quote:I haven't seen any pictures, and frankly I'd think that for anyone who is really racist, pictures of the products of interracial couplings would only make them more mad. But I don't pretend to understand the inner workings of a racist's mind.
That was my response as well. The taboos against interracial marriage have never been strong in this region and in fact the majority of people have a mixed racial background so I'm not sure they really understand that for many Americans being part white might be worse than being all black.
We were talking about some of the roots of racism in my Civil War history class the other day, and I read an essay by an historian who said that by and large, when Europeans went to South America and the Caribbean, they were mostly single men, but when they came to North America, they came in either family units, or equal male to female ratios. The result? In the south there was a lot of intermarriage between white men and local women, and at that time, racism as we know it today just didn't exist. And it never really developed in the same way, nor did the taboo against interracial marriage.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
So... with McCain doing badly now... who would've been a better Republican candidate? With all the current economic trouble/Bush unpopularity, is there a Republican who could win?
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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quote:Originally posted by plaid: So... with McCain doing badly now... who would've been a better Republican candidate? With all the current economic trouble/Bush unpopularity, is there a Republican who could win?
Romney might have crashed and burned for other reasons, but I think with the economic crisis having happened now, him being on the Republican ticket would have reigned in some of the drop off we've seen in McCain support.
Posts: 14316 | Registered: Jul 2005
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posted
Honestly, I do not think this was the year for Republicans. I sometimes feel like McCain was almost offered up as a sacrifice by the party. Granted, he didn't do himself any favors by pretending to be someone else, but the only way I think any Republican candidate had a chance was if Clinton had won the nomination. Or maybe that's just because I couldn't stand her. Posts: 2392 | Registered: Sep 2005
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posted
At the same time, I think Clinton would have had a lot of lower middle class white rural support that Obama isn't getting. Obama will still crush her in terms of total votes, but Clinton wouldn't have ANY means been a pushover. Besides, 10 to 1 says she would have picked Obama as her VP. They would have been a powerful ticket, and I think it would have locked up the White House for 12 years at least.
Who would the better Republican candidate be? Michael Bloomberg maybe, if he had chosen to run, and as a Republican. Other than that, Romney backstopped by a strong evangelical conservative with hardcore abortion credentials, basically Sarah Palin, but if we're playing 20/20 Hindsight, then not Sarah Palin. She turns off as many people as she turns on it seems. Romney would have blunted the bulk of Obama's economic steam, but he would have had his own problems. I think he would've done better in the debates as well.
But like rollainm said, if McCain circa 2000 had shown up to dance, this would be an entirely different hoedown. He dug his own grave in many ways. Too much coaching.
I think Huckabee was the VP candidate that should have been. If you need a strong religious conservative with zero questions about his/her beliefs, choose the ex-minister. Furthermore, he's been vetted in state level gubanatorial elections and a nationwide presidential elections. The guy is ridiculously likeable and folksy. I disagree with him to high heaven but I'd jump at the chance to have lunch with him. He's funny, honestly folksy, and seems genuinely awesome, despite some of his more outside the mainstream views. Palin was chosen to woo disaffected Clinton supporters AND excite the base. She excited the base, brought in almost none of those Clinton supporters, and has totally turned off the center. Huckabee could have excited the base and wooed a crap ton of undecided centrists, and I think it would have played well to McCain's supposed middle of the road stature as well. Huckabee was absolutely the best choice for McCain, and had Romney won, for him too.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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Blayne Bradley
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Huckabee IS awesome same here, I disagree with him on every level but man, I couldn't imagine not hanging out with him.
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Blayne Bradley
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Palin still doesn't know what the VP does
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quote:Originally posted by plaid: So... with McCain doing badly now... who would've been a better Republican candidate? With all the current economic trouble/Bush unpopularity, is there a Republican who could win?
Is it necessary for me to say it? How about the guy who correctly predicted the implosion of the economy and was accused of saying the sky was falling (even here on this forum)? How about the only person who saw this coming and knows how to stop it from happening again and again and again, worse every time?
Right now, Ron Paul is the only person who has the brains and commitment to keep things from getting a lot worse than they already are.
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
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quote:Originally posted by plaid: So... with McCain doing badly now... who would've been a better Republican candidate? With all the current economic trouble/Bush unpopularity, is there a Republican who could win?
Is it necessary for me to say it? How about the guy who correctly predicted the implosion of the economy and was accused of saying the sky was falling (even here on this forum)? How about the only person who saw this coming and knows how to stop it from happening again and again and again, worse every time?
Right now, Ron Paul is the only person who has the brains and commitment to keep things from getting a lot worse than they already are.
Ron Paul would have been an awful choice for a lot of reasons. His views on the federal government are ridiculously outside the mainstream. McCain might not like pork, but Paul wants to get rid of everything. He's a weak public speaker and a poor campaigner. Obama would have plastered the GOP debates all over the airwaves of the other candidates, McCain included, telling Paul he was wrong left and right about nearly everything.
I think Paul was a breath of fresh air when it comes to the Iraq war, the problems with it, the reasoning behind it, etc, and the attacks he suffered from McCain, Giuliani and the others were despicable and stupid. But there's no way you'd be able to sell his economic policies to mainstream America. Obama would have painted them as two old out of touch white guys.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I don't want Ron Paul as president, but I certainly see his value as an alternative voice, even if I don't agree with everything he says.
Posts: 3826 | Registered: May 2005
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posted
And apparently Mrs. Palin has decided that she needs to outgrow the McCain campaign machine and begin to strike it out on her own. Either that or McCain needs to clamp down on the aides running their campaign. I can't imagine how these aides think their doing their candidate any favors by leaking this sort of information to the press.
quote:A Palin associate defended her, saying that she is "not good at process questions" and that her comments on Michigan and the robocalls were answers to process questions.
posted
I just can't get the "We've got them just where we want them" line out of my head.
And, with that, John Stewart's comments:
"We've got them just where we want them! Here's the plan...we're going to let Obama win. Then, after three maybe four years of running the country, we spring the trap!"
Posts: 3852 | Registered: Feb 2002
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quote:Originally posted by fugu13: Ron Paul has also incorrectly predicted the implosion of the economy again and again and again.
Even a stopped clock is right occasionally.
Yeah, you could probably fill a small book with his various permutations of incorrect assumptions of economic collapse.
Ironic thing is really that his type of deregulation/nonregulation shtick, especially in the case of credit default swaps, was essentially what brought us to this current state of affairs, so Paul would (if anything) be considered more or less complicit in the factors which created the very situation he now wants to strut his plumage over.
Paul is not in a good position. Libertarian economics has fared poorly in the wake of this event. People now want more regulation, not less. Even Greenspan has morosely shelved his Ayn Rand books and made the ground-breaking personal discovery that markets need more national regulation than he believed in.
quote:The admission that free markets have their faults was a shift for the former Fed chairman who declared in a May 2005 speech that ``private regulation generally has proved far better at constraining excessive risk-taking than has government regulation.''
quote:Alan Greenspan said a ``once-in-a-century credit tsunami'' has engulfed financial markets and conceded that his free-market ideology shunning regulation was flawed.
posted
If you look at the actual transcript, his 'concession' is being misrepresented by the news. He acknowledges that he didn't see it coming, but mostly talks (accurately) about how even a good system has outlying statistical events.
Exactly the same as how about one in twenty results that are confirmed with ninety-five percent confidence will be wrong.
Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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Perhaps bloomberg "is responsible" for "perhaps taking ... [the] statements" "of" "Greenspan ... [out] of context" but there are some telling statements by the guy. He concedes that his regulatory model was too lax.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
I've seen a couple different articles now with statements like this :
quote:“The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish,” this [senior Republican] strategist continued. “I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races.”
That's a hell of a decision to have to make. Go for the chance of the come-from-behind victory and take the chance of losing the Senate... or give up on the White House, and help hold on to the Senate.
Hard time to be John McCain.
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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posted
This is not really a difficult decision, as the chance for a come-from-behind victory is practically impossible at this point.
The election has been over for weeks now, and when I first called it, McCain was still in better shape than he is now.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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quote:Originally posted by BlackBlade: And apparently Mrs. Palin has decided that she needs to outgrow the McCain campaign machine and begin to strike it out on her own. Either that or McCain needs to clamp down on the aides running their campaign. I can't imagine how these aides think their doing their candidate any favors by leaking this sort of information to the press.
posted
See, they screwed it all up from the beginning. If McCain is a Maverick, then Lieberman is a Goose, and therefore Palin is obviously Merlin... makes sense right?
George Bush is Bear. He used to be top dog, but he lost it at the beginning, and now he's down and out. Grounded. And Obama is obviously Iceman- he's going to be Top Gun in the end.
Now all we need is a barechested volleyball scene.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: See, they screwed it all up from the beginning. If McCain is a Maverick, then Lieberman is a Goose, and therefore Palin is obviously Merlin... makes sense right?
George Bush is Bear. He used to be top dog, but he lost it at the beginning, and now he's down and out. Grounded. And Obama is obviously Iceman- he's going to be Top Gun in the end.
Now all we need is a barechested volleyball scene.
posted
Quentin Tarantino is what you get when you combine equal parts arrogant, movie fanatic, insight, and cocaine.
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he can “guarantee” a win on Nov. 4 in a squeaker victory that won’t be clear until late that night.
Posts: 262 | Registered: Oct 2008
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quote:Originally posted by Unicorn Feelings: Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that he can “guarantee” a win on Nov. 4 in a squeaker victory that won’t be clear until late that night.
If this prediction proves true, it really raises suspicions that the elections are rigged.
Posts: 12591 | Registered: Jan 2000
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I'm seriously caught between and . My girlfriend thinks they're seriously just making fun of us.
Meanwhile I'm trying to psychoanalyze them to figure out whether they're trying to use reverse psychology on us and they actually favor Obama or if they seriously support McCain.
Posts: 3295 | Registered: Jun 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: See, they screwed it all up from the beginning. If McCain is a Maverick, then Lieberman is a Goose, and therefore Palin is obviously Merlin... makes sense right?
George Bush is Bear. He used to be top dog, but he lost it at the beginning, and now he's down and out. Grounded. And Obama is obviously Iceman- he's going to be Top Gun in the end.
Now all we need is a barechested volleyball scene.
quote:Originally posted by Darth_Mauve: There is a push to leverage Governor Palin into the Republican front runner for 2012.
I think that would just about guarantee 8 years of President Obama.
She'll never win the primary. It's that simple. I think she'd certainly win a lot of primaries, but I'm betting a more well known GOP governor from a larger state takes a swing at the GOP ticket in 2012, and he'll wipe the floor with her in the big states.
Alcon -
I heard about that. CNN had a quote from the McCain camp about how Al Qaeda was lying or something, I can't remember the exact quote. Frankly I thought they'd come out endorsing Obama to give McCain more fodder to attack him with. But the reasoning behind their support of McCain makes perfect sense. If their enemy is peace, the guy who represents the best chance for peace would be their enemy as well.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
You know, I like to believe that this is in general well-intentioned on both sides.
On one hand, you have a bunch of lists that almost certainly contain a certain number of fraudulent names. On the other, the mechanisms for automatically detecting frauds have a false positive rate of about 25%. So if you don't run those automatic processes well in advance of the election, 25% of your voting population will be forced to re-register within a very narrow timeframe. But if you run them too early, late registrations will still contain an unacceptably high number of frauds.
Frankly, it's for this reason that I support the idea of a national Voter ID.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Blayne Bradley
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posted
I think Canada has a system like that, I get my voter card in the mail, tells me where to vote and then i go to vote.
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The problem is the initial law passed by Congress I think last year or after the last election. It required states to create central databases but without a whole lot of direction. The result is typographical and administrative errors can lead to tens of thousands of mismatches per state. I can't remember the state, I want to say Wisconsin or Minnesota, but one state's federal election commission had a few former judges on it, and a third of them were deemed invalid under the system. I'll have to double check that, I think I got a detail or two wrong there.
But the point is that this purging method is ridiculously prone to error. Part of the problem also is that voters can challenge this at the polls, but a lot of them don't know that, so they just give up and don't vote. It's impossible to know what sort of effect this could have on the outcome, but considering the numbers of new voters and the numbers on a state by state level that are in danger, it's potentially scary stuff.
It's a poorly written law that most of these problems are resulting from.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
BB: Kinda. There's a database gleaned from various places. For example, there's that checkbox on your tax return that lets the Canadian Revenue Agency pass on your name and address to Elections Canada.
But it doesn't seem to be much of an issue since we allow people to register to vote on the day of voting with a big list of valid ID anyways.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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Blayne Bradley
unregistered
posted
Yessss.... I am the real BB....
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quote:Originally posted by kmbboots: From BlackBlade's link:
quote:A Palin associate defended her, saying that she is "not good at process questions" and that her comments on Michigan and the robocalls were answers to process questions.
Seriously?
Yeah, see, it's like when kids learn that they are supposed to say "no offense" before saying something offensive. Then they think it's fair game to say whatever they want, because they said "no offense." Another classic is "please." Here, Palin thinks that as long as she admits to being bad at answering questions, this will somehow be dismissed as irrelevant to running the most powerful nation on the face of the earth...
Posts: 9912 | Registered: Nov 2005
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posted
Lyrhawn, it was Wisconsin. Although the details were a bit wrong. Basically, the AG's calling for a last-minute purge of the voter rolls using the current technology, but the current technology would recommend for purging four of the seven members of the commission and the Attorney General.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Hmmmm, I guess I'll have to expand it to BlBr and BlBl
Re: the electoral college
I found that pretty useless considering the huge Obama margin in the States and the odd Iraq and Cuba outliers that probably correspond to US military personnel.
Its would probably be better for the Economist to call it an unreliable poll of British and American expats rather than, well, an unreliable poll of the whole world voting.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
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