I'm fascinated by this perception, because I've seen it in print many times, but if nothing else, Ryan's plan and his inteviews pretty conclusively establish that he is NOT numbers driven or detail oriented.

Have there been a bunch of v.p. debates that clearly moved the needle after a clear win by one of the candidates

I guess you missed Ryan destroying Obamacare, to Obama's face, back in 2010.

I guess you missed Ryan destroying Obamacare, to Obama's face, back in 2010.

I wouldn't expect you to notice something like that- because you have demonstrated and inability/refusal to engage actual details and numbers throughout this thread-

That's an odd thing to crow about.

That's like crowing about being the first person to say the numbers add up to 12 simply because you were insisting for months that 7+6=12. As they say, a broken clock is right twice a day.

Ha ha. So that will be the spin if Romney wins?

The same as it is if Romney loses. The Liberal Media Conspiracy never rests.

Who went awol? How is you being wrong about things two months ago spin?

Funny, but when you could've gotten 3 to 1 on multiple betting sites just over a week ago, you weren't biting even then.

I also see that the famous GOP party discipline has reasserted itself bigtime, Romney has walked back from quite a few "Primary Romney" positions towards the center, with nary a peep from the nutters...

Yeah, that is probably their defining feature as a party through all the years. Issue change, level of conflict with the Dems changes, but there is always discipline.

If Romney had taken his presidential debate positions in the Republican primaries, he would have been rejected outright, but there's no one peep from the right on his re-discovered moderate stances.

If Romney had taken his presidential debate positions in the Republican primaries, he would have been rejected outright, but there's no one peep from the right on his re-discovered moderate stances.

I never heard lefties complaining when Clinton pulled off his infamous "pivot to the center."

And didja notice? Even Joek's not going to defend his boy. He just moves on to the next attack.

If you thought anything in #2025 even remotely constituted an "attack," you must not spend much time out in the real world.

The New York Times
U.S. Suspects Iranians Were Behind a Wave of Cyberattacks
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER
Published: October 13, 2012

WASHINGTON — American intelligence officials are increasingly convinced that Iran was the origin of a serious wave of network attacks that crippled computers across the Saudi oil industry and breached financial institutions in the United States, episodes that contributed to a warning last week from Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta that the United States was at risk of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor.”

After Mr. Panetta’s remarks on Thursday night, American officials described an emerging shadow war of attacks and counterattacks already under way between the United States and Iran in cyberspace.

Among American officials, suspicion has focused on the “cybercorps” that Iran’s military created in 2011 — partly in response to American and Israeli cyberattacks on the Iranian nuclear enrichment plant at Natanz — though there is no hard evidence that the attacks were sanctioned by the Iranian government.

The attacks emanating from Iran have inflicted only modest damage. Iran’s cyberwarfare capabilities are considerably weaker than those in China and Russia, which intelligence officials believe are the sources of the overwhelming number of probes, thefts of intellectual property and attacks on American companies and government agencies. ...

Iran has a motive, to retaliate for both the American-led financial sanctions that have cut its oil exports nearly in half, and for the cybercampaign by the United States and Israel against Iran’s nuclear enrichment complex at Natanz.

That campaign started in the Bush administration, when the United States and Israel first began experimenting with an entirely new generation of weapon: a cyberworm that could infiltrate another state’s computers and then cause havoc on computer-controlled machinery. In this case, it resulted in the destruction of roughly a fifth of the nuclear centrifuges that Iran uses to enrich uranium, though the centrifuges were eventually replaced, and Iran’s production capability has recovered. ...

The United States has never acknowledged its role in creating the Stuxnet virus, nor has it said anything about the huge covert program that created it, code-named Olympic Games, which was first revealed earlier this year by The New York Times. President Obama drastically expanded the program as a way to buy time for sanctions to affect Iran, and to stave off a military attack on the Iranian facilities by Israel, which he feared could quickly escalate into a broader war.

From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program.

Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Olympic Games — even after an element of the program accidentally became public in the summer of 2010 because of a programming error that allowed it to escape Iran’s Natanz plant and sent it around the world on the Internet. Computer security experts who began studying the worm, which had been developed by the United States and Israel, gave it a name: Stuxnet. ...

These officials gave differing assessments of how successful the sabotage program was in slowing Iran’s progress toward developing the ability to build nuclear weapons. Internal Obama administration estimates say the effort was set back by 18 months to two years, but some experts inside and outside the government are more skeptical, noting that Iran’s enrichment levels have steadily recovered, giving the country enough fuel today for five or more weapons, with additional enrichment.

Whether Iran is still trying to design and build a weapon is in dispute. The most recent United States intelligence estimate concludes that Iran suspended major parts of its weaponization effort after 2003, though there is evidence that some remnants of it continue. ...

Mr. Obama, according to participants in the many Situation Room meetings on Olympic Games, was acutely aware that with every attack he was pushing the United States into new territory, much as his predecessors had with the first use of atomic weapons in the 1940s, of intercontinental missiles in the 1950s and of drones in the past decade. He repeatedly expressed concerns that any American acknowledgment that it was using cyberweapons — even under the most careful and limited circumstances — could enable other countries, terrorists or hackers to justify their own attacks.

“We discussed the irony, more than once,” one of his aides said. Another said that the administration was resistant to developing a “grand theory for a weapon whose possibilities they were still discovering.” Yet Mr. Obama concluded that when it came to stopping Iran, the United States had no other choice. ...

But by the time Mr. Bush left office, no wholesale destruction had been accomplished. Meeting with Mr. Obama in the White House days before his inauguration, Mr. Bush urged him to preserve two classified programs, Olympic Games and the drone program in Pakistan. Mr. Obama took Mr. Bush’s advice. ...

Mr. Obama has repeatedly told his aides that there are risks to using — and particularly to overusing — the weapon. In fact, no country’s infrastructure is more dependent on computer systems, and thus more vulnerable to attack, than that of the United States. It is only a matter of time, most experts believe, before it becomes the target of the same kind of weapon that the Americans have used, secretly, against Iran. [Emphasis added]

Nobody's bothering to defend Romney's policy shifts.

The idea of the Daddy-Mommy-children single unit family - the "nuclear family" - evolved in post-War America. It's called "nuclear family" because the idea of the thing developed in the "nuclear age" - post atom bomb and all that.

Not really. The term "nuclear family" is meant to distinguish a particular type of family from the "extended family." Much like the nucleus is the center of the atom, a married couple and their offspring are the center of the larger family.

A brief defense of Romney's policy shifts:

Romney's policies he pretended to endorse in the primaries were insane. He was for tighter money, complete deregulation, trade war with China, invasion of Iran, scary levels of abortion prohibition and a ridiculous, budget-busting tax cut. At least, in the unlikely event that he wins, he won't have committed to policies that would bankrupt and threaten the country.

Ok. I can, sort of, see the point. The problem here is that I'm a quarter of the way into teaching myself economic history for a new project,*** and I've grown very annoyed with the way that capitalism gets naturalized in so much of the literature. The idea that once feudalism "weakened", then the natural human capitalist tendencies could be freed. The notion that a population shock like the Black Death produced the oppportunity for proto-capitalist improvement first struck me that way, though it doesn't have to be taken that way. I overreacted because suddenly people were talking about an obscure things I've developed strong feelings about, sorry.

Posted this afternoon on nytimes.com; more bad news on the foreign policy front for Obama:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/world/middleeast/us-suspects-iranians-were-behind-a-wave-of-cyberattacks.html

(CNN) -- Former U.S. Sen. Arlen Specter -- who embodied a dying breed of liberal Republicanism, switching to the Democratic Party at the twilight of his political career -- died after a lengthy battle with cancer, his family announced Sunday.

So you weren't wrong because apparently a debate two to three months after your statements were made can be considered "details and numbers"? Again, what were you right about? What numbers were you right about? What details were you right about?

Arlen Specter, the irascible senator from Pennsylvania who was at the center of many of the Senate's most divisive legal battles - from the Supreme Court nominations of Robert H. Bork and Clarence Thomas to the impeachment of President Bill Clinton - only to lose his seat in 2010 after quitting the Republican Party to become a Democrat, died Sunday morning at his home in Philadelphia. He was 82.

If Obama was cruising to reelection, 70 million people — the most since 1980 — wouldn't have watched the first Romney/Obama debate in the first place. Romney wouldn't even have had the opportunity to change minds.

So the debates are terrible and uninformative, but people watch them anyway, just for the fun of it?

Joe Biden with a puppy. That is all.

Why in the world would you think people watched the debate in order to be persuaded, as opposed to rooting for their own "team"?

So you are crowing now that you will be in right in 3 weeks?

Um, an 85% chance of winning doesn't mean that 85% of the voters are going to vote for Obama.

1992 had 69.9 million viewers.

I think some off the cuff assumption that the polls were/are wrong because of TV ratings for a debate is a silly assumption to make.

Around the country, Republican operatives have been making moves to keep Mr. Johnson from becoming their version of Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate whose relatively modest support cut into Al Gore’s 2000 vote arguably enough to help hand the decisive states of Ohio and Florida to George W. Bush.

The fear of Mr. Johnson’s tipping the outcome in an important state may explain why an aide to Mr. Romney ran what was effectively a surveillance operation into Mr. Johnson’s efforts over the summer to qualify for the ballot at the Iowa State Fair, providing witnesses to testify in a lawsuit to block him that ultimately fizzled.

Libertarians suspect it is why Republican state officials in Michigan blocked Mr. Johnson from the ballot after he filed proper paperwork three minutes after his filing deadline.

And it is why Republicans in Pennsylvania hired a private detective to investigate his ballot drive in Philadelphia, appearing at the homes of paid canvassers and, in some cases, flashing an F.B.I. badge — he was a retired agent — while asking to review the petitions they gathered at $1 a signature, according to testimony in the case and interviews....

Robert Gleason, the Pennsylvania Republican Party chairman, vowing that the state will become far more competitive for Mr. Romney than Democrats realize, said he was not about to give Mr. Johnson an easy opening to play a Nader to Mr. Romney’s Gore in Pennsylvania this year.

“This election will be close — if you remember, Bush lost by only something like 143,000 votes in 2004,” said Mr. Gleason, noting that his party has managed to disqualify tens of thousands of Libertarian signatures. “So we play the game hard here.”

But one explanation is that a chunk of the population doesn't want either one to win

I'm not sure how/if that's affecting polling, but I'm fairly hopeful that most Americans wouldn't want either man anywhere near the White-House in an ideal world.

Greg, this "Jolly Old" wonders if elections are less complicated over there in your "Jolly Old".

“The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
--Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

Seems like a good time to jump in and say the new season of "The Thick Of It" is great! Not sure about less complicated, but it sure leads me to believe elections here have more swearing than in the US.

Which sums up why I gave up on Douglas Adams in high school. No matter how you tie yourself in knots, you're still stuck in this world, where making claims about no one being allowed to hold a job doesn't mean the job goes unheld, but leaves it to someone who's even worse. If on these lines, hypocrisy is the discovery of adolescence, then the discovery of adulthood was, to me, the impact of relative difference. Thanks, Ralph Nader! People who you find unattractive and hypocritical but who are marginally less bad than the alternative have real-world consequences more important than one's own state of moral purity.

I'm going to side with Joe on this one

That priest/minister/whatever can't be trusted to help me get toward enlightenment--he prays too much.

This statement is 100% true in a manner that in no way whatsoever supports the intent of your rant.

The truly decent and the quietly humble will generally spend their lives as low-level office workers.

Koch Industries, the Wichita, Kan.-based company run by the billionaire Koch brothers, sent a voter information packet to 45,000 employees of its Georgia Pacific subsidiary earlier this month.

In it was a letter, dated Oct. 1, from Koch Industries president Dave Robertson implicitly warning that "many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences" of voting for President Obama and other Democrats in the 2012 elections, a list of conservative candidates the company's political action committee endorses and a pair of editorials: one, by David Koch, supporting Mitt Romney, and the other, by Charles Koch, condemning Obama.

"While we are typically told before each Presidential election that it is important and historic, I believe the upcoming election will determine what kind of America future generations will inherit," Robertson's letter--first published by InTheseTimes.com--begins. "If we elect candidates who want to spend hundreds of billions in borrowed money on costly new subsidies for a few favored cronies, put unprecedented regulatory burdens on businesses, prevent or delay important new construction projects, and excessively hinder free trade, then many of our more than 50,000 U.S. employees and contractors may suffer the consequences, including higher gasoline prices, runaway inflation, and other ills. This is true regardless of what your political affiliation might be."

Well, if you don't like what the Koch Brothers are doing, go out and start your own company.

The President of the Central Mississippi Tea Party, a woman named Janis Lane, believes that women are too “mean, hateful” and “diabolical” to vote, and likely should not have been given the right. In an interview with the Jackson Free Press, Lane told the interviewer, “I’m really going to set you back here. Probably the biggest turn we ever made was when the women got the right to vote.” She went on: “Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting. There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how than can skewer a person. I do not see that in men. The whole time I worked, I’d much rather have a male boss than a female boss. Double-minded, you never can trust them.”

The truly decent and the quietly humble will generally spend their lives as low-level office workers.


Losers.

So, it's OK for unions to tell their members who to vote for (and use money taken from their pay to support candidates the individual members may well oppose), but it's not OK for employers to tell worker who they think would be bad for America their business?

I think unions are perfectly free to say "Hey, this guy's policies will lead to more jobs/pay/benefits for our members, you should vote for him.", which is exactly what the employers are doing. Anything beyond that is wrong, whether done by employers or unions.

Which sums up why I gave up on Douglas Adams in high school. No matter how you tie yourself in knots, you're still stuck in this world, where making claims about no one being allowed to hold a job doesn't mean the job goes unheld, but leaves it to someone who's even worse. If on these lines, hypocrisy is the discovery of adolescence, then the discovery of adulthood was, to me, the impact of relative difference. Thanks, Ralph Nader! People who you find unattractive and hypocritical but who are marginally less bad than the alternative have real-world consequences more important than one's own state of moral purity.

Shall we classify the "if you vote wrong, well, it'd be a shame if anything happened to your nice little job here, wouldn't it?" implied gangsterism as something "beyond that?"