I love this ad:
It merges so many anti-Romney memes: Heartless, entitled plutocrat? Check. Vulture capitalist? Check. Corporate welfare queen who wants the feed trough all to himself? Check. And the dog on the roof of the game-piece car and fancy French cuffs? Genius.
[H/T: TPM]
Betsy
whoa
Soonergrunt
@ Betty Cracker, top: I was about to post on this very thing, but you beat me to it. It’s a great ad.
JenJen
I’ll have all of you know that none of this matters, since my coworker just told me that Obama is going to use the hurricane to declare martial law and suspend the election.
True story!
Maude
@JenJen:
Tell co worker about the FEMA re education camps.
dmsilev
@JenJen: We are reliably informed by conservative sources that Obama controls the weather, so obviously he created this storm to give himself the excuse to order FEMA to round up all of the conservatives into detention camps.
I mean, obviously.
Punchy
Offshore odds update:
McCaskill to win MO: -750 (!)…holy fucking wow
Tester to win Montana +150 (I thought he was ahead?)
Obama to win VA +120 (I thought he had a 5 pt lead?)
Obama to win OH -220 (really the only state that matters)
Cacti
That’s not fair.
Romney wants all plutocrats to be able to loot the Social Security trust fund.
smith
Excellent ad and oh so true.
Slightly OT: I was on one of my daily sports sites and in their roundup (where they post interesting links of the day) they mention the Drew Chambers link bashing Nate Silver.
Cue mouthbreathing commentators below agreeing with what Chambers said and that Silver “fudges” his numbers. For Nate’s sake (and ours) I hope Nate’s numbers are solid (and correct).
PreservedKillick
@JenJen:
A bit of an improvement. At least your coworker didn’t think Obama caused the hurricane.
Schlemizel
I haz a sad. I live in a ‘safe’ state so this won’t run on the local TV unless they want to catch the Western edge of Worseconsin.
donnah
Joss Whedon and now this: Two Best Political Ads EVER!
Ohio is loaded with crappy ads running constantly, and I would love to see these good ones showing here. Anything that spells out the Romney plan is good news. Especially Zomneys!
gogol's wife
That’s a brilliant ad. Great graphics.
catclub
@dmsilev: You would think that if you knew the other guy could control the weather, there would be some respect.
TR
Beautiful!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
ahem
Not that anybody at the DNC reads Balloon-Juice, I’m sure. Great minds think alike, etc.
Ohio Mom
@JenJen: I’d say are you sure you don’t work at the same place my husband does but I know there are no women there. Every day he comes home slightly crazed from having to hear stuff like that all day. How do you stand it?
dmsilev
@catclub: You’d think that. “In other news today, Mitt Romney’s campaign bus was struck by lightning and set on fire just outside of Toledo. The Obama campaign refused to comment on whether the President had signed a deal with Zeus that initiated the strike.”
smith
@JenJen:
I wish you could reason with these people but you can’t. To them, everything bad that happens is Obama’s fault.
I wish they would settle on a meme: They call Obama “stupid” and “lazy”, yet he’s capable and cunning enough to time Hurricane Sandy right in time for the election.
Like I said, you can’t reason with flaming idiots.
dmsilev
Speaking of Romney and grifting, there was a story this weekend (which I can’t seem to find) about how Romney’s campaign consultants absorbed something like $130 million of his fundraising (not counting money which said consultants passed on to TV stations and other media). The equivalent figure for the Obama campaign was $3 million.
JenJen
@Ohio Mom: Honestly, this stuff used to bother me a lot more but these days, I get a big kick out of it. For over two years, they have been absolutely certain that Obama would lose reelection, and so I have a feeling a lot of them are going to be in for a real shock come next Tuesday, especially here in Ohio.
Also, too: Brian Kilmeade Wonders If Obama Cancelling Events For Hurricane Sandy A Sign His Campaign Is In ‘Disarray’
Heh.
Omnes Omnibus
@smith: I am sure they would grant that he has some form of low animal cunning.
dmsilev
@JenJen: Yes, but in fairness to Kilmeade, he’s a deeply stupid person.
KXB
The visuals definitely grab a hold of you. Even if you are tired of political campaign ads, the setup of this commercial holds your attention.
Maude
Clinton told a crowd that Obama had to go back to DC because the storm is worse than they thought.
At least we know where the president is today. Reminds me that on 9/11 we had no idea where Bush was.
It is excellent that Clinton is campaigning. He’ll do a good job. I don’t know if he’ll go to the other Obama campaign stops. The VP candidates are campaigning.
Jamey
Holy FUCK, that’s amazing. I just donated $$ to get this ad on the air everywhere.
Corner Stone
@Ohio Mom:
Does he work at a company that does jock strap quality control?
MomSense
@JenJen:
Tell them that you heard that if you don’t vote for Obama, he will direct the HAARP stations to their coordinates.
kd bart
Quick question regarding Rasmussen. I know they’re a robo poller, which I gather means no cell phones, who does all of their polling in a 4 hour period with no call backs to numbers that did not answer but do they release their demographic,(age, affilliation, income, etc.) breakdown data for any of their polls? Even to those who pay for their service?
Jamey
Watched it a second time. Gold dice. Lands on “snake-eyes.” Clever and damnably impossible to ignore.
dmsilev
@dmsilev: OK, found the story:
Looks like the parasite has parasites.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@smith:
Sort of like hoping that a geologist can predict an earthquake. I think Nate’s doing an excellent job, but you’re not quite understanding what his methods mean. Even if Obama lost the election, Nate could still be “correct”.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
Nah, it was just the new model of DRONEZZZZZZ!
Baud
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I never could get my mind around the idea of assigning a probability for the occurrence of a unique event.
Corner Stone
@dmsilev:
Hey, somebody’s going to get that money, amirite?
smith
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I know what his methods are. My original post wasn’t clear (and that’s my fault). I think his methodology is solid, and I know his track record.
I’m just hoping Obama wins that’s all. My words/thoughts got jumbled in my original post.
Cacti
The new Ras poll has Rmoney +2 in Ohio. What are the odds that the librul media ignores the raft of contrary polling data and trumpets the Romentum?
kdaug
Anticipate the camera crews are pre-positioned to get footage of shocked, bewildered people who’ve just lost their homes and loved ones being asked “Has Obama helped you yet? No? You don’t have any water? Power is still out?”
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
@JenJen: Do you just point them to the Busken Poll? It has lots of local cred! And is currently 11079/9092, advantage President.
It was interesting to hear Page Busken (BYU grad and major donor) tell Marketwatch tat he’d have bet the bakery that Obama would win in 2008. I found that clip researching stuff about the poll to send to Fallows, who I thought might find it interesting.
Roger Moore
@dmsilev:
I think you’re thinking about this article. The graphic that goes with it is pretty impressive, too.
Elizabelle
Love the ad.
Never tire of the dog on the roof playing piece. Perfect. (Good sound effects throughout, too.)
ericblair
@dmsilev:
It’s remoras all the way down. Hoocouldanode, advocating a business model based solely on short-term monetary self-interest would result in problems from too many impatient selfish greedy bastards.
dmsilev
@Roger Moore: Yeah, I found it. Turns out ‘Romney campaign consultant’ was the right search term to use.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@smith: OK. I get what you’re saying here. I’m the same way: If Obama loses, I’ll probably curse Nate at one point during the night. Just because one part of my brain understands the math, doesn’t mean that it would be easy to take a loss.
Mike E
@smith:
Especially the ones who get you work hours… )-:
AA+ Bonds
Substance is dead; hail the reign of the stupidly cynical
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Baud: Actually, you’re not. You’re assigning probabilities to two events, whether something happens or not. Because they are binary and exclusive, we tend to only talk about one of the numbers, but there are two probabilities in this case: Obama wins: .7something, and Romney wins: (1 – .7something).
It’s probably a little easier to think about if you actually consider all of the candidates.
AA+ Bonds
You see, criticizing capitalism’s institutions is good for exactly one thing: protecting a do-nothing Democratic administration by transforming all critique into partisan horse racing
slag
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Nice call! But you’re right…there are lots of Romnopoly games out there, it appears: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIi5J3jbGk0&feature=plcp.
Baud
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
I get what you’re saying. Probabilities just seem more intuitive to me when you have repetitive events that can result in a distribution curve.
piratedan
@JenJen: #3, well you can tell them that you’re part of the secret network of liberal lackeys that have been infiltrated into the work force and that their names have already been submitted to the authorities but you’re compassionate to their situation and as such, you’ll be activating the neo-confederate railroad on their behalf, that moves good, God fearing Republican families via an underground network of amtrak stops and taxidermy vans to relocate them to safety in places like Topeka or Opp, Alabama to start their new lives under the suspicious scrutiny of others supposedly just like them.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Baud:
Given the Electoral College, it makes more sense to think of it as the aggregate result of 50 distinct events which have non-trivial correlations with each other.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Baud: Like voters? Or, how about predicting the time you get to work everyday? It’s not exact, but we tend to have a good idea, and if you plotted the distribution, it would be somewhat bell shaped.
GregB
I’d like to preemptively declare that Sandy is Obama’s Katrina.
ThresherK
Great stuff, but not a Trump Hotel in sight?
Ah well, ya can’t have everything.
Mnemosyne
@AA+ Bonds:
It’s so weird how people keep comparing Obama and Romney like there’s some kind of election coming up or something.
feebog
@ kd bart:
It seems to me that they released limited information on the crosstabs during the 2008 election to non-subscribers. I have paid no attention to their polls because they are in the tank for rMoney and their numbers are skewed by at least 2 to 5 points. We will see if they start correcting now that we are only a week away. That has been their pattern in the past.
JenJen
@piratedan: Well, I wouldn’t want to give away the plot, now would I? ;-)
HEY! Rasmussen has Romney +2 in new Ohio Poll. #ShockedFace
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@feebog:
And yet for some reason Ras’ preditable election-eve swing back towards the Democratic candidate fails to trigger any “late surge for the Dem” stories in our news media. Almost as if reporters know that Ras cooks their numbers differently from the other major polling outfits and then swings back to the rest of the pack right before the election. And yet this doesn’t stop our intrepid reporters from using earlier Ras polls (with their built in bias) to write stories and headlines.
Methinks that Mr. Orwell may have been on to something with his “doublethink” concept.
Schlemizel
@Cacti: I’d say 101% with a margin of error of 2%
slag
@AA+ Bonds: Wow. I get this: http://front.moveon.org/this-super-speedy-clip-will-debunk-anyone-who-says-obama-is-a-do-nothing-president/?rc=daily.share in my email, and then I see your comment. A complete coincidence, I’m sure.
Jay in Oregon
@dmsilev:
Well, that and he can time travel. In, fact, a recently-unearthed video shows that the circumstances surrounding Barack Obama’s birth make River Song’s backstory look tidy and straightforward.
Higgs Boson's Mate
@AA+ Bonds:
I see that institutionalized capitalism hasn’t done at all well by this nation for some time. By characterizing this administration as “do-nothing” you’re ignoring an intransigent Congress and thereby making an ass of yourself, again.
Joel
@Punchy: If I were a gambling man, I’d take my chances on Tester and Virginia, because I trust Sam Wang and Nate Silver (both have Tester as a slight underdog, IIRC) a lot more than gamblers here. After all, the money involved is probably a lot smaller than sports betting, so the lines are probably not “true”.
Elizabelle
Tee hee.
Leaving these suckers on the tarmac has got to have felt good.
WindyCityCat
OT, but for anyone who reads XKCD, today’s comic is a doozy. It’s got a complete history of the ideological makeup of Congress since the beginning plus selected facts and commentary along the way. Lots to digest.
Roger Moore
@Baud:
You can also use them as a way of measuring your confidence in a prediction or measurement. For example, I work as a scientist, and a big part of my job is figuring out which proteins are present in a sample. Many of the most interesting ones are present as tiny traces and are hard to identify. When I give people my results, they include probabilities that the IDs of individual proteins are correct. Since my work is more of an intermediate rather than a final product, it’s useful to treat the probabilities as a measure of confidence; it gives people an idea about whether any specific thing I claim to have found is worth investing effort in following up.
trollhattan
@Joel:
Sam Wang takes the idiots on, directly, and evidently Krugthulu has joined the fray.
http://election.princeton.edu/2012/10/29/nerds-under-attack/#more-8151
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
Its not a “do nothing democratic regime.” You can argue that there are many things they should have done differently. But Obama did not “do nothing.” The Lily Ledbetter Act , ACA, planned expansion of Medicaid, running FEMA, attempt to put through the Dream Act, pull out of Iraq, planned pullout from Afghanistan, attempt to get funding for returning Vets, stimulus bill, jobs bill, and many other pieces of legislation that were attempted although blocked by the Republicans are all not nothing. In fact, when you see how positively hysterical with rage the actual ruling capitalists of this country are with the Obama administration you have to figure that, au contraire, the dems for once did something right. They did not do everything I would have liked to see them do with respect to Wallstreet, wall street corruption, the financial markets generally, and the housing and debt crisis but &^%$on toast points no one else got within spitting distance of doing half what they did. McCain wouldn’t have managed anything and neither would alternate universe Hillary or Edwards.
aimai
Roger Moore
@Higgs Boson’s Mate:
More important, he’s ignoring all the things the administration has done. Maybe he didn’t deliver on the issue that’s most important to you, but that’s no reason to ignore the ways he did deliver.
Soonergrunt
OT–SCOTUS just refused the cert petition by the State of Oklahoma regarding the OK Supreme Court (OKSC? SCOK? SCOOK?) decision that declared the proposed “personhood” amendment/law to the OK Constitution to be unconstitutional.
beltane
Too many lunatics on the internet today. The wingnuts are claiming Sandy is being overrhyped to deflect energy away from Benghazi while some CT inclined people on our side are saying the Republicans have geo-engineered Sandy to keep the Northeast from voting.
Baud
Thanks, everyone, on the probability help. I actually do understand the math behind it at some level. It’s just easier for me to visualize running repeatable experiments that generate data that confirm or refute expected outcomes. An Obama win or a Romney win won’t do that, so it’s more abstract to me.
Roger Moore
@Joel:
And sports (and political) lines are set to balance the book, not to reflect an accurate probability. If there’s some reason why the betting population is unbalanced, the line will reflect that unbalanced population rather than the real odds.
Baud
@beltane:
I don’t think that’s why Sandy is overhyped, but I do think a nice fringe benefit of Sandy is that it probably blunted whatever last-minute lie Romney had planned to unleash.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Roger Moore: That was a far better description than I was coming up with.
AA+ Bonds
@Mnemosyne:
I think I can respond to pretty much everyone who replied to my comments using this quote: the elite has captured your dissent by ensuring that there is always “some kind of election coming up or something”
Better not talk about what hasn’t been accomplished or the disaster that will result; THEREZ A WAR ON
aimai
Can I just say something about the implication of AA Bonds and other purity trolls attack on Obama’s advertising as, somehow, falsley populist. Populism, like feminism and other leftist tropes, is a good servant for a political party–but a very dangerous master. You can’t stuff the genie back into the bottle. If pupulism works, if feminism works, and brings your voters to the polls then in effect you’ve written a check they are going to demand you cash. These ads are aimed at getting voters out, but they are also, in a sense, political theater and propaganda that isn’t easily dropped post election. They are forming the electorate and its expectations.
aimai
Baud
@Roger Moore:
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Agreed. That was a helpful description. Thanks.
AA+ Bonds
@aimai:
Fuck populism; no program = no victory
That said, the President is never your friend
At best he (or she) is always a foe that has been pressured to concede to some of your demands
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Baud: I often go back to my Schrodinger’s cat t-shirt on some of these: Conduct your experiments on whether individual atoms of Uranium have decayed.
beltane
@Baud: That’s true. It will also give him the opportunity to say something stunningly offensive and heartless about the 10s of millions of people who are being affected by this.
Galtians serve no purpose during natural disasters unless someone thinks of a way to turn them into flotation devices.
dmsilev
@Baud: At least one candidate for last-minute lie appears to be “Obama is sending Chrysler Jeep jobs to China”. It’s blatant enough that even Chrysler is calling bullshit, but apparently Romney and his campaign don’t care.
? Martin
So, how hard are Republicans praying for this storm to wipe out NYC?
Paul
I wonder if he realizes that Romney also cancelled events. Or is a campaign only in a disarray if the black guy does it, according to FoxNews…
Man, they are idiots at that station. Not to mention their gullible viewers.
AA+ Bonds
I can understand why you folks think a capitalist-controlled liberal is so much better than a capitalist-controlled conservative; what I don’t understand is the cackling glee with which you greet the manipulation of the American people when the pot takes it to the kettle
Political advertising in this country is depraved and uncontrolled, period
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
Actually, that’s a pretty tired meme which I note is peddled by various posters around town that, somehow, “there’s an election coming up” is somehow a shocking piece of propaganda. Again, to the contrary, only naieve children are surprised to discover that politics happens year round and that the struggle to mobilize people to get into power is just one facet of the overall struggle. Its an important part of the struggle–if you aren’t in power you can’t advance any agenda. But the people bitching that Obama or any politician didn’t accomplish enough during the course of a two year term, or a four year term, are never the people who showed up to do the heavy lifting (law suits, fundraising, mobilization, education) that would have made it possible to advance their cause incrementally.
These people are passive consumers of politics–I “pay” with my vote and I am entitled to action on my pet cause. The fact that a whole lot of debris has to be cleared and re-cleared from the field every two years and every four years; the fact that the terrain (house, senate, judiciary, economy) changes every few years; completely escapes them. No: you don’t get “credit” for having voted for anyone. No, you don’t get to bitch and moan because the actual job of legislating is two steps forward and three steps back. You just have to go to work again right after the election to mobilize and fight.
aimai
Yutsano
@? Martin: Den of iniquity right there. Anyone label it the New Sodom yet?
Baud
@? Martin:
Isn’t Sandy supposed to make landfall at Atlantic City, which is associated with Trump? Maybe God has had enough of Trump’s shit?
AA+ Bonds
@aimai:
If you don’t take this seriously, why should I?
Politicians and political parties in contemporary America are gatekeepers for capital, including your party and your politicians
bemused
@Maude:
I remember reading about government internment camps during the Bush era too and I think even before that during Clinton presidency. I’m betting they are the same or almost identical stories that the frightened, conspiracy-prone latch onto just changing the name of the party as the culprits.
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
Jeezus, of course the President isn’t my friend. Does anyone think he is? However, in this case, he’s not my enemy. Romney is my enemy. Romney was my governor. I know EXACTLY how much Romney hates people like me (women), how much he hates people of color, people who are gay, people who have long hair, people who are poor, people who are in need, pregnant women who need abortions to save their fucking lives. There is a giant, unbridgeable gulf between Barack Obama the human being and Romney the human being. That is just the fact.
aimai
AA+ Bonds
No, hold on, I mean that the meme is lulz and I can haz cheezburger, sorry about all that stuff regarding actual politics and power struggles etc.
Xecky Gilchrist
@dmsilev: there was a story this weekend (which I can’t seem to find) about how Romney’s campaign consultants absorbed something like $130 million of his fundraising (not counting money which said consultants passed on to TV stations and other media). The equivalent figure for the Obama campaign was $3 million.
This is pretty much exactly what I expected from Citizens United. Republicans cannot spend money efficiently, their fingers are too damn sticky.
scav
@Baud: Would it help if you thought about adding more and more attrbute information to each and every coin toss or sun-rise to recognize that they too are unique events? They’re simpler (especially if we weed back out the attribute/differences that don’t materially impact the outcome/outcome) events, but . . .
or that might just blow-out what visualization you’ve got.
Hill Dweller
@dmsilev:
Willard is getting hammered for this lie, which is an indication the media is starting to believe Obama will win, IMO.
gwangung
You need to work on reading comprehension.
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
“Gatekeepers for capital.” Hel-llo? This is a capitalist country. It was yesterday and it will be tomorrow. My personal ancestors: anarchists and socialists and radicals couldn’t change that. It won’t be changed by any political party currently in existence. But there is still a fuckload of work that gets done and will get done underneath that fact. The 40 hour work week, rights for all, rule of law, health and safety regulation, public education, infrastructure, the ACA–these are all worth fighting for even if we can’t create a utopian socialist paradise with no rich people in it at all.
The best we can hope for is to highly regulate capital and the oligarchs and the best we can manage at this point is a Democratic party which has been purged of its blue dogs. There’s no other game in town. Continuing to pretend that there is an alternative which, though invisible to normal people, exists out there is just absurd.
Mouse Tolliver
On MSNBC right now they’re showing Romney talking about shutting down FEMA. “Send it back to the states!” he says. How exactly is a state going to handle disaster relief when it — and the five or six other states that surround it — are buried under snow and water?
We better start seeing ads about this ASAP. And Dems need to nationalize the message that Republican policies are penny-wise but pound foolish.
AA+ Bonds
@aimai:
I was trying to be nice, but yes, he is your enemy, if a fairly unimportant one in the long term – he is the public face of capital’s enforcement of the exploitation of your labor, as is his opponent
As an individual, he only matters to material politics as far as he fulfills that role or challenges it (I will except cultural politics here for the sake of argument since we are discussing the economically-centered advertisement above). And all of his language so far this campaign “cycle” has been toward the self-regulation of “better corporate governance” – that is, he promotes the idea that American capitalists should hobble themselves in how they exploit workers, which of course will not be implemented even if he himself chooses the head of large American firms
Such firms would lose; they would be bought (it’s rare that any of them die anymore); their “responsible” leaders will be replaced or shift their “governance” model to be competitive
This is a contradiction – the interchangeable individual actor at the mercy of the market which purports to represent the sum of individual action – and it is one of the problems with capitalism
A swell dude as President and a bunch of similarly swell dudes running American companies will not change this, which is one reason why the Democratic Party has been captured by press-focused cynics
slag
@AA+ Bonds: And yet, here you are, pushing the “do-nothing administration” meme as if it’s even remotely trenchant commentary. Go fuck yourself.
beltane
@Mouse Tolliver: Mitt Romney and the Republican party will let America drown rather than have the very rich pay another penny in taxes. No one should ever forget this.
Betty Cracker
@aimai: Thank you. Christ, I can’t believe this needs to be pointed out yet again. (Le sigh.)
Xecky Gilchrist
@Baud: It’s just easier for me to visualize running repeatable experiments that generate data that confirm or refute expected outcomes.
If I understand right, that’s what Silver and Wang both do, it’s just that the experiments are simulations that tweak the behavior of voters or states around according to probability distributions of some sort.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
I am fairly sure the current head of FEMA is not bitching about finding the right Pinot or calling home to make sure his horses are being taken care of properly in his absence.
Funny how those bitching about a “do-nothing presidency” seem to have forgotten what a real do-nothing presidency looks like. Hint: it involves people drowning in their attics.
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
Oh baby! I’ve read Marx and you ain’t no Marxist. Fuck off with your crazy shit. You have no idea what politics looks like in the real world but I would just like to remind you that in the long run, while you are waiting for your communist utopia and the withering away of the state, we are all dead. In the short run the ACA means that 40 million more people will get up and have health insurance and some non-insignificant portion of those people (10 million? 20 million?) will not suffer and die horribly of preventable, treatable, illnesses. Some non-insignificant proportion of those people will be able to live lives of a smidge more joy and hope than before the ACA passed.
That is more significant in real world terms–a more loving accomplishment by this President and a house full of crazy, cranky, compromised Dems led by Pelosi than anything you will ever accomplish in your god damned life. TAke off your high hat and show a little respect.
aimai
Southern Beale
New conventional wisdom from someone over at CNN is that Romney has peaked. He has to win Ohio to win at all, and he’s still behind there. It’s not looking good for him.
I’m glad this is the “CW” from inside CNN.
Scott S.
@AA+ Bonds: If you’re never going to vote for a candidate until he’s your friend, you’ll never vote for a candidate. It’s a nice excuse for staying inside and pretending to be politically sophisticated and pure, but it’s kinda a silly argument, isn’t it?
AA+ Bonds
As I have explained over and over I always vote straight-ticket Democratic and consider it to be the absolute least one can do regarding politics given a political system that fails democracy; given a practical choice between two capital-controlled parties, I choose the one most likely to, for instance, indirectly foster slowed growth of the world’s population, and otherwise delay other points of crisis as capitalism barrels toward them
I would rather not compound my bad faith by cheering when I see Democrats wield a vulgar critique of capital to attack another capital-controlled party – and I do not understand why those on Balloon Juice are so eager to do so
Wall Street versus Main Street is a stupid dichotomy to begin with: small business owners in the United States exploit their workers (and in many cases must exploit their workers) in worse ways than large corporations, with legal loopholes to match
Lojasmo
@AA+ Bonds: why don’t you, then, talk specifically, about what has not been accomplished? Lemme guess. DROOOOONEZ
scav
AA+Landers’ rules for marriage: if there’s no Mr/s Right immediately available, marry the poxed, insane rapist pychopath with jealous tendencies and a police record.
Scott S.
@AA+ Bonds:
I would rather not compound my bad faith by cheering when I see Democrats wield a vulgar critique of capital to attack another capital-controlled party – and I do not understand why those on Balloon Juice are so eager to do so
We can’t all be pure as the driven snow and grim as cold death. Some of us is impure and likes to have fun. But you enjoy your monastery.
Cassidy
@AA+ Bonds: Fuck all that. You play to win. Period. If I gotta call Romney and Little Angry Annie Mormon, swinger, rapist, babykillers to make sure they don’t get in the White House, then you’re damn skippy I’m gonna spread rumors about an orgy involving satanic sacrifice.
Jamey
Guess Romney’s now the auto-industry’s best friend.
amk
In FL, with 19% of 2008 turnout, the dems are catching up with the repubs in the early voting @ D-41.0 to R-42.6.
Ben Labolt tweets
Eat that FL-is-a-wash doomers. Looking at you, omenus and betty crocker.
MattR
@Roger Moore:
This is not quite true. They do manage risk by trying to balance the money on both sides but they also base their decisions on more than just this one factor. Like other businesses, they will accept additional risk if they believe it will increase their profits. For example, if they think team A has a 70% chance of covering the spread, but all the money is coming in on team B they won’t necessarily change the spread to get more bettors to take team A.
El Cid
@AA+ Bonds: Karl Marx was quite supportive of the ability of workers to use the limited influence they had in electoral politics to use the power of the bourgeois state for their interests when possible and at the very least to blunt its ability to harm them. The state was an extremely powerful machine in his analysis, and the franchise though an imperfect tool was certainly worth using to try and keep the worst forces of reaction (and there were and are many reactionary forces) from wielding that machine without limit.
Roger Moore
@scav:
Frequentist statistics are much easier to grasp than other interpretations, so it shouldn’t be surprising when people go back to them if they’re having trouble understanding things. And they’re certainly a more reasonable place to go if you’re trying to evaluate competing claims about an event’s probability. We don’t hold presidential elections often enough to judge between Sam Wang’s model and Nate Silver’s, which is frustrating if you have a frequentist model of probabilities. As a scientist, I prefer Sam Wang’s model because he seems to give tighter error bars, and thus provide an easier to test model, than Nate Silver does.
AA+ Bonds
To make it clear: yes, you are exploited when you are sold a shady variable rate mortgage and then face foreclosure from the bank
But you are also exploited when the state subsidizes housing from the bottom to the top and then requires that you join in debt peonage to put a roof over your head by selling your labor for less value than you produce
The Democrats have done a half-assed job of addressing the first and of course cannot contemplate addressing the second and so the entire economic line of attack falls apart
Omnes Omnibus
@AA+ Bonds: Reading your comments on this thread, it appears then that you object to anyone finding any enjoyment or pleasure in any aspect of the election process. Sorry, mark me down with Emma Goldman on that one.
Democrat Partisan Asshole
@AA+ Bonds: You speak of “bad faith” when the party in this election – the one you supposedly want to defeat – has been relentlessly sticking it to the electorate you supposedly give a shit about, and thwarting their will, since 2000 – and you’re complaining that an ad is acting in bad faith?
I laugh and disengage with this: you’re a fucking liar.
beltane
@amk: When you live in the red part of a state it’s really hard to get handle on what’s going on overall. I say this because I live in a reddish part of Vermont and I’m always amazed that Dems do so well statewide.
AA+ Bonds
@Democrat Partisan Asshole:
I freely admit that I act in bad faith by voting for Democrats, and that it is a propaganda tactic because Democrats have inculcated within themselves a blind white-hot fury toward anyone on the left who doesn’t
lacp
@AA+ Bonds: Relax. It’s a goddam political ad, it’s not supposed to be the Communist Manifesto or the Rights of Man. What exactly do you think political advertising should look like, anyway?
El Cid
@AA+ Bonds:
Not only true, but it’s worse than that — small business owners are historically among the most eager supporters of fascist political movements.
(And I mean “small business” in the sense of actually small, not just “anything with fewer than 500 employees”.)
Partly it’s because they so frequently occupy the status of being both the owner and the exploited workers themselves. Thus so much of their animus against unions and labor benefits, because they cannot achieve similar gains against themselves.
AA+ Bonds
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not true at all; I enjoy browsing and analyzing the rhetoric of the far right, which I do here often
Somehow I doubt that
bemused
The romnopoly ad is good.
What a contrast to Mitt’s latest ad with Jeep lie. Aside from the usual lies, it’s ho-hum. Who thought the 50’s-60’s era PSA tone was a winner? They must be trying to appeal to old white folks who dream of the “perfect” 50’s. It sure won’t appeal to younger voters and certainly not to this not so young voter.
AA+ Bonds
@El Cid:
Of course (see my comments above about delaying crises and why I vote Democratic) but there are reasons why Marx pushed so hard for the formation of social democratic (what we now would identify as “Communist”) parties that demanded worker control over the means of production, with an improved welfare state as a transitional form rather than the end goal
blingee
At 1min it’s not going to have much airplay though. I doubt this PAC has that kind of money. I only get excited at good 30second spots which are obvously intended for more airplay.
scav
@Roger Moore: My gut reaction is just to prefer the simpler model, given all other thing, and, better still, rely on different models based on different principles. So there’s a tell, I’m more a modeler (muddler) than a statistician at base. Sam I like, but I’m glad Silver is there as part of the effort.
J.
OMG, love the car with the dog on top. And yes, great graphics all the way around. Thanks for posting, Betty. I love the ad, too. Though this is still my favorite Mitt Romney parody (though it’s true).
Speaking of Mitt Romney and Hurricane Sandy, thanks to the latter blowhard, my neighbors removed all FOUR of their Romney/Ryan sign. I guess there is a silver lining to this storm cloud.
MikeJ
@Mouse Tolliver:
Sandy may actually be Romney’s Katrina.
Election Follower
Let’s face the facts: Romney’s lies will work. The Big Lie always does.
SatanicPanic
@AA+ Bonds: So what you’re saying is that principled, substantive discussion is what’s going to usher in the great socialist era?
Mnemosyne
@AA+ Bonds:
Oh, next week’s election is imaginary, and only people like you who took the blue pill can really understand. I get it now.
Yutsano
@Mnemosyne: But don’t you see? Once AA+ installs his great socialist paradise there won’t BE a need for elections! You’re just too caught up in the system to recognise his brilliance. It’s true, just ask him!
Omnes Omnibus
@amk: Dude, I don’t know enough about FL to make a prediction. Over the weekend, I was tweaking you for bitching at Betty Cracker for reporting what she saw and not making up shit about happy gumdrop land.
@AA+ Bonds: You don’t have any idea what my fundamental philosophical views are. The vast majority of my comments about politics on this blog are fueled by the fact that I try to take a pragmatic approach. It comes with advantages and flaws. One of the major flaws is that every presidential candidate from a major party in my lifetime has had positions to the right of my own. It means I supported the ACA even though Medicare for all came far closer to my preferences. The major advantage is that I get to see movement toward beneficial policies.
MattR
@Mnemosyne: I am generally relatively sympathetic to AA+ Bonds’s point, but to make it 8 days before an election is just ludicrous.
Unrelated, I was impressed by this facebook post on the First Army Division East’s page (via TPM). I appreciate the loyalty and sense of duty, but I hope they don’t push the envelope to the point of creating new casualties.
Palli
@dmsilev: money laundering
Ash Can
Saw on LGF that Obama is making a statement about Sandy. Too bad these aren’t red states getting clobbered, since I fully expect him to emphasize precaution, common sense, and personal safety.
Yutsano
@MattR: They’ll evacuate if necessary, but the Tomb Guards take that shit VERY seriously. It’d have to be really catastrophic to get them to abandon their post.
joes527
Wait – When they mortgage the future in that ad, they turn the cards from upside down to right-side up. That’s totally wrong.
I think the ad needs to be fact checked.
amk
@Omnes Omnibus: as apposed to I don’t know enough about FL to make a prediction “realists” like you, right ?
Supernumerary Charioteer
@ericblair: We’ve known it for twenty-some-odd centuries, at least.
“Mencius appeared in audience before King Hui of Liang. The King said, ‘Good Sir, you have not regarded a thousand tricents too great a distance to come here – surely it must be that you will bring great profit to my state.’
Mencius replied, ‘My Lord, why must you speak of profit? Indeed, there are no things but humanity and righteousness. If Your Majesty says ‘Whereby may I profit my state?’, your ministers will say ‘Whereby may I profit my family?’ and your commoners will say ‘Whereby may I profit myself?’. From top to bottom, all will be thinking of profit, and the state will be in danger.’…”
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@AA+ Bonds:
You don’t really believe all that, do you?
You always vote straight D, yet you’re filled with self-loathing because you don’t like an ad? One that you didn’t produce or pay for?
If you think that Obama isn’t pure enough, the time to make that case is during the primaries. Gnashing your teeth and rending your garments and flagellating yourself with chains now is stupid. It only helps those who are even worse when it comes to issues you claim to care about.
Once the party candidates have been chosen, your choice is between and among the parties. Arguing against Obama is an argument for Bohener and Cantor and McConnell and DeMint and Scalia and Alito and Norquist all their cohorts. Not between Obama and Kucinich or between Rmoney and Ike.
Either you’re a troll on this topic, or you’re very confused about how politics actually works. Or maybe both. In any event, your argument doesn’t make much sense.
My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
MattR
@Yutsano: Yeah. I completely understand and applaud that. I am sure the soldiers standing guard feel that the risk to themselves is a reasonable cost to pay in order to honor those who served before them. But I am not so sure those veterans would want to see additional soldiers suffering injury in their attempt to honor them.
@Ash Can: Just watched it. He did a nice job of shutting down the idiot reporter asking “what about how this will impact the election” by pointing out that he is more concerned with the impact to residents, to first repsonders, to our infrastructure and to our economy.
Hal
Here’s hoping a close race in FL inspires Floridians who would vote Obama to get out and vote. Then they can tell all the retirees “you’re welcome” anytime any of them scoot by in a lark.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Ash Can: “And don’t drink the Clorox, it’s bad for you.”
Mnemosyne
@AA+ Bonds:
Shorter AA+ Bonds: Communism can never fail, it can only be failed! The only reason it hasn’t worked is because it hasn’t been properly implemented!
No wonder you spend so much time reading far-right websites. You have much more common with them than you do with us run-of-the-mill liberals.
amk
@MattR: The whole buncha whc’s are stoopid maroons.
Omnes Omnibus
@amk: I did not say you were making up shit. I said you were bitching about BC reporting what she saw at her polling place instead of making shit up. Clear?
FlipYrWhig
I don’t remember AA+ Bonds affecting the voice of the grad-lounge Marxist before. Suddenly he sounds like bob mcmanus at LGM.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
The ironic thing is that given his trenchant critique of his own contemporary political scene, it is unlikely that Marx himself would be anything like a doctrinaire Marxist if he lived today. He would most certainly be writing a fearsome critique of early 21st Cen. Capitalism, but incorporating into it other elements (like the fractal distribution of wealth generation within information-based economies) that were missing from the industrializing economy of the mid-19th Century, and he most certainly would be paying attention to and using to the best advantage of his arguments the tools of economic and sociological analysis which have been developed since that era. Nor is is difficult to imagine him taking a much more contingent view of history, one incorporating a more individualistic view of society based on the lack of evidence for class-based solidarity on the part of numerous historical actors (both individually and in aggregate) since the mid-19th Cen.
The real historical Marx was very much a creature of his own time and place but it is a disservice to his talents as an observer and analyst to imagine that his critique would have come out just exactly the same were he granted an additional century and a half of information to mull over. What we need today is an anti-capitalist ideology based on contemporary realities, and were Marx alive now he would be one of the first people to tell us that.
amk
@Omnes Omnibus: Nah, I was ‘bitching’ about her I am 100 percent sure that FL is a loss “prediction” based on ??? Go read the posts.
FlipYrWhig
Yes, yes, elites manufacture consent, contain radical potentialities, blah blah blah. Also, America is an empire and language is sexist. None of those justify contempt for people engaging in politics electorally rather than in consciousness-raising conclaves, or for people who still use “he” and “she” instead of “zie.” If The System deprives you of better tools, for fuck’s sake, use the worse ones and apply more torque.
FlipYrWhig
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Also, at a certain level, yes, factory labor is a form of peonage, but that’s cold comfort when there are no factories left. Carolina millworkers would love to be a bit less emancipated from their industrial shackles right about now.
ding dong
i do not mean to sound flip but aren t the areas affected in the non super blue states expensives beachefront property and therefore more likely to be republican. Also are anne and mistermix okay?
John M. Burt
In the comments on YouTube, someone
whinesasks whether Parker Brothers approved of this message. The first reply is that they don’t have to, since it is fair-use parody.My response, though, is to point out that Parker Brothers’ Monopoly(TM) was an unauthorized and uncredited ripoff of The Landlord’s Game, created to teach the children of the working class how the system was rigged against them.
MikeJ
@amk:
scav
@FlipYrWhig:
And, given a little thought and skill, you can put a hell of an edge on stone ones.
(see efficient use of advertising limited dollars)
trollhattan
@J.:
This prompts me to mention that in my supposedly blue neighborhood an investation(hardy har) of Rmoney signs has broken out the last few days. Ugh.
Brachiator
The Romney counter ad plays to The Angry Real American White Man(tm), promises to kick out all the Mexicans, and as a bonus, guarantees all the fertile, compliant women an Angry White Man could ever want. Oh, yeah, no backtalk from blacks or gays allowed.
J.
@trollhattan: My condolences.
Maude
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Except that Engels wrote a good portion of Das Capital.
Marx was an immoral fool. He was wrong about Capitalism because some changes had started to occur and he didn’t seem to know that.
amk
Updated FL early vote count
Turnout 22.1% of 2008
Dem 42.0%
Rep 41.5%
None/Oth 16.5%
http://elections.gmu.edu/early_vote_2012.html
Another Halocene Human
Awesome movie, terrible ad: text flashes past too fast for even me to read it and I’m pretty fast, as my perfect SAT score back in the day would attest to, too many messages competing for attention, and the tax card in particular is hard to parse. (Monopoly itself is quite simple and doesn’t have gamer board game style chance cards with different outcomes for different players.)
But if they had gone a little slower and more deliberately it would be an awesome share-on-youtube clip.
Oh well.
Davis X. Machina
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: For updating Der Alte, you can’t beat J-L Goddard, the ultimate revisionist; Je suis marxist — tendence Groucho.
trollhattan
Because I’m newly informed I must trivialize and/or ignore the forthcoming election as part of my one-of-the-sheeple role, here’s the actual frealz wedding invitation for the would-be son-in-law of the would-be griftress vice president.
http://www.tmz.com/2012/10/28/levi-johnston-married-sunny-oglesby/
Some folks are unable to ever disappoint.
Another Halocene Human
@Maude: Tell co worker about the FEMA re education camps.
The same guy who proves Christianity is a myth using non-scholarly (internet bargain basement and looney bin) sources and whatever you call the verbal equivalent of numerology also proved that there are FEMA death camps coming so, like, science!
Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God
@WindyCityCat:
Awesome graphic. And today I learned from it that the Democrats (ie the party of secession) won the House in 1873, less than a decade after the Civil War’s end.
In other words, causing the Civil War has a political cost of ‘only’ 8 years.
These past 12 years are making a little more sense to me now.
PeakVT
Where are the FP slackers?
MattR
Not so bad here in north, central Jersey. Mostly misting with a decent constant wind and some pretty strong gusts. Took Ellie out without incident, though she was already beginning to show her displeasure at being outside. Gonna have to try and do it again one more time before the worst rain hits and hopefully she will be able to hold it until the strongest stuff passes.
El Cid
@AA+ Bonds: Of course, but the important thing about that is that he and others (for good or ill, it should be recalled) actually set out plans, organizing, and did the work of making such parties viable and eventually successful electorally.
But then with victory came the sins of power, including the social democratic leadership of Germany calling in the right wing paramilitaries to crush revolutions in cities so as to continue to repress — as was being done throughout Western Europe — popular and soshullist and even military opposition to the hyper-nationalist Great War.
The founding of social democratic parties and even their victory is no protection from the same sorts of influence of establishment and elite power that affect the peculiar political system of the U.S.A.
Davis X. Machina
@Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God:
That puts Bush II on Mt. Rushmore around 2032 or so….
Soonergrunt
@beltane: I think Sandy is being overhyped because THE VILLAGE and New York City are getting hit, and there’s nothing our press corpse likes more than making themselves part of the story.
El Cid
@Maude: Of course, since capitalism was fairly new in the world, how was he to know that eventually democracy would so completely tamp down the tendency toward oligarchy and the polarization of nations between an exploited majority and a tiny hyper-capitalized minority?
Maude
@Another Halocene Human:
Ooh, I missed that, thx. I’ll keep an eye out for those FEMA trucks.
@ding dong:
You are not being flip at all.
One thing that can cause a problem is that all the communication, power and stuff down in the Wall Street area is underground and flooding could FUBAR it.
The Republicans don’t make sense. I stop trying to figure about anything they say.
aimai
This whole discussion reminds me of the bizarre essay that appeared on the op ed page of the Boston Globe yesterday. It argued that “If” Obama loses the election it “will be because he made fun of Romney.” You see, in the world of good people politics is a terribly serious business that should be conducted by two men issuing boilerplate bullet points about their policies. Obama has violated this obvious custom by using joke phrases like “Romnesia” and “Romnopoloy” while Governor Romney has nothing to do with the spread of Fox News rumors and films that depict the President as a ravening Muslim Communist, his wife as a fat Royalist Cow, the President as a puppet figurehead of the military who ordered the killing of Bin Laden while he was drunk, the President and the Secretary of State as having gleefully watched the murder and rape of an Ambassador on closed circuit TV and then gone to bed satisfied with doing nothing, etc…etc…etc…
AA bonds describes a typical purists confusion about who politics is for and how it is organized. There’s the politics of elections during which all’s fair if you get into power by attracting the largest number of votes and satisfying the largest number of your voters afterwards. Then there is the politics of legislating and ruling (yes, gasp, ruling) which is a politics of compromise, diplomacy, and war by other means to get things done. Sometimes what you are trying to do are obvious things like just maintaining the god damned infrastructure, birthing the babies, burying the dead. Sometimes its higher level stuff or foreign policy or climate change. But whatever you are doing its all politics and if you want to do something in this world you’d better be willing to stoop to conquer because the other assholes are not playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules.
aimai
Another Halocene Human
@AA+ Bonds: You see, criticizing capitalism’s institutions is good for exactly one thing: protecting a do-nothing Democratic administration by transforming all critique into partisan horse racing
What if capitalism and modernity aren’t going away and the best we can hope to do is reduce social and economic inequality, put a bigger firewall around our private lives, and humanize the face of government slightly?
The place is called Europe, and it seems pretty awesome every time I visit.
Maude
@Soonergrunt:
Could put up a thread, pretty please?
@El Cid:
I read about Marx and capitalism a long time ago because I was curious about what was what.
The “Captains of Industry” had already made some changes to how they abused workers. It wasn’t as bad as before.
I think Marx was talking more about the 1700s than was was currently going on.
His home life was less than honorable.
Marx didn’t care about workers, he wanted to be rich and famous.
Southern Beale
Unemployed guy asks Paul Ryan how deregulation will create jobs, says “we don’t want to work for $1 an hour,” and Ryan responds by offering him candy and a Packer’s schedule.
PeakVT
We’re having a nice little burst of earthquakes in the US today – 3.4 in Arizona, 2.9 in North Carolina, 3.9 in Arkansas, and the 3rd 3.9 in California in 3 days.
Clearly, God is telling you to vote for the candidate I favor.
Mnemosyne
@Another Halocene Human:
Pfft. That’s crazy talk. Everyone knows that we’re all going to move onto rural farming collectives just as soon as we tear down capitalism and re-create the world economy on a barter system.
Maude
This is a dangerous storm and the big winds and flooding will be around after dark. The storm hasn’t made landfall yet. We are getting gusts of wind, but not hurricane strength.
There will be sustained winds around 40 mph, with guts at around 80 mph.
The media is doing the right thing to make sure people pay attention.
Betty Cracker
@amk: Insightful as a urinal cake, aren’t you? Fuck off.
TenguPhule
24 hours after death, the corpse floats.
max
I would totally send aimai a dozen roses if I could. (If they were wanted, mind.)
Altogether: HEH.
Meanwhile, Gallup boosted Romney by one point in the LV (51-46) and the RG (now 48-48). Curiously, after the sudden steep drop in Presidential approval last week, today approval bumped +3 (!) to 51% and disapproval dropped 4 to 44%. So I guess that last debate had no effect. (Pre-debate numbers are now rolled out of the six day.) Hunh.
That said, Sundays have appeared to have been terrible days for Obama every week for a month now (like all the polls suddenly started polling only Idaho) so we’ll see what happens tomorrow.
max
[‘Rumussen needs to make a big net change here and it does look like they’ve started backing it in.’]
scav
@Maude: If we restrict our belief to only scientists who are morally perfect (according to some standard perhaps not their own) and unambitious and with an omniscient knowlege of the present, we’d have far fewer journals to read.
MattR
@Maude: Weather Channel just said that the storm surge at Battery Park has now exceeded what they hit during Irene last year. (And it is gonna get worse since they are approaching low tide at the moment and they still have 8 hours or so until the worst has passed.
? Martin
OH NOES! Obama is doomed! This photo making the rounds!
Do you see the two soldiers with their backs to the shot? Their guns – have bayonets on them! See Obama does hate all of the troops and America and money and Jesus and even horses and high carbon steel!
PeakVT
@TenguPhule: So we should preemptively kill Galtians anytime a storm threatens? Hmmm…. /rubs hands together
aimai
@AA+ Bonds:
OK, sure, but what’s your point? The cure for the first one is legislation that creates laws that people can sue under, or something–I don’t know?–like a Consumer Protection Bureau or something–that might undertake the herculean task of working to protect consumers from exploitation.
As for the second point: “selling your labor for less value than you produce” this is just gibberish except where Republicans are trying to legislate “right to work” and that is precisely one of the biggest differences between the two parties. But even in a Communist state where the state itself provides housing it is provided in exchange for your labor. In the US the state does not set the value of labor and it doesn’t require you to buy a house.
aimai
amk
@Betty Cracker: Pathetic response to a real ‘poll’.
some guy
I thought I had read some really really stupid comments here at BJ before, but this puts the icing on the Stupid Cake.
aimai
@Mnemosyne:
True story: my great grandfather was a real live Kropotkin style anarchist who founded two anarchist communes in the US. One of them flamed out spectacularly and ended in a lawsuit detailed in his book Quest For Heaven when the assorted idealists couldn’t make a go of a farm in Michigan that had been sold to them with a hidden peat fire burning underneath the land. So I, personally, am not expecting any kind of Anarchist utopia to arise spotaneously or by design.
aimai
Anoniminous
@max:
Different days and different times in each day bias a poll for different responders. RW events also exert a bias, such as polling during the Super Bowl will increase the number of woman respondents.
Professional pollsters are supposed to correct for such things to get as close as possible to a random sample.
Joel
By the way, just want to register my dissent here. Don’t love the ad, it’s pretty standard fare political attack material. The graphics are decent, but there’s a serious uncanny valley effect going on. The car with the dog on the roof is a good touch, however.
Raven
@Soonergrunt: The Bounty sunk off Hatteras.
Corner Stone
What a weird fucking thread. And I say that having been a primary malefactor in some really weird threads here.
? Martin
@aimai: Just an aside for the larger group: what’s the difference between a libertarian utopia and an anarchist utopia?
TenguPhule
I don’t see what harm it could do to be prepared.
aimai
@amk:
I have to join Betty in saying a hearty “fuck off” amk. This has nothign to do with polls. Betty simply described her experience of voting in a very red part of the state and put it out there for people to see as a real life anecdote–the kind people are offering up all over the country so we can get a snapshot of what’s going on. You flew off the handle and became hysterical with accusations that she was somehow attacking or subverting the Obama narrative about the voting in Florida and that she would be “contradicted” by the polls. This never made any sense since the Obama campaign prides itself on being quite realistic about its prospects in places like Betty’s rural area. But in any even Betty wasn’t making any kind of prediction about the overall race and your continued flogging of this dead horse is just bizarre.
aimai
? Martin
@Raven: That’s really quite sad, even as just a replica. Tall ships are infinitely cool.
Maude
@Raven:
Last I read, 2 crew were missing.
Maude
@Corner Stone:
I do my best to keep it weird.
TenguPhule
@? Martin: One is full of asshole flamers and the other is full of flaming assholes.
Soonergrunt
@Hill Dweller: Well, NPR did say that the AP has predicted that Obama will win with 285 EV this morning.
Baud
@? Martin:
One of them is an escapist fantasy world.
The Dangerman
@PeakVT:
The experts say there is no such thing as earthquake weather…
…but, right now, it is the proverbial earthquake weather in California (at least SoCal). Unnaturally warm (sorry east coasters). All we need is one more disaster to deal with before the election.
? Martin
@TenguPhule: I agree. Why wait until the last minute?
Higgs Boson's Mate
@? Martin:
The anarchists grow their own pot.
Maude
@MattR:
Yikes. Wind gusts are picking up here.
Thanks for the info, hadn’t seen it.
Elizabelle
@Soonergrunt:
True that. And those are Villager waterfront houses in harm’s way.
They had to fellate untold sources and massage “conventional wisdom” real hard to get them.
some guy
True that. The battle begins anew November 8th: http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/263721-liberals-fear-lame-duck-betrayal-by-incumbent
Corner Stone
Is that snow in the live shot of the RI beaches?
Brachiator
@Soonergrunt:
NY City is the center of finance, and much else, and a huge population center. A massive storm there is, as Biden would say, a big fucking deal.
@scav:
True enough. Even applies to someone like Marx, who was more a religious philosopher than a scientist.
SatanicPanic
@? Martin: the size of their trust funds
Corner Stone
In keeping with the weird thread, I have been giggling softly to myself at the description of a commune “flaming out” due to a hidden peat fire.
That is too much.
Anoniminous
@Corner Stone:
Right. Thread needs more word problem.
If a train leaves Boston doing 60 mph and the gravitational costant is 9.8 meters/second^2 what is the average sno-cone consumption during the Iowa State Fair?
To the nearest furlong, IF you please.
aimai
@? Martin:
Well, as I understand it, the Kropotkin style anarchists thought that order could arise at smaller, substate levels. They had a communitarian approach towards self governance, work, education, and general social needs. On the farm everyone was supposed to pitch in according to their ability and draw out according to their needs, consensus was used to make decisions, there were joint meals and joint childrearing. The idea wasn’t that each individual was out for himself, but that all joined together to produce a supportive community that guaranteed everyone subsistence and growth.
My grandfather was also one of the founders of the Modern School Movement–something which in its present incarnation reflects a little of the same split between crazy right wing libertarian ideas of the family as an isolated, embattled, monad fighting against “schooling” as indoctrination in liberal ideas and the unschooling/homeschooling of liberals opposed to authoritarian right wing ideas.
The early anarchists were also called Libertarians. But the modern libertarian utopia in the US is conceived of in Randian terms–a war of all against all, ubermensch against moochers. A libertarian utopia for everyone would be one in which the strong triumphed and the weak accepted their lot (subservience, sickness, death). Needless to say that is not an anarchist utopia.
A really fine book on Anarchism in fiction, is Dennis Danver’s The Watch.
Higgs Boson's Mate
I mentioned that I’ve ridden out a few hurricanes along the Gulf coast. The winds were amazing, the storm surge was surprising, but the rain, oh shit. Those storms start breaking up as soon as they come ashore and they drop a lake’s worth of rain in a very short time. Be wary of flooding, ya’ll; the storm ain’t over until it stops raining.
? Martin
@Corner Stone: Can’t be – it’s 55 degrees there. Any snow will be at elevation or well to the west.
SFAW
@Baud:
And the other has orcs?
Whoops! Wrong meme.
Svensker
@MattR:
A friend in NYC tells me they are really worried about the effects of salt water flooding the subway system.
People saying this storm is hyped have never shoveled water coming through their kitchen windows in NJ in the dark. Flooding and downed power lines are going to be huge.
Friend sent pictures of Hoboken and the Hudson River is already up to nearly flood level — with no rain and no hurricane yet. It’s all going to flood.
Elizabelle
@Corner Stone:
It could be sea foam taken to the air.
Interesting photo on front page of the WaPost with sea foam. Looks like falling snow.
Elizabelle
@Corner Stone:
It could be sea foam taken to the air.
Interesting photo on front page of the WaPost with sea foam. Looks like falling snow.
Another Halocene Human
@aimai: The best we can hope for is to highly regulate capital and the oligarchs and the best we can manage at this point is a Democratic party which has been purged of its blue dogs.
Another tidbit XKCD’s chart doesn’t capture: the broad liberals during the great liberal consensus period aren’t really the same as the ‘liberal, not left’ senators of more recent times, who used to brag about being 0wned by corporations, putting them properly in the red column if you’re going by the common people vs. money metric.
Baud
@SFAW:
Ha! Not off by much.
trollhattan
@The Dangerman:
Just want to point out that Canada unleashed its tsunami gun on Hawaii last weekend, but it fizzled like a North Korean nuke. Regardless, I agree with Krauthammer that we should preemptively bomb Canada to STOP THIS AGGRESSION, MAN.
R-Jud
@Svensker: Atlantic City is already under water, and the tide was still going out a little while ago.
Another Halocene Human
@AA+ Bonds:
I’m trying to be nice here, too. Apparently you are unaware of Obama’s appointments in DOL and in Labor Compliance, not to mention the fact that he appoints federal judges, and that the UAW is attempting to organize majority African-American auto workers in Right-to-Work states in the South again after almost ten years.
They quit a year into the GWB administration after learning that the deck was stacked against them.
If you were a real leftie, you would be reading worker’s news like the TU newsletter, the AFL-CIO email list, and dKOS labor.
I call Republican plant. ;-)
Yutsano
@The Dangerman: We just had a big one up this way. Either that was a pressure release or a sign of things to come. Or Rainier’s gonna blow its top. Who knows?
Corner Stone
@Svensker:
Is there a way we can monetize this trend? How can we use our capital to best maximize profit?
Corner Stone
@Anoniminous:
If I know my costants, and I think I do, I’m going to say…purple?
Corner Stone
@Elizabelle: They haven’t shown it again but I think you are right.
scav
@Corner Stone: damn! I went with sparrows, or possibly seals on a baseball cap.
Anoniminous
@Corner Stone:
The actual answer is 16 tons of #9 coal, but purple is close enough.
A lollipop for you.
ETA: for those who don’t understand math a “costant” is a cosine that never changes.
Or a typo … but one won’t get tenure by admitting it.
Anoniminous
@scav:
Sparrow would have been correct but it was a trick question: with Sandy a’comin all trains out of Boston have been cancelled
Origuy
@aimai:
Why does this remind me of this scene from Annie Hall?
Another Halocene Human
@AA+ Bonds: But you are also exploited when the state subsidizes housing from the bottom to the top and then requires that you join in debt peonage to put a roof over your head by selling your labor for less value than you produce
You’re right, the home mortgage deduction distorts the market in ways which are not always good for people. On the other hand, a no debt system does have issues, which is why there is some interest in cultures where cash is dominant to promote the use of leverage in home purchasing.
As long as there is a controlled rate of inflation and wages track inflation, you get that home for a big chunk upfront but an increasing discount over time. This is rational and led to great prosperity.
Deflationary wring-out cycles destroy this system. The Fed prevented deflation for many, many years, but the plutocrats at the helm right now are screaming for deflation.
FDR kept the mortgage deduction b/c of the influence of the home/mortgage/sales lobby, and Clinton expanded it, part (but only part) of what fueled the bubble. Greenspan was a terrible Fed chair.
A controlled inflation with wage and dependent income tracking (SSI, SSD, for example) redistributes income silently from heirs and rentiers to working age people, job creators (lol, I mean small entrepreneurs), and holds the dependent harmless.
The government’s power creates both property rights and delimits how workers are paid. If the government withdraws or defends capital, then workers are a commodity which is paid less than the cost of production. I don’t really understand what your gripe here is about wages. We need a government to guarantee collective bargaining rights and create and defend minimum wage levels (and to act in the market by employing government employees at a living wage and using PLAs). With those actions come some compromises. Not sure they’re necessary for the system but they were necessary politically. Limiting the sorts of labor actions that are legal.
Okay?
amk
@aimai: Go read that thread (however dead it may be) before you mouth off.
Another Halocene Human
@FlipYrWhig: If The System deprives you of better tools, for fuck’s sake, use the worse ones and apply more torque.
I can hear Bosie’s voice right now shrieking, “You’re so–so–so– working class.”
Betty Cracker
@amk: What the fuck is your problem? I’m allowed to speculate on what I think the outcome will be in my state, and if it doesn’t coincide with your happy unicorn world, tough fucking shit. I’ll call it like I see it.
As I told you several times when you started trolling me in the dead thread, I don’t think FL will go our way, but haven’t written it off completely. If I had, I sure as hell wouldn’t be scheduled to do GOTV work for 12 hours a day next Saturday and Sunday.
I’m not sure why you won’t let this go. Aimai is right — it’s bizarre. And stupid.
Another Halocene Human
@Mnemosyne: Pfft. That’s crazy talk. Everyone knows that we’re all going to move onto rural farming collectives just as soon as we tear down capitalism and re-create the world economy on a barter system.
Trufax. Wasn’t that what Star Trek kept trying to tell us in the 1990s?
aimai
@amk:
I did read the thread at the time. You come across like a fucking loon.
aimai
opie jeanne
@dmsilev: The LA Times, this week.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-campaign-payday-20121027,0,6084625.story
Anna in PDX
In response to AABonds+ – not one comment in particular but your general gist, gee, I think it is self serving populism too but my take is way different than yours though I bet that politically you and I are about the same place on the spectrum.
I am glad that people are talking about class more than 2 or 3 years ago. Glad that class critique is a part of the election and its ads. Glad that people are starting to wake up and notice we have classes in this country and that our social mobility is largely a myth.
Changing the conversation is an important part in changing the process. That ad is a lot different than Democratic ads in the past few elections. Of course that does not mean that we won’t still have to fight like hell to keep the Dems from going all “grand bargain” on us. It just means that they are paying lip service to an argument they used to merely ignore and we can use this in our favor during the actual fight.
Fred
The ad is great. I love the details. Did a lot of freeze framing just to read all the little stuff and savour the imagery.
One thing that bothers me is the question of legality. Several years back the trade mark holder was on the war path over any use of the Monopoly brand even brining action for the use of the type style. This definitly crosses that line and then some. Does political speech trump that in some way? Of course with only a week to go they might not even have time to deliver a cease and desist letter.
Anyway, ’tis a thing of beauty for sure.
Paul
@AA+ Bonds:
This would put you in the same category as the tea baggers, the fake Christians on the far right and yes, Wall Street. They also consider him an enemy.
I doubt it will ever happen, but maybe one day people like you will realize that the President does not have as much power as people like you think he does.
By the way, I assume you also think so called progressives as Bernie Sanders and Amy Klobuchar are enemies as well? While Obama wanted to close Gitmo, the so called progressives Sanders and Klobuchar voted no…
Jebediah
Has anyone else heard the rumors about the Romney family engaging in Satanic-sacrifice orgies? I don’t have all the details but I heard something about babies and maybe goats.
amk
@Betty Cracker: All this bile just because I called out your stupid prediction with real facts on ground ? And you are the one talking about living in la la land?
@aimai: Yeah, fuck you too.
amk
@Betty Cracker: All this bile just because I called out your stupid prediction with real facts on ground ? And you are the one talking about living in la la land?
@aimai: Yeah, fuck you too.
amk
@Betty Cracker: All this bile just because I called out your stupid prediction with real facts on ground ? And you are the one talking about living in la la land?
@aimai: Yeah, fuck you too.
amk
@Betty Cracker: All this bile just because I called out your stupid prediction with real facts on ground ? And you are the one talking about living in la la land?
@aimai: Yeah, fuck you too.
amk
@Betty Cracker: All this bile just because I called out your stupid prediction with real facts on ground ? And you are the one talking about living in la la land?
@aimai: Yeah, fuck you too.