manic. He fidgeted and wagged his head back and forth with each sentence. He had a rapid patter like a used car salesman. He presented his ideas as if he had just thought of them, like Doc Emmett Brown in Back to the Future coming up with the screwball scheme to intercept the lightning strike that stopped the clock.
The line from the debate that did Romney the most damage was claiming to love Big Bird, but that he was going to kill him if elected. No child or former child will permit his parents to vote for Romney. This is likely the biggest mistake he has made so far in his campaign.
If God had wanted us to fly, he would gave given us tickets.
~ Mel Brooks (1926-06-28 age:91)
He has been caught lying about his residency when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts. But because he is rich, he was not prosecuted. He takes large amounts of money from questionable sources. Like Perry, he sees the presidency as primarily a way to make a lot of money under the table.
Romney has been trying to soft-pedal his Mormon cult membership by saying, that Mormons are a type of Christian, they just believe in an additional book that trumps the bible, the Book of Mormon. The fundamentalist Christians logically should look on this with the same skepticism they would a Muslim candidate who explained that Muslims too believe in the bible, it is just that the Qur’an trumps it.
He won the nomination since he is most likely to consistently represent the interests of corporate America. He is proud of the fact he represents the interest of big business and the wealthy.
Romney is on record supporting gay rights. However, in his trademark flip-flop fashion, he embraced the radical right wing Christian loonies. To help his new position sound more convincing, he has bound himself to them with ever tighter hoops of steel. Any day now he will announce his support for burning gays at the stake for heresy. Nobody believes his positions. They always change later. He is sort of a Rorschach ink blot that people of both sides can project their fantasies on. To win an election, a candidate must span the middle ground. Romney seems to be heading off the far right deep end. If he does win, I can only presume he will continue to fibrillate his positions.
On 2012-08-11 Mitt Romney announced Paul Ryan as his running mate. I think this was a foolish choice for the following reasons:
Why did Mitt choose so foolishly? He was just throwing a bone to the Tea party whom he needs to do the volunteer work of electioneering. Unless Mitt dies in office, Ryan will not actually deliver any of this. It is just bait.
Republicans have taken a giant step to the right and insulted half the voters. This flies in the face of conventional wisdom that to win an election, you must straddle the middle and push your opponent to the extreme edge. I suspect their strategy aimed at exciting the base and getting it out to vote will be catastrophic. After the Republicans lose the election, the knives will come out and the far right, Tea Party, labour haters and Fundamentalist Christian loons are going to be blamed, in particular Paul Ryan. Perhaps the Republicans plan to win with massive electronic voter machine fraud.
He pronounces his name ging-rich because the family pronunciation ging-rik sounds too German. He is the front runner as of 2011-12-09. He embarrassed himself by spending vast sums of money buying diamonds for his barracuda-like trophy wife on credit at Tiffany’s. He has had three wives and various extramarital affairs, usually a no-no for Republicans. Ironically he was one of the chief bayers calling for Clinton’s blood to punish him for his infidelity. Newt converted to Catholicism, again normally a bar to Republican office. He had to pay $300,000 in fines for financial improprieties. This lead to his resignation in 1997. He is a good friend of major convicted felon Jack Abramoff. He is not only a philanderer, he is a bastard. He demanded a divorce from his first wife Jackie in her hospital room, where she was recovering from uterine cancer surgery. He refused to pay alimony and child support after their divorce. He is an attention whore will say any outrageous thing off the top of his head get to get headlines. Serious candidates don’t do that. I am pretty sure he will implode within a few months. He could be described as Rush Limbaugh lite. He is like a somewhat pudgy butterfly flitting from topic to topic without any depth. His speeches are just a disconnected pile of superficially clever-sounding tweets. He is pathologically conceited and makes no effort to hide it. He will trip soon with some unbelievably gauche comment about how much better he is than everyone else. And then there are his wives who have stories to strategically leak to torpedo him.
Newt is an unusually unprincipled politician. One of the things he does is dog whistle to the racists. He brings out the worst in people by making subtle racist references. Remember the scene in Ragtime when the racists could not stand it that the black hero was well dressed and owned a fine car. Newt plays on that same sentiment, talking indirectly about putting the uppity nigger Obama in his place. It is not about changing Obama’s policies, it is about punishing a black man for acquiring too much status.
Ron Paul has a plethora (look it up; I am using it accurately) of consistency. Consistency is a rare virtue in politicians. Ron Paul is crazy, but is a kindly delightful way. He missed his calling. He should have been a mathematician. Mathematicians explore imaginary worlds with simple rigid rules. They apply the rules to find out where they lead. Ron Paul yearns for a real world as simple as one of the mathematical ones, with a few simple rigid rules to explain everything. So he concocted a number of rules of thumb, e.g. government should be smaller, then presumed they applied without exception to the real world. Like a mathematician, he was consistent. No matter how goofy the conclusions this process produced, he publicly advocates them. He is deluded in thinking a handful of simplistic rules are all you need to manage life in the real universe.
Unlike his rivals, he does not appear to be motivated by greed, ego or cruelty. He is almost professorial. His son, Rand Paul, however, did not inherit his father kind heart, just his nuttiness and rigid thinking. He belongs in opposition to introduce novel ideas, not in power.
Ron Paul is the only Republican candidate who has not publicly vowed to violate his oath of office and the constitution by using the federal government to force Christianity on the entire population. He want to leave that up to the states.
Paul has a rather naïve view of freedom. He seems to think it is possible for everyone to do whatever they please and magically it will not impact on anyone else. That could approximately happen in the day when your nearest neighbour was 10 km (6.21 miles) away. But today, almost everything you do impacts on your neighbours. Driving your car pollutes the air and releases greenhouse gases. What you pour down your sink can foul up the sewage system requiring expensive repairs. What you put into the garbage can contaminate or quickly fill up the garbage dump. The music you play or motorcycle you rid can keep your neighbours awake. If you don’t take care of you health, others will be stuck with the medical bills. Like all American politicians he is happy to sacrifice the freedom of others for even the smallest economic benefit to Americans.
Some of his ideas I find appealing and I am far from a typical Republican including: avoiding wars, repealing the Patriot Act, radically different approach to illegal drugs. Others are so crazy, he must know they could not possibly fly: e.g. cheating Americans out of their pension contributions and handing the sheep to the Wall Street wolves where people gamble, often ending up with no pension at all.
Even though he is now out of the race, Paul is frantically promoting a scheme to restore economic prosperity to America. The idea is to destroy the unions and thereby push all wages down slightly above those in the third world. Then corporations won’t need to outsource. Ordinary Americans will live like Mexicans and the wealth of those who own the corporations will be drastically enhanced.
| Difference Between Rick Perry and Roedy Green (the author of this website) | ||
|---|---|---|
| Issue | Rick Perry | Roedy Green |
| running for US President | ||
| candidate for the antichrist | Oprah Winfrey | Rick Perry |
| Porn | Perry made his money investing in the pornographic movie company Movie Gallery. This is a hypocritical (though not unexpected) given that he passes himself off as a rabid evangelical Christian. | Given that it is ok to depict even murder in movies I believe it should be legal to simulate any imaginable sexual act, so long as no illegal act is committed in the process. |
| gays | Fun to lynch ’em at barbecues. No marriage equality of course. Bring back don’t ask don’t tell or stronger. | Full equality and integration |
| prayer | Contrary to, prefers to pray in front of large TV audiences. Wants Christian prayer mandatory in schools and other gatherings. | Believes that saying I’ll pray for you is the polite way to say I’m unwilling to do anything useful to help. |
| environment | It is what you have to destroy to make money | The environment is more important than anything else. Without it to sustain us, we will have no economy and no people. |
| global warming | A giant conspiracy of all the world’s scientists masterminded by Al Gore to hurt the profits of Exxon-Mobil because they are jealous of all the money it makes. This even includes scientists like Svante Arrhenius who discovered the effect of CO₂ on global warming back in the 1800s. His solution to the droughts currently plaguing Texas — public prayer for rain. | The greatest threat to life on earth, second only to global nuclear war. |
| oil companies | They have all the money. They are generous to me. I will do whatever they tell me to. | The age of oil is coming to a close for two reasons:
|
| homeless, disabled, elderly, sick | What profit are they? They are lazy. Let’em die. | We don’t even execute war criminals any more, so why should be we letting people die who did nothing more wicked that losing at the musical chairs game of finding a home? This is not a lifeboat situation. There is no great difficulty ensuring everyone gets the minimum support to stay alive. |
| military | Even though the USA has the biggest military or earth, bigger that all other countries put together, he wants to increase spending, funding it by reducing programs to the poor, elderly, disabled and sick. | The military should be big enough simply to defend the USA, not to mount optional aggressive wars. Its job is not to bully the rest of the world into handing over their resources to the USA. |
| abortion | make abortion illegal | freedom of choice |
| Christianity | Christianity is the majority religion so evangelical Christianity should be
taught in schools and the government should shove it down the throats of
everyone, especially sinners. He has an invisible friend whom he alleges gives
him infallible advice. He wants evolution to be banned from schools.
Either faith in Christ can cleanse all people of their sin, or none, but not some… The truth of Christ’s death, resurrection and power over sin is absolute. |
Christianity is an obsolete, brutal, mean-spirited superstition. The constitution says that the government has no business favouring one religion over another. To me this means the state should stop giving a tax holiday to the favoured religions who get one now. |
| the rich | The rich are better than other people. We should pay homage to them by excusing them from taxes. The other reason is they give me huge amounts of money to say this. | The rich should pay enough taxes to stabilise the wealth gap. As the country gets wealthy, everyone should notice, not just the rich. The system now is far too heavily weighted in favour of the rich. |
| unions | Unions need to be squashed. They help the middle class take unfair advantage of their employers. | Unions are the only voice the middle class has to look out for their wages and working conditions, even when they are not unionised. Unless something were done to reign in the forces allied against the middle class, they are absolutely necessary. |
| lives | Perry chooses to live in a parched desert with water so polluted it is undrinkable. People die when air conditioning fails. If the rest of the world followed suit, he would feel right at home. | Roedy grew up in Victoria and Vancouver, BC Canada, a part of the world with the mildest climate, temperate rainforests and the cleanest water. He would like to see the rest of the world brought up to that same standard. |
| minimum wage | It’s unfair that ordinary folk should make more than the minimum wage, and the minimum wage is too high. | Jobs for adults should pay sufficiently to provide food and shelter. Jobs for teens can be lower. |
| loyalty | has already stated his goal is shattering the union by advocating Texas secession and he is running for office in order to do it. | is a Canadian citizen. Has no particular loyalty to the USA |
| biggest concern | The emperor of Japan is having sex with the sun goddess. This causes terrible things to happen to the world economy. | Politicians like Rick Perry lying that nothing needs to be gone about global warming. |
| charm | based on the Al Capp Lil Abner character Tiny, perpetually 15½ yars old, big, dumb, handsome. Even though he has a BSc, he affects the accent of someone who dropped out of the second grade. | based on being Canadian |
| embarrassment | Perry started out as a Democrat and is now posing as right of the Tea Party. | Outsmarted by embezzlers who go away with his life savings. |
In summary, Rich Perry is just like George Bush without the intelligence or integrity. Thankfully, he dropped out of the race after coming last in New Hampshire.
She has an invisible friend whom she alleges gives her infallible advice. This woman is delusional, crazy, nuts, bonkers. She has no grasp of human culture. It is as she were raised by wolves. She claims her obviously gay husband changes the sexual orientation of others by scamming their money and saying a prayer over them. I don’t think I have even once caught her publicly saying anything true. Truth is meaningless to her. She just makes everything up as she goes, trusting FOX will censor out any correction. She has no administrative experience. She is too stupid to run a pet shop, much less a country.
The good thing about Bachmann is she is dragging the Republican party way into the loony right zone. Even if she is not the candidate, the elected candidate will be considerably wackier that had she not been in the race. Since the name of the game in politics into win the most votes, a party must straddle the middle. Her influence will make the Republicans repulsive to the middle.
After losing badly in Iowa, on 2012-01-04, Bachmann withdrew from the race with a speech that effectively said she would like to be the VP (Vice President) candidate. She would give Romney a bone for the far right and female balance. I think that might not be wise. Most of America would be horrified by the thought of a Bachmann presidency after an assassination, but that would also apply to Perry and Santorum.
Rick (Captain Ahab) Santorum is a candidate for US president obsessed with persecuting gays. Gays in return have honoured him in an unusual way. He claims that gay marriage is a privilege, not a right, but he fails to explain what he did so virtuous that made him worthy and gay people like me unworthy. When Piers Morgan asked him if he were a bigot, he answered indignantly that it was impossible for him to be a bigot because he was just doing what the Catholic church asked him to do.
The Catholic church has done many bigoted things in its history including burning witches, torturing protestants to death, supporting slavery, blocking civil rights for blacks, murdering innocent Muslim children living in Jerusalem at the time of the Crusades and slaughtering Christians who had ever any contact with Muslims. To this day the Catholic Church indirectly encourages its followers to beat up and kill gay people by spreading lies about gays and quoting cherry picked anti-gay verses from the old testament. Just because a church advocates something does not exclude it from being bigotry. Just because the church harbours, aids and abets paedophiles does not make it right. Santorum was never big on logic. Santorum’s logic parallels the Nazi who excused himself on the grounds he was just following orders.
Santorum has a horror of polygamy (odd since most of the celebrities of the old testament he admires so much were polygamous). He believes if gays are permitted to marry, it will immediately follow that polygamy will become legal. Further, people will marry pets and oddly napkins. He believes the law is all that holds back these unholy alliances. (He must have a very odd fantasy life.)
Polygamy, if ever legalised will keep the lawyers busy for decades. Think how complicated things get partners joining and dropping out of the union, yet the union persists, bringing/taking children with them. How do you divide property? How do you handle child custody? How do you make laws that apply to the huge variety of possible unions? I think the best way to handle it would be with custom contracts. That is not what marriage is for. It is a standard contract for unions to protect dependents.
Gay marriage is a legal piece of cake in comparison. You can use the exact same laws as now except where the laws treat men and women unequally. There you probably want to clean things up to be fairer for straights anyway.
I think Santorum has greatly overestimated the slipperiness of the slope to polygamy, both because of the legal difficulty and because there are so few people pushing for it.
However, if legal polygamy law could be done, I’d say fine. How other people arrange their unions is none of my business so long as the kids are protected. Official polygamous marriage vs informal polygamy would almost certainly increase the protection for the kids.
Santorum goes bananas at the thought of freedom of choice because his wife had an abortion doctor lover for five years.
Santorum said that President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 speech pledging to keep religion out of politics makes [him] want to throw up. He believes that as president he has the right to force his Catholic dogma down the throats of all citizens. Being elected would give him that right.
If Democrats were use to Republican dirty tricks, they would donate to Santorum, both to face the weakest candidate and to tar the entire Republican party with Santorum’s rectal slime reputation.
Santorum, Perry and Bachmann competed as to who was the craziest right wing Christian fundamentalist. This makes no sense because the winner of that contest will automatically be rejected by the general public as too extreme. Winning that small contest will hurt chances to win the big contest! This suggests none of them are really running for president, but rather for FOX commentator or similar post, to help with reelection to the Senate, or just for the attention and ego boost. They are irrelevant vanity candidates.
Santorum does not understand that as a potential president, he speaks for the USA. He shot his mouth off accusing the USA of assassinating an Iranian scientist without evidence. Now the rest of the world takes that as tantamount to the USA confessing to the crime.
Santorum is a climate change denier. He contends concern over climate change is a giant conspiracy of slavery-loving scientists from 195 countries to fabricate data to destroy the freedom of Americans to pollute as they please. He has no evidence for this. It is just that he does not like his (or his supporters’) freedom to pollute threatened.
Republicans are stupid to promote Santorum as their candidate. Most of the country detest him. He would have no chance against almost any Democratic candidate. Republicans are so blind that they think they can ignore the most basic rule of politics — you must get the most votes. To do that, you must win the votes of the middle-of-the-roaders. If you don’t do that, you can only win if there is a third party candidate taking away part of your opponent’s vote. How are they planning to win? voter fraud?
Rick Santorum told women that should they be raped and made pregnant, they should consider it a precious gift from the rapist. All this right-wing Republican and right wing religious fundamentalist craziness about banning abortion and contraception, renewed persecution of gays, endorsing bullying of children (so long as you call them gay) and mandatory Christianity has put women voters off. Rush Limbaugh equated advocating access to contraception with prostitution and called one young advocate a slut. He did not apologise until many of his sponsors withdrew and his show was canceled in two cities. There has been a 18 point flip in the polls for women voters, so that if the election were held today, Democrats would win in a landslide.
Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.
~ Napoléon Bonaparte (1769-08-15 1821-05-05 age:51)
Jon Huntsman is the relatively sane Republican candidate. As such, he is given little chance of winning the nomination. As candidates in general go, he is weird, but the competition is so insanely out to lunch, he looks relatively normal in comparison. Being the sanest of a group of loony toons is faint praise and surely not sufficient merit to rate the presidency. One by one his rivals have taken the lead then publicly embarrassed themselves as completely unsuitable. He figures if he can just hang in there to the point where everyone starts thinking about who has a ghost of a chance of beating Obama, he may be the last man standing.
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In 2008 Palin lost the election for McCain. He was so elderly people worried she might be called on to become president, rather than just attend ribbon cutting ceremonies. They worried she was a drooling idiot. Now in 2012, they know it.
This man is a national joke. The campaign is long. The people are bored. They want a Gong Show. Cain is a contestant. His solution to the people’s problems? Higher taxes for workers and lower taxes for the rich. His solution to the deficit and debt? Lower revenues. The people applaud. They don’t seem to notice how idiotic that is. He brags about his association with two of the most corrupt men on the planet, the Koch brothers. His 999 campaign is an upside down 666 campaign. The Christian boobs lap it up. He claims he forgot that he settled two sexual harassment lawsuits out of court. Every time he opens his mouth, he puts in, not only both feet, but both legs. He has no political experience, just being a CEO (i.e. absolute dictator). Being president is about skillful persuasion. He is as subtle as a fluorescent pink tie. He will get the gong/hook soon to be replaced by another clownish entertainer.
Cain is absurdly optimistic. He perfectly well there were women he had sexually abused who would go for revenge once he stepped into the spotlight, but he went ahead anyway without dealing with the problem, just wishfully hoping they would leave him be. He has suspended his campaign.
It does not matter who the candidate is, the Republicans could win even with Ted Nugent or Bill Shatner. They win by electronically stuffing ballot boxes. Getting rid of electronic voting machines or putting in safeguards to make them a least a tiny bit difficult to fiddle should be the #1 Democratic priority. #2 should be fighting Republican laws to exclude Democratic voters.
Gary who? Gary Johnson is the Libertarian candidate for President.
Given that relatively moderate Mitch Romney has all but won the Republican nomination, the party has the problem of picking a V.P. candidate that will excite voters Romney cannot. Two possibilities touted are Marco Rubio, representing the lunatic right and possibly appealing to the Latinos based just on his handsome Latino appearance and Allen West, who could perhaps be described as Sarah Palin in drag. West claims that gays choose to be gay the same way they choose a flavour of ice cream. I don’t know how he explains to himself why so many young people commit suicide when they are unable to change their sexual preference. Then I ask, what business have politicians like West telling people they must eat strawberry ice cream and that chocolate is forbidden. It is none of their business. West also believes that Muslims should not be permitted so serve in public office, only Christians. He personally tortured an Iraqi civilian in Iraq without authorisation. He also claimed that between 78 and 81 members of the Congress were card-carrying members of the Communist Party. He is black, so Republicans hope that might drain away some of the race-based support for Obama. He a bona fide fruitcake and I thought Dan Quayle was the bottom of the barrel.
Polls say Obama will win. However, a lot can happen between now and election day. The Republicans have shot themselves in the foot by parading a gong show of crazies seeking the nomination. Those clowns tarnished the whole party even further. The Republicans have also expressed their death wish by nominating such a weak candidate as Romney. He is the cause of the high unemployment figures. He can’t seriously be touted as the solution. There is tape of him supporting every unpopular position imaginable. He is a sitting duck for flip flop and attack ads.
On the other paw, the John Roberts Supreme court has invoked Aussie-rules politics:
The public has not yet developed sufficient skepticism. This means dirty tricks will likely dominate the contest in an unprecedented way.
There were three boys: Bronco and Mitt and George. George was a bit of an idiot and foolishly fed Grandma some poisonous herbs. She became deathly ill. Bronco was actually Dr. Bronco Bama and came to see if could bring Grandma back to health.
Mitt and his friends did everything they could to ensure Bronco did not succeed:
Bronco was at his wit’s end. Everything he did to try to save Grandma, the boys derailed. However, the boys were unable to block everything Bronco did and Grandma gradually improved. The boys wanted Mitt to become her doctor, so they told Grandma that Mitt would put her back on a regiment of George’s wonderful herbs that would have her better in no time.
Grandma was getting on and Mitt’s logic was irrefutable. She indeed was not getting better as fast as Bronco promised and Mitt said he had absolute confidence in himself. Had Mitt ever been known to lie or decommit a previous position as Mitt called it? Well yes, but he had such a sincere smile. She noticed what the boys were up to, but she tended to forget things.
So what motivated Mitt?
We report, you decide.
Did Grandma let Bronco continue to be her doctor?
Did Grandma fire Bronco and let Mitt be her doctor?
Did Bronco find a way to stop the boys from interfering?
Did Mitt and the boys manage to bump Grandma off and get her money?
Come back Wednesday for the next thrilling episode.
 |
recommend book⇒It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| by | Thomas E. Mann, Norman J. Ornstein | 978-0-465-07473-0 | paperback | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| birth | 1944-09-10 age:73 | 978-0-465-03133-7 | hardcover | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| publisher | Basic Books | 978-0-465-03136-8 | eBook | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| published | 2012-05-01 | 978-1-4708-2387-0 | audio | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| B007UPDFKA | kindle | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| The Republican party has jumped to the right to court the religious fundamentalists. With that came a racist distaste for Hispanics and blacks, which politicians like Jeb Bush are saying is suicidal considering the changing demographics. The size of the tents of both parties are smaller. He analyses the polarisation of politics and the politics of obstruction. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
recommend book⇒On Bullshit | |||
| by | Harry G. Frankfurt | 978-81-8552373-6 | paperback | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| birth | 1929-05-29 age:88 | 978-0-691-12294-6 | hardcover | |
| publisher | Princeton University Press | 978-1-4008-2653-7 | eBook | |
| published | 2005-01-10 | 978-1-4193-5303-1 | audio | |
| B001EQ4OJW | kindle | |||
| He distinguishes between lying which is knowing the truth and carefully crafting statements to trick the listener into believing that something else is true and bullshitting, which is just making things up without caring if they are true or not, with the intent to persuade and spinning, which is dissembling, technically telling the truth with the intent of deceiving. Most political speech today is bullshit. | ||||
| Greyed out stores probably do not have the item in stock. Try looking for it with a bookfinder. | ||||
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