44% of Americans plan to not vote for Obama

[ritsuka]

A billionaire businessman forcing a president to release his birth certificate is a poor substitution for the government actually responding to popular pressure on real issues.

 

[topdog]

I'm going to take my life in my hands and jump into the middle of this discussion.

On the topic of Obama Election Fraud vs. Bush Election Fraud:

• Yes, people's votes were thrown out in the close Florida election and the presidency hung on a Supreme Court decision. But that is not fraud, unless the Bush campaign caused the hanging chads, confusing ballots, and paid off the Supreme Court justices. What we had in 2000 was essentially a statistical tie that had to be broken on technicalities.
• On the Kenyan newspaper story - that does not qualify as evidence. Evidence would be the source of their information about Obama's Kenyan birth (which the article does not share). As an unsouced statement (in a paper of questionable editorial standards) the author's assumption of Barak's Kenyan citizenship has no weight. The other way to look at the article's lack of journalism is to assume that all things in print are true until proven false. Good luck wading through the Internet with that standard

.

Absolutely not the platform of the Tea Party....

Completely true, since the Tea Party is not a real political party, has no membership, no governing body, and no platform. Which makes it easy to hijack for whatever purposes one might wish. There are certainly many Tea Party supporters who are also cultural conservatives. Does that mean the Tea Party leans to cultural conservatism? Well, since it has no platform, what is the Tea Party if not the political ideas of its members? (If you could define its members, which you can't.) Or, the ideas of it's leaders. (If you could define it's leaders, which again, you can't.)

 

[wablood]

I am definitely voting for Obama again. The Tea-Baggers and right-wing nutjobs have once again shown they are all talk with nothing of substance to say. They were SOOOOO focused on unemployment and other real problems. How have they spent their new-found time and power? Defending the indefensible DOMA and trying to dismatle healthcare reform when they know they don't have enought votes to do it. They are wasting their time on fruitless projects instead of what the campaigned to do.

 

[casino]

Free Speech (asshole or not - lol)

It is distressing that any wingnut (in this case Trump rather than Beck, Palin, etc.) can cause such a disruption and when "unmasked", move the disruption onto a new topic (in this case educational credentials).

Our system here allows this bullshit, and to try and control it in any way is most definitely the proverbial "slippery slope".

 

[ritsuka]

I have to say, this "birther" sideshow is exploited by both parties to obscure the real issues. I had the displeasure of overhearing someone watching MSNBC (the democratic party's version of fox news) on this topic yesterday, and was disgusted. After the host spent fifteen minutes talking about how great Obama is and how horrible that a lowly idiot like Trump would try to hurt the reputation of such a fantastic president, they then brought on some black pundit to talk about how historic the election of an African American to the white house was.

While I voted for a black woman for president (Cynthia Mckinney of the Green party,) I am so, so sick of having a minority president and having to listen to the pompous blowhards that ideologically refuse to make even the smallest criticism of Obama because of their identity politics. It would be the same thing if Hillary Clinton got in. If there was a gay president who had been in office for years with policies of endless war, poverty, and corporate power, I would not be sitting around somewhere with my eyes shut and beaming about the historical achievement that our community had won. People doing that should not be given any credence or put on a pedostal because it substaniates democratic partisanship. Unlike Behrluver's ridiculous comment below linking Obama to the black panthers, the fact is he has done nothing to change the structural racism that keeps African American's living in the ghetto or the wildly disproportionate number of young men of color in prison. He prefers to spend the governments money dropping bombs on peasants in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Iraq, Libya, Somalia...

If this is the sort of election season we're going to have, I'm just going to tune out. Someone like Russ Feingold (who has nothing to lose as he isn't currently in office under the democratic leadership) needs to take the democratic nomination away from Obama, or maybe we can have a fair 4-way race if the republicans/tea party can't unite, and someone from the independent left can win. But the system itself needs to be taken down.

 

[daudder]

obama is going to win in a landslide, and rightly so.

 

[gb2000ie]

... MSNBC (the democratic party's version of fox news)....

I'm going to call out some false equivalence here. Yes, both stations have clear ideologies, MSNBC is a liberal network. However, they are honest about it, and make no false claims of being 'fair and balanced'. Another difference I see between the two networks is their attitude to facts. Sure, MSNBS present the facts from a liberal point of view, but they do at least try to stick to the facts, and more importantly, when they fall short, they issue corrections. I have a lot of time for a news organisation that takes the time to make it's corrections as prominent as the errors were, and call attention to them, rather than not making any corrections, or doing it in small print hidden away somewhere.

If Fox News were a conservative MSNBC America would be having a lot healthier a political debate now. Both networks would be putting out a wildly differing point of view, but at least if it was all based on facts, it would be productive debate.

B.

 

[gb2000ie]

obama is going to win in a landslide, and rightly so.

I admire your optimism, but I'm not so sure I see any evidence of that yet. If anything, I see an Obama on the back foot who's tried to compromise and be constructive but been taken for a ride (no public option, Bush tax cuts renewed, gave away LOADS in the budget), and who has failed to live up to the ideology he proclaimed in his campaign. America is now in three wars not two, and Gitmo is still open for business.

What has Obama done to enthuse his base? He was elected on the back of a landslide of optimism and excitement from the liberal base. Are you seeing much of that at the moment? Fox News may want you to believe he's been a leftist commie, but he really hasn't, his been VERY middle of the road, and with the Republicans running right faster than a speeding bullet the middle is charging off to the right too. All in all - it's been a pretty underwhelming two and a bit years for liberals.

Who the republicans put up against him is what's going to decide this. Obama by compromising was hoping to be seen as reasonable and as trying to work with republicans for the common good of the nation. That may have been picked up by swing voters who are neither very liberal or very conservative, and who hate all the partisan BS in Washington. If I'm right in that statement, and if the Republicans put up a total loon then I think he can win and win well. I guess the best thing that could happen for Obama would be for Palin or Trump to run. Such strongly polarising figures would jolt the disillusioned liberals into action, and would turn off swing voters. It would also really fire up the republican base, but without the swing voters, that's just not enough to win a nationwide election.

Anyhow - as I've said from the start - this poll is meaningless until we have the two candidates selected.

B.

 

[hawtsean]

Tell me, is it an impossibility for a liberal to engage in discussion without name calling. Is it that difficult to disagree politely?

Both sides are guilty of name calling at one point or another. Political debates seem to favour killing the messenger, rather than discussion of the message.

 

[ritsuka]

I'm going to call out some false equivalence here. Yes, both stations have clear ideologies, MSNBC is a liberal network. However, they are honest about it, and make no false claims of being 'fair and balanced'. Another difference I see between the two networks is their attitude to facts. Sure, MSNBS present the facts from a liberal point of view...

No, I don't think they speak from a "liberal" point of view necessarily, but from a democratic party point of view--thus even right wing democratic policy and/or politicians are given support, excuses, and defended. That's why I compare them to the republican's fox news--because both tend to pass everything through a partisan filter. I, personally, have no time to listen to editorializing talkshows with no news or information involved, such as Chris Matthews, or even to hear Rachel Maddox so carefully skew her coverage not to seem critical of the Obama whitehouse, whether it is on the wars or the economy. I favor independent media like Democracy Now! that has no such associations to political parties.

 

[gb2000ie]

No, I don't think they speak from a "liberal" point of view necessarily, but from a democratic party point of view--thus even right wing democratic policy and/or politicians are given support, excuses, and defended. That's why I compare them to the republican's fox news--because both tend to pass everything through a partisan filter. I, personally, have no time to listen to editorializing talkshows with no news or information involved, such as Chris Matthews, or even to hear Rachel Maddox so carefully skew her coverage not to seem critical of the Obama whitehouse, whether it is on the wars or the economy. I favor independent media like Democracy Now! that has no such associations to political parties.

Judging by the fact that you can't spell her name I'm guessing you're not a regular Maddow show viewer! If she is supposed to be a White House apologist she's REALLY crap at her job.

She's very hard on the white house when they invariably don't live up to their promises. Just off the top of my head, here are some repeat topics where she was strongly anti-Democratic party and administration:
* the slowness in dealing with DADAT
* the response to the Deep Water Horizon rig, and especially the recent return to drilling with the known-flawed blow out preventers
* the failure to push for true health reform
* the never-ending wars, including great specials where she spent a week in both Iraq and Afganistan
* the renewal of the Bush tax cuts
* the failure to close GitMo

Those are just big-themes, there's lots of little stuff too, particularly rank hypocrisy, something I think always needs to be called out.

Maddow is an un-avowed liberal, she's not a DNC fan-girl, nor is she an arm of the Democratic party machine. She is independent, but liberal.

Now - as it happens hers is the only MSNBC show I watch regularly because she does such a good job putting her stories into their larger context, and sticking with a story so you can see it evolve over months. I consider it very well researched and presented editorial. It's not a news source, but one source of interesting and well presented analysis of the news. I'm not saying she's perfect, or that you could watch just her show and nothing else and be well informed, but just that she puts out high quality editorial from a liberal point of view. A left-wing Glen Beck she is not!

Also - I HATE the Ed Show - that man is a big bloated arrogant wind-bag. He's just a mirror image of Bill O'Reilly - he shouts down his guests and has more arrogance that I thought it was possible to fit into one body. He also takes part in political events which to me is unacceptable for anyone in the news business. Hanity does it too, but that doesn't make it right!

B.

 

[ritsuka]

I disagree with you about Rachel--you didn't even mention that she pushes the merits of Obamacare and the mandate to buy private insurance--the corporate welfare plan that was passed in lieu of a public option or real single payer system, her blind support of Israel, or cheerleading for the bombing of Libya. I am quite familiar with her program, as my partner watches it, and I hear her pointing the the finger at the republicans while giving the democrats and Obama a free pass all the time, and taking a very lukewarm stance against the war on terror that is personally not enough for me, as someone on the American independent left (which should not be confused with the center-right democratic party.) If you don't detect it yourself, it's an issue of perspective.

I would watch out for MSNBC--as part of the US mainstream media, they went out of their way to push the war on Iraq on the american people with their very unfact-based, biased coverage of the issue (they even fired Phil Donahue because he was against the war.)