pacino wrote:Did you tell them you're broke and the they proceeded to call you a victim?

I visited Obama and Romney field offices in three swing states -- Ohio, Colorado and Virginia -- dropping in unannounced at random times to see what I could see. There were some consistent, and telling, differences.

Obama's office suite in Sterling was in an office park next to a dentist's office. The front window was plastered with Obama-Biden signs, the door was propped open, and the stink bugs that plague Virginia in the fall crawled over stacks of literature -- fliers for Senate candidate Tim Kaine, Obama bumper stickers -- piled on a table near the front reception desk. In rooms in front and back, volunteers made calls on cell phones, while in the interior, field staffers hunched over computers. One wall was covered with a sheet of paper where people had scrawled responses to the prompt, "I Support the President Because...", while another wall held a precinct-by-precinct list of neighborhood team leaders' email addresses.

Only about a mile down the road was the Republican office, a cavernous, unfinished space on the back side of a strip mall next to a Sleepy's mattress outlet. On one side of the room, under a Gadsden flag ("Don't tread on me") and a poster of Sarah Palin on a horse, two long tables of land-line telephones were arrayed. Most of the signs, literature, and buttons on display were for the local Republican congressman, Frank Wolf. A volunteer in a Wolf for Congress T-shirt was directing traffic, sort of -- no one really seemed to be in charge and there were no paid staff present, though there were several elderly volunteers wandering in and out. The man in the T-shirt allowed me to survey the room but not walk around, and was unable to refer me to anyone from the Romney campaign or coordinated party effort.

These basic characteristics were repeated in all the offices I visited: The Obama offices were devoted almost entirely to the president's reelection; the Republican offices were devoted almost entirely to local candidates, with little presence for Romney.

The Nightman Cometh wrote:Don't know why betting markets have Obama around 58% to win. At best it's probably 50/50 and by next week Romney might be the favorite if the state polls keep inching towards him.

dajafi wrote:I hit a nadir of pessimism about the election Monday night (and couldn't sleep as a result).

CalvinBall wrote:more good polls for obama in nevada today. +4 in ppp and +2 in rasmussen.

good in ohio too. +5, +3, tie.

But that story doesn't hold up well either. The emails in question contained nothing more than "raw" intelligence, uncorroborated and unverified, that often flows in after an event. Intelligence officials typically don't deliver their assessments until they have "finished" reports based on multiple sources, and corroborated evidence, and Obama officials such as Rice certainly would not have been out in front of the TV cameras citing raw intelligence. And as the government's most senior officials say, the Benghazi case has taken them a long time to finish. "People forget that a Palestinian group was the first to claim credit for 9/11," said the intelligence official. "There was no message from the field in those first hectic days that would have eliminated questions or proven who was behind the attack."

Indeed, as White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters, all that Wednesday's stories reported was "an open-source, unclassified email about a posting on a Facebook site. I would also note I think that within a few hours, that organization itself [Ansar al-Sharia] claimed that it had not been responsible." Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in separate remarks on Wednesday, also said that "posting something on Facebook is not in and of itself evidence, and I think it just underscores how fluid the reporting was at the time and continued for some time to be."

Even now, intelligence officials say, the full story is not known. It is not even clear that the video-inspired protests in Cairo were unrelated to the attack in Benghazi, because some of the extremists who attacked Stevens and his colleagues may have been provoked by watching the demonstrations on TV. Officials say they are still compiling a list of suspects.

"The bulk of available information still supports the early assessment that extremists --many with ties to Ansar al-Sharia, AQIM [Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb], or other groups -- didn't pre-plan the attack days or weeks in advance, but launched their assault opportunistically after they learned about the violence at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo," the intelligence official said.

philliesphhan wrote:

Aziz Ansari ‏@azizansari

"Sorry officer, no ticket for me, if I'm over the speed limit, that's something God intended. Peace."

CalvinBall wrote:

pacino wrote:Did you tell them you're broke and the they proceeded to call you a victim?

he kept saying if i make over 100,000 a year. i told him i dont make that.

also said if i dont have health insurance, which i do, or if there arent specific coverages in it im going to get taxed even more. is that even true?

td11 wrote:

CalvinBall wrote:trivial as gay marriage

yeah i'm done here

RichmondPhilsFan wrote:

Werthless wrote:

Bucky wrote:I think we're sort of at the root of the philosophical differences. People who rely on religious beliefs to set their values feel that their beliefs intrinsically can't be bigoted because those are the beliefs of a widely practiced theology.

I'm definitely reconsidering my thinking... I'll have to give it more thought. I'm not a lawyer, but there are certain protected classes on which a government/employer/etc cant discriminate. The law probably needs to catch up, but there's a reason that certain characteristics are not protected classes.

Maybe because I'm not gay and I can get married, but I view marriage as less of a human rights issue than something like the death penalty or abortion. And on these issues, I think many would disagree with calling your opponent bigots by virtue of their position. And if you (collectively) wouldn't call someone a bigot for supporting certain kinds of murder, then how can you call someone a bigot for something as trivial as gay marriage? Is someone who supports the death penalty a bigot who wants to play God with people's lives? Is a person a bigot who won't protect the life of fetuses 14 weeks old? I think it's a huge stretch, and cheapens the word for people who truly deserve to be called it.

(Sorry for the jarbled post)

Come on, man, that's not even close to the definition of bigotry. There's no way that anyone can intelligently respond to that because it's simply nonsense. ALL PEOPLE who commit capital murder are eligible for the death penalty (whether the application of the death penalty is affected by race is a valid and entirely separate issue). ALL PEOPLE were 14-week-old fetuses at some point in their life.

Cole Sear: I see bigoted people.
Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]
Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
[Cole nods]
Malcolm Crowe: Bigoted people like, in government? In office?
Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see each other. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're bigots.
Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?
Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere.

JFLNYC wrote:I can find no poll which ended 10/18 or after in which Romney is leading in Ohio.

Actually, make that 10/13 or after.

TenuredVulture wrote:I wonder if any of the independent campaign groups are dedicating any money to GOTV, or is that still primarily a party function? It seems likely that both campaigns reached diminishing returns on advertising a long time ago. I suspect that you might also get to a point where additional advertising actually has the opposite of its intended effect. For instance, when Corzine ran for Senate in 1998 he won, but by a much smaller margin than had been predicted--did spending all that money on ads in the last weeks of the campaign actually diminish support?

CalvinBall wrote:the president has more field offices in ohio than romney has in oh, fl, and va combined. that is awesome.