Friday, November 9, 2012

GOP's Problems, David Betrayus

"Mitt Romney was very gracious in his remarks in his concession speech. Shortly after Mitt Romney conceded, Paul Ryan was untied and set free." –David Letterman
"Congratulations to President Obama on being reelected president of the United States. Turns out it is not all bad news for the Republicans. It seems that depression is covered by Obamacare." – Jay Leno 
"Exit polls show that President Obama did well with women, beating Romney by 11 binders." – Jay Leno 
"Some more good news – the president announced today he is not going to raise taxes on the entire 1 percent, just Donald Trump." – Jay Leno
"I really think in all of what happened yesterday, the only person who should be considered a 'loser' is Donald Trump. I'll tell you why. He went on Twitter demanding a revolution. So far no one's listened to him — because he's Donald Trump! After that, Trump tweeted, 'The world is laughing at us.' I'm thinking, No, Donald. The world is laughing at you and this is why. It is because you're wearing an orange face and a crazy wig. This is the uniform the world over of a clown! Nobody laughs WITH the clown. They laugh AT the clown. Then when the clown gets angry, it is funnier." – Craig Ferguson


Now that the election is over, the time to point the blame for the GOP's failure begins. Karl Rove wrote in the Wall Street Journal, pointing the finger in every direction but himself. Depending on how connected to organized crime Sheldon Adelson is, Karl may soon disappear from this earth some dark and gloomy night... When I saw Karl having his hissy fit on Fox Tuesday night, I first thought it was some kind of guerilla theater, especially when Megyn Kelly mentioned that they had rehearsed her walk to the back of the studio to the decision desk... I hope that Fox replaces brain-dead hosts like Steve Doocy and Sean Hannity with more classy and intelligent women like Megyn, after all, how much longer can she dumb it down every night?

It seems there are hundreds of reasons why the Republicans lost, the best ones come from letters to the editor, in this case these came from the NY Times:

"Perhaps their underlying problem is arrogance. Perhaps the problem is scorn for the common plight. Perhaps the problem is  the morality or nostalgic thinking trapped in a thankfully bygone era... But I think that the most likely reason of all is simply that the Republican heart has grown two sizes too small."

"... They are not talking about examining the core principles that turned off many voters... If they continue to be more interested in getting votes than in getting at the issues that are important to the changing face of America, they will continue to lose. And they will slide further towards irrelevance."

Unfortunately, among the crazy conservatives who want to drag the rest of us into the depths of their depressions, we get emails like this: "The bottom line is the revolution is nearing completion. We have lost our privacy, soon we will loose our right to self defense, and then The Bill of Rights will be no more. This is no longer the Republic we older people once knew. Re-electing this man is unforgivable. All of our descendants will curse us for betraying and mismanaging this beautiful idea that was once America. We have sentenced them to a life without personal rights, class mobility, or the joy of being truly free. Get ready for the era of Executive Orders, a european socialist form of government. We are now a nation of 350,000,000 dead men walking. Including the people who consider themselves liberal. What a joke on them."... I'm sorry you feel so negative about the election results my fellow old fart; I wonder where you got your doom and gloom philosophy... Maybe it would be better for all of us if you just went ahead and committed suicide... I may be grumpy, but I'm not a self-deluded idiot...

Err, forgive me, too much caffeine. But, by far my favorite letter is from Michael Lazare from Boise, Idaho: "I'm an old white guy (80). I've voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since Adlai Stephenson. My age allows me to be crotchety, so to all you newspapers, networks, pundits and pollsters, just one request: Stop categorizing me. I don't like it."

What impressed me the most about this election was the larger portion of citizens interested in policies, foreign policy, and economics, educating themselves so that all those years spent in college paid off... A smarter, more engaged electorate forced the news media to be more challenging to the candidates and the spin both campaigns gave to events. Hopefully, this trend will continue, but I do think that the energy we put into our national debate will not be as intense if Hillary decides to run.






The hot news today is the resignation of the Army's golden boy, David Petraeus. I had been wondering what he had been up to because he'd be keeping a low public profile once he became director of the CIA. That didn't stop Leon Panetta from making regular press releases when he was director, but David didn't speak out when Iran shot down a drone, or his listening post in Benghazi was attacked this last 9/11. Turns out he was too busy horn-dogging around, having an affair with the woman who was his biographer, Paula Broadwell.

Coincidentally, the FBI is investigating if Ms Broadwell could have had access to any private emails or military intelligence since David became the top spook, which may have defined the timing of his resignation, before the situation got ugly. Kiss your marriage of 37 years good-by champ...

What bothers me, and makes me want to call Mr Petraeus a coward, is the fact that the affair had been going on for several years, and it was called off only after it had been discovered by the FBI. If this hadn't happened, they could have continued the affair indefinitely.  It's always activites like these that reminds us that we are led by flawed human beings, so different from the people we put on their golden pedestals... Usually, the CIA takes care of their own investigations. The FBI would have to be invited to investigate within the CIA, so it looks like someone didn't get along with the head honcho very well... Revenge can be a bitch, sometimes...

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Obama Is Elected, And It Wasn't Even Close...

"Mitt Romney is reminding everybody about changing your clocks. He's urging his voters, his constituents, and all Americans to turn your clocks back to 1954." – David Letterman
"Good news for the Republicans: Once the polls close on Tuesday, they’ll be able to bring out Paul Ryan again. He’s been hiding with Mitt Romney's tax returns." – David Letterman
"What happened is Romney had a rally where they bought $5,000 worth of canned goods from Wal-Mart, handed them out to their supporters, and then had their supporters pretend to be giving them to the victims for the cameras. Because that's what Mitt is all about -- people. People pretending to help people. Later on he gave blood, then stole it back and chugged it." – Bill Maher


The presidential election went just about how the statistics guys predicted, and Barack Obama won both the number of voters and the electoral college to win another four years. The only people in denial was Karl Rove on Fox News, who threw a hissy fit on camera, and the other newsreaders tried to accommodate him. He thought that it was premature to declare Ohio for Obama when there were some precincts that were historically voting Republican that had yet to report in.

Then, Fox News did something that resembled guerilla theater rather than a serious news program. They sent Megyn Kelly, with a camera following her, back through the studio to ask the "election desk" why they had decided against Mr Rove, who has spent over $300 million in super-pac money in commercials against Obama. ThinkProgress wrote: "With neither side backing down, senior producers had to find a way to split the difference. One idea was for two members of the decision team, Mishkin and Fox’s digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt, to go on camera with Megyn Kelly and Bret Baier to squelch the doubts over the call. But then it was decided that Kelly would walk through the office and interview the decision team in the conference room. “This is Fox News,” an insider said, “so anytime there’s a chance to show off Megyn Kelly’s legs they’ll go for it.” The decision desk were given a three-minute warning that Kelly would be showing up..." The Fox statistics guys basically said that Rove was blowing smoke out of his ass, said that the amount of votes outstanding was 140,000 in the Republican areas, and 750,000 outstanding from the Democratic areas, and there was no way that Romney would win in Ohio. The cameras cut back to Karl Rove, who stupidly repeated his argument and continued his red-faced fit. He also called the Romney campaign, causing a delay of two hours before they admitted defeat... Luckily for Fox, they went to commercials, and when they came back, Mr Rove had been removed from the spotlight...

Conservative pundits had all predicted a Romney landslide, despite all of the math against them. Peggy Noonan, Dick Morris, and Karl Rove all were living in their own la-la land, and Donald Trump, who is in the angry first stages of Alzheimer'ss, called for a revolution... It won't be much longer until he loses his television show, which helped feed his autocratic ego... Those same pundits are now calling for Obama to move further to the right, or as they call it, towards the middle, so that there can be bi-partisan solutions to our problems. As Lee Siegal in the NY Times put it: "It was startling to hear, on CNN, the assembled pundits almost unanimously agree that President Obama had to find the “middle ground,” move to “the center” and “build relationships” with Republicans. Where have they been for four years? Mr. Obama had been trying desperately to find the political center for his entire first term, only to be stymied by Republicans trying to recapture the White House by rejecting his every attempt at compromise and then blaming him for being unwilling to compromise."

Nine out of the ten swing states all went for Obama, and Mitt Romney's home state of Massachusetts went for Obama... Even the county where Paul Ryan makes his home in Janeville, Wisconsin, voted for Obama... The factors that went overwhelmingly for Obama were the Black vote, the Latino vote, young people under 30, and the female vote. Nationally, more women voted than men, resulting with a whole binder full of women elected to Congress. 20 were elected last night, including Elizabeth Warren and Tammy Duckworth, both whom I'm in awe of... The high turnout from these new strongholds will change the face of our future elections. For example, adios to Tod Aiken, Allen West, Joe Walsh, and Richard Mourdock, all tea party idealogues...



Here in my home state of Colorado, Obama won, twice in a row. His winning in 2008 caused the pundits to list Colorado as a swing state. One of our best kept secrets, now out in the open, is that even Conservatives enjoy getting stoned. Marijuana is a wonderful drug to ingest while spending time outdoors in the Rocky Mountains. Now, we even put it on the ballot, making it legal for anyone over 21 to buy a personal amount of marijuana, and it passed last night. In fact, marijuana got 50,000 more votes than Obama did... My brother-in-law and I were laughing at this, and I asked him if he would now try and buy some. He replied that no, he stopped smoking it years ago, but it's nice to know that the opportunity is there... I discovered that sometimes smoking a joint before going to sleep, it helped me on days that were very painful. I stopped when I moved to Colorado, never signed up for medical marijuana, and wouldn't know where to get it even though that may soon change. But my doctor has prescribed tramadol for the pain, and it works pretty well, so I doubt that I'll be searching out where my local distributor is located... When I was younger, I swore that I'd never let myself end up taking pills as I got older, yet here I am taking a small handful twice per day. Getting old sure sucks... Just like my religious and political beliefs, I may not be partaking in this social experiment, but I don't mind if others do... God Bless a Stoned America...



Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Nov 6th, 2012


As of Tuesday morning, Nate Silver, from the NY Times, makes the prediction that Barack Obama's chances of being re-elected are at 90.9%, making Mit's chances of winning at 9.1%. That's a larger margin than I would have given, but he is a lot smarter than I am, so I'll go with his numbers...

Unfortunately for the GOP, after their defeat a whole bunch of ugly old white guys will be saying that the problem is that they haven't found a candidate who is properly Conservative enough... But the primary candidates this season were all extremely right wing, and they made the race to the primary look like a carnival run by the clowns... And now the Dick Morris's, Joe Scarborough's, Bill Kristol's, and Sean Hannity's all look like they shared in taking some of Rush Limbaugh's Oxycontin... That leaves Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin as the standard bearers, to chew at each other like weasels during the next 4 years...


Mitt Romney
Barack Obama
225.0
-14.0 since Oct. 30
313.0
+14.0 since Oct. 30
270 to win
June
July
Aug
Sept
Oct
Nov
330
270
210
9.1%
-13.5 since Oct. 30
90.9%
+13.5 since Oct. 30