Ann_SS

You need to read Nate Silver's blog at the NY Times. Well done statistically sampling by pollsters give a fairly accurate measurement of the electorate at a given moment. This is why political campaigns do their own internal polls as well as pay attention to respected external ones. They would not spend the time and money if they did not believe that the polls help them gauge how well their campaign was doing at any given moment. Yes. This is one of the highest rated debates. People tuned into see how these two men went up against each other. Debates might be memorable for some lines, but it is a good opportunity for candidates to share their ideas with the average citizen who is not well educated, are not political junkies, and only get their knowledge from political ads and the local news. Obama should have shown confidence rebutting Romney's lies. Instead he let Romney get away with sounding credible and far moderate that he is actually. I tend to agree with you, but I don't see how it benefits Obama to perform so poorly with any section of the voting electorate. The minimum that he should have done was held his own. I did not expect much from Obama in this debate, but watching him flail and back off was not what I expected at all.

I think that Obama's advisors are taking the fall for his failure in the debate. They had to know that Romney would lie and try to paint himself as a moderate. These are savvy people. They would have prepped Obama with lines to subtly reference the 47%, outsourcing jobs through Bain, and sacrificing the middle class to enrich himself and his wealthy friends. These are the most damaging things for Romney. This failure is on Obama. He let Romney tell lie after lie and barely responded. Obama needs to step up and do a better job going forward, especially in the next town hall style debate.

So Obama is coming out swinging now. The NY Times and other reports hint that he was the one who refused to use the campaign attack lines in the debate against his advisers wishes. Hopefully, he has learnt his lesson. He needs put the smack down on Romney until November 6th. He needs to call Romney on his consistent lies and flip flopping instead of standing there and taking it.

Obama did not have to reference it directly. He could subtly pointed out that he is the president of everyone that all American are responsible and work hard when an appropriate moment came along. There is nothing that Romney could have said in response to that. Ultimately, Obama should fought back in that debate and did not. No way can he or his advisers be happy with that poor performance.

After perusing various news Web sites, I see that the commentary and polls indicates that Romney won hands down. If nothing else, this should get Obama's competitive fire going. Maybe he was the one who was complacent because of the state polls showing him ahead. Even if Obama's team advised him to play it safe and stay presidential, he clearly his political survival instinct failed him when he did not fight back when Romney was attacking him during the debate. I mean, Obama should have at least referenced Romney's 47 percent comment to undercut him. Weak.

Eh, the debates never mean as much as the media make them out to be and they never change the polls or voters' opinions in any permanent or meaningful way. Nate Silver, FiveThirtyEight blog at NY Times, pointed this out yesterday or today. Another thing, maybe the negative feedback will push Obama to start talking about what he wants to do over he next four years in a substantial way.

I did not watch, but Chris Matthews is having a meltdown on MSNBC so I think that it is safe to assume that Obama did not do particularly well. Sometimes you get what you deserve and this is exactly what Obama deserves for making the stimulus too small and bailing out the banks while ignoring the middle class struggling with the mortgage crisis. He needs to explain his failures and tell us how he is going to make sure that he does not repeat them.

Love, love Gabi! I am so glad that at least one character is channeling my Marlon/Laurel hate.

Hilarious! Sarah Silverman | Let My People Vote 2012 - Get Nana A Gun Voter Harassment, Circa 2012: http://www.nytimes.c...circa-2012.html We need a pro-voting African American and Hispanic group to train as election observers and start invading the suburbs in major Republican neighborhoods across America. I can just imagine the horror and outrage. LOL!

What always strikes me about the gleeful contemptuousness in which these right wing conservative Republicans regard less fortunate is the damn hypocrisy that they loudly proclaim themselves Christians and that America is a Christian nation. Where the loving of thy neighbor?

It is this negative spin that the Republicans and some others offer (not saying you) I will never accept. The government is We the People. It is our taxes that fund the government programs. On what planet, can anyone's participation in a government program at any point of their lives be considered a handout? Student loans and programs help put uneducated young people through college, but then they enter the workplace and pay their share of taxes. People work hard, retire, and get their share of what they paid into Social security/Medicare/Medicaid. Maybe you go through a period of unemployment and have to rely on unemployment benefits for a period of time. A middle or working class family has a child with Down's Syndrome or other health serious problems, Medicaid provides coverage. Of course there are people who put in less than others, but this is the price of living in a society that does not discard the least among us. The only other option is that we leave our sick children, elderly and disabled to suffer and die in a corner .

I understand why all these men/women want to be president; power, ambition, and ego. I never buy the "public service" lip service that they all offer. By the Republicans, but I don't see even the mainstream media buying this one.

Those red states also take more federal money than they pay out. Most of the elderly people (about a 1/3 of the people who do not pay federal income tax) who live on social security did in fact pay federal income tax when they were working so Romney is saying that they should pay federal income tax twice on this money. These people are mostly Republican voters although he claims that they are Democrats. Not only this, but the lower middle class people do not pay federal income tax because of the Bush tax cuts, then there are wealthy people and corporations who do not pay federal income tax. Here are Romney actual comments which you really should read. "There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it -- that that's an entitlement. And the government should give it to them. And they will vote for this president no matter what. ... These are people who pay no income tax. ... [M]y job is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

"This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare? " "The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor. " When David Brooks has to call out Romney and his delusion about the American people, you know things have hit bottom. I don't think that this is the common public view at all. Yes, there is a segment of the population that is delusional about the truth about their socioeconomic status and are disdainful of others less fortunate and have no close that Romney and his ilk feel this way about them, but this not close to being everyone or I think even most of population. Yeah, I don't see this is the mainstream media coverage at all. There might be a line on Obama's gaffe in 2008, but most of the articles focus on Romney's disdain and misrepresentation of almost half of the population. I don't get this at all and read lots of political commentary.

I don't even know where to begin with that Romney's deceptive, disdainful, and contemptous statements about the people who voted for President Obama.

I just don't buy that Hillary lost because our society is less ready to have a woman leader. I think she was poor candidate who struggled to convey her ideas and failed to inspire enough support. Politicians have to persuade people to vote for them, it is not just enough to show up. I am not the biggest Obama fan, but I can see why he won; a combination of him being a strong campaigner, good orator, and a struggling economy.

But come on, how does it make sense of the world believing that Obama beat Hillary because the majority of Democrats hate women more than they hate black men or that Obama won the election because whites must hate white men more than black men or because of so called white guilt? I never thought there would be an African American President in my lifetime or ever really, but hearing these explanations for his victory totally blow me away. This is exactly why you stay here and fight with the rest of us for rights of women, poor, disabled, and our fellow citizens who do not have a voice. I am never giving over my country to these right wing conservatives with their anti-woman, anti-diversity, and warmongering beliefs.

I read this article and a lot of if does not ring true. It certainly seems to be at odds with some of the insider articles about the well organized machine written earliear in Romney's campaign. It strikes me as one of those scapegoating articles that pops up just before the trailing Presidential candidate loses. Everyone in the campaign is looking for other work because they see the tell tale signs that they won't be working in the White House. They don't want to be painted with the loser brush so they are all pointing fingers away from them and at the most convenient target, the unpopular Stevens in this case.

Conservative groups using imaginary and manufactured voter fraud as a strategy to suppress the vote: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/17/us/politics/groups-like-true-the-vote-are-looking-very-closely-for-voter-fraud.html?_r=1&hp&gwh=BD5D4BD314A8D3AD0A35617B43F97144

The racial stereotypes and generalizations flying around this place are incredible. The idea that Democratic voters hate women more than black men is a false generalization and extremely simplistic thinking just like the rant that people must only voting for Obama because he is black. Hillary Clinton had the nomination sown up, but her campaign was badly run and she turned out be a crappy politician unable to appeal to the majority of Democratic voters. She was also hurt by the fact that Obama was a better orator. The opinion that Obama is unqualified or the least qualified person to be President is another incomprehensible one. There are no established qualifications to be president. The people who vote determine whether or not they feel the candidate is qualified to be president. We have had presidents from all sorts of background. And if history has thought us anything, you never know who is going to be a great, good or bad and forgettable president.

After following John Edwards' trial, I am convinced that there is something mentally wrong with him. I think that it is more than justifiable to consider him a sociopath. Why? What about his irrational rants, use of ridiculous nicknames for the President, and his occasional euphemisms about race and ethnicity makes you and others think that Max was "different" or "above this?"

Seriously, that smug self-satisfied smirk on Romney's face as he walked away is so telling. I bet his campaign staff is cringing.

Republicans do not want a national system. It would take the ability to manipulate and suppress the vote of a segment of the population in specific states out of their hands. This is why they keep trotting out the few instances where voter fraud occurs, to try to bolster their lie that it is widespread when the evidence indicates otherwise.

Ah, the warmongers emerge. Always ready to send other people's children off to war to be killed and maimed and do the same to others in a drop of a hat. Anything to waste lives and make profit for their allies in the military industrial complex. Here is a tip to the warmongers: Netanyahu is doing a favor to support his friends, Sheldon Adelson and Mitt Romney, but he is NOT the President of the United States. He does not get to dictate when he meets with the President or the foreign policy of the United States. If Netanyahu wants to bomb Iran, I don't see what is stopping him. But I think that his government and our supposed allied Arab governments have killed and/or contributed to the deaths of enough Americans to last a lifetime. Like when 14 of the hijackers on 9/11 were Saudis and somehow Iraq that was the real problem. .

Ian was always a jerk. He could be kind and loved his family, but he was ambitious and driven which made him ruthless. It drove Cindy away from him. Her affair with Simon Wicks was actually understandable. However, Ian got worse when he found out Cindy cheated and Steven was not his son. Spoiler about Sharon's new story: http://www.digitalsp...t-revealed.html