Election

[rodinuk]

You'll find a load of threads on this in the Politics & Religion forum


Politics and Religion
Two topics to avoid in light company, this board was especially created for you to "tote the party line" and voice your opinions, thoughts and beliefs on whatever tickles your fancy or currently gets your goat. All political & religions threads BELONG HERE.
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[Willie Escalade]

No you won't...

[Prospero]

Obama has done wonders... read this.


http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

[trish]

Great link Prospero. Thanks.

[Stavros]

Hmmm....

Signed financial reform law allowing shareholders of publicly traded companies to vote on executive pay
-Standard procedure in most large corporations for decades -and is it the business of any government to impose such a regulation on private companies?

Issued executive order to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay
-It is still open, the prisoners are still there, the military tribunal continues to judge them.

Obama's record doesn't look so bad when a list like this is trotted out, even if there are various ways of recording job growth in a context which doesn't do Obama any favours, but then this a biased list of achievements. Luckily I do not have to vote, and there are a wide range of domestic US issues which I don't really understand because I don't live there and thus miss a lot of the nuances of policy that might seem obvious to a US citizen.

On Foreign Policy, Obama has tried to repair the image of the US that was so badly damaged by the Bush Presidency, and has probably succeeded by appearing to be less belligerent, and to be fair to him he has been locked into commitments that I am sure he would rather dispense with, Guantanamo being one of them.

Although a military withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan was inevitable, Obama has failed to grasp an opportunity in Afghanistan that would have given the US a strong position in the region, while financially in the long term compensating for the USA's extensive involvement in Afghanistan over 30 years -I refer to the minerals contracts being negotiated by the Karzai government with India, Japan, China, and Russia. It seems almost perverse that even though the wealth is probably not as great compared to, say, South Africa, it is big in Afghan terms, yet there is the prospect that NATO will walk away from Afghan merely counting its bodies, while the rest count their money.

Thus, Obama could have positioned the US as the broker with regard to 1) the development of Afghanistan, and 2) an insistence that India and Pakistan reach a conclusive agreement over Kashmir. Left to themselves, neither India nor Pakistan will reach an agreement on a running sore that is now 65 years old and like many 65 year olds ought to be retired, and as extremists in Kashmir are as volatile and dangerous as their brothers in India and Pakistan, it would make sense to settle the Kashmir problem as part of a 'new deal' for all across the region, based on industry/economics, which, in addition, could become the basis of a new politics, security and the kind of transition which the US has been quietly supporting in Somalia.
This is one area where Obama's Presidency has failed, and unless he addresses it in the second term the US will lose an important opportunity to use economics as a healing process, as it has been in Vietnam.

The inability to comprehend the morphology of revolt in the Middle East is common to many, not just the Obama administration, and at some point one must ask what could the US do anyway? The intervention in Libya was decisive, but no two Arab countries are the same, even if dictatorship appears to have common traits across the world. Libya was always an easier lock to pick, whereas Syria is beginning to run out of control. Here Obama's failure was not to step in as soon as trouble started, to reach out to the Russians and find a diplomatic way of ending the Asad regime's grip on power. It is possible that in spite of Netanyahu's loathing of Obama, the Israeli govt played on its own fears in an attempt to divert US policy from having a creative input into the Syrian crisis. It is also possible that Hillary Clinton played a role by being over-cautious on Syria where the US could have been more activist/creative. I wonder if Mrs Clinton will remain as Seretary of State in the 2nd term, or leave to write her book, and maybe consider a tilt at the top job in 2016-?

More serious has been the increasing use of drones as an alternative military strategy to boots on the ground. The full implications of death by remote control have yet to be considered in terms of their military and legal ramifications. That the US has murdered a US citizen with a drone might be an issue for US citizens -except that when allies of the USA murdered American citizens in El Salvador in the 1980s, President Reagan wasn't bothered- but the precedent it offers is intriguing. Proportional response has been a tricky but vital element in the law of war since the Treaty of Westphalia, if not before. The use of drones to attack targets in Iran -or Iran's potential use of drones to attack targets in Israel, raises issues over what happens next if such weapons become common. At the moment, computing viruses are replacing boots on the ground, but I wonder if we are all stumbling into a future that offers military engagement on a level that is allegedly 'efficient', cheaper, and appears to reduce the risks that accompany troops in the field.

Obama for obvious domestic reasons is turning back to the hydrocarbons industry with a favourable eye -after the moratorium on deep water drilling that followed the Deepwater Horizon disaster, the US is 'open for business' again for conventional and unconventional oil and gas reserves in the Lower 48 -fair enough, if it becomes an important and cheaper source of energy the US would be mad not to exploit it. But the variety of opinion on shale reserves and the hydraulic fracturing used to recover them cannot agree on how far it is safe and how far it runs the risk of provoking land subsidence, contamination of water supplies etc. America, its your call.

Obama has not offered global leadership to the alternative energy future you who are under the age of 30 must eventually live with. It doesn't matter how rich the hydrocarbons in the US are, they will not be enough, and the alternative energy sector has had a poor record in recent years, in part because the technology is still struggling to create mass energy systems at cost, or create things which people want to buy, like electric cars. It remains to be seen if Federal grants to the industry will make a difference, or whether private capital is that interested in the long term energy future to make a real investment, but then there is no reason why the US should be the place where innovations are developed.

But on broader environmental issues, where previous US Presidents clearly didn't care, there is no leadership or inspiration from this President either. I suspect it is not a priority issue for him.

My final note is to say how dull this election has been, the only real issue of interest is the polarisation in the Republican Party, as often happens when a party loses power -the soul-searching seems to have opened up a chasm between those whose view of the world is processed through a biblical prism which distorts what they then see, and those who might these days, like Colin Powell, be as comfortable voting for Obama. How far this lurch to the extreme will benefit or cost the Republicans I do not know, but it doesn't look like a healthy development.

[martin48]

Obama has done wonders... read this.


http://whatthefuckhasobamadonesofar.com/

Here's another link

http://pleasecutthecrap.typepad.com/...y-20-2009.html

Not bad for a non-American Muslin

[natina]

The U.S. economy remains in a gray area, so it's no wonder that the presidential race is essentially tied. Gross domestic product grew at a 2 percent annual rate between June and September, according to figures out Friday. The White House says this means the economy has been growing for 13 straight quarters.
"This report provides further evidence that the economy is moving in the right direction," Alan Krueger, head of President Obama's Council of Economic Advisers, said in a statement.
But the economy isn't performing nearly well enough, Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney said in a speech in Ames, Iowa, after the report came out.
"President Obama frequently reminds us that he inherited a troubled economy. But a troubled economy is not all that he inherited. He also inherited the greatest nation in the history of the Earth," Romney said. "What he did with what he inherited made the problem worse."
The final jobs report before the election will be released next Friday. The September report saw the unemployment rate fall below 8 percent for the first time in nearly four years — but just barely, to 7.8 percent.
That's how most of the economic data are looking now. Things are improving, but are nowhere near where an incumbent president would like them to be.
"I think the data are consistent with expectations," says Phillip Swagel, a public policy professor at the University of Maryland, who worked in the Treasury Department under President George W. Bush.
"The economy is growing, but at a modest pace, with only modest job creation and stagnant incomes for American families," Swagel says. "Not recession, but not satisfactory."
On the other hand, sustained if not tremendous growth makes it more difficult for a challenger like Romney to convince the voting public that a change in course is required.
Recent polling shows Romney beating Obama in terms of whom voters would prefer to see managing the U.S. economy. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll released Thursday, 53 percent of likely voters said they trusted Romney more on the economy, compared with 43 percent who favored Obama.
But an Associated Press-GfK poll out Friday showed a much narrower advantage for Romney on economic issues: 47 percent, compared with 45 percent for Obama.
That poll also pointed to some economic optimism among voters, with nearly 60 percent saying they expect to see things get better over the coming year.
"Maybe it's direction that matters," says Thomas Hyclak, an economist at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania.
"If things are bad and getting better, it doesn't hurt the incumbent as much," he says. "If things are bad and getting worse, it really does affect the chances for the incumbent."
There's also some evidence to suggest that people's perceptions of the state of the economy is skewed by their partisan inclinations. That is, voters who support Obama are more likely to see the economy as improving than Republicans are. "There's a huge partisan component to views about the economy," says Shanto Iyengar, a political scientist at Stanford University.
A recent Purple Strategies poll found that 37 percent of voters in 12 swing states believe the economy is getting better. Ninety-four percent of those voters say they support Obama, compared with just 5 percent of those who believe the economy is getting worse.
The economy is about where most economists would expect it to be at this point, Hyclak says. History suggests that a recession triggered by a collapse in the housing market and a financial crisis is bound to lead to a sluggish recovery with slow job growth.
Yet the nation's economic growth remains at risk. The looming fiscal cliff has shaved 0.6 percent off of GDP growth this year and cost a million jobs, according to a report from the National Association of Manufacturers. And the mixed corporate earnings season has caused the stock market to zig and zag.
Economists are predicting that the nation's financial picture will brighten over the next couple of years. The research firm Moody's Analytics predicts GDP growth will approach 4 percent in 2014, with unemployment coming down. And the latest forecast from the International Monetary Fund predicts annual growth of about 3 percent in the U.S. economy over the next four years, which would be much better than in other rich nations.
Happy days might not be here again, but consumers are opening their wallets. Back-to-school spending was up this year, while holiday spending is expected to grow modestly. Recent GDP growth was driven by consumer spending and improvements in the housing market.
A survey released Friday showed the Thomson Reuters/University of Michigan consumer sentiment index at its most optimistic reading since September 2007.
It's possible that people who do have jobs are starting to feel a little less uncertain than they were a couple of years back, suggests Hyclak, the Lehigh economist.
Timing matters. The last one-term president, George H.W. Bush, lost his re-election bid in 1992 — the "it's the economy, stupid," election — even though the economy was growing at a much faster clip than it is today.
GDP grew by 3.8 percent in the summer of 1992 and was growing even faster by the time the election was held. "Yet Americans did not feel as if the economy was recovering," Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz writes in his book The Age of Reagan. "Rather, they thought Bush was out of touch with the suffering and anxieties of middle- and working-class citizens."
Obama doesn't face those same image problems. Polls have consistently shown that Americans believe the president has a good feel for the hard times they're going through.
Still, they're not convinced he's done enough to make things better. At least, a firm majority isn't convinced. And it may be too late at this point to change many minds.
"It will take a large dose of very good news or very bad news to affect the election at this late date," says John Sides, a political scientist at George Washington University. "To me, the [new] GDP numbers are neither." Copyright 2012 National Public Radio. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.




http://www.google.com/ig?brand=LENN&bmod=LENN#m_9

[danthepoetman]

I find these as funny as they're eloquent...

[Ben]

Is this a reason to vote for Obama or Romney or simply abstain from voting????

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Obama’s 284 Drone Strikes in Pakistan

A map of every reported drone strike in Pakistan:

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...e_strikes.html

[danthepoetman]

Personally, Ben, I think the Romney-Ryan duo at the White House would be an absolute catastrophe. The four years of the Bush administration led America in a position Obama has to fight the Republicans to get it out of. Imagine a government more to the right for 4 more years if not 8!