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Well of course he's not in debt. When you don't spend the millions and millions that the major contenders spend, you won't be. If Ron Paul were running a comparable national campaign, he'd be in debt too. And, for the record, all of the campaigns have cash on hand (Obama, for example, had $24m as of January, and only $1m in debt.)

When I see those signs advertising Ron Paul, I get kind of upset. Why? Because someone wasted the idea of highlighting the backwards "love" in R"evol"ution for the Ron Paul campaign. I can think of about 5 other international organizations who could benefit from that slogan so much more. Why is RP's campaign even doing that? I can see that his followers are enamored with him, and that he has lots of ideas, but is RP himself running on a platform of love? Has he ever even actually talked about "love"? As a person who dabbles in marketing and advertising... that's such a waste of a good slogan.

 

That kind of bugged me about Paul's campaign. He had enough cash that he could have won in New Hampshire, and possibly ridden the momentum to the nomination, but he barely campaigned there. With a better campaign manager, he could have done really well -- he was the only Republican candidate with any sort of enthusiasm behind him.

I would hope that Obama would have cash on hand, considering the number of people who have donated to his campaign. If he's managed to spend it all already, he's doing it wrong.

It's a sixties throwback thing.

Sometimes I think that the way we should run our elections is for the money donated to the campaigns to be used to print lawn signs, which they can then sell back to us to put in our lawns. Then, on election day, we just count up all the signs, and the one with the most signs wins.

 

Why is it that we can vote "Yes" for a candidate but not "No"? I wish we could vote "No" for someone and if that candidate got enough "No" votes they couldn't hold office.

As it stands, I don't want to vote "Yes" for anyone who appears to be ready to gain the nominations. Why am I forced to place a vote for someone I do not wish to see in office?

Let us vote "No"!

 

I am having fun watching and listening to Ron Paul spending to protect his Congressional seat. I see local signs and ads where he never bothered to run before. But his record has the locals seriously looking at alternatives for his seat. Its is very difficult to beat an incumbent, but Paul's record and statements and positions have made him vulnerable. Now the discussions include the question can he spend presidential campaign monies on congressional campaining?

I still think this is the year of none of the above, and we all deserve better. Our children and the rest of the world deserve better solutions than are being considered today if you hold us responsible for the current batch of politicians and special interests running the world ( and I am beginning to believe we are getting exactly what we deserve in political representation since we have allowed it so long). I am being forced now to consider voting for people because they are less bad than the alternative???????

 

As I see it, the Republicans are getting ousted for two reasons: The primary reason I think is the PATRIOT Act and all of its ilk -- Americans really don't like Congress fiddling around with fundamental Constitutional principles. Since the 1950's and Joe McCarthy, that's a pretty Republican thing to be doing, honestly -- the Democrats haven't tried to screw with the Constitution too much since Roosevelt. Woodrow Wilson was pretty good at it (President Bush reminds me a lot of Wilson, actually), but political parties in 1912 have little similarity to their counterparts today beyond the labels.

The secondary, though still important, reason is the profligate deficit spending when the Republicans controlled the Congress. Americans are largely fiscally conservative, though in an irresponsible sort of way (I'll get to that shortly), and they don't have a lot of patience for the sort of overspending the Republican Congress was engaging in. This is slightly more of a Democratic thing than the primary reason, given that Democrats happily overspend too, but as I pointed out earlier in the thread, raising taxes and running up huge budget deficits is a much more Republican thing to do, despite their bloviating to the contrary (though the Democrats don't get a free pass on budget deficits, which I'll also explain shortly). President Bush is actually the first Republican president in quite a long time who hasn't raised taxes, for which I give him credit, but I think he should have held the line on spending when the bills he signed came from his own party, he looks like a stubborn, partisan asshat when he tries to do it now -- as admirable as the effort may be, it's transparently too little, too late.

Another uphill battle that the Republicans have is that important parts of their core agenda are wildly unpopular (this is the part about American fiscal conservatism). When they took control of Congress for the first time in 50 years in 1994, they started a platform of ending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, all of those big entitlement programs (Newt Gingrich, as Speaker of the House, was largely responsible for this shift). The idea is nothing new, though they're more civilized about it now; there was a Depression-era plot to overthrow the federal government as a reaction to Roosevelt's New Deal programs. One of my personal heroes, Major General Smedley Butler of the United States Marine Corps, who was the most decorated Marine in history at the time of his death, personally foiled the plot. But, I digress. The problem for the Republican Party is that the programs they want to eliminate were quite popular in 1994, and are overwhelmingly popular now. Americans love those programs. They love the idea of cutting taxes, but they don't want to cut the programs that eat the lion's share of those taxes. This is basically why the military is sent overseas with inadequate body armor and such, irresponsible fiscal conservatism has to cause a problem somewhere.

For the record, I support the elimination of Social Security, along with a Constitutional amendment banning the government from ever assigning any unique identifier to any citizen, to curb the abuse caused by that stupid number. Medicare/Medicaid need to be reconfigured or eliminated too, none of the Democratic candidates harping about fixing health-care is talking about the real problem, which is that the entire set of laws and programs are set up as welfare for the biomed industry. I doubt they'll fix that one, either.

I also promised to explain why the Democrats don't get a free pass on budget deficits: In recent history, Democrats have presided over decreased budget deficits, while Republicans have presided over wildly increasing deficits. Some of that is fiscal responsibility, to be sure. However, most of the reason is that the economy historically does much better under Democratic presidents than it does under Republican presidents. This has nothing to do with the economic policy of either party; they mostly leave it alone, which is a good thing (though the giant handout that the folks in DC recently orchestrated as an "economic stimulus package" is frankly, moronic). It has to do with the fact that the relative health of the economy has much more to do with the perception of its relative health than anything else. The economy is overwhelmingly driven by consumer spending, so its relative health is overwhelmingly related to how likely consumers are to spend. Consumers spend more when they perceive the economy to be strong, which drives the economy to actually be strong. It's not rocket science.

Now, this hurts the Republicans in two ways: First, and foremost, historically there are just a lot more registered Democrats than registered Republicans, almost twice as many. When their guy is in office, they feel more confident in his economic policy, and by extension, in the economy. As I pointed out above, this has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with perception, but perception drives the economy. Second, Republicans tend be more hawkish and beat the war drums a lot harder when they're in office. Wars evoke perceptions of global unrest, bad times, etc., which causes reduced consumer spending unless there are other mitigating factors. During the Iraq war, the Federal Reserve cut interest rates to historic lows, to stimulate the credit market as a mitigating factor, but as we're seeing now, that doesn't work forever.

I give the President a pass on this one. Really, when was the last time he even drove a car, let alone put gas in one? He gets chauffeured everywhere he goes as part of his job. He came across as uninformed when he said it (which he really is good at), but I can forgive him for not being up to date on gasoline futures. He's got plenty of other stuff to worry about, after all.

 

I'm with you on getting the government out of our lives.

The Democrats talk big about change, but they're pushing the same unimaginative crap that they've been pushing since the New Deal. I plan on voting for Obama if he gets the nomination though, because as much as his platform sucks, it's less damaging to the country than the misbegotten "National Security" agenda the Republicans are pushing.

To be fair, I haven't seen anything from either Clinton or Obama that costs any more than a month's worth of Iraq. As far as tax increases, that's probably going to happen sometime. At this point, we've borrowed so much money from China and run up such a huge deficit to pay a billion dollars a day for our Middle Eastern adventures that we'll need to either cut spending drastically or raise taxes drastically to pay it all back (I prefer the 'cut spending' option myself).

Clinton's health care plan is actually pretty much identical to Mitt Romney's plan in Massachusetts (it was quite humorous watching him bash it at the debates). More unimaginative nonsense.

The "Why should my taxes pay for X?" thing is a common Republican meme, and it's a non-starter. I do understand the sentiment, I'm not happy about my tax dollars going to Iraq (which is most of the Federal budget lately), among other things, as I just don't see the value in messing around over there. However, taxes are part of living in our society, and part of using a common monetary system. We're always free to opt out of that monetary system if we don't like paying the taxes on it. We do get to dictate the tax rates and what the taxes are spent on, as our representatives in Congress ultimately decide that, and they work for us, but every other American voter also gets to dictate that, so, individually, we're not always happy with the results.

First, did you know that, in the 1950's, when our economy was at its peak strength, union membership was at its peak, minimum wage was close to $14.00/hour adjusted for inflation, and the highest tax bracket was 90%? I'm not saying that they are necessarily good ideas (actually, they largely aren't), but the idea that his changes would destroy the economy is laughable. Besides, Obama can't legislate as President, he'd have to talk the Congress into it if he wanted to implement any of it. Oh, wait, he actually could implement some of it with all of those unprecedented powers the Republican idiots in Congress and the Supreme Court pushed through for President Bush. The morons are going to regret that when they don't control the White House anymore.

"Even McCain"? You seem to persist in holding the perception that Republicans are more likely to cut government spending, when it's the reverse. You know all the "stay in Iraq for a hundred years if necessary" talk (a billion dollars a day for a hundred years is 36.5 quadrillion dollars, about 20% of our GDP over the same period, not counting inflation -- though GDP would probably grow at about the same rate, based on past behavior), that pro-life agenda requires enforcement (which costs), immigration/border control requires enforcement (has anyone thought of the number of INS agents needed to locate and deport 12 million illegal immigrants?), the War on Drugs eats up billions of dollars a year, yet the party claims to be fiscally conservative because they complain loudly about the two-percent edge-cases that happen to be spent on domestic welfare programs. I agree with the sentiment, but when they complain about those and are fine with all of the other waste, they give the appearance of being hypocritical, self-centered assholes.

This is one of the reasons why I was supporting Ron Paul until it became obvious that he wasn't going to win -- he was self-consistent, and actually did want to reduce the size of government. It really revealed to me how borderline-evil the Republican party has become, given how badly the party treated him.

So, the choice this time around has been reduced to happy-go-lucky morons or evil bastards. Not great, but I'm going with the morons for now.

Agreed.

 

Do you have a source for this? The only reference I found on his website to guns is this:

"Respect the Second Amendment: Millions of hunters own and use guns each year. Millions more participate in a variety of shooting sports such as sporting clays, skeet, target, and trap shooting that may not necessarily involve hunting. As a former constitutional law professor, Barack Obama understands and believes in the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms. He will protect the rights of hunters and other law-abiding Americans to purchase, own, transport, and use guns for the purposes of hunting and target shooting."

This is from a PDF linked at http://www.barackobama.com/issues/additional/. I do notice that he doesn't say anything about self-defense or concealed-carry, so what I found doesn't really disprove your concern. However, based on where it's linked on his site, it seems to me that it just isn't an issue that he cares all that much about.

However, I'm not trying to get you to vote for Obama, or anyone else -- if you can't vote for him based on his stances on the issues, I would encourage you to vote for a different candidate who more closely matches your views. Hell, I don't agree with him on many issues, I can hardly fault you for the same. I'm only supporting him out of a more or less complete hatred of what the Republican Party has become (look at how the party treated Paul), he seems to be the best shot at throwing them out of the White House at this point.

In my earlier posts, I'm simply trying to correct what I perceive to be misconceptions regarding some of the things you posted.

Mostly, yes. The scary thing is that we've borrowed about the equivalent of our GDP from China. Essentially, the country is broke.

Actually, I think it's more likely that you and I would prefer a candidate who would be liked by a distinct minority of Americans. There's real enthusiasm on the Democratic side for both of their candidates. There's more, I think, for Obama, his support actually reminds me a lot of the following that Ronald Reagan had in 1980. Clinton even has a lot of support, surprisingly enough, though that seems to come primarily from the old guard of the Democratic Party. They have had huge, record breaking primary turnouts though, that has to be indicative of some sort of enthusiasm. Whether this follows through November is anyone's guess, though.

I heard that yesterday, and while it's not surprising that an incumbent Republican in Texas won his primary, I still think it's great -- we need more like him in Congress.

 

I did notice that, yes. It's an interesting omission.

Good information, I hadn't seen that. Great site...

Yeah, he doesn't want to ruffle too many feathers. I would expect that of any Democratic candidate. Republicans are another matter, they have to be polarizing to some degree because of the broader spread of views within their party, and the party's greater distance from the center. But I digress.

Possibly. From everything he's said recently, I don't think guns are a high-priority issue for him one way or the other, so I'm really not very worried about it. I tend to watch Congress more closely on issues like this, any changes in the law have to start there.

Yes and no. They referenced militias in the first clause, but the second part clearly says "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". Therefore, it's about the government at any level having no say whatsoever over your keeping and bearing arms.

Very true, and an important point.

 

That's the price we pay for having a government composed of human beings. There has never been, and never will be, a candidate for any public office who wouldn't do this.

You have to read between the lines on his statement, here. He's saying that he wants to appoint pro-choice judges, just as Republicans say they want to appoint pro-life judges. This particular litmus test that has evolved is about the stupidest criterion I can think of for appointing such an important position, actually. Frankly, it's a crapshoot anyway -- it's a lifetime appointment, so politics fly out the window, and you never know for sure how the judge will turn out. For example, Justices Roberts and Alito are very different (I actually think Roberts is a very good judge), and they were both appointed by the same President.

 

Well, I have just a couple of statements to go on in relation to guns, compared to many more statements, and actual legislation on other issues, and the statements on guns that I disagree with are from several years ago in the IL Assembly. I looked through what I could find of his legislative record, and as far as I can tell, he's never introduced any gun-control legislation. He's been a legislator for more than a decade, so he's had ample opportunity to do so if he wanted to. This is why I don't think it's very important to him. I agree that he's obviously not the most pro-gun candidate out there, but I fail to see why you seem concerned that Obama is some sort of Manchurian candidate with regard to that specific issue.

Actually, the legislative axe he seems to grind the most is government accountability, which is why I am supporting him, as I believe that this is the most important issue facing us with regard to the Federal government at this point in time, and he's the only candidate left in the pool who has any record of even attempting to do anything about it.