What if Romney doesn’t win the nomination? What if its Santorum? Don’t you think a war in Iran would affect your life?
What happens if Ginsberg is replaced by someone like Bork?
Blacks survived segregation for the most part as well.
Its Obama’s sprint to the center that makes moderate Republicans afraid, because lot of Republicans are running further right to distance themselves from Obama. This is what makes republicans scary in a way that Democrats are not.
The funniest argument is the sort of stuff you hear from the NRA. "Sure Obama hasn’t taken away your guns during his FIRST administration, he was using his first administration to lull you into complacency by doing a bunch of conservative things so he could get reelected and go buck wild and take your gun during his SECOND adminstration. THATS the plan!!!
In quite a few areas, the Republicans are monday morning quarterbacking a quarterback that won the game by saying that they could have won by more.
Its hard to criticize Obama’s foreign policy unless you are Ron Paul and want to be isolationist or McCain and you want to bomb the middle east to the stone age. But that hasn’t stopped Republicans from doing so now that the economy (other than gaas prices) isn’t really cooperating with them.
Why do you hate freedom?
Don’t mind them. It hurts their feelings that they are junior partners in the endeavor. There’s nothing wrong with that but their ego’s won’t allow them to admit it.
Roberts, Kagan and Sotomayor probably didn’t shift the court very much in any direction. Replacing Sandra Day O’Connor with Alito probably did.
The oldest member of the court is Ginsburg. If they replace someone like her with someone like Alito, it will affect our everyday lives.
I don’t think this campaign is particularly effective.
That said:
I don’t think there’s any analogue. Here’s why: policies that slightly address income inequality are a major pain to a miniscule population that command enormous tracts of public opinion. Their actual quality of life is affected by a negligible amount. We can say with some confidence that Pete Peterson is not going to starve to death.
On the other hand, something like healthcare is an issue that dogged insistence on behalf of the head of government may save the lives of American citizens. I still have not seen any satisfactory reason why the lifespan in the US is tied with a country that has a healthcare expenditure 1/14th of the size of it.
So I don’t accept your premise. Perhaps changes will be slight for upper-middle class heterosexual white males under a Democratic or Republican presidency. But upper-middle class heterosexual white males with empathy can realise that a slight reduction in quality of life for them is worth a massive increase in quality of life for the nation.
I had a cute little Obama-related location prior to the election of 2008, but I will not have one in 2012, nor will I vote for the guy. The number of things that are worse, or at least as bad, now as in the Bush Administration is depresisngly large. The U.S. military is still launching drone strikes against unarmed civilians in Pakistan and Yemen and countless other places. U.S. forces are actually on the ground now in more countries than they were back then. The military-industrial complex is still a behemoth almost as large as the combined militaries of the rest of the planet, even though we face no serious military threats, and we continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on military programs, weapons, and research that have no conceivable use. In many issues of civil liberties and government secrecy, activists have categorized Obama as “worse than Bush”. In short, Obama has made clear his intention to continue Bush’s program of making the American government-military-corporate behemoth the supreme ruler of the entire world and killing anyone who gets in its way.
Anyone heard of any good third-party candidates running this year?
I can’t - I live in Cameron country and I strongly suspect his policies are one elaborate prank just to see how far he can go and how many people he can piss off.
Yes, David Cameron. This is better than having a foreign nation as our Prime Minister, I guess, but they’d have to try hard to be worse.
It’s got ridiculous - starting the privatisation of the NHS and the police, attempting to sell off our canals, forests and, recently, even our roads, passing tons of laws that adversely affect the poorest (esp. with regard to housing), passing tons of other laws that benefit the richest (also esp. wrt housing), reducing all public-sector pensions, limiting minimum-wage laws, having people on benefits work for free full-time for private companies like supermarkets, removing state benefits from people with very serious disabilities, including terminal cancer, planning to reduce the top rate of tax when even the right-wing think tanks are saying “what? Dude, seriously?”
And that’s just the first few things off the top of my head.
All of us have the power to implement our preferences. That’s the whole point of living in a democracy. And even those of us who can’t vote (foreign nationals, minors, disenfranchised felons, whatever) can urge others to vote how we’d like. Heck, even in a despotism, we’d still be able to urge our leaders to change their policies-- You can’t persuade your football team to move their goal posts to the other end of the field.
Yeah, I understand how you feel and i felt like that too until I saw the Republican debates. I remember the last time people felt this way, we elected George W Bush, but least in 2000, we weren’t confronted with the current crop of Republican candidates. If you were in California, I’d say, fine, no harm done but if you live in Northern Virginia then you are in a swing state that looks like it might be as close as North Carolina was last time around. Obama might not need Virginia to keep the White House but youa re going to feel like an ass if someone like Santorum wins because you (and a few thousand people like you (I think the swins was like 0.2% of total votes cast)) decided that you needed to make a statement.
Godwinizing is specific to Hitler. What I did was called analogizing. Sure segregation was tougher but you seem to be under the impression that homosexuals are not second class citizens in many ways.
No he just made that up because he thinks the comparison is over the top. its abit over the top but when you flippantly blow off other people’s civil rights, you are inviting those comparisons. If it was his rights being infringed, he would have a cow but since its only the yucky gay people… meh, no big deal.
I used to be a card carrying member since they were the only major party that were against the war. There’s no question that they were closer to the Labour government than the Conservatives on every social and (presumably) financial issue though and the only reason they formed the coalition with the Conservatives rather than Labour was because they would have been massively unpopular and incapable of forming an actual majority. However, they’ve now sold out on every issue: student fees, privatisation, slashing of benefits… The one party where they really stood apart from the Conservatives was in wishing to overturn age discrimination legislation introduced by Labour, which is a real relief. Looking back, while Labour was complicit in the war in Iraq and introduced student fees, they also introduced minimum wage laws, devolution to foreign parliaments, comprehensive employment discrimination laws and moderate House of Lords reform. They were just as willing as the Lib Dems to introduce electoral reform towards the end of Brown’s stint and more willing to introduce constitutional reform. I think they did so poorly at the last election as a result of the recession, internal disputes and Gordon Brown’s mismanagement. I think Ed Milliband is just about useless: David Milliband would be a far better leader and Tony Benn much better than either.
“Nouveau Godwinizing?”