JCC [Reactions] U.S. Presidential Election Day 2012

The size of the line was the only scary thing at my polling place.

 

For some reason this makes me think or Arlol and some comments he made awhile back, calling Obumma something along the lines of antichrist or god-wannabe. Whatever. I wonder how the guy is handling the loss.

 

By proclaiming the apocalypse as clearly Obama is the anti-christ, what with his support of women and gays and his evil muslim ways.

 

What else are you supposed to replace those horses and bayonets with??

 

The dinosaurs had better have feathers.

 

not that only our resident mormon and catholic conservatives have commented on the romney loss thus far. the evangelicals are conspicuously absent. the rapture, my friends, has come

its a joke. that's omar from teh wire. i assumed you would all get the joke. get with the pogrom, folks

and lowie i know you're sad about pete stark but dont worry, it's PRETTY obvious (though not quite called yet) that my soon-to-be-representative Kyrsten Sinema won here in arizona, (her district includes tempe, lotta college kids, and areas of phoenix that are largely latino and gentrifying yuppies, which is how she was able to get in), making her the reigning openly-atheist congressperson. she's also openly bisexual, which is a first (i know you hate those, but its there)

interesting note that attack ads against her were ubiquotuous here the last couple months but i didnt hear any of them mention her atheism or bisexuality. most of them focused on two tongue in cheek comments she made: one on being a "prada socialist" (and while i wouldn't consider her a socialist myself, she's certainly a left enough democrat i was able to justify voting for her) and one where she said stay-at-home wives "leech" off their husbands and basically said they should get jobs

the fact is that both of these types of ads probably really just energized her base (young professionals and students) many of whom i think hold a certain cachet for the lukewarm, tongue-in-cheek radicalism she was engaging in with both comments. i can report she was certainly the handsdown local facebook darling of this election. i saw more posts supporting her than i saw urging people to vote out arpaio

 

Doomsday, end times, etc etc... in other words, business as usual.

 

Paul Ryan says he won't pull a Palin (Okay, he didn't say that, but he does say he intends to return to Congress after voters in Wisconsin re - elected him to be their Rep. while rejecting him for Vice - President)

 

Yeah, business as usual alright.

 

I need to watch The Wire. It's gotten too many good reviews from my friends and critics for me to remain culturally ignorant of it.

 

its the same creator and team that does Treme. do you watch Treme at all, being in weeziana as you are?

 

As if we needed further proof, Bob Dylan is an effing genius...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/2012/11/06/bob-dylan-obama-win-landslide_n_2081644.html

 

Stark's loss was somewhat noteworthy, but my issue isn't that he lost, but that he lost because he was attacked for being an atheist to lose. A subtle difference. And why on earth would I hate someone that's bisexual?

 

you hate demographic "firsts" and as to "why" id assume its because as a white straight male who's had thousands of political role models to choose from that look like you and come from similar backgrounds to you, you just dont get what all the hubub's about

 

I'm so, so glad I finally took the time to watch that!

 

If this is true, it speaks poorly of Romney: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/08/mitt-romney-lost-election_n_2095013.html

Romney should not have been particularly surprised about what happened. At the least, he should have been prepared for it. I think they may well have bought into their own hype, which is rarely a good thing. It appears that the good citizens of RedState/National Review/Powerline etc. weren't the only ones expecting a Romney victory. As the story in the New York Times yesterday described, the Obama campaign did a great job throughout the campaign and faltered only once. That mistake was the fault of their candidate, not the organization itself. Romney's campaign team was not nearly as high quality as Obama's, and part of the reason they lost is because of that. It's not a major reason, but it's still part of it.

 

My issue is that the attitudes of "firsts" is that I dislike the focus on someone fitting a demographic, and not the person being most qualified or otherwise the best. I think there's an issue when the reason someone should be supported is because they fit a certain demographic, just as I have issues whenever that's the reason someone should be opposed. It's why I part ways with Vivec on being excited that a physicist got elected, and it's also why I don't get upset that there's only one atheist in Congress (however, things like polls that say people outright won't vote for an American, or treat Muslim as a slur, do bother me, because those are systematic). And all that is separate from how I'd still have no reason hate bisexuals. I really don't see why I'm supposed to dislike her for being bisexual.

And yeah, I don't really see anyone that falls into the category of "political role model with the same background as me", given that if we're going to be particular about this, just about every politician out there has this religious background (real or projected). Even Sinema was raised religious. I don't really see the people out there raised with my background of being raised NOT religious. But I don't see the point of getting upset that no one prominent out there shares my background on that. It seems irrelevant, to me, that every candidate out there is a theist, my concern is only if their policies are secular or not.

 

I assumed they'd known for days or weeks that they were losing and were merely putting on a show for their supporters and funders. Clearly, his well-delivered concession speech had been in the can for a while and was beautifully rehearsed.

 

It was well-delivered not because it was canned and rehearsed, but because it was genuine. I've said numerous times that I think the real Romney would be a hell of a chief executive. The problem is he had to be the standard-bearer for such a farce of a party that doesn't really have any cohesive message, but is just stitched together of numerous different factions; the only overarching idea is that they dislike liberalism and President Obama especially. Between reading this book (which is in no way a simple panegyric or hagiography) over the last month and the centrist sentiments that sometimes revealed themselves during the course of the campaign, I've grown to like Romney quite a bit. Yes, the shameless flip-flopping and pandering is pretty repulsive, but the fact that he had to do it to even be a palatable candidate says a lot more about the party than about himself.

 

It seems like Boehner has kind of given up on repealing the ACA at least so long as you speak directly to him and not his spokesman :

"Obamacare is the law of the land."

Edit: Condition2SQ there's also the fact that Romney's public image was, in part, 'baked in" so to speak by the beating he took during the 2008 primary season that McCain won. Some of the missteps over the summer (his Libya response, "Mitt the Twitt", 47%), combined with Obama going hard with Bain Capital, as well as the unexpected drop in Unemployment in Sept. only served to seal his fate but good.

 

This doesn't surprise me.

These are the same people who believed the electorate was going to be even more white then 2004, even though history suggest otherwise.

 

Allen West refuses to concede Florida race; wants ballots, voting machines impounded.

Where's that headesk YouTube vid I posted several weeks ago?

 

That just makes it sweeter.