“Building a new stadium down the street does not work unless (Ron) Lancaster spilled some DNA in the lot where they’re going to build the new stadium,” he added. “You have to refurbish (Mosaic Stadium). You’ve got to can all new ideas you might have and use the sacred ground. Fenway did that and that is why Fenway is loved. The new Yankee Stadium isn’t the same as it used to be.”
The former Boston Red Sox and Montreal Expos pitcher will not be running for the vacant mayor’s position in Regina later this year. With his opinion on the new stadium, he wasn’t sure he would garner many votes anyway. But that is nothing new to the former member of the Rhinoceros Party. Lee ran on the Rhino ticket in 1988 for president of the United States. Not surprisingly, he didn’t make the ballot in a single state. He said one of the high-ranking members within the party gave him a six-pack of Molson Canadian and asked him to run for president.
“I adhered to their funny philosophy,” Lee said. “My campaign slogan was ‘No guns, no butter. They’ll both kill you.’ And I only campaigned in federal prisons where I knew they couldn’t vote, and I only accepted a quarter in campaign contributions.”
With it being an election year in the U.S., Lee said he is all in for the re-election of Barack Obama.
“The only time (Mitt) Romney opens his mouth is when he needs to change feet,” Lee said of the Republican nominee. “If Obama does lose this, which I can’t see happening, then it’s because of a lady in Florida who works for Jeb Bush and Diebold, the voting-machine company. If Obama even comes close to losing this election, it’ll be fraud.”
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Of course. But leaders are not moral, and warfare is not moral. Even when it is, at times, Just. The only morally pure decision vis-a-vis the WW2 PTO in August 1945 would have been to either quit, or quit after liberating China/Indo china by attacking only military targets. And even that second one is on dodgy MORAL grounds (although it would have been Just).
You can't really perform the A-Bomb calculus BECAUSE THERE IS NO GUARANTEE that Japan surrenders and you won't have to invade/blockade/give up anyway.
I think it's a good thing for the GOP Jeb went early (or was he on the networks? I was watching on cspan.) I mean, I think everyone will give Jeb a pass on standing up for his brother - but I'm not quite sure a tribute to W is something that works for the GOP.
BTW - I know you can't compare 2008 to 2012 and I also won't dispute the idea that the GOP is more enthused than Democrats this time out (the RV vs LV screen numbers in polls bear that out)... but ratings for Paul Ryan's speech were down 17 million versus Sarah Palin's numbers in 2008 (from 37 million viewers to 20 million). That has to mean... something.
I used to play online, about 12 years ago. I don't own the board game anymore.
If campaigns are advertising on BBTF, maybe they do have too much money.
they are likely on a run of network somewhere and you might be cookied to have the Romney ad follow you around.
Most likely it just reflects the difference between an unknown and exotic female curiosity from an exotic locale and just another whitebread cookie cutter spokesman for the upper 1%. If anyone really doesn't know by now what this Ayn Rand clone** thinks, they wouldn't have been likely to be interested enough to tune in and start hearing him at the convention. He's more of a novelty than Romney himself, but he's just as likely to cost Romney votes as he is to win him any new ones.
**Though even Ayn Rand wouldn't be sick enough to want to have the government force a rape victim to bear a rapist's child. Only a religious fanatic of the worst sort would ever try to impose that perverse bit of legislation.
I used to play online, about 12 years ago. I don't own the board game anymore.
You need nothing but access to a computer and the internet.
None at all. And this is during the RNC, where they're basically proclaiming victory before the fact. (Granted, I haven't watched this convention at all and tuned in simply to see Clint.)
Do these people here really Believe?
Romney camp says he ad libbed a bunch of it. I hope so.
Angels up 2-1. Greinke's maddening.
If so, it was political malpractice letting him on stage.
I wonder if they even had something on the teleprompter for him (link):
If Eastwood went all Heartbreak Ridge in his speech, that would have been amazing. Opportunity lost.
Well no. Dred Scott was a federal decision and as far as I can tell it was a correct decision given the law of the land.
Hell, had the south not seceded there's zero chance Lincoln would have taken any action against slavery. He was absolutely clear that slavery was legal though he was equally clear that he found it abhorrent. And prior to the start of the war only a minority of Northerners were in favor of abolition. (Though it's fair to say that a plurality simply didn't have strong opinions and that abolitionists outnumbered those in favor of slavery. And that the anti=slavery movement was growing quickly)
That's the way more than a few senior Allied officers saw. The way I see it though, an awful lot of people believed it was absolutely necessary for the aggressor nations to admit complete defeat. A second world war so soon after the end of the War to End All War made the vast majority of decision makers determined that there be no ambiguity, no blaming of some scapegoat. And after the news of the death camps, they were determined to have war crimes trials (they'd probably have insisted on those anyhow)
And you know what? There hasn't been a third world war. Yeah, decades of Poles, etc. got a raw deal, but all in all things seem to have worked out OK in the long run.
Tonight lacked last night's energy and enthusiasm, although I did find the latter part of Romney's speech somewhat interesting. I thought one section could be summarized like this: Boo science! Yay religion! Boo diplomacy! Yay war!
I can't figure out who they were trying to win over tonight.
You should read this. If you mean what you wrote that Lincoln wouldn't have taken any action, that's just clearly and demonstrably false. He promised not to take any action to change the law of slavery in the states where it existed; he did not believe he had that power. He also, though, promised to eliminate slavery in the territories, establish limitations on the right of property in persons, appoint anti-slavery judges, permit the flow of anti-slavery literature through the mails into the South, and in many other ways use federal power to make it more difficult to maintain slavery, to hasten its demise. That doesn't make him an immediate abolitionist but the other alternative is not doing nothing.
I can't wait for the election to be over. For the past month, I haven't been able to watch a video on youtube without seeing an Obama or Romney ad. Now they are starting to filter out into other sites (including BBTF). I blame my lurking in this thread.
I said it was 65/35 Obama months ago, and to me it doesn't feel any different now. I don't think this is because of a large rally of support for Obama, it's just Romney is completely unlikable. It also doesn't help that the GOP completely threw the Paul supporters/delegates under the bus at the convention, removing whatever slim chance Romney/Ryan had at trying to absorb the 10-15% of the party that Paul was polling at during the primaries.
The obvious message that would fit him and come naturally to him is I'll be your dad. He likes talking about his father and about being a father, and he seems to want to say, come on, kids, trust me. But that message must play terribly in focus groups or something.
Given the economic data I would say Obama's chances have had to have gone up in the last few months, if only because now there's less time for the economy to tank (which seems to be Romney's only chance).
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_CVN_CLINT_EASTWOOD?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2012-08-30-22-38-51
Well, half the ticket has supported raising the federal funds rate. That'll fix things!
the experts like to say money cancels out but if someone spends a lot as in a lot of money then it can matter in a close race
that helps the governor
the analysis shows that in some states it's just a matter of getting the right counties to break your way
that helps the governor
he is running a disciplined campaign
that helps the governor
gonna be close and things could break late just as they did for the president in 2008
in fact what I described was the president's blueprint helped by a great ground game
that ground game doesn't have the zest this year
that helps the governor
i respect the president. he kept his campaign promises and did what he thought best
but it's the first half of that is the problem. and i do think he lacks the gumption to lead. trusting harry reid and other halfwits to carry your water is ridiculous
i do appreciate the effort. carrying the deadweight that is the dem leadership and being president is a colossal burden
if he led like he campaigned he would be a superhero as president
But I'm not sure it was a great idea to let him go out there unscripted. Not that it matters. His appearance alone was symbolic, if that is worth anything (and I guess that it's not).
know a bit about what can trigger that there meandering
People don't need a lot of help to make up their mind on the economy, they feel it every day - on the job, at the grocery store or gas station, and, unfortunately, in the unemployment line. There doesn't seem to be any shortage of bad economic news - new claims for unemployment were higher than predicted this week, continuing a trend, and it was reported that mean family income has declined 4.8% under Obama's "recovery". I would take the opposite position than the post quoted above - less time for the economy to recover cuts against Obama, not for him (which is not to say there'd be a recovery if Obama just had more time).
my party doesn't take failure lightly
He also knew that given the existing makeup of Congress he couldn't actually do anything about imposing an end to slavery in the territories.
Incidentally, here is a copy of the 1860 Republican platform. Note item 5 complaining about "the intervention of Congress and of the Federal Courts of the extreme pretensions of a purely local interest". There's no chance he could have done anything about the congressional side, and the courts wouldn't exactly be a reliable route as it was constituted in 1860.
Both Douglas and Lincoln wanted a local vote to determine whether they would be admitted as a free state (that's the issue the Southern caucus broke with Douglas over). That's not the way it works though. Congress has the say and there just weren't the votes (particularly in the Senate).
something big would have to break and most big econ thIngs are bad
I didn't see the speech, and I like Eastwood, but that's a great image. And I agree with your earlier post that this election could easily go in either direction, based on unknown and unforeseeable events between now and November. The only thing that makes me feel somewhat good at this point is that the swing states are still pretty much all leaning towards Obama.
MItt Romney may win. Mitt Romney may end up being a great president.
But no way is this a disciplined campaign. It's Al Gore 2000 to a different beat.
only dc wonks and fretters know about the euro trip. irrelevant
and the president had his own issues in 08
the governor has solid ads running where they need to run he has folks working where they need to work when the president says anything off key it is an ad in 5 seconds
senator mccain had none of this and he was right there until kaboom at the end
the gop is coordinated and driven
that is the governor's doing
My position basically remains unchanged from back in the spring: I see Romney as a very slight favorite in November. I'm not betting the house or anything; I just believe that (1) people generally vote their wallets and (2) the polling and underlying metrics (right track/wrong track, voter enthusiasm, job approval, unemployment, jobless claims, etc.) are unfavorable to Obama and unlikely to get better over the next 70 days.
As for the convention, I thought it went about as well as could be expected. The focus was shifted back to Obama's failures and the bad economy, and there were no major gaffes or controversies. Condi, Martinez, and Ryan were great yesterday, and Rubio and Romney were great tonight. The GOP message was tough but upbeat, and it's going to be tough for Obama & Co. to counter it next week since the "Hope and Change" Obama of '08 has given way to a nasty, negative president whose economic track record is abysmal.
I do think you're misreading the complaint about Congress. As the platform states over and over, slavery was a purely local institution; the Republicans believed that the federal government should never intervene to support it. This was not just a preference but a legal principle to them, derived from British common law. Freedom was the national default; slavery had to be constructed by local law. So the complaint isn't that Congress is meddling; the complaint is that Congress intervened to defend slavery, which it should never do. That principle would hardly have forestalled Lincoln. Lincoln, unlike Douglas, believed Congress should ban slavery in the territories. He did believe that when territories applied for statehood they could include slavery in their constitutions or pass laws for slavery afterward.
What Lincoln could have done if the Southern delegations stayed is a much thornier issue, and the very one that Upper South members raised. The only threat to slavery, Virginia newspapers wrote, would come if the Southern delegates left Congress. I wouldn't want to bet either way on what would have happened; the Senate certainly would have been a thorn in the Republican side in anything that depended upon congressional enactment.
Lincoln would not have needed congressional approval to lift the decades-long ban on anti-slavery literature moving through the mails in the South. This was a big deal to many white Southerners, who feared that the movement of those materials could lead the Upper South states toward gradual emancipation.
Would Lincoln have appointed anti-slavery postmasters in the South? That's a trickier question. On the one hand he offered the cabinet slot to Gilmer; on the other hand Gilmer read the tea leaves and refused the position.
Romney's current ad campaign is blatantly dishonest (the welfare attacks). I think at a certain point, the narrative of him being so casually dishonest will hurt him.
The fact that you describe a naked lie as "solid" is disgusting.
Didn't the financial crisis happen right at the end of Sept? I thought one of the major issues wasn't just the severity of the crisis, but the fact that it happened so suddenly at a moment when people were ill prepared to respond to it.
Politics as entertainment just reached a new peak. I'm torn whether that display was pathetic or brilliant.
He wasn't an abolitionist, immediate or otherwise. Garrison and his fellow abolitionists--marginal figures that they were--despised Lincoln. Lincoln himself had no use for blacks--a point that he made clear for decades in public speeches--and was obsessed with the idea of forcibly relocating them to another continent. His expressed interest in stemming the spread of slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of the slaves, but of the poor whites who would be displaced by slave labor.
Romney's current ad campaign is blatantly dishonest (the welfare attacks). I think at a certain point, the narrative of him being so casually dishonest will hurt him.They're not solid because they're truthful, they're solid because they work. Truth ain't got nothing to do with it.
There's nothing wrong with raising the welfare issue. Obama opposed welfare reform and appointed opponents of welfare reform to policy making positions. The Administration stretched their authority in ways many consider beyond what the law allows to potentially weaken the work requirements. A legitimate issue.
Sure. The Dems will get some jokes out of it at the DNC, and so will the late-night talk show guys, and the Twitterati, like the one I posted. But the jibes will be mostly gentle, since Eastwood is 82 years old and is more popular than either Obama or Romney. And that IMO is all it amounts to.
Defining abolitionism has been tricky; at times people define everyone to the right of Garrison as just anti-slavery, a position that makes Frederick Douglass' abolitionism suspect. Once you step beyond that, the lines get more and more complex. You can end up in endless debate that doesn't illuminate much. Was Salmon Chase an abolitionist? Democrats thought so! You end up with politicians who say they are just anti-slavery while their opponents call them abolitionists. In the end abolitionism went from an epithet to an epaulet over the generations, but in neither case was its meaning stable.
Besides, the claim that Garrison and his fellow abolitionists despised Lincoln is strange. Douglass endorsed him in 1860, though with major reservations. Garrison did not endorse him but followed him closely in 1860 and with a much more modulated tone than you suggest; later of course Garrison called him the man most responsible for emancipation and by 1864 refused to say a bad word about him. Lincoln was not in 1860 the candidate of those antislavery men who were closest to abolitionists; Salmon Chase was. But Lincoln was acceptable to them, in a way that Bates or Blair wouldn't have been. By 1864, he was a hero to many, though not all, of them.
Then you shift to Lincoln's view of race. But this tells us nothing about his view of either slavery or abolitionism. It's our tendency to assume the two tracked each other, and sometimes they did. But there were bitterly racist abolitionists. And more moderate anti-slavery politicians who were more committed to anti-racism.
Lincoln's own views were complicated and have been well studied. But a couple of the things you say are just untrue. He most emphatically did say, over and over, that slavery destroyed the welfare of slaves. He spoke less about the impact of slavery upon poor whites than Seward, for example, and much more about the unfairness of depriving people of wages for labor. To say his opposition to slavery had nothing whatsoever to do with the welfare of the slaves is just not consistent with his voluminous public record.
And on colonization, he literally never endorsed or even tolerated the idea of forcible colonization. That's simply untrue. He did support voluntary colonization, and pushed his support to an embarrassing extent in an 1862 meeting with black Washingtonians, but he never thought forcible relocation was justified. And once voluntary colonization died, he didn't revive it. The idea that he had no use for blacks is also baffling. We sometimes want to work in binaries; if he wasn't John Brown he must be Bull Conner. He over and over said that blacks deserved legal and civil rights but that he was not sure they deserved political rights and that he did not think social equality was possible or enforceable by the government.
Lincoln isn't my personal hero. The celebration of the Great Emancipator can get cloying. But the inverse of it, the presumption that Lincoln was solely self-interested, has the disadvantage of being unrelated to reality.
I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling."this
Each day that passes is one more day that such a financial crisis can't happen, at the very least. Romney is running out of innings for the opponent's bullpen to explode. I'm sorry, but I think I must be missing your point. Perhaps I didn't make mine clearly enough.
That economy is done. I would not try to have an intentional recession now. Romney cutting taxes on the rich is just going to give them more money to not spend. I suppose he could make things worse if he actually raises taxes on the middle class. Tax cuts are inefficient stimulus at any level anyway. With Obama it will putter along as now for how long it lasts.
At some point it would help if the financial colossus could be broken up, but I don't see how. They can likely kill the career any politician that trys in the current climate. If it were possible I'd try incentives and taxes to get some investments moving, but again you have to be able to put it into place. I think any reform other than fits and starts is going to run into too much resistance.
Looking back at the Great Depression, you had some groups like labor and farmers that could put some pressure on the system. We don't have that any more. You can get real reform if you have a powerful oppositional force, but we don't now, unless China forces us to do some things. If that happens it probably won't be pretty. Best case might be a Japan-type stag for 20-30 years, at least. This might be a tougher solve than the Depression or stagflation.
Under what circumstances would you try to have an intentional recession? (That's a sincere question and not me trying to be a smartass.)
Presumably when a Republican is president.
Yeah, but people don't like that in their pols, mostly. The upside for Obama's style is probably Woodrow Wilson, not that I know that much about Wilson.
The most successful pols seem to be able to morph into multiple personalities Sybil-like, or are forever dancing around the center like Nixon and Clinton did. Romney's upside would probably be an Ike style, not that he would ever be that popular. The secrecy and lack of plans seems dominant, I think that's the only approach he could pull off. Ike never wanted to do anything.
Early in Reagan's first term Volcker raised the interests rate close to 20%. It was believed to be an intentional policy to help break the stagflation pattern present since the late 1960s, and it's usually credited with causing a sharp recession. Reagan blamed it on Jimmy Carter every chance he got, which made little sense since the recession didn't even start until Reagan was in office a few months. Like most things Reagan, people bought it.
We used to have a lot more recessions than we do now, when we were more of an industrial economy. It wasn't unusual to have one every two to three years. But often they were fairly mild recessions. Now we have long expansion periods marked by speculative bubbles. Well, there's no speculative bubble and not much expansion, but the last three times, yes. You had the Wall Street bubble in the late 1980s, Internet, and housing. All followed by significant recessions and struggles with jobless recoveries, which we have again now.
This is part of the reason I don't think presidents have much impact on the economy. I guess some of the regulations change, and that does matter, but the most novel thing was what Volcker did. It's been a while.
When Carter took office the discount rate was 5.5%. When he left office the discount rate was 12%. The highest the discount rate got while Reagan was in office was 14%. The prime rate (which I think is set by banks, and not the Fed) did go as high as ~20% (likely what you are remembering-- edit: higher actually 20.5%), but that was a consequence of the extremely high (~10%) inflation at the time causing the banks to abandon the discount + 3% rule of thumb. (Edit: Actually, the reasons probably go beyond simply inflation. I don't know enough to comment intelligently on the matter. Maybe someone could chime in?)
I don't think Volcker raised the discount rate to 14% to intentionally create a recession under Reagan's watch so Reagan could then turn around and use the recession as a political weapon against the Democrats. (I'm also not saying this is what you are suggesting, but reading your reply as a response to my question suggests I interpret it that way.) Reagan certainly did use it as a political weapon (almost certainly wrongly for the reason you note -- presidents don't have much impact on the economy), but I think the intent behind raising the interest rates a further 2% under Reagan was largely a conscious decision to solve the inflation problem before attempting to solve the unemployment problem.
Which is a doubly awesome comment, considering the Salvador Dali Museum is in St. Pete.
War and failure to compromise with a Congress controlled by Republicans? An incapacitating stroke during which the First Lady keeps the VP out of power? That's not a good upside. :)
If they had really learned anything, they'd have turned in the exams a month late with three other take home exams from different classes attached.
Just more confirmation that Rory Gilmore made the right choice.
Oh that was clearly the wrong choice. But she was doing pretty good up until then.
With the talk of rooting interests in shows over in the other thread I think Gilmore Girls is a fascinating exercise in a show unintentionally turning a character into one you actively dislike. I know it wasn't intended to be, but I enjoy watching the last couple seasons of that show as a rather dark story of how young people of promise can fail to turn out as you'd hoped.
At least she broke up with him at graduation.
Have you watched Bunheads? Best new show of the summer, like Gilmore Girls but with ballet and four different Rorys.
Your analysis is good. Yes, pre-Depression it was an industrial economy with boom-bust.
This is what nostalgia and scotch are for.
As well he should be. I mean, who's a more accomplished and talented person -- Clint Eastwood, or Barack Obama/Mitt Romney? It really isn't close.
I have absolutely no sense of who will win at this point, none. I'm trying to recall if I ever had that lack of feeling I know who will win at this point before... Maybe 2004.
Regarding Clint, didn't watch, don't want to watch, I LOVE Clint, I figure this performance could do me no good.
I was watching BBC World News this morning, they were, umm, BAFFLED, I mean it, they weren't attacking Romney, praising Obama, it was more like, "... I ummm, I guess we just don't get American issues..."
I mean given the situation in Europe and whatnot, Eurozone/Austerity, they get what Ryan's about, but Romney and Clint, juts baffled, had no idea what Romney was saying or trying to say or whether he was trying to say anything of substance
Likewise. There's no way Obama would survive an economy this disasterous, distended, and hopeless if he was running against a normal major party politician but he happens to have the good fortune of running against an unlikeable, phony, odd stiff.
I sense that Obama is a slight favorite, but I wouldn't bet more than 10 bucks that he'll win.
This year I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. It's been "probably Obama" for almost a year, but I've been expecting the Event to happen which changes the equation for equally as long. The world economy is at best a wobbly top right now, and it wouldn't take that much of an event to get it toward tippling over.
They don't.
Well becoming President of the US and running an Olympics/being Governor/amassing a huge fortune are actually bigger accomplishments than being a great actor and director.
Don't get me wrong I love Clint, but the fetish many have for entertainers is really silly. All three are talented. Clint has accomplished the least in terms of real world impact.
And again I love Clint, he is one of my favorites. He is very talented. One of the greatest Hollywood has to offer in terms of total package. His is top 50 all time in Hollywood (wild guess by me, don't hold me to it).
But more accomplished that the President of the US? That is just crazy talk.
Nope.
But more accomplished that the President of the US? That is just crazy talk.
Clint Eastwood could easily have functioned effectively as President of the US. Barack Obama and Mitt Romney wouldn't have a chance in hell of competently directing a serious film the caliber of Eastwood's.
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