I’m pretty sure the poll isn’t off by very much.
Most of the 47% don’t realize they are in the 47% and if they do, they rationalize it away.
Just to follow-up on this, I think it is a clever and extremely misleading tactic.
In front of conservative audiences you say “Repeal Obamacare! Repeal Dodd-Frank! Replace them with common sense reform!”
But then when you want to persuade the center you say “Keep the parts of Obamacare and Dodd-Frank that everyone likes!”
The two aren’t logically inconsistent, but I think the fair inference from “Repeal Dodd-Frank” is that you want to get rid of all of it–not that you want to tweak it at the margins.
Really? Even my hardline neocon friends have respect for the guy as a leader. They just don’t like where he’s leading us to.
After a few beers and single malts (they do have taste) they admit that they don’t trust Romney one bit, so there’s some angst there…
Sure, because some people can’t enjoy a meal unless they know someone else is starving. The zero sum mentality. I used to see it a lot when I taught 4th graders.
He’s not really leading us except by virtue of the power of his office and his known big-government, quasi-socialistic philosophies. Congress is leading us wherever it can or being twarted wherever it can be, guided in part by whatever synergy it has with Obama’s innate beliefs, and then he either signs on or has veto power over what Congress tries to do. And to the extent things are kind of going the direction he’d like, which is bigger and more government (read more government control) and income redistribution, he’ll sign on and call it good.
Maybe you should take a nap, SA? You’re babbling again.
You don’t like Obama because you have genuinely stupid ideas about how you want the government to work. Your shitty ideas would make any reasonable president seem bad to you.
Also, using buzzwords like income redistribution suggests you don’t understand that what government does is redistribute income. What the fuck do you think an army is? Or Social Security. Or Medicare. Or roads?
These “known big government quasi-socialist philosophies”? I don’t know this, but you do? Well, what are they? Is that like “anything to the left of Calvin Coolidge”? Do all Democrats have them, like they all have liberal cooties? Do I need special glasses to see them? Because I bought a pair from a comic book ad so I could see girl’s underwear, but then I found out a lot of them don’t wear underwear, so, really, what a waste…
But they’re “known”, right? Does that mean anything other than you can just say it and not need to prove anything?
Dear, dear, Lobohan. It’s so cute the way you pepper virtually every post to a poster you disagree with with accusations of stupidity. Regular as pot roast at the diner, and just as overdone.
But I digress. Tradionally, things like the army and roads are tools which the government pays for with taxes and which benefit the population at large. These tools used to be paid by most but thanks to Democrats are now paid for by only half the people who benefit from them.
Income redistribution is when government takes money from a certain segment of the population and either flat-out gives it to another segment or spends it on their behalf.
While an argument can certainly be made that thanks to the Democrats things like the army and roads may now qualify as a form of income redistribution since so relatively few are currently paying to finance them, the distinction between tools paid out of public coffers to benefit everyone vs. money seized from one group to be given to another is a distinction in civics that could easily be grasped by the average fifth-grader.
So while it may be easy to understand your eagerness to deflect from your own mental deficiencies by assailing the intelligence of virtually every opponent you encounter…you ain’t fooling a damn soul!
But I say that in the nicest way possible.
Cheers. 
Your grade: 50%, F.
An army? No, not income redistribution.
Social Security: Yes, income redistribution.
Medicare: Yes, income redistribution.
Roads: No, not income redistribution.
There’s some wiggle room on the question of Medicare. And I suppose there may be some special case in which a roads project was set aside for minority or disadvantaged contractors to bid on that would qualify it as income redistribution, but in general, road construction is the government paying for a delivered product. There’s no effort, as a general rule, to see that a favored class of person receive income when a road is built.
What’s your educational background?
You are falling victim to your standard folly. You think that because you watch “The First 48 Hours” and it shows crime, that crime must be rampant.
You then see me call you stupid, and assume I must call everyone I disagree with stupid. The trouble, SA, is that you aren’t smart. Your arguments are particularly stupid and banal.
Anywhoo, keep up the paper-towel research.
Wrong. The military takes money from rich people and shifts it to defense contractors and soldiers.
Same with roads. Don’t let your personal dislike for me to drive you lash out at my every post. 
A road built in a poor area favors that area. Good try though.
Surprisingly meager, especially since I make a big law-school worthy like yourself look silly a couple times a week.
You have a years-long reputation for insulting the intelligence of virtually everyone whose posts or opinons you disagree with. Someday, should I be sufficiently arsed, I might post a long, long, long post of your doing just that. Should’t have to go back more than a few days or weeks even at that.
It’s amusing in light of your crime show and towel tube comments that you should characterize my posts as stupid and banal. And I note that in addition to my questioning how you could fail to understand concepts that would be clear to a fifth-grader, Bricker gives you a failing grade and questions your education himself.
All in all, I think smugness is not your friend right now.
I think this is basically it - he’s a lot more comfortable when he thinks everything is scripted and will go his way. He’s used to getting a bit more than he earned without having to do much - witness his Nobel Prize. And he’s great in interviews where the interviewer will jump in and help him when he makes a gaffe. That’s probably why he tried to shut down FoxNews a while back - they treated him the way the rest of the MSM treats Republican Presidents.
I have a feeling - maybe it’s a hope, but still - that if Obama does try to be a hardass in the next debate, it may wind up backfiring. [list=A][li]It will look desperate, and [*]He doesn’t have the practice to bring it off. [/list]Obama is supposed to be all “Hope and Change” and the Repubs are big ol’ meanies. Flip that, and it’s not going to work. Plus Romney is more used to dealing with shit like that - he’s gotten it all his political life. [/li]
Sure, it would make the Usual Suspects on the SDMB wet themselves with delight, but probably not normal people.
Still might be fun to watch, though.
Regards,
Shodan
I know this is off topic but I was very surprised by this quoted passage. Steve Jobs is infuriated because the government isn’t bending the immigration laws so that he can get more employees, cheaper? It infuriates me that Jobs explains the reasons why his corporation can’t do things rather then getting out there and doing those things themselves. Nobody is preventing Apple from training whomever they like and then employing them. Jobs apparently wants the government to just pick more fruit from the big engineer tree they have in the back yard, right next to the money tree.
If I remember correctly the number of engineers needed was huge, something like 35,000, and not all upper level engineers but mostly assembly line level guys who could be taught what they’d need to know at trade schools. Jobs said Apple employs 500,000 people in China mostly because they have the engineering personnel to support the operation. He told Obama that he could move more of Apple’s jobs to America if American universities and trade schools were churning out enough engineers for Apple to hire and he suggested that Obama seek out ways to increase educational output for the types of jobs that would be in demand for the production side of the tech industry.
As to your other point, I think it’s a little unrealistic and impractical to expect Apple to pre-educate all its own employees. There isn’t a major corporation I can think of that doesn’t look to the nation’s universities and other educational facilities for employees who require that level of training.
Um… he just got the one Nobel Prize, right?
Not sure how that’s a good illustration of what he’s “used to.”
Jobs is hardly unique in wanting more visas for educated talent. Every tech giant requests more educated workers then they get. Google, Microsoft, etc.
It’s one of the more infuriating things about our immigration policy. We let in as many uneducated non-English speaking criminals as can walk over the border. But educated professionals and doctors who come from around the world end up working elsewhere because we don’t let them stay after we’ve educated them.
They end up in Canada or Europe who are happy to have them patenting inventions, starting businesses and adding value to their economies.
It’s an example. I don’t speak for Shodan, but for other examples see:
President of Harvard Law Review
Illinois State Senate Seat
US Senate Seat
Presidency of the United States
You’ve got to admit, for a guy who never had a private sector job he does have quite the history of falling ass backwards into things.
You might start by actually learning the President’s work history, instead of spouting right-wing lies.
In what way did he “fall ass backwards” into the Law Review?
Or to his state senate seat?
I’ll give you the US Senate race, in which the sex-club-fueled withdrawal of Ryan played a part.
But the Presidency? Against a well-oiled, well-heeled, extremely experienced Team Clinton? No way.
This tendency irritates me no end. It can’t ever be that the opponent is a fine, comptetent person with whom we disagree. No, no – he must be evil, shiftless, rotten to the core, something. Why?