Let the campaign begin!

Obama "I didn't go to Israel to find political donors and hold fundraisers"

#saveusobama #obama4president

Was it because I was drunk, or did Romney really say Syria was Irans only way to have direct access to the sea?

VivaStPauli wrote:Was it because I was drunk, or did Romney really say Syria was Irans only way to have direct access to the sea?

No, he really said that.

Geography tips for Romney:

1. Iran is not landlocked.
2. Syria and Iran do not share a border.
3. The only sea Syria has access to is the Mediterranean.

The funniest thing is, that Iran is even in the news for the past couple of months due their various threats to block the straight of Hormuz, or however that's spelled.

Well, I guess when you focus too much on magic underwear, and on how Jesus lived in the US of A, and people are "better" the whiter they are, it's hard to focus on the little, non-mormony, things. :X

Yeah, there have been news stories recently about Iran acquiring armed speedboats to control the oil trade route in the strait of Hormuz. I think Obama is both more intelligent and more capable than Romney.

Oct. 22: Ohio Has 50-50 Chance of Deciding Election
By NATE SILVER

The supposition that Ohio is the most important state in presidential elections is not always true. The decisive state in the 2000 election, of course, was Florida. (Al Gore also could have won by carrying New Hampshire or Missouri, both of which were slightly closer than Ohio that year.)

In 2008, Barack Obama won by a clear national margin, so the Electoral College did not really come into play. But had he suffered a sudden decline at the end of the race, Colorado or Iowa — not Ohio — would have been the decisive state (or what we call the tipping-point state in FiveThirtyEight parlance).

But this year, all the clichés about Ohio are true. In our most recent simulations, Ohio has provided the decisive vote in the Electoral College about 50 percent of the time.

We will return to the Buckeye State in a moment. Let me first give you a whirlwind tour of the three dozen polls released on Monday. I am going to be somewhat more circumspect than usual because what we will mostly be watching for the next few days is whether Monday night’s debate had any effect on the race — something that polls before the debate won’t tell us.

Monday’s Polls

How close is the race according to national polls?

There were a remarkable number of them, 15, released on Monday. Pretty much every pollster with a pulse weighed in. (Unnecessarily meticulous note: I am excluding one case of a poll that was published on Monday but which conducted its interviewing back in September.)

Seven of the polls showed President Obama ahead, six had Mitt Romney ahead and two showed the race tied.

If you average the 15 polls, they show a tie, exactly. Neither candidate had an edge, even in the second decimal place.

There is a debatable case that Mr. Obama’s national polls are a pinch stronger than a week or so ago, when there was a period of a few days when they seemed to suggest that Mr. Obama was trailing by perhaps one percentage point.

Our method uses both state polls and national polls to calibrate its estimate of the national popular vote; the state polls, in our view, have suggested a slightly stronger outcome for Mr. Obama all year than that implied by the national polls alone.

We do show just a tiny bit of improvement for Mr. Obama, however. In our “now-cast” — our estimate of what would happen in an election held today — Mr. Obama’s advantage in the popular vote is now taken to be 1.2 percentage points, up from a low of 0.3 point on Oct. 12.

Mr. Obama also seems to be holding onto thin leads in the polling averages in the states that are most essential to his path forward in the Electoral College.

Two polls of Wisconsin published on Monday, for example, gave him leads of 3 and 5 percentage points.

There were four polls published of Pennsylvania on Monday, showing Mr. Obama ahead by margins varying from 3 percentage points to 10. Our forecast model comes in toward the lower end of that range, showing a lead there of about 4.5 points for Mr. Obama right now.

A quick word about Pennsylvania: the FiveThirtyEight forecast model has liked it for a long while as a high-upside play for Mr. Romney, since winning it would devastate Mr. Obama’s electoral map and since Mr. Romney has relatively few other opportunities to play offense. Pennsylvania is almost certainly a more plausible win than Minnesota or Michigan, for instance.

But as Monday’s polls ought to attest, it is also a high-risk play — Mr. Romney has only about a 7 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania, in our estimation. Any state that Mr. Romney is trailing in by 4 or 5 percentage points at a time when he is tied in national polls is not essential to the electoral calculus. It might be a worthwhile luxury expenditure given Mr. Romney’s flush cash situation, but it is probably not more than that.

Mr. Romney got a stronger poll in Iowa on Monday, where a survey from Rasmussen Reports showed a tied race there. That is down from a two-percentage-point lead for Mr. Obama in Rasmussen’s prior poll of the state.

In Ohio, polls split the uprights between our forecast there, which projects Mr. Obama ahead by about two percentage points. A Quinnipiac University poll (conducted in conjunction with CBS News) had Mr. Obama five percentage points ahead, but a Suffolk University poll had a tied race.

There was also a poll published by Pulse Opinion Research, the parent of Rasmussen Reports, in Ohio on Monday, and that one had Mr. Romney up by one percentage point. This is a slightly unusual case, however, as we classify Rasmussen Reports and Pulse Opinion Research polls together for purposes of the model since it is essentially the same poll conducted under different brand names. Rasmussen Reports itself published an Ohio poll late last week that showed Mr. Obama up by one percentage point instead. The Rasmussen-branded poll is actually the more recent of the two (despite having been published earlier) and so receives more weight in our forecast.

These details would not be worth writing about in any other state — but Ohio is Ohio, and whoever wins it is extremely likely to win the election.

Ohio, Ohio, Ohio

We are now running about 40,000 Electoral College simulations each day. In the simulations that we ran on Monday, the candidate who won Ohio won the election roughly 38,000 times, or in about 95 percent of the cases. (Mr. Romney won in about 1,400 simulations despite losing Ohio, while Mr. Obama did so roughly 550 times.)

Whether you call Ohio a “must-win” is a matter of semantics, but its essential role in the Electoral College should not be hard to grasp.

Were he to lose Ohio, Mr. Romney would have a number of undesirable, although not impossible, options.

The most favorable path, in the view of the model, would be for Mr. Romney to carry both Iowa and Nevada.

Of the two states, Iowa is the easier get. The polls there show a split between ties and leads for Mr. Obama, as opposed to Nevada, where they are mainly split between smaller leads for Mr. Obama and larger ones. In addition, in Nevada, Democrats have a significant voter-registration advantage and are building a large lead in early voting; the polls there have also tended to underestimate Democratic performance in recent years.

But Mr. Romney does not get to pick and choose if he loses Ohio; he would need to win both Iowa and Nevada under this plan. Furthermore, he would need to win New Hampshire to avert a 269-269 tie, where the polls have been inconsistent at best, but seem to show Mr. Obama slightly ahead, on average. On top of all that, he would need to win both Colorado and Virginia. The race is so close in both states that the model has fluctuated between showing them as blue states and red states with almost every new poll that comes in.

The major alternative would be for Mr. Romney to win Wisconsin, which would allow him to lose both Iowa and Nevada (although not Colorado or Virginia). But Republicans have had a number of seemingly favorable periods in Wisconsin — after Democrats’ failed attempt to recall the state’s governor, Scott Walker, after Mr. Romney named Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin as his running mate, and during Mr. Romney’s overall surge in the polls recently — and have never quite pulled ahead in the average of polls there. Wisconsin is certainly a big factor in the election, but may also be the sort of state where Mr. Romney has a pretty easy path to 48 or 49 percent of the vote, and a hard one to 50 percent.

Or Mr. Romney could carry Pennsylvania, but this is less likely still, especially as Pennsylvania is highly demographically similar to Ohio but slightly more Democratic-leaning. In our simulations on Monday, Mr. Romney lost Pennsylvania 99.5 percent of the time when he also lost Ohio.

But if Ohio is almost a must-win for Mr. Romney, the same case could be argued for Mr. Obama. Were he to lose Ohio, Mr. Obama would then need to carry either Virginia or Colorado — along with holding Wisconsin, Iowa and Nevada.

In other words, Mr. Obama would need to carry at least one of the states where he is now tied in the forecast rather than leading. Thus, Mr. Obama’s narrow lead in Ohio accounts for the bulk of his overall advantage in the forecast right now. Were Ohio decreed to Mr. Romney by fiat, Mr. Obama’s chances of winning would decline to 57 percent from 70 percent in the forecast.

Alternatively, Mr. Obama could carry either Florida or North Carolina, but as in the case of Mr. Romney and Pennsylvania, these permutations are just not very likely. In the simulations on Monday, Mr. Obama won Florida just 0.4 percent of the time that he lost Ohio, and North Carolina only 0.2 percent of the time when he did so.

Unlikely does not equal impossible, but Ohio is central enough in the electoral math that it now seems to matter as much as the other 49 states put together.

I am not sure whether I should be congratulating you or consoling you if you happen to be reading this in Toledo.

Forza Rossoneri wrote:Yeah, there have been news stories recently about Iran acquiring armed speedboats to control the oil trade route in the strait of Hormuz. I think Obama is both more intelligent and more capable than Romney.

Especially when it comes to foreign policy. The man has 4 years of experience under his belt.

Romney is better when it comes to the economy though. He tried to steer the conversation back there a couple of times last night.

Yuri Yukuv wrote:Disappointing debates, no questions about war on drugs, prisons, powers of police, POTUS killing US citizens without trial or the patriot act. What a shame.

This is what happens when the parties organize the event and the questions rather than a third party, as it used to be.

Holy debates, Obatman! For all the personal dislike for each other said to exist between these two ordained priests of American capitalism – often misidentified as Free Market Enterprise – Mitt Romney and Barack Obama have shown to be equally adept at dealing with trivia and secondary issues… and equally inept at dealing with every substantive issue.



Their polemical theatrics have not tackled head on any of the significant issues affecting the nation’s direction – assuming there is a charted course we’re navigating – by way of any specific domestic or foreign policy. And that unequivocally affects the nation’s viability in the short, medium and long term.



Perhaps substantive matters are not meant to be debated, lest debaters be found out in either deceit or ignorance. Montaigne said it best when he wrote, “Men only debate and question of the branch, not of the tree.” [Essays II.xii.] And all three debates have been about the branches and foliage… and not once about the tree (our nation) and our need to diagnose its health, and if found to be diseased, propose a plan of cure. But the duopoly has chosen for us two arborists who either lack mastery in the field or, the most likely reason, lie to the public for motives which are personally or politically expeditious. That’s the price Americans must pay for their corrupt two-party system.



It would have been helpful if there had been meaningful questions asked of the candidates to the presidency by either the moderator or a select panel of experts; or if the candidates had exhibited vision and/or courage to bring to the debate – something totally absent in all three debates; questions not just for the candidates to answer, but for the voter to better understand what is at stake in this election. Why do we maintain this political taboo that forces us not to look at ourselves, our institutions or our imperial, undemocratic form of government? Is it our Americentricity?



Only the idealistic among us would expect, no, require, that transcendental issues be addressed by the candidates. Issues such as: the unconstitutional power-ascendancy of the Supreme Court; the obscene influence that money has on elections; the question of universal healthcare or the sacrosanctity of social security; or why we insist on being an empire with a quarter of the world under our protection. However, there were other critical issues of interest to most voters that weren’t touched, or where direct answers were not demanded from the two candidates, such as:



If our level of consumption continues to exceed, and by a considerable amount, our level of production, what remedial options do we have other than to keep on borrowing ad infinitum? But that’s a topic no politician would dare touch. Yet, isn’t Greece really a 1/30th scale economic model of the US? Then, why do we point the finger at Greece as a mismanaged economy, or at the EU as a welfare model, when we should be pointing that finger at the US with a de facto bankrupt economy?



Why do the candidates talk about bringing back those good paying manufacturing jobs when we know for a fact that most manufacturing jobs now being created pay only half as much… and that the jobs which were exported during the past three decades are gone… gone… forever gone? That globalization is a fact of capitalism totally embraced by business and government during the last two decades, Democrats and Republicans holding hands on this issue? Is either candidate in favor of reverting to the economic model of protectionism (tariffs, etc.)?



Can either candidate answer why government fails to address economic problems in a timely manner, waiting until it’s irremediable late? Such as accounting for short-funding of state pensions (one trillion), or the eventual cataclysm in student loans (one trillion), or the eventual rescuing of municipalities and conniving banks (again), or the unfunded costs of taking care of our own victim-heroes of the new expeditionary wars.



How can a fully matured economy such as the United States afford a national debt which is likely to exceed during the next presidential cycle the nation’s GDP by more than 25 percent? I fear that Standard and Poor’s recent credit downgrade of the US is far too small and accommodating, tainted perhaps by misguided patriotism.



And in foreign policy, for all the talk by both candidates in addressing the problems besetting the Middle East, they both failed miserably in identifying the key to success for the US: helping, insisting, forcing a solution in the creation of a 2-state Palestine. The United States will not attain credibility with the people in the Middle East unless and until Palestinians are given a fair deal. Yet Palestinian claims did not enter the debate, only Israel’s concern with Iran attaining nuclear capability.



Here we are two weeks before Election Day and we are told that the election is too close to call, that either Obama or Romney could win the election. Well, perhaps the winner cannot be predicted, but we know for sure who the loser will be: Americans… all Americans except for those who are part of the Thug-elite.

What is Romney's policy on foreign affairs in comparison with obama ?

Anyone saw Donald Trumps proposal video to Obama ??

Mourdock.


The fact that he beat Lugar in the primary and has a strong chance of being elected to the Senate sure makes me proud to be from Indiana.

How many Todd Akinites are we going to see crawling out of the woodwork?

Rape has never been and never will be "intended by God"

I cannot believe the Republican national party let the state primary pick Mourdock over Lugar. Lugar would have been a guaranteed Republican seat in the Senate... so much so that the Democrats may not have even run a candidate. Given how tight the Senate is (Dems hold it by 2 seats currently) throwing away the incumbent advantage and putting out this ultra-conservative is quick simply an idiotic mistake to make. Strategically speaking the Republican Party has shot itself in the foot in this race and Mourdock's just managed to blow a toe off their other foot now too.

I was a fan of Obama but since there are no better choice, i hope he wins.

RedOranje wrote:Mourdock.


The fact that he beat Lugar in the primary and has a strong chance of being elected to the Senate sure makes me proud to be from Indiana.

why is indiana such a populist state?

Here's a website that I know Yuri will LOVE.

Make Romney's tax plan add up: The Interactive Version!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/31/interactive-make-mitt-romneys-tax-plan-add-up/

I took a very, VERY aggressive strategy to cutting and capping, and I am STILL short, here's where I'm at so far:

Deductions:
Itemized Deductions: Capped at 17,000 - $137 Billion Raised

Exemptions:
Carried Interest Loophole: Closed - $15.1 Billion Raised

Tax Credits:
Eliminate Coal, Oil, and Gas Subsidies - $3.6 Billion Raised

New Taxes:
Carbon Tax: Implemented - $105.3 Billion Raised
Tax on Bank Liabilities: Implemented - $6.9 Billion Raised

Increase Tax Rates:
Adopt Clinton Era Estate Taxes - $39.9 Billion Raised
Increase Social Security Cap - $43.8 Billion Raised
Increase Health Care Excise Tax - $30.6 Billion Raised

Overall, I am STILL short $97.8 Billion

Here are some things I could have cut to put me over the top, but I thought were too extreme:

Eliminate Health Care Exemption - Would raise $197.9 Billion
Broad Based Value-Added Tax - Would raise $260 Billion
Narrow Based Value-Added Tax - Would Raise $140 Billion

Read an interesting article on how Romney's 5-point plan is very similar to Bush's in '04. Thoughts?

how come the US doesnt have Value Added Tax

What are the arguments FOR a value added tax??


Also here's a fun video of what some "top" Republicans think of Mittens:

GOP in meltdown because Chris Christie dared to praise Obama

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21565623-america-could-do-better-barack-obama-sadly-mitt-romney-does-not-fit-bill-which-one

In Mitt Romney's world even Jesus has a second house...

@ Swanhends- I liked the quote in that video that goes like this "you can only flip (your side on an issue) so many times before people start questioning your character"- or something like that.

There's proof there of how many times he's flipped on issues. And even though I've been following this race for quite a short time (since like August tbh) I've seen him flip on issues already.

I just wonder. After his history of flipping to different sides on issues, how in the world is he even close to Obama?

To me, he looks like a guy that will do/say anything just to get elected, and I have no idea wtf he'll do when he's in office (both do to his lack of a consistent stance on things and his non-specific magical 5 point plan). If I could vote, I couldn't bring myself to vote for someone like that.

Are people just putting hands over their eyes and screaming "lalala" and refusing to see, or are they just not bothered by his lack of a consistent stance on any issue?

Romney angering the Italians now. Saying that he doesn't want America to end up like them, Greece or Spain. To be fair though, I can't say I disagree with him considering the economic plight those countries are in, but for a man that went to England and took a huge shit on it during one of its proudest moments, you'd think he'd cool it with the dumping on other countries stuff

Latest polling in the swing states:

Colorado - Obama leads 48.5% to 47.7%
Florida - Romney leads 49.1% to 47.9%
Iowa - Obama leads 48.2% to 46.2%
Nevada - Obama leads 50% to 47.3%
New Hampshire - Obama leads 48.8% to 47.5%
North Carolina - Romney leads 49.8% to 46%
Ohio - Obama leads 48.9% to 46.6%
Virginia - Romney leads 47.9% to 47.4% (virtual tie)
Wisconsin - Obama leads 50% to 45%

Electorally, Obama leads Romney with 57 to 53 votes among the swing states. Obama also leads Romney with likely/leaning states 237 to 191, giving him a total of 290 electoral votes to Romney's 248. Since 270 are needed to win the election, if things stay this way with the swing states, it will likely be an Obama victory

When it comes to election predicting, I stay as far away from the media as I can. Individuals polls are very fallible, polling averages, on the other hand, are a much better indicator of whats actually going on/whats going to happen if you ask me

If you want to know what the likelihood really is for Candidate X is to win, the best place to go is actually to the bookies, the people whose only objective is to make as much money as possible, and as such are above the political white noise that colors other peoples opinions.

Here they are:



Also Nate Silver's 538 forecast is up to 80% Obama