quartermainefan

I have two ignorant questions (sorry if this stupid), but what's the deal with all the people questioning whether or not Barack Obama is American and wanting to see his birth certificate? And who or what are Birthers?

Also, why are the conservatives so afraid of socialized medicine (I guess that is what Obamacare is...correct me if I'm wrong)?

Obamacare isn't even socialized medicine. All Obamacare says is "our health insurance system sucks and is incredibly expensive, therefore we are making it a law everyone must have health insurance and we are making no effort to socialize medicine to get around the health insurance problem". It makes no sense.

How much do you pay for healthcare? Here a family of four with top of the line all-access, gold standard health insurance will pay thousands per month.

Oh, about birtherism. Obama is black, so repu---I mean racists cannot accept a black man as president so they came up with a theory he isn't even american. Far from being a theory of the fringes, this theory has been adopted by Donald Trump, joked about by Mitt Romney and been used to attempt to pass legislation by actual republican elected officials. It is so entrenched in mainstream republican thinking that the main source of republican news--Rupert Murdoch--has used his network to gin up the conspiracy theories and spread the lies. No republican repudiates this theory with any teeth in their statement, opting instead to say vague nonsense like "I have no reason to think he is not American" thereby leaving his republican brethren breathing room to continue to fan the flames. Maybe John McCain said in black and white terms this was all nonsense, but that's somewhere close to being about it.

This is a great piece and really lets the republicans do all the talking.

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I don't know if anyone on this site still watches the show but it is coming back tomorrow.

I guess this is Blaine singing, not sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAAQ6g7Fuqg&feature=share&list=ULIAAQ6g7Fuqg

and I dont know who is singing this, leading me to assume it is the new girl, but whoever it is did a nice job

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCrca6N6RUo&feature=channel&list=UL

The only thing that stood out was her poor diction at the end where instead of saying "good bye to..." she sang "goodbye ta..."

A woman on Mitt Romney's FB said Satan led Americans to vote for Obama.

For the Radical Right, Obama Victory Brings Fury and Fear

In a long thread at the anti-government site Free Republic on the passage of same-sex marriage referenda, commenters were apoplectic -- and frightened. "Get ready for God's wrath," wrote one. "The people are choosing Satan's finest." "Fudgies win again," wrote another. "Incidents of HIV [to] rise again." And a third: "America is going to pay for its unbelief and its love of abortion and homosexuals. ... And IT DESERVES IT."

The article was nice not to cite Freerepublic as a mirror on modern republican thought I guess. Far from being the fringe, it is the new republican mainstream.

It was a status quo in the makeup of Congress, but the stakes were so huge that status quo in terms of the country was a victory. We aren't exactly in a great place now but we might have gone hurtling back to the darkness if our de facto leader became Grover Norquist. There was a major change in what was expected and what was typical, but that isn't something which is fun or cool to chatter about.

There is no way to spin the status quo as a success story. Every person, republican and democrat can see what an ineffectual joke congress is. I have to assume the republicans will decide the problem is they weren't conservative enough and will make sure Obama passes as little as possible, so they can start their run for 2016. Mitch McConnell openly admitted this was his senate strategy all along, why would he start now trying to legislate? His angry statement last night I think points the way to how things go in the Senate, and the tea party controls the House.

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Was Dick Morris on FOX tonight? He is such a great prognosticator with his promises of a Romney landslide, I was curious what he had to say to explain away his latest wrong prediction.

The Ryan pick turned out to be a mystery. They picked him because he was the republican idea man, then immediately shut him up and said they didn't agree with his ideas. Then he eventually disappeared. It was unfair to him and he should have borrowed a page from Palin and gone rogue.

If Bachmann loses it will be the end of a perfect night. Did Mrs McMahon lose? She can go back to her steroid empire.

I just turned on FOX news to see what they are deluding themselves with, and they have their bogus heat map, where the counties are colored red and blue and they offer that as proof at the injustice of it all. What they don't mention is that in half those counties there are more tumbleweeds than people. It only takes a family of four to turn it red, and a conservative horse I guess. New York County may be geographically tiny, but there are more people in it than in half the states I would imagine.

Like I said, landslide. Florida is coming through.

I hope that Nate Silver rubs the political pundits' faces in the dirt and shovels crow into their mouths.

current map

Nate Silver's projection:

I am ecstatic Obama was able to win, but it sucks he does not have the popular vote. Republicans have to ask themselves about the legitimacy of their theories about skewed polls and democratic oversampling. I believe they honestly believed that, even the people on this board who cited it, but if you get your news from FOX and republican blogs you are in a fantasy world devoid of actual facts. It also doesn't serve the republican party well to run such extreme candidates in the caucuses. The conservative zealotry cost republican the senate also and until they free themselves from the maniacal warriors of the tea party the republicans are doomed to face ongoing disasters.

I think Obama owes a huge debt of thanks to Bill Clinton, who all by himself got the Obama steamroll this summer, and to Joe Biden who had to recover for Obama after that disastrous first debate.

The media loved McCain. Maverick this, Maverick that.

The electoral college is the worst way to elect people, and completely unfair. 1/8 of the country lives in California and yet no one asks them for their vote. 4 people and a cow live in Iowa and every candidate and a trillion reporters descend on that state to chronicle their every whim in the caucus. It's ridiculous. If 99% of the people live in one place, then 99% of the vote should come from that place. in the 1700s the country had more farms, there were not many people living in the cities, dueling states had to manipulate the constitution to make sure they had a voice (why Rhode Island gets 3 votes still to this day I will never know. It's like a vote for every person in that state). It's all so undemocratic, but it is time to go to the most fair voting measure of, that being one man/one vote.

All the pundits on TV seem to be predicting Obama. Well, all the pundits not on FOX I guess. Sandy was good to Obama, I don't think there is any way to see it otherwise. It will be interesting to see how the press will react if Nate Silver proves on the money again. His estimation is so wildly different than the entirely of the press and media, that if he is right and everyone else is wrong, why do we need anyone else?

The Devil-Doll is a B&W 1936 horror film directed by Tod Browning and starring a cross-dressing Lionel Barrymore and Maureen O'Sullivan as his daughter, Lorraine Levond.

http://youtu.be/-Trtb91m6gU

Tod Browning directed the Holy Grail: London After Midnight with Lon Chaney. It is presumed lost with no copies known to exist. I hope one turns up. He also directed Dracula with Bela Lugosi.

That is why I post here and at my other website. I get the liberal circle jerk here and the fight against the conservative circle jerk there. If there is a moderate msg board I haven't found it.

How is it moderate to not see Senator Fake Rape and Senator God Rape for what they are: republicans? Is seeing what they are, the mainstream republican in 2012 somehow not moderate? I am not suspicious of them and I take them at their word when they espouse their views, the views that are accepted by the majority of republicans in their state. How does that make me not moderate? For that matter, how does it make me liberal and not conservative? Is there an inherently liberal position on religious rape I am not aware of? I don't even see how discussing them qualifies as a circle jerk. They are who they are, they say what they think, their republican constituents accept them and their positions enough to vote for them. How is seeing this in any way something only a liberal can do? I would have thought the criteria was just having eyes and ears. Is it liberal to remember that Senator Wide Stance was against gay rights? Better yet, is it not moderate to say all these people are republicans?

Last I saw, Todd Akin (who has since said his opponent isn't "ladylike" and behaves like a dog) is tied in the polls.

The sad thing is Mourdock could also still win, in spite of saying no woman should ever consider terminating a pregnancy by rape.

These men don't even say, "I'm not a woman, so I can't give the final answer, but my view is..." They repeatedly speak for women. I guess they would say they're speaking for the unborn, but what it really sounds like is they treat women as brood mares.

This year has had a long string of men talking about how rape pregnancies are for the best and that if a woman didn't want to be impregnated via rape, she would be able to stop it while she is being raped. This feels like someone dipping their toe in the water. I think next year we're going to see a big media push and "studies" to make the public support the idea that abortion should not be legal in any circumstance.

Well that is the whole tea party charade, that they were not republicans and were inspired by economic worries and not concerned with anything but righting the economic troubles. As soon as they got in power state after state started pushing anti-abortion legislation, revealing their true fundie freak colors. The media went along with them pretending they were a real movement out to change the system, when in actuality all they are are republicans out to game the system, purge the republican party of anyone who is not insane, and turn the country into some sort of fundamentalist theocracy any Ayatollah would be proud of.

You just gotta love republicans. I said it before and will say it again. And it seems they are all alike!

WASHINGTON -- Indiana GOP U.S. Senate candidate Richard Mourdock declared Tuesday night he opposes aborting pregnancies conceived in rape because "it is something that God intended to happen."

Debating Rep. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) in their final Senate race showdown, a questioner asked them and Libertarian candidate Andrew Horning to explain their views on abortion.

I can't wait for someone to chime in and claim the Indiana republican candidate for senate (no doubt in the lead in that state) is somehow a "fringe" figure and not a living embodiment and the epitome of what it means to be a republican today and a member of the republican party mainstream.

Speaking of someone else who doesn't actually represent republicans but just coincidentally calls himself one, whatever happened to Senator Fake Rape? Is he winning in the polls?

I totally believed what Todd has been saying, however, what I am saying that he has been pushing this narrative for the last couple weeks only now he is reporting/admitting that it has been coming from the Republicans directly. It is political game playing through the media, but it remains crazy talk. There is no statistically evidence that Romney is close to 270. If anything, the opposite is true.

Chuck Todd strikes me as a dull thinker. He basically goes to pundit HQ, picks up whatever conventional wisdom being pushed that day is, and goes with it. They all do pretty much. Andrea Mitchell however I firmly believe is a stealth republican. You can hear it in her sketchy analysis time after time as she does cartwheels trying to find a way to get to "both parties do it!" even if both parties don't. I guess that is the modern version of being impartial though, to pretend something is true just so you do not have to say what the truth actually is because the truth is damaging to one party.

The worst of all is the hack from Meet The Press. That guy has no business asking anyone anything and I have no doubt if you tallied the republican vs democratic guests on his show over the years the republicans would outnumber the democrats greatly. His idea of journalism is to find what his friend Karl Rove said and then say "Senator, some people say...." when the the some people is a partisan spin meister who wouldn't know the truth if it fell on his head.

Romney was out of his element on foreign policy, everything he said was generic and devoid of substance. It was clear that he was not comfortable discussing foreign policy when he tried to shift the discussion to the economy.

I think it was Obama who shifted the discussion to the economy. Obama did a good enough job. He pretty much painted Romney as a guy who wants to build ships just to say he built them, wants a trade war with China, and wants to portray things in the GOP comfort zone of us against the Russians. That said, the first debate trumps all the others combined because it was so abysmal for Obama that all the people fleeing for their lives from Romney got stopped dead in their tracks and recoil now from Obama. He had 10 point leads in major states evaporate overnight. Instead of rolling over Romney and now setting sights on the House, democrats will be lucky to keep the presidency. That first debate will be discussed for years to come as the worst debate by a presidential candidate maybe ever.

I thought Obama won this one handily. The bayonets crack, the battleship crack, the 80s are calling crack, this type of dismissal works for me. I don't need false civility to find a candidate likable, the snark makes me like them more to be honest.

Then there were times Romney agreed with Obama, which sort of makes his criticism of his foreign policy seem petty. I didn't think Romney came out ahead on a single topic.

Even though there are fringe elements that might believe the lies about Barack Obama's birth

"Fringe elements"? Is that what we call Donald Trump, Mitt Romney's joke writers, random FOX personalities, and various state officials who try to pass birther laws? If the establishment is now the fringe, then please define fringe.

When Mitt Romney stands up and jokes about where he and Ann were born and about no one ever asking to see his birth certificate, it's not because he believes Barack Obama isn't an American.

No, it because he is seeking to exploit and profit from racism.

MSNBC is stating that the woman who asked him how he' differs from Bush wasn't satisfied with his response and she'll be voting for Obama. It's hard to imagine there are still Undecideds at this point.

I don't believe that woman was undecided at all. I am decided, but for the chance to go to the debate and ask a question I would lie my face off. She was squarely in Obama's camp just by virtue of the question because I would have asked the same question only added sharper language.

Wow, so Candy Crowley corrected herself on CNN after the debate... Romney was CORRECT about Libya? Either way on the Libya thing, it's a problem for Obama because if it WASN'T a terrorist attack, why did the administration deny that for weeks? If he DIDN'T state it was a terrorist attack, then what was Obama's point in the debate? It's a paradox and the only reason Obama got away with it is because he received help from Crowley. No surprise there... but wow.

It was interesting to see how many times Obama hid behind Crowley. To the point where he would actually LOOK to Crowley for help in shutting Romney up, or even interrupting asking to move on. Amazing, especially since the man had almost four minutes more speaking time than Romney.

I think the two were even on substance, Obama wins in bluster. The fact of the matter is that this all boils down to Obama and his record. Can he defend it? Can he defend his economic and energy policies? And how long can he maintain this ruse regarding Libya and foreign policy in general?

The one thing that I criticize Romney for in this debate is that he willingly limped off to his corner after being hushed by both Obama and Crowley. That was a mistake, in my opinion. He interjected a couple of times, one to Biden-like smiling from Obama... he should have done it more often. Nobody knows where you stand on an issue if you aren't heard... he should have insisted. What, Crowley was gonna call in security to lead him out? Come on... Romney should have been as aggressive as Obama, maybe even more so.

You saw things that didn't actually happen. Romney had a semblance of substance with regard to Obama's record: the deficits are up and unemployment is high. But he has zero substance about his so-called 5 point plan. I have a 1 point plan for this afternoon, to make a billion dollars. Trust me, I have a plan and if I say I will make a billion no newspaper reporter or economic think tank can say otherwise. What is my plan? I'll tell you after you lend me the 1 million seed money.

That is Romney's position. He has a 5 point plan but no matter how many people say his plan doesn't add up he refuses to elaborate on any of it. He is a pack of lies in an expensive wardrobe. Do you know which tax write offs he will eliminate to finance his 20% tax rate deductions? It's great if you do because no one else does, and the NY Times would love to hear from you so you can help explain it to everybody.

He came off as a blustery flim flam man trying to bully the moderator and talk over Obama. Obama ate his wheaties and for once decided to show some backbone.