Politics

Well, since no one else created this thread, I figured I would. Cast your vote for the next president of the US!

Taking a cue from George Will's new column posted just half an hour ago, I ran down this interesting article from OpenSecrets (Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics): http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2008/10/us-election-will-cost-53-billi.html Note that that's including all the primaries as well as Congressional races. But their total for the presidential races, including primaries is about $2.4 billion, which is about double the 2004 amount and triple the 2000 amount. Yow. According to George Will, though, that's about a billion less than Americans will spend this year on potato chips. Hmm. I guess that does put things into perspective a bit,…

What do you think is more likely out of these three scenarios? The extended versions of the options below - option 1. Obama will be elected president because the US and the world genuinely need this perceived positive change: accepting an intelligent black, result of a mixed marriage, Christian, outsider, who has taken drugs and had a ‘raised Muslim’ father. option 2. Obama will be elected president by vote rigging, to soften up the US international image on a surface level only. This would be useful for making US opponents more pliable. Getting them to more readily give up their nukes, power, alliances, and to sell their resources, etc. option 3. Obama wo…

I see there's been a lot of argument recently (here, and in the national dialogue) about throwing the word "socialist" around, and about what it actually means and whether it's necessarily bad. So I thought I'd bring up this particular example and give it its own topic, because, due to its current governor's central role in the name-calling, this might be especially revealing. Ok, so here's the deal: Alaska has zero state income taxes and zero state sales taxes. Instead, almost all of its revenue comes from the federal government (Alaska receives almost twice as much federal money as it pays in federal taxes) and from charging oil companies to use the land. This latte…

Check this one out. It is pretty much a given that the Clinton years were an economic boon. Yes, taxes were raised but the debt increases plunged, and even more importantly, the economy flourished. That really blows this gigantic hole in the theory that higher taxes stifle economic activity. Of course, with all of these new potential debt increases on the table, things look somewhat daunting. I see it as kind of a going-out present by the Rep administration. What are your thoughts on this? http://www.lafn.org/politics/gvdc/Natl_Debt_Chart.html

I'm puzzled what the following text means. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elections_in_the_United_States#Eligibility Can someone explain what this means? I thought that "eligible" meant that you are available for a political position, and other people can vote for you. But I seem to understand from the quote above that 5.3 million people are not allowed to cast their vote at all? Can someone explain the text in more simple words? I don't seem to understand. (I found this bit of information when searching for the answers to the questions in the post I put up just a minute ago. It seemed too much off topic to include it in that post.) I'm hoping that t…

Just a week before he comes up for re-election, Alaskan Senator Ted Stevens has been found guilty of bribery. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10076855-38.html http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=am_l8kAQbIXw&refer=us He was convicted by the Bush Justice Department -- the greatest prosecutor of white-collar criminals and elected officials in the history of this country (which followed a Clinton/Reno JD that didn't prosecute a single one, and deliberately avoided Democratic contributors!). This is the same department which was tragically unable to find sufficient evidence to convict Louisiana Senator and Democrat William Jefferson after…

I started this as a reply but I think I'll make it a new thread. How bad is this election? How are your friends and family members dealing with the stress? What kind of emails have you been getting from friends? I thought it was bad four years ago, but it's far worse this time around. I'm actually kinda glad I went through the whole argue-with-your-friends-about-politics thing the last couple times around, so I knew better than to fall into that trap again, but I've seen some real knock-down, drag-outs between some of my friends, and my in box has been flooded with "absolutely essential" information from partisan friends on both sides of this thing for months no…

Interesting article in Time magazine yesterday about what's behind and ahead of us on the price of oil: http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1853775,00.html?imw=Y In a nutshell, they focus on the rather astonishing drop in demand in the US, which has fallen another 10% in just a matter of weeks. Furthermore, the Department of Transportation and many analysts are saying that the fall in US demand may be permanent. And the drop in demand apparently extends to foreign markets as well, including China, which has been hit hard recently by the looming US recession, resulting in Chinese factory closures at an unprecedented rate (there were several st…

The Dow rose 889 points today, the second largest one-day gain since earlier this month when it shot up 906 points. However, this cannot be described as a good month on Wall Street: http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/28/markets/markets_newyork/index.htm What does this bode for our economy? Are we headed for a second Great Depression? Or will we eventually ride this one out like we did the S&L crisis? I opt for the latter, but I think who we choose as President will greatly influence the outcome. We need a President that can reinstill our faith in the economy, get people to start spending again, and get banks to start lending again. Personally I hope…

http://www.economist.com/vote2008/?source=features_box_main McCain does not seem too popular internationally...

Well that's that, the bailout has been signed into law: http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/03/news/economy/house_friday_bailout/index.htm I'm going to wait for some analysis before I decide if I'm happy.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,444101,00.html What?? Why are we attacking Syria? This is completely absurd...

Obama is in Denver right now (watching it live), and is going on to Colorado State University to speak in a venue that holds 20,000. The lines to get into that venue are 2 miles long http://www.coloradoan.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081026/NEWS03/81026007/1002/rss (whoops, how did this end up in computer science? my bad)

http://redgreenandblue.org/2008/10/11/eu-bans-incandescent-light-bulbs/ How progressive of them. I can only hope that America gets a government who would go for this kind of thing soon...

I voted for Obama today - early voting. I relocated recently and I have never been very active in local politics. Consequently, I really was not familiar with the local candidates. With the positions that I was not familiar with, I decided to choose the candidates with this method: If one candidate was female and the other male, I chose female If one candidate had Jr. or a numeral after their name, I didn't chose them If the two did not apply, I chose democrat. My wife told me she mixed it up with the parties, but leaned towards libertarian locally. After further reflection, this seemed to make more sense. See why I chose more females? Hopefully, I …

I don't know if you guys have heard about this in other parts of the country, or if this is happening elsewhere (in fact I've missed the news the last couple days), but the Florida early voting situation is freaking insane. One of my wife's co-workers had to wait eight hours to vote yesterday. EIGHT HOURS! Holy cow! According to the article I linked below, as of about 24 hours ago almost half a million Floridians had already voted. Some counties have already doubled their 2004 totals. Part of the reason for the long lines is that it's a large ballot this year, with many referendums to consider, but I think it's mostly because people are afraid there are goin…

This is just a wild guess, but I think energy will be the next bubble. People will rush to put their money into companies that have a sexy idea and big promises for the future - but zero earnings. What do you think will be the next bubble? Do you think America will be able to generate another bubble?

This thread will probably cater to US citizens, but if you recently voted in your country's national elections, feel to post here too. I'm going to go ahead and give a gist of who I voted for as well, but feel free to just say you voted. I voted! In my case, I voted for Obama for president, Udall for Senate, and Polis for Congress. The respective predictions of these people taking office (courtesy http://FiveThirtyEight.com): Obama 93%, Udall 94%, Polis 99% So I have pretty good confidence that I voted for the winners

The Obama and McCain campaigns both have Twitter feeds: http://twitter.com/BarackObama http://twitter.com/JohnMcCain Obama primarily posts the rallies he's attending. McCain primarily seems to be posting negative comments about Biden, negative responses to his coverage he's been receiving in the press, or his latest attack ads.

I've heard that Americans can vote for more than just the president. You're also voting for a part of the house of representatives and senate (which together form the congress)? Is that a separate vote? (I mean, can you vote for a republican in the house of representatives, an independent in the senate, and Obama for president or something like that)? And if you are registered as a republican voter, can you still vote for a democrat? I've never understood why, in the primary elections, all democrats don't become a member of the republicans, and then vote for the softie-republican? Or why all republicans don't become a democrat member and vote for the hardliner-d…

(Mod note: Apparently you can't have an all-caps subject line. Go figure. This thread is about the political group, not the nuts from oak trees. Lol.) We haven't talked much about ACORN here, and I suspect it's because we will mostly be in agreement with the basic issues. And I tend to avoid small-time political wranglings as beneath us, but with the Supreme Court issuing a ruling on the subject on Friday I think it merits a thread. For background, here's a link to the Wikipedia article on ACORN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN In a nutshell (all puns intended), they're a special interest group advocating various social issues for the "working poor"…

America has long been idealized as a place where oppressed people could go to begin a new life in freedom, recently exhibited xenophobia notwithstanding. The recent problems, if economists can be trusted, are in no small part related to real estate values falling. If America was to not have any numerical limit but were to allow any qualified individual to become a citizen, what would be the economic effect? IMO it would not take long to both increase real estate values and raise tax revenue to a level closer to what we are spending.

Rumor has it that Sarah Palin will show up on Saturday Night Live this week (Edit: Looks like this will be happening on 10/18 or 10/25). I mention it mainly for the political interest, though it's surely going to be a comedy bit. http://features.csmonitor.com/politics/2008/10/10/palin-on-saturday-night-live-you-betcha/ What do you all think of all these politicians showing up on entertainment shows? I've always thought it was kinda bogus, though the appearances themselves can be amusing.

I wonder, really wonder, just how long it's going to be before people start reporting/reading this properly. For so long, people have watched this arbitrary figure of the deficit floating between 1 to 500 billion dollars, conveniently hiding the massive expenditures that get added to the national debt and true measure of the extra 10 trillion dollars that make it up. Any auditor would proclaim this as misrepresentation, because only the truly informed know what is really going on. I think that this is a big secret that is really going too far. What is your perspective on this issue? Do you see the media as not being completely forthright about this issue?