Herman Cain, spinning Newt getting a shellacking tonight, just said that he was a better kid after his dad gave him a shellacking

Also congratulated Mitt Romney on having 84 electoral votes

Unbelievable that he was the frontrunner in the polls like 3 months ago

cshort wrote:

TenuredVulture wrote:The reason why the current recovery is much less impressive than those of the past is that the causes of the recession were different than those of the past--specifically, this recession was caused by over-leverage. That means that companies and business are spending their recovery money paying off debt, rather than using it to consume and start new business. I mean, that's what I understand anyway but it's probably an oversimplification.

Also, however, you have to add to that a secular shift in the economy that's been going on for decades now. People who worked in manufacturing through the 80s shifted to construction as manufacturing jobs went over seas. That resulted in a slow erosion of purchasing power. Things got worse however as the construction boom ended and those construction jobs went away. The problem is those jobs are not going to come back. This is probably why Pacino thinks there will never be a boom again. However, I don't necessarily agree. But people are going to have to develop new skills to cope with economic changes.

Corporations are sitting on a mountain of cash right now, it's the governments that are over leveraged. Until corporations get a clearer picture on how things are going to play out, they'll sit on the sidelines and not make significant capital investment. Governments would be wise to put in place tax policies that will encourage investment (the UK has already started this) once companies are ready to move, and the US corporate tax rate is well behind other countries in this respect.

I also agree that there will be other booms. Technology is advancing so rapidly it's inevitable. The idea is to make sure there's a business and educational environment to take advantage of it.

cshort spitting' truth

Reform our educational and tax systems, and we'll get our booms.

I *love* the Newt supporters spin that he was outspent 15-1 on the air in Florida

Romney's campaign outspent Newt's campaign 15-1 because Romney has a campaign that does things like raise money and buy campaign ads and identify supporters and turn them out to the polls. This is, in bizarro anti-GOP establishment world, a negative. Real campaigns don't mess around with those details. They just make weird offers of Lincoln-Douglas Debates and make sure to have no message consistency.

Newt's SuperPAC spent millions in the state attacking Romney. Final ads aired tally was 68% negative on Gingrich, 23% negative on Romney, 8% positive on Gingrich. So a bit more than 2-1 in favor of Romney. Romney+Romney's SuperPAC outspent Gingrich+Gingrich's SuperPAC by about 4-1, but the public sector unions spent a million bucks hitting Romney too.

Colin Quinn on the Dennis Miller radio show a few weeks ago:

I don't know which came first, Dockers or Santorum, but one was made for the other one.

Newt was just not meant for a suit. He should be wearing a track suit. He looks like a German 12-year-old boy eating ice cream at OctoberFest.

TenuredVulture wrote:You people have it all wrong. Newt is like the greatest thing ever (for political science professors who need something entertaining to fill 20 minutes of class time.)

Saying "Newt is an ass" followed by 19 minutes 58 seconds of laughing doesn't count.

pacino wrote:newt's children are over 40. mindblowing

The ones he /knows/ about.

(rimshot)

Werthless wrote:Reform our educational and tax systems, and we'll get our booms.

Just in time for the end of the 2nd term of President Chelsea Clinton

jerseyhoya wrote:Newt's SuperPAC spent millions in the state attacking Romney. Final ads aired tally was 68% negative on Gingrich, 23% negative on Romney, 8% positive on Gingrich. So a bit more than 2-1 in favor of Romney. Romney+Romney's SuperPAC outspent Gingrich+Gingrich's SuperPAC by about 4-1, but the public sector unions spent a million bucks hitting Romney too.

I think it was the 24% of ads that were neither positive or negative about Gingrich that killed him. How much money was wasted on those ads that apparently were so generic and lame that they did not even register with the public or political analysts?

Hearing Bob McDonnell, VA governor, is being bandied about as a viable VP candidate. Some of that is to pull VA back to the GOP from its swinging to Obama last election and another is to provide a conservative flavor to a potential Romney ticket. He has been a pretty big waste of office space in VA in my view. I think he would bring some problems with him, the least of which is quietly returning Confederacy Month back to the official Virginia calendar in 2010. He set the month as April. Part of this gaff was declaring that slavery wasn't significant to Virginia's Civil War history. He recanted that statement a day later, presumably when someone stopped by with a history book. At the start of he Civil War Virginia had more then 500,000 slaves. I would not miss Bob if he moved on.

thephan wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Newt's SuperPAC spent millions in the state attacking Romney. Final ads aired tally was 68% negative on Gingrich, 23% negative on Romney, 8% positive on Gingrich. So a bit more than 2-1 in favor of Romney. Romney+Romney's SuperPAC outspent Gingrich+Gingrich's SuperPAC by about 4-1, but the public sector unions spent a million bucks hitting Romney too.

I think it was the 24% of ads that were neither positive or negative about Gingrich that killed him. How much money was wasted on those ads that apparently were so generic and lame that they did not even register with the public or political analysts?

What

gr wrote:Colin Quinn on the Dennis Miller radio show a few weeks ago:

I don't know which came first, Dockers or Santorum, but one was made for the other one.

Newt was just not meant for a suit. He should be wearing a track suit. He looks like a German 12-year-old boy eating ice cream at OctoberFest.

This calls for an image of Augustus Gloop. Too bad I can never figure out how to post them.

I did want to comment on Rick Tyler. He is clearly a jerk but I give him a lot of credit going into the lion's den wearing a meat suit. I think Maddow and Sharpton were way off base linking Newt's "Entertainer in Chief" comment to race-baiting. Obama sang some Al Green and Newt was mocking him for it and trying to score some cheap political points; so what. The linkage on something like that is why racism will NEVER be dead. Some people immediately go into auto-pilot with these kinds of comments without really thinking about it. Newt used the word "entertainer" as related to our black president so it HAS to be racism, right?

If Newt had said something like, "The President has a pretty good cross-over dribble but I intend to use my Presidency to keep people from crossing over our border from Mexico", people like Maddow and Sharpton would be all, "Oh, sure, because Obama is black and black people are good at basketball". Now I am not arguing that Gingrich is not racist; he very well may be. What I am suggesting is that no reasonable person can link the Entertainer in Chief comment to race-baiting. It is just silly and obvious for the wrong reasons.

I really used to enjoy watching Maddow because her research is second-to-none, she can debate anybody on politics and she, IMHO, was pretty good at keeping things somewhat balanced, i.e. she was not against something just because it was linked to Republicans (like Schultz). But the last month or so she has been almost unbearable to watch. It is like she received a memo on December 31st saying that if she was more "pro-Democrat" beginning January 1st she was gonna be out on her ass.

Alright, rant over.

thephan wrote:Hearing Bob McDonnell, VA governor, is being bandied about as a viable VP candidate. Some of that is to pull VA back to the GOP from its swinging to Obama last election and another is to provide a conservative flavor to a potential Romney ticket. He has been a pretty big waste of office space in VA in my view. I think he would bring some problems with him, the least of which is quietly returning Confederacy Month back to the official Virginia calendar in 2010. He set the month as April. Part of this gaff was declaring that slavery wasn't significant to Virginia's Civil War history. He recanted that statement a day later, presumably when someone stopped by with a history book. At the start of he Civil War Virginia had more then 500,000 slaves. I would not miss Bob if he moved on.

The Confederate History Month thing is really just nothing. The bigger problem is probably still his law school/public policy thesis. If GOPers made a big deal out of Michelle Obama's thesis, what are Dems going to be able to do with Bob's thesis?

For the non-Virginians http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2009/09/10/mcdonnell-thesis-heats-up-virginia-governors-race:

The thesis, written while McDonnell was at Virginia Beach's evangelical Regent University pursuing degrees in public policy and law, took a far-right approach on a number of social issues. Calling feminism one of the "real enemies of the traditional family," McDonnell wrote that working women were "detrimental" to family values. He also wrote that a 1972 Supreme Court decision that allowed unmarried couples to use contraception was "illogical," that the government should "fight any attempts to redefine family by allowing special rights for homosexuals or single-parent unwed mothers," and that government should "statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators."

Oh and unlike Michelle Obama, Bob was 34 when he wrote the thesis.

Combine that with his anti-gay policies, the new anti-abortion regulations, and a bunch of other minor things, and he'll have a lot of trouble disavowing his "past" uber-conservative views. The Deeds campaign was incredibly poorly managed in 2009 yet they still got some traction out of this... think what a well-managed smear campaign could do. "Romney-McDonnell... the most anti-woman ticket since the 1950s." "A Romney-McDonnell administration would have women back in the kitchen... where they belong." "Romney-McDonnell don't think that women should have the right to birth control."

traderdave wrote:This calls for an image of Augustus Gloop. Too bad I can never figure out how to post them.

not the best Gloop snap, but

jerseyhoya wrote:

thephan wrote:

jerseyhoya wrote:Newt's SuperPAC spent millions in the state attacking Romney. Final ads aired tally was 68% negative on Gingrich, 23% negative on Romney, 8% positive on Gingrich. So a bit more than 2-1 in favor of Romney. Romney+Romney's SuperPAC outspent Gingrich+Gingrich's SuperPAC by about 4-1, but the public sector unions spent a million bucks hitting Romney too.

I think it was the 24% of ads that were neither positive or negative about Gingrich that killed him. How much money was wasted on those ads that apparently were so generic and lame that they did not even register with the public or political analysts?

What

My statement was more about addition and grouping. Gingrich 68% negative + 8% positive = 76% when grouped where as it might have been useful to say 11.7% of the ads were Gingrich positive leaving 88.3% as Gingrich negative. The Romney negative number just sort of floats as there is no Romney positive ads accounted for and with 68%+23%+8%= 99%, the Romney positive ads cannot be just 1%. So the 24% can from the perception that 24% of the Gingrich ads were unaccounted for.

Newt is done no matter what he thinks. I know, counting him out is just asking for him to return in some way, shape or form. Now the job has to be for the GOP to turn Romney into something that people can actually vote for. He is the 1% and he embodies it so well. I just don't see Romney being able to carry the election especially when the attacks against Obama are starting to falter against reality. Perhaps the strategy is to wait it out and find someone capable for the 2016 bid.

I know it came out wrong, but still he said it.

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:The Confederate History Month thing is really just nothing.

I will agree to disagree. Confederate Month was killed previously, so his reconstituting it as part of a campaign pledge to the Sons of the Confederacy was pretty shameful. If I recall, he announced this either on MLK day or during Black History Month as a sign of his complete ignorance. I almost want to say that he originally wanted to make it February or something. Then his version of spin had him try to tie it to the anniversary of the Civil War. The best was the sound bites from the cracker proponents of Confederate Month cementing Bob to their misguided cause. Regardless, the Governor should have just walked away as the Commonwealth (yes we are one too) is a one term state so there was nothing to really lose especially with so little to gain..

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:The bigger problem is probably still his law school/public policy thesis. If GOPers made a big deal out of Michelle Obama's thesis, what are Dems going to be able to do with Bob's thesis?

For the non-Virginians http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2009/09/10/mcdonnell-thesis-heats-up-virginia-governors-race:

The thesis, written while McDonnell was at Virginia Beach's evangelical Regent University pursuing degrees in public policy and law, took a far-right approach on a number of social issues. Calling feminism one of the "real enemies of the traditional family," McDonnell wrote that working women were "detrimental" to family values. He also wrote that a 1972 Supreme Court decision that allowed unmarried couples to use contraception was "illogical," that the government should "fight any attempts to redefine family by allowing special rights for homosexuals or single-parent unwed mothers," and that government should "statutorily and procedurally prefer married couples over cohabitators, homosexuals, or fornicators."

Oh and unlike Michelle Obama, Bob was 34 when he wrote the thesis.

Combine that with his anti-gay policies, the new anti-abortion regulations, and a bunch of other minor things, and he'll have a lot of trouble disavowing his "past" uber-conservative views. The Deeds campaign was incredibly poorly managed in 2009 yet they still got some traction out of this... think what a well-managed smear campaign could do. "Romney-McDonnell... the most anti-woman ticket since the 1950s." "A Romney-McDonnell administration would have women back in the kitchen... where they belong." "Romney-McDonnell don't think that women should have the right to birth control."

34, that is an indiscretion of youth written by a boy with no worldly experience. Bob daughter was allowed to leave home and serve as a military officer. Etcetera and so forth.

Where I am no fan of Bob, the AG, Ken Cucenelli, just scares the heck out of me, and an early McDonnell departure scares me with where Cucenelli would land. He already has filed his 'for Governor' papers. Crazy Ken Cucenelli makes bigot Bob McDonnell seem like a pretty solid, inclusive and loving citizen.

I never thought of VA as a creepy state, but man it's creepy

Cantor
Cuccinelli
McDonnell

where does it end

drsmooth wrote:

traderdave wrote:This calls for an image of Augustus Gloop. Too bad I can never figure out how to post them.

not the best Gloop snap, but

Awesome! Thanks, drsmooth!

drsmooth wrote:I never thought of VA as a creepy state, but man it's creepy

Cantor
Cuccinelli
McDonnell

where does it end

They also have that's racist George Allen running for Senator again

Sean Duffy (R-WI) reminds me of the cocky guy in Die Hard who's sure he can cut a sweet deal with Alan Rickman