My kind of state (Minnesota):

Q3 The candidates for President are Democrat
Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney. If
the election was today, who would you vote
for?
Barack Obama............................................. ... 53%
Mitt Romney............................................ ........ 43%
Undecided......................................... .............. 4%

Q4 Do you trust Barack Obama or Mitt Romney
more on the issue of the economy?
Barack Obama............................................. ... 50%
Mitt Romney............................................ ........ 44%
Not sure .................................................. ........ 6%

Q5 Do you trust Barack Obama or Mitt Romney
more on the issue of foreign policy?
Barack Obama............................................. ... 54%
Mitt Romney............................................ ........ 41%
Not sure .................................................. ........ 5%

Q6 Who do you think won the debate between
Barack Obama and Mitt Romney this week?
Barack Obama............................................. ... 19%
Mitt Romney............................................ ........ 64%
Not sure .................................................. ........ 17%

http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/p...e_MN_10912.pdf

Originally Posted by '58 Flat

It's all gonna come down to the 16th (the last debate, about foreign policy/natural security, is hopeless for Obama).

Why would you say that? Obama's foreign policy is successful.

If Romney bows down to Netanyahu, then he loses whatever credibility he might hope for in his new goal of middle east peace. Romney has no clue. Turning over our country to him would be turning over our fortunes to a roulette wheel. It would be a Forrest Gump foreign policy: you never know what you're gonna git.

Romney is now ahead in the RCP average, for the first time. The margin is Romney +0.7%. If you drop the last pre-debate poll from the average, he leads by 1.4. His lead is now 2 in the Gallup tracking poll, which has just switched over from registered voters to likely voters.

On average, a challenger gets 70% of undecideds on election day. If you apply that to the average of the post-debate polls, it suggests that Romney would win about 52% of the vote if the election were held today. If the polls are underestimating Republican turnout and/or overestimating Democrat turnout, the margin would be even bigger.

Time will tell, but that's where things stand right now.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

Romney is now ahead in the RCP average, for the first time. The margin is Romney +0.7%. If you drop the last pre-debate poll from the average, he leads by 1.4. His lead is now 2 in the Gallup tracking poll, which has just switched over from registered voters to likely voters.

On average, a challenger gets 70% of undecideds on election day. If you apply that to the average of the post-debate polls, it suggests that Romney would win about 52% of the vote if the election were held today. If the polls are underestimating Republican turnout and/or overestimating Democrat turnout, the margin would be even bigger.

Time will tell, but that's where things stand right now.

Happy to see the already Dem heavy skewed polls have turned in Romney's direction. I dont take anything for granted. This is a Chicago operation were talking about. Expect lots of dead people, felons, illegals etc voting and union goons stuffing ballot boxes.....especially in OHIO...

Originally Posted by Weave

Happy to see the already Dem heavy skewed polls have turned in Romney's direction. I dont take anything for granted. This is a Chicago operation were talking about. Expect lots of dead people, felons, illegals etc voting and union goons stuffing ballot boxes.....especially in OHIO...

Yeah, from the Republicans. They've done it before there.

I have been reading the posts on the Lifecourse Associates blog by Neil Howe and he has well argued doubts about Romney winning the president. However he has noted that Romney was the most favored candidate in the Republican primary among the Millennials who took part in it.

Neil Howe's blog is here http://blog.lifecourse.com/

Anyway I believe Romney has a good chance of winning the presidental election, however it would be a very narrow victory.

This election is bringing the nutcases from both sides out of the closet...

This is completely random, but I have a friend who is a Millennial pagan. She apparently has said that there apparently amongst the pagan community is a "Curse Romney Project" gathering followers. She herself isn't interested in getting involved in such a thing, and to put it in her own words: "this whole thing just strikes me as really immature."

And then another friend of hers reminded her that apparently the FAR Christian Right (and we're talking the type that make your run of the mill Conservative Christian look liberal) was out in out praying for Obama to die: "there was actually a movement abroad in the early spring to stage a 40 Days of Light Over Washington or some such. It turns out at least one pastor trotted out Ye Olde Testiment "let his wife be a widow and his children orphans" at the pulpit, in reference to the President."

What the fuck is up with all these whackos coming out of the closet? I mean come on--it's just a fucking election for christsake. Zounds we're out of the 3Ting world when nobody gave a shit... reminds me of the kind of language my mother recalled hearing her parents talk about "that man in the White House" in reference to FDR.

I mean, really, it's not like Obama's been the best anti-christ (he's kinda failed at that job as he didn't have a statue erected to him that'd shoot flames at Christian believers by his third year), nor that Romney will be the richest jackass to have held the office... but I mean, come on... it's politics: they're all corrupt assholes. No need to get worked up about it.

~Chas'88

Originally Posted by Tristan

I have been reading the posts on the Lifecourse Associates blog by Neil Howe and he has well argued doubts about Romney winning the president. However he has noted that Romney was the most favored candidate in the Republican primary among the Millennials who took part in it.

Neil Howe's blog is here http://blog.lifecourse.com/

Anyway I believe Romney has a good chance of winning the presidental election, however it would be a very narrow victory.

The date was September 23, when the Republicans were doing badly. Mitt Romney was getting attention almost exclusively from the Right, and polling all showed that Barack Obama was 'ahead' of where he was at the same time in 2008. Romney may have been a seeming moderate -- a technocrat who at least had some use for rationality -- before he sold out to the Hard Right. If he was tamer on church-state relations than Perry or Santorum he clearly stated that all that was wrong with America was that it did not have enough faith in the economic inequality, personal hardships, and deference to economic elites. At the same time, President Obama offered himself as a moderate reformer based on his record, failing to address the one Third Rail of politics: mass poverty. It remains true that Americans had largely ignored the Party conventions but especially the Republican Convention, that Paul Ryan showed why it was a bad idea to nominate a sitting member of the House of Representatives, and individual Republicans made statements that might please the most superstitious among us but offend everyone else.

We need be aware that the economic interests behind the Republican Party (and as significantly its front groups including Crossroads, Freedom Works, Americans for Prosperity, and the Club for Growth) have deep pockets and showed how they can blow away the other side with well-financed stealth candidates who offer conservative platitudes in 2010 and then, once the stealth candidates are elected, they can get lockstep obedience from the pols that they backed. A Tea Party pol from suburban Pittsburgh is hard to distinguish from a Tea Party pol from the rural South or the rural Midwest. In view of such politicians I could expect any ascendancy among them to imply a Party discipline as rigid as that known in the old Soviet Union. Those pols would introduce a novel form of dictatorship -- government by lobbyists. Those have proved disappointments to people who expected constituent service to the electorate instead of to deep-pockets backers.

American democracy can die in this Crisis Era. Just think of how unlikely the demise of democracy was in Germany in 1928 -- and five years later the country was under the rule of a criminal syndicate. No, we don't have the jackbooted thugs as Germany had, let alone the alienated nationalism commonplace among Germans in the 1920s, but we do have plenty of people whose bodies are in the 21th Century and whose minds are in the Middle Ages.

Ruthless people have found the seams of our Constitutional system. In earlier times those who knew of those seams either lacked the means of exploiting them to the extent necessary or else found the prospect of an American dictatorship unthinkable. Now some know how to do it and have no ethical scruples against doing so.

Citizens United vs. Federal Communications Commission is the worst and most dangerous decision of the Supreme Court -- ever. Sure, Dred Scott was horrible, but it simply recognized a condition that already existed and did not apply to all Americans. Plessy v. Ferguson established the ludicrous idea that "separate but equal" could itself imply equality, especially when those who did the segregating got the prerogative to decide what constituted 'tolerable' equality -- but that decision recognized the reality of the Jim Crow South and was a statewide option. Korematsu made an alien-seeming minority whose loyalty to America was suspect because of its cultural features lasted only as a war measure and became moot afterwards. Kelo offers the threat of corruption by public officals who might use the concept of eminent domain as a means of giving cronies what the want but does nothing to change the electoral process. Citizens' United potentially gives economic elites dominion over the political process because a huge amount of money can produce, buy, and distribute huge quantities of Orwellian propaganda intended to transform America into a pure plutocracy. The ignoramuses who insist that any science is void if it contradicts either the agenda of vested interests, pseudohistory such David Barton's mythical 'providential' history of America, or a bunch of traditional lore of some ancient vagrants whose most obvious descendants no longer believe that stuff in full want America to fit their ideal -- especially those Americans who would hate it.

A successful coalition of the super-rich, militaristic neocons, and Christian fundamentalists could impose a Christian version of Iran -- a country in which women are almost invariably subordinate, homosexuality is a crime, 'justice' has degenerated into revenge, institutional corruption is the norm, economic inequality is severe, elections are at best choices between extremists, and any religious communities that run afoul of the regime are suppressed. Oh, yes -- youth are cannon fodder in aggressive wars. But this will not be the result of a failed revolution that replaces one sort of tyranny (the despotic Shah Reza Pahlavi II) with another; it will be the demise of the world's oldest, and second-largest democracy just so that a few people can grab even more economic power at the expense of the rest of us.

Such a scenario would be the unqualified failure of a Fourth Turning. We can't be sure that this Crisis Era can end as swiftly with the satisfaction that one gets (as in the highly-successful movie of the last 4T, The Wizard of Oz) when Dorothy has her last encounter with the Wicked Witch of the West.

Originally Posted by Chas'88

This election is bringing the nutcases from both sides out of the closet...

This is completely random, but I have a friend who is a Millennial pagan. She apparently has said that there apparently amongst the pagan community is a "Curse Romney Project" gathering followers. She herself isn't interested in getting involved in such a thing, and to put it in her own words: "this whole thing just strikes me as really immature."

And then another friend of hers reminded her that apparently the FAR Christian Right (and we're talking the type that make your run of the mill Conservative Christian look liberal) was out in out praying for Obama to die: "there was actually a movement abroad in the early spring to stage a 40 Days of Light Over Washington or some such. It turns out at least one pastor trotted out Ye Olde Testiment "let his wife be a widow and his children orphans" at the pulpit, in reference to the President."

What the fuck is up with all these whackos coming out of the closet? I mean come on--it's just a fucking election for christsake. Zounds we're out of the 3Ting world when nobody gave a shit... reminds me of the kind of language my mother recalled hearing her parents talk about "that man in the White House" in reference to FDR.

I mean, really, it's not like Obama's been the best anti-christ (he's kinda failed at that job as he didn't have a statue erected to him that'd shoot flames at Christian believers by his third year), nor that Romney will be the richest jackass to have held the office... but I mean, come on... it's politics: they're all corrupt assholes. No need to get worked up about it.

~Chas'88

I thought Wiccans considered using "black magic" (AKA, curses) to be a bad thing.

Just more proof that all religions are full of hypocrisy.

RCP state averages now have Romney leading in FL and CO. He's also leading in VA if you drop the pre-debate polls.

Eugene Jarecki’s new film dissects America’s failed and cruel drug war

Oct 6th 2012 | from the print edition
BACK in the early 1990s, Mike Godwin, a lawyer and frequent participant in online discussion groups, made an observation that came to be known as Godwin’s Law. It states: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Hitler or Nazis approaches one.”

Both sides seem to see evil in the other side.

Originally Posted by Chas'88

but I mean, come on... it's politics: they're all corrupt assholes. No need to get worked up about it.

~Chas'88

Politicians are not all corrupt assholes. They are as good or bad as we choose to vote for. If they are bad, then the corruption is visible in the mirror.

Obama re-elected will mean our government is hobbling in the right direction on some things; although much depends also on the congressional election. Romney elected would be a disaster; the wrong direction on everything.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Politicians are not all corrupt assholes.

Name three (national-level ones, so we all know who you are talking about) that aren't. We'll see.

There are now four separate polls showing Romney with a lead nationally, by an average of 2.25%. Two of those polls still include data from before the debate.

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

There are now four separate polls showing Romney with a lead nationally, by an average of 2.25%. Two of those polls still include data from before the debate.

Maybe we should take a poll of the polls?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Name three (national-level ones, so we all know who you are talking about) that aren't. We'll see.

Maybe you should define "corrupt." Because they support policies you disagree with? (e.g. maybe they voted for a war once)

How about Feingold? Barbara Boxer. Bernie Sanders. Maybe even Ron and Rand Paul?

Even if they are all corrupt, the fault lies with us. We put them there; we tolerate the system as it is. They are our representatives, and our reflection; nothing more. Saying they are all corrupt does nothing to make them better.

Originally Posted by radind

Both sides seem to see evil in the other side.

I definitely see evil in the other side. I don't see an absence of it on our side.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

How about Feingold? Barbara Boxer. Bernie Sanders. Maybe even Ron and Rand Paul?

Ron is the reason I asked for three. The exception that proves the rule, if you will.

Bernie Sanders is the guy who recognized Obama's Health Insurer Shareholders' Profits Protection Act for what it was, said so, and then voted for it anyway after a private talk with a Chicago sleazebag. Even if that's the only thing he's done (which I have a hard time imagining to be the case), it still demonstrates that he is a person willing to engage in things that he himself recognizes as wrong if it will net him a political gain. That's certainly one fair working criteria for being a 'corrupt asshole'.

Feingold I'll have to give you as a second (good thing I didn't say 'two', eh?)

Boxer is a die-hard Drug Warrior, regardless of the well-known (and acknowledged by her, even) consequences of that position. She's also one of AIPAC's main go-to toadies. And she's a very vocal supporter of PIPA. And of course, she elected, with no reservations, to bail out the banksters and assorted cronies back in '08.

Even if they are all corrupt, the fault lies with us. We put them there; we tolerate the system as it is.

Who's this "we", kemosabe?

They are our representatives...

They claim to be your representatives. For that claim to be actual fact, however, they would actually need to act in your interests and along the lines you desire. I'd say there's pretty good evidence that corrupt politicians (and here I repeat myself) most definitely are not acting in the interests of the majority of the people. It means that when they say they represent you, they lie. Big surprise, I know...

Originally Posted by JustPassingThrough

RCP state averages now have Romney leading in FL and CO. He's also leading in VA if you drop the pre-debate polls.

Your beloved Rasmussen just showed the President up 11 in New Mexico, which is about what it was before the debate. This is after Rasmussen showed Obama up 5 in Pennsylvania and 6 in Connecticut.

The debate bounce looks transitory.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Ron is the reason I asked for three. The exception that proves the rule, if you will.

Bernie Sanders is the guy who recognized Obama's Health Insurer Shareholders' Profits Protection Act for what it was, said so, and then voted for it anyway after a private talk with a Chicago sleazebag. Even if that's the only thing he's done (which I have a hard time imagining to be the case), it still demonstrates that he is a person willing to engage in things that he himself recognizes as wrong if it will net him a political gain. That's certainly one fair working criteria for being a 'corrupt asshole'.

Feingold I'll have to give you as a second (good thing I didn't say 'two', eh?)

Boxer is a die-hard Drug Warrior, regardless of the well-known (and acknowledged by her, even) consequences of that position. She's also one of AIPAC's main go-to toadies. And she's a very vocal supporter of PIPA. And of course, she elected, with no reservations, to bail out the banksters and assorted cronies back in '08.

Is this "corruption" or voting for things we disagree with? A private conversation proves nothing. Politicians have to make compromises to get things done, unless they are dictators. This does not necessarily make them "assholes" or "corrupt."

Let's see, others who might qualify: I'll give you a Republican first: Jeff Flake. Then there's Tom Udall, Michael Bennet, Ron Wyden, Sherrod Brown, Amy Klobuchar, Kristen Gillibrand, Al Franken; they might qualify.

Who's this "we", kemosabe? They claim to be your representatives. For that claim to be actual fact, however, they would actually need to act in your interests and along the lines you desire. I'd say there's pretty good evidence that corrupt politicians (and here I repeat myself) most definitely are not acting in the interests of the majority of the people. It means that when they say they represent you, they lie. Big surprise, I know...

We is you and I and all Americans. If you don't vote because "all politicians are corrupt," you are in part responsible for the "corruption" for sure. To be corrupt, politicians have to violate ethical standards that are already in the law, or at least should be in the law according to public interest groups we support. It should include officials that we have at least some evidence that they have been bought. That is a fairly objective standard. To be "assholes" means they don't do what we want. If you claim they must do what you want 100% of the time in order not to be an asshole, I don't agree with that claim. I would rather say about 2/3 of the time, which is a higher standard than most people have.

Originally Posted by Tristan

I have been reading the posts on the Lifecourse Associates blog by Neil Howe and he has well argued doubts about Romney winning the president. However he has noted that Romney was the most favored candidate in the Republican primary among the Millennials who took part in it.

Neil Howe's blog is here http://blog.lifecourse.com/

Anyway I believe Romney has a good chance of winning the presidental election, however it would be a very narrow victory.

Thanks for the perspective. All of us are w-a-y too close to be even remotely objective.

Well the blue tide, seeping in from the oceans and Great Lakes, is receeding at the moment, according to the RCP map. Maybe global warming will cause it to rise again. It certainly should, if people are paying attention to it; or at least people should be smart enough not to vote for the wrong policies, and for a man to carry them out who can't be trusted to say or do the same thing from one day or one hour to the next, except maybe to protect his own pocket. Just because he can perform well at a debate? Come on, we already knew that. Well, we'll see how smart the people are. I stand by my prediction until it succeeds or fails!

I know I know, there is also New Mexico, and contrariwise, the Gulf states. With that in mind, the blue tide mostly represents oceans and lakes, but also in general the tide from beyond our borders. You can see the blue tide from below in southern Texas and even Arizona as well as NM and the coastal states of FL and CA, but not the Gulf states. The red menace, or the rusting and scorching heat, represents heartland areas of America; or you could call it provincial, as opposed to urbane and aware of the larger world.

Originally Posted by B Butler

Maybe we should take a poll of the polls?

That's Nate Silver's job, and a tough one it is.

At one time, we had campaign driven polling, which eventaully became poll driven campaigning. We may now be at the point of poll driven polling, with the campaigns providing little other than basic entertainment.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Ron is the reason I asked for three. The exception that proves the rule, if you will.

Bernie Sanders is the guy who recognized Obama's Health Insurer Shareholders' Profits Protection Act for what it was, said so, and then voted for it anyway after a private talk with a Chicago sleazebag. Even if that's the only thing he's done (which I have a hard time imagining to be the case), it still demonstrates that he is a person willing to engage in things that he himself recognizes as wrong if it will net him a political gain. That's certainly one fair working criteria for being a 'corrupt asshole'...

Bernie is doing what legislators are supposed to do. He accepts the more-than-half loaf, since the full loaf is a distant dream. More is expected of Presidents.

Originally Posted by Eric the Green

Well the blue tide, seeping in from the oceans and Great Lakes, is receeding at the moment, according to the RCP map. Maybe global warming will cause it to rise again. It certainly should, if people are paying attention to it; or at least people should be smart enough not to vote for the wrong policies, and for a man to carry them out who can't be trusted to say or do the same thing from one day or one hour to the next, except maybe to protect his own pocket. Just because he can perform well at a debate? Come on, we already knew that. Well, we'll see how smart the people are. I stand by my prediction until it succeeds or fails!

I know I know, there is also New Mexico, and contrariwise, the Gulf states. With that in mind, the blue tide mostly represents oceans and lakes, but also in general the tide from beyond our borders. You can see the blue tide from below in southern Texas and even Arizona as well as NM and the coastal states of FL and CA, but not the Gulf states. The red menace, or the rusting and scorching heat, represents heartland areas of America; or you could call it provincial, as opposed to urbane and aware of the larger world.

Notes to Democrats of all stripes:

1. People will follow, but someone must lead
2. Leadership is appreciated at the gut level.
3. Republicans do gut-level very well
4. Learn!