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[Hitokage]

i totally forgot he said he would go into pakistan to get bin laden if they weren't cooperating...

Which many republicans mocked and criticized at the time.

 

[Aaron Strife]

http://www.boston.com/news/politics...-globe-poll/4u10XRyC5PmIPCkKsutsnN/story.html




Warren 43%
Brown 38%
Undecided 18%


First evidence of Romney affecting down ticket races?

Scott's got this on lockdown.

Or should I say lockbrown

 

[Clevinger]

Which many republicans mocked and criticized at the time.

Including some dude named Willard Romney.

 

[Black Republican]

Ohio Columbus Dispatch poll

Obama 51 Romney 42 LV (last month was 45-45)

http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2012/09/30/1-dispatch-poll-shows-obama-in-lead.html

 

[AniHawk]

september 30, 2008, obama led mccain, 49-43 in the gallup polls. october 1 it was 48-44. october 31, it was 53-40.

 

[The Librarian]

It'll be hard for Obama to not come off professorial. After all he has to make nuanced arguments/spin about his entire record outside of Bin Laden. That makes him vunerable to attacks from the media, and these Romney zingers. Given the media's interest in a close race I expect them to focus on Obama seeming tired, off his game, etc at the slightest thing. This will either be a boring tie (which equals an Obama win) or a Romney victory, I don't see any middle ground. Obama doesn't throw knock out punches

You're the one who sounds tired, off his game and boring, PD.

Yup.

 

[Drek]

september 30, 2008, obama led mccain, 49-43 in the gallup polls. october 1 it was 48-44. october 31, it was 53-40.

And we'll see a similar trend right off here because polling questions will soon turn from "who are you voting for?" to "who are you voting for or who have you already voted for?"

Bams banks votes like a motherfucker. This is why he can often out-perform likely voter models. The best part is the GOP has themselves convinced that it's some kind of dead people voting registration fraud scheme, when in reality it's just well orchestrated ground games driving people to the polls.

Case in point, recently they had a pop up polling station at the University of Northern Iowa. When it was on campus Michelle Obama went there and gave a speech about the importance of voting, with a line created by the school marching band leading from her speech to the polling station.

How do you beat that when you don't even see it, and instead think it's all this voter fraud boogie man?

Iowa going blue is already a lock at this point because of it's ability to petition for a pop up polling station and it's early voting dates.

 

[TacticalFox88]

Paul Ryan reiterated his opposition to marriage equality, during a town hall in Cincinnati, Ohio on Tuesday. “The things you talk about like traditional marriage and family and entrepreneurship. These aren’t values that are indicative to any one person or creed or color. These are American values, these are universal human values,” he said in response to a question from the audience.

Really? Universal human values? Because they're certainly aren't a huge segment of the population that support gay marriage. But universal!

 

[Hitokage]

That's one of the most outright dumbest things Paul Ryan has said. "Traditional marriage" as contemporary American conservatives view it is anything but universal.

 

[codhand]

This is an example of where Romney can kick ass in debates:

Haha. Mitt stared down Newt pretty good. Newt can't even look at Mitt.

Yeah, this was a good moment for him.

13 minute Republican debate clip. *Shudders*

Romney: Mr. Speaker I'm not anti-immigrant I have a Cuban friend, and a Mexican dad.

 

[Averon]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-undecided-voters-20120930,0,4062228.story

Undecided voters lean from Romney toward Obama

WASHINGTON — For Mitt Romney, making a comeback in the race for president will require changing the minds of voters like Barry Hubscher, Cathleen Kimmel and Michael Gray.

All three had considered voting for the Republican nominee as recently as August, but lately they have found themselves leaning toward President Obama. Listening to them and others like them helps explain the shift in polls toward Obama since the Democratic convention and illustrates the magnitude of the task that lies before Romney as he tries to catch up in an increasingly challenging race.

In an effort to explore the sentiments behind the poll numbers as Romney approaches the first of three presidential debates, Los Angeles Times reporters over the last week interviewed four dozen voters who in mid-August had told pollsters for The Times and USC's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism that they were undecided or only weakly committed to their candidates.

Asked an open-ended question about what news regarding Romney or Obama had stuck in their minds over the last couple of weeks, 1 in 3 spontaneously mentioned Romney's videotaped remarks about the 47% of Americans who do not pay income tax — the only incident to be so widely recalled.

Many voters, like Montoya, perceived Romney's remarks as an unguarded moment of truth, a peek behind the veil of the campaign. But the problem the GOP nominee faces goes deeper, the interviews made clear: His remarks have stuck with voters in part because many had already found his message wanting.

Hubscher, who manages a dining club in one of Chicago's western suburbs, is one such voter.

Over the last year, he has been listening for a compelling reason to back Romney. In the poll, he said he leaned toward the challenger. Indeed, Hubscher epitomizes the profile of a voter Romney should have been able to count on: a suburban, white, 50-year-old man who manages a business, thinks of himself as a Republican and has been disappointed with Obama after voting for him in 2008.

And yet, a little more than five weeks before the election, he now leans toward giving the president another term. "I kind of feel like he hasn't fulfilled the promises he set out, so maybe we should look in a different direction," he said. "But I'm not really feeling the Republicans have put forth a candidate to replace him."

"I just don't think Romney has made his case," he said, citing a lack of specifics in Romney's campaign pledges.

Hubscher watched the Republican convention and was deeply impressed by Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida. "I felt a connection to the things he was talking about," he said. By contrast, Romney, who spoke later the same night, made little impression. His campaign, Hubscher said, boils down to, "'Look what a bad job Obama's done, and I'm not that guy.' That's not good enough."

Even among Romney backers, that sense of disappointment came up frequently. When asked what they remembered of the two party conventions, only one of the four dozen interviewed brought up Romney's speech.

 

[Delusibeta]

I had suspected the 47% video was GG for Romney's campaign, and here's a little bit of evidence towards that. It's of course not over until the pollmaster makes his speech, but I will be very surprised if Romney can get out of the hole he's in before polling day.

 

[TacticalFox88]

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-undecided-voters-20120930,0,4062228.story

Undecided voters lean from Romney toward Obama

Romney am cry.

 

[Owzers]

John McCain is on cnn now.....i dislike him 95% of the time and today is no different. On occasion he'll say something thoughtful and real but most of the time it's the old man yelling at a cloud routine.

 

[codhand]

Romney am cry.

God reading about the thought process of "independents" makes my head hurt.

That Simpsons clip going around recently of Homer going to the polls is more accurate than I would have ever thought.

Likes Ron Paul, hates Obama, and it took the 47% video to convince him Romney's policy's would benefit the weathly, and disregard the working class?

Am sigh.

 

[Tim-E]

Supreme Court Faces Weighty Cases and a New Dynamic

The coming term will probably include major decisions on affirmative action in higher education admissions, same-sex marriage and a challenge to the heart of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Those rulings could easily rival the last term’s as the most consequential in recent memory.

The theme this term is the nature of equality, and it will play out over issues that have bedeviled the nation for decades. “Last term will be remembered for one case,” said Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer with Williams & Connolly. “This term will be remembered for several.”

The term will also provide signals about the repercussions of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s surprise decision in June to join the court’s four more liberal members and supply the decisive fifth vote in the landmark decision to uphold President Obama’s health care law. Every decision of the new term will be scrutinized for signs of whether Chief Justice Roberts, who had been a reliable member of the court’s conservative wing, has moved toward the ideological center of the court.

“The salient question is: Is it a little bit, or is it a lot?” said Paul D. Clement, a lawyer for the 26 states on the losing side of the core of the health care decision.

The term could clarify whether the health care ruling will come to be seen as the case that helped Chief Justice Roberts protect the authority of his court against charges of partisanship while accruing a mountain of political capital in the process. He and his fellow conservative justices might then run the table on the causes that engage him more than the limits of federal power ever have: cutting back on racial preferences, on campaign finance restrictions and on procedural protections for people accused of crimes.

It is also possible that the chief justice will become yet another disappointment to conservatives, who are used to them from the Supreme Court, and that he will join Justice Anthony M. Kennedy as a swing vote at the court’s center. There is already some early evidence of this trend: in each of the last three terms, only Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy were in the majority more than 90 percent of the time.

“We all start with the conventional wisdom that Justice Kennedy is going to decide the close cases,” said Mr. Clement, who served as United States solicitor general under President George W. Bush. “We’ve all been reminded that that’s not always the case.”

The texture of the new term will be different, as the court’s attention shifts from federalism and the economy to questions involving race and sexual orientation. The new issues before the court are concrete and consequential: Who gets to go to college? To get married? To vote?

...

She was referring to challenges to an aspect of the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which bars the federal government from providing benefits to same-sex couples married in states that allow such unions. The federal appeals court in Boston struck down that part of the law, and both sides have urged the court to hear the case. More than 1,000 federal laws deny tax breaks, medical coverage and burial services, among other benefits, to spouses in same-sex marriages.

The justices will also soon decide whether to hear a more ambitious marriage case filed in California by Theodore B. Olson and David Boies. It seeks to establish a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

Chief Justice Roberts has not yet voted in a major gay rights case. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinions in both Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 decision that struck down a Texas law making gay sex a crime, and Romer v. Evans, a 1996 decision that struck down a Colorado constitutional amendment that banned the passage of laws protecting gay men and lesbians. Most observers see him as the decisive vote in same-sex marriage cases.

The justices are also quite likely to take another look at the constitutionality of a signature legacy of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2009, the court signaled that it had reservations about the part of the law that requires the federal review of changes in election procedures in parts of the country with a history of discrimination, mostly the South.

“We are now a very different nation” than the one that first enacted the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for himself and seven other justices. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

More at link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/u....html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120930

 

[The Librarian]

I will be fucking pissed if the Supreme Court knocks down any part of the VRA. Further showing the extremism of the court's Conservative wing.

How is this an issue 40 years later?

 

[Tim-E]

I will be fucking pissed if the Supreme Court knocks down any part of the VRA. Further showing the extremism of the courts Conservative wing.

How is this an issue 40 years later?

"See, conservatives? I'm still just like you! I haven't switched teams! heh heh heh" - Justice Roberts

 

[Hitokage]

I will be fucking pissed if the Supreme Court knocks down any part of the VRA. Further showing the extremism of the courts Conservative wing.

But now, if they do so, they can point to the ACA and say SEE? FAIR AND BALANCED.

Also remember the terms in which Roberts sided with the ACA, as he made a shot at the Commerce Clause while doing so.

 

[cartoon_soldier]

VRA will get struck down for sure.

 

[Tim-E]

VRA will get struck down for sure.

I don't see the entire Act being struck down, but the part where the federal government has to actively monitor any changes in election procedures in the south likely will.

 

[cartoon_soldier]

I don't see the entire Act being struck down, but the part where the federal government has to actively monitor any changes in election procedures in the south likely will.

True that's what I meant to say!

 

[Tim-E]

True that's what I meant to say!

<3

I do the the gay marriage one will be the blockbuster of the session. Any word on when this session will begin?

edit:

Looks like arguments begin tomorrow and they go through the first part of December.

 

[Rocket Scientist]

In 2009, the court signaled that it had reservations about the part of the law that requires the federal review of changes in election procedures in parts of the country with a history of discrimination, mostly the South.

&#8220;We are now a very different nation&#8221; than the one that first enacted the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for himself and seven other justices. &#8220;Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.&#8221;

Sounds like he's really out of touch with the current state of affairs concerning election procedures. It all seems like one big clusterfuck from here. Having different election procedures within one single country is ridiculous from the start though.

 

[Basileus777]

Our Ohio poll tonight is going to be good news for Mitt Romney, at least on the curve of all these polls showing him down 8-10 there

I certainly think Obama is up in Ohio, but I also think it's a lot closer than many of this week's public polls have suggested

PublicPolicyPolling


Romney's comeback week is already getting started!

 

[Averon]

PublicPolicyPolling


Romney's comeback week is already getting started!

Being down by 4-5 points instead of 8-10 is better. But you're still down and time's running out; early voting has already started.

BTW, here's a new Dispatch poll

Obama 51%
Romney 42%

 

[Hitokage]

Sounds like he's really out of touch with the current state of affairs concerning election procedures. It all seems like one big clusterfuck from here. Having different election procedures within one single country is ridiculous from the start though.

The conservative wing of the court... out of touch? NEVER.

Just like when they declared that race was no longer a factor in the justice system, and they weren't going to let flimflam like statistics show them otherwise!

 

[codhand]

ha, just saw Ron Christie at Central Park, he dates/is married? to a fly white lady.

 

[Particle Physicist]

"I'm not a candidate."

Ha, I knew I forgot something!

 

[teh_pwn]

Media keeps discussing Ohio and (sometimes) Penn as swing states. The polls have been 8+ points for a while. They're not swing states anymore. At least in this election.

 

[cartoon_soldier]

Media keeps discussing Ohio and (sometimes) Penn as swing states. The polls have been 8+ points for a while. They're not swing states anymore. At least in this election.

I think the Ohio margin is more like 4 points than 8. And also a bunch oh sites moved Ohio to lean dem last week.

 

[B-Dubs]

PublicPolicyPolling


Romney's comeback week is already getting started!

Somehow I doubt it, this could just be an outlier. The real test will be when all the other polls come in. Besides a 6 point margin isn't much better, I doubt it closer than that.

 

[teh_pwn]

I think the Ohio margin is more like 4 points than 8. And also a bunch oh sites moved Ohio to lean dem last week.

Looks like we're both wrong. +5.9

But it's getting to the point where we might as well call Indiana a swing state. It's clearly going Romney, but why not.

 

[RDreamer]

Wow, they're saying on the MHP show that Obama actually lost the same-day voting in 2008 by quite a bit. It was like 1.3 million to 700,000 (I think I caught that right). Early voting is what put him way way ahead.

That's pretty crazy if true. I have to wonder, then, just how much a blow to the Republicans it would be to have voting day be a national holiday. I kind of get the feeling that people are voting early because they may not be able to find the time on that day, and thus they have to try and do it around their own schedule.

 

[B-Dubs]

Wow, they're saying on the MHP show that Obama actually lost the same-day voting in 2008 by quite a bit. It was like 1.3 million to 700,000 (I think I caught that right). Early voting is what put him way way ahead.

That's pretty crazy if true. I have to wonder, then, just how much a blow to the Republicans it would be to have voting day be a national holiday. I kind of get the feeling that people are voting early because they may not be able to find the time on that day, and thus they have to try and do it around their own schedule.

Pretty much. Think about who has time to vote on a day when everyone has work. Election day really needs to be a national holiday, no excuse.

 

[Averon]

The media talking about PA being a swing state is more ridiculous that OH being discussed as one. At least with Ohio, there's relatively recent elections showing it swinging from blue to red. For some reason, the media is hellbent on keeping PA a "swing state" despite all history and evidence to the contrary.

 

[The Librarian]

The justices are also quite likely to take another look at the constitutionality of a signature legacy of the civil rights era, the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In 2009, the court signaled that it had reservations about the part of the law that requires the federal review of changes in election procedures in parts of the country with a history of discrimination, mostly the South.

“We are now a very different nation” than the one that first enacted the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for himself and seven other justices. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

This got my blood boiling.

 

[789shadow]

This got my blood boiling.

The VRA is basically the only thing standing between us and the 1960s all over again.

 

[PhoenixDark]

The VRA is basically the only thing standing between us and the 1960s all over again.

lol wut

 

[The Librarian]

Just because you don't think it's needed anymore doesn't mean it's unconstitutional you idealogical fucktards.

 

[PhoenixDark]

Just because you don't think it's needed anymore doesn't mean it's unconstitutional you idealogical fucktards.

That's uncalled for

 

[cartoon_soldier]

lol wut

Texas redistricting was explicitly done to deny Hispanics their right to proper representation.

There won't be poll taxes, but expect redistricting willbe done in states like Texas to explicitly benefit white or at least republican candidates.

 

[Tim-E]

I'd wait until we see hear the arguments before you get your blood boiling just yet. In addition, I really, really don't see the entirety of the Voting Rights Act being struck down. If the provision of federal oversight on election procedure changes in the south was to be overturned, it would still be 100% illegal to carry out discriminatory voting practices. I think it's pretty evident with voter ID laws becoming so popular that states will still do shady and awful shit to suppress votes regardless of what the federal government is doing.

I don't think the law needs to be touched and it's stupid to even hear arguments on it, but I'd wait before you go into a frenzy over it.

 

[B-Dubs]

“We are now a very different nation” than the one that first enacted the Voting Rights Act, Chief Justice Roberts wrote for himself and seven other justices. “Whether conditions continue to justify such legislation is a difficult constitutional question we do not answer today.”

We're not that different. Look at how the first african-american president is treated by many, we've come a long way but not far enough. You can get rid of that part of the law when the generations and attitudes it was meant to monitor have died off, not before.

 

[Y2Kev]

I had a bad feeling this morning for some reason. It's like Romney trough'd too early.

 

[B-Dubs]

I had a bad feeling this morning for some reason. It's like Romney trough'd too early.

Don't worry, I'm sure he will say something dumb and or horrible at the debates. Or his taxes might finally come out, it is around that time if those hackers weren't full of it (they were and we won't see them but god it would be funny if they weren't).

 

[Tim-E]

I had a bad feeling this morning for some reason. It's like Romney trough'd too early.

There will definitely be a "Romney making a comeback!" narrative over the next month due to our media being god awful, but there's no use in thinking it's going to lead to him suddenly taking the lead in every swing state.

 

[Byakuya769]

There will definitely be a "Romney making a comeback!" narrative over the next month due to our media being god awful, but there's no use in thinking it's going to lead to him suddenly taking the lead in every swing state.

Yep. Polls are going to oscillate, it's the actual momentum that's important. But, gotta keep people interested in the horse race, and pollsters gotta keep us discussing their numbers.

 

[PhoenixDark]

Chris Christie: Republicans Should Not Back Todd Akin

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R) said Sunday that Republicans ought not to support Todd Akin, the GOP nominee for Senate in Missouri, who made headlines with his recent remarks about "legitimate rape."

"No," Christie said on ABC's "This Week," when asked if he thinks Akin deserves GOP support. "No, I don't."

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/chris-christie-republicans-should-not-back-todd-akin

One of many signs that Christie won't be the religious right's first choice in 2016 imo

 

[Baraka in the White House]

Guys, I took a shit this morning and it just slid right into the water with nary a splash, like an Olympic diver or something. I think this is a sign. Romney's about to pull away with this.

I can FEEL it.