BETTER YOUR BRAIN

Source: messagememes

shortformblog:

• Romney, 2007: “I’d be delighted to sign” a bill outlawing abortion.
• Romney, Tuesday “There’s no legislation with regards to abortion that I’m familiar with that would become part of my agenda.”
• Romney, yesterday “I’m a pro-life candidate. I’ll be a pro-life president.”

So, which one is it? You sort of have to, you know, take a position on these things. source

Source: ihopericksantorum

Dem Newswire: Paul Ryan

demnewswire:

• Rated 0% by NARAL, indicating a pro-life voting record
• Prohibit federal funding to groups like Planned Parenthood. (Jan 2011)
• Voted NO on enforcing against anti-gay hate crimes. (Apr 2009)
• Voted NO on expanding services for offenders’ re-entry into society. (Nov 2007)
• Voted YES on…

1. As far as the Presidential election goes, this week has pretty much set in stone that Romney is going to be everyone’s reluctant choice for the GOP nominee. Unless they pull some magic and premiere a new candidate at the convention, the race isn’t going to be interesting again for a while. Obama should beast at the debates and that will be that. 

2. On Rush Limbaugh- his comments this week about Sandra Fluke, the women who was not allowed to testify at the congressional hearing regarding contraception as a women’s health issue, went a little something like this:

“What does it say about the college co-ed Sandra Fluke, who goes before a congressional committee and essentially says that she must be paid to have sex, what does that make her? It makes her a slut, right? It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She’s having so much sex she can’t afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex. What does that make us? We’re the pimps.”

For a man always complaining about people twisting his words, he sure knows a lot about it. I don’t think I need to explain everything that’s wrong with what he said, but there’s enough here to go on for pages. Equating being on birth control to being a prostitute…I would call it demeaning but it’s so ridiculous that I can’t take it seriously enough to call it that. There are so many reasons for being on birth control, from medical to oh, you know, not wanting to get pregnant. 

Rush is an ignorant, hateful, patriarchy-supporting, slut-shaming, woefully misinformed man; I feel terrible for everyone subjected to his opinions every day. He’s awful and Fluke has handled the situation with nothing but class, responding by calling him out for being the patriarchal, dismissive asshole that he is. 

Fuck the patriarchy; Fuck Rush Limbaugh. 

3. On Andrew Breitbart, who died today at age 43 leaving behind several small children:

We’re on opposite ends of the spectrum and I was remarking the other day to a friend about how repugnant most of what came out of his mouth was. I’m still pretty bitter about his work in bringing Anthony Weiner and ACORN down, and he has said more than his share of heinously offensive things over the years. He was a virulent racist and sexist and I did not like the guy.

However, he was an impressively influential figure anyway you cut it. He helped launch Huff Po and Drudge, two major story-breaking news sites, and has had his hands in just about every major political happening in the past few years. He built himself up in the image he wanted to embody,a rather repulsive one but exactly to his specifications. He did nothing anonymously and fought tooth-and-nail for his beliefs.

I can’t say I’ll miss him having his hands in all the wrong pots, threatening liberals, and being an asshole on general principle alone, but things will be a little less interesting without his enthusiasm for stirring the pot.

ShortFormBlog: Obama opens up big lead over Romney in general election polling

shortformblog:

• 9 point lead for Obama over Romney in the latest WaPo/ABC News Poll source

» It’s the largest lead either candidate has held over one another since The Washington Post/ABC News started polling Romney-Obama match-ups in April of last year. It’s also a huge reversal from just a month…

• ooo good question how have they furthered conservativism?
• Romney: 1. I have a huge family 2. I worked in the private sector 3. I was governor of a largely democratic state and used English immersion in my schools.
• Gingrich: “I helped Reagan into office, who’s the champion of liberty now bitches?”
• Obamacare is a freedom crusher, watch out guys.
• Santorum is just nipping at Romney’s heels, he needs to pick an issue
• Ron Paul is kind of the bomb, he’s a feisty old bastard. “Guys, just follow the fucking constitution. Seriously.”
• Romney better keep Teddy Kennedy’s name out of his flip flopping mouth, too far. 
• What scares you about the Presidency? GOOD question BriWi
• “We have tremendous institutional biases against doing the right thing, against getting things done” -Gingrich   well, you would know Newt
• “America still is great.” really dodged a bullet there Romney…

I feel like I just wasted 2 hours of my life. Gingrich is an elitist, Romney is trying, Santorum is losing and knows it, and I think Ron Paul is genuinely baffled that his fellow candidates are so badly misinformed.

• According to Paul, all we should get out of Terry Schiavo’s case is to have a living will. Welp.
• WE GET IT ROMNEY. You don’t like Obama. Cool. So how will you be any better?
• I don’t think any of them really care about NASA. Just a thought. Also, they don’t know jack about space. If we really wanted to get to Mars, we could. We need to stop worrying about getting men BACK from Mars and just get them there. Send up robots to be working and building habitats, the astronauts live in a lunar pod type deal at first and then move in to the space station as it’s finished. maybe they come home eventually, maybe they don’t, but for years they explore and send information back. We could definitely find people willing to go, and it’s way more cost efficient to take a one way trip because the biggest issue with manned Mars travel is hauling enough fuel to send everyone home.
• Oh commercial space great let’s take the last frontier and fuck it up too Gingrich…

• Santorum is demonstrating how very little he knows about Iran. Keep talking, keep it up.
• FUCK the Keystone XL pipeline, get out Santorum. Back to the frothy mix from whence you came.
• OH SNAP YOU GO GIRL “Why is it okay to court voters in Spanish but not to provide for them in Spanish?” Now to watch everyone dance around the question to not lose voters in Spanish. 
• Romney and Gingrich would only sign the DREAM act if it included a focus on the military. If you want to die for America, you’re good. If you want an education, you’re SOL.
• BEET SUGAR OH MAN GINGRICH REALLY IS DWIGHT SCHRUTE THE CONSPIRACY IS ALIVE

• After that little hissy fit attacking Newt, I’m not sure that Romney came out ahead but Gingrich definitely came out the loser.
• Newt really does look like a Sith Lord. I just can’t get past it. 
• Oh so now Santorum wants to help people…I don’t really have anything to say about that. Homeowners do need help. 
• The whole rest of the stage is just staring at Ron Paul while he explains the financial meltdown. I want a better explanation of how he wants to liquidate the debt and take the burden off of the tax payers
• Romney: “You have to have regulation”. Well heavens above, what have we here? “We need regulation that is up to date.” 
• OH CUBA QUESTIONS LET’S GO
• Romney wants to move Cuba to freedom and fight for democracy….but not open relations with them. huh.
• Gingrich thinks we should overthrow the regime…and blames Obama for not forcing an “Arab spring” in Cuba. oh okay.
• wait wait Ron Paul DOESN’T like the isolationism of not talking to people? This is news to me. He has a point though. “We talked to the Soviets, we talk to the Chinese…” “It’s not 1962 anymore and we don’t have to use force and intimidation in overthrow of governments” Well damn Ron Paul, let’s go. You talk to those Cubans.
• Santorum is seriously underestimating how many Castros are lined up in Cuba and overestimating how interested the Taliban is in Cuba. 
• Well for once Gingrich hits it, the American people have no interest in going to war. Largely true.
• I wish Romney would talk about how he would handle Afghanistan, not how he things Obama has handled it poorly
• YEAH YOU GO RON PAUL we do NOT want a hot war in Iran. “I think it would be the most foolish thing in the world to go to war with Iran” 
• why are we even talking about going to war with Iran this is so inane

So I guess I’m watching this. 

whatever.

• Santorum keeps talking about constructive and destructive capitalism, not sure he knows how it works.
• Hahahahah you go BriWi “So you never peddled your influence?” to Newt. Let me tell you Newt. Despite what were apparently your best efforts, you never represented me particularly well and you’re pretty embarrassing to the state of Georgia anyways.
• Gingrich is FINALLY getting jumped all over for basically being a corrupt, pandering jerk who used legislation to get his way and help himself out. It’s hypocritical of Romney to be the one calling him out but this needed to happen.

Welp, there it goes. The first primary is approx. 91% over and now we pretty much just have to sit back and wait for Super Tuesday.

Surprising no one, Romney came in first by a pretty large margin, with more votes than Paul and Huntsman, who came in second and third respectively, combined. Romney upped his numbers from 2008 pretty significantly, pulling in about 40% of the vote this time. Congrats, you campaigned for 5 years and won yourself a couple of percentage points (also probably the GOP nomination).

Paul brought in 23% of the vote. In a state that’s pretty damn proud of their “Live Free or Die” motto, the fact that the self-styled champion of liberty did well is no major change up. Again, Paul isn’t going to win the nomination and I doubt he’ll win a VP bid but he seems to be in the campaign for the long-haul, at least for a few more months. If enough others drop out, he has the potential to detract from Romney pretty heavily if he leans on his crutch as the anti-establishment option. He’ll keep things interesting if nothing else.

Huntsman. I was hoping he could slide into 2nd place, but it was not to be. Although earlier polls showed him being within a few points of Paul, even beating him in some, the primary results speak otherwise. He came in at around 17%, which while respectable is not the sort of results he needed or should have received given that he’s run a campaign largely focused on New Hampshire. He has no real chance at winning in South Carolina in a few days, and I suspect his run is coming to an end.

(I hate that he isn’t winning, and it makes me resent the Republican party even more that they don’t recognize what a great candidate they have right in front of them. I genuinely feel that Huntsman is not only a good candidate for the general election but that he’s a good man. I think he would have given Obama a run for his money and proved to the nation that the GOP is capable of getting behind a non-fringe candidate. He would have pulled in a lot of independents and disenfranchised democrats, making up for some votes he would have inevitably lost from his own party because he worked under O as ambassador. He’s knowledgeable, nice, and I think has the potential to be a very strong, capable leader if given the opportunity. He did great things in Utah and I have no reason to think he couldn’t send the country in the same direction. Unfortunately, his lack of presence in earlier debates and unwillingness to dip into his (hella extensive) personal accounts to fund his campaign are driving the final nails into his coffin. At the same time that I realize it’s a poor choice politically for him to not fund his own campaign extensively or plunge into the partisan, nasty fray, it’s also I like him so much. He believes in democracy, and you can tell he would rather lose honestly than self-promote to win empty votes. He has the potential to unite the country and it’s a damn shame his run for POTUS is coming to an end so soon.)

Gingrich, Santorum, and Perry are fighting it out for 4th. Perry might stick around for the Southern primaries, but if I were him I would drop out now. He has like 1% of the vote at this point, he’s just wasting money. Gingrich’s numbers aren’t stellar, but neither did he expect them to be. He’s polling really well in South Carolina and some other Southern states so I suspect he’ll stick around for a while longer as well. Santorum isn’t doing well outside of the midwest, as I predicted. His momentum took him about as far as the Iowa border and promptly puttered out. He might stick around in hopes of a VP bid since a few candidates have indicated they would choose him but I doubt he’ll be in the race much longer.

Real life got in the way of my political fixation last night (except not really because all I talked about in the car with my pal Philip was the primary) so I didn’t watch the debate. I’m remedying that now and you’ll reap the fruit of my labor.

• I’m so glad to not see Bachmann up on stage anymore.
• 200,000 new jobs last month, what up. Romney is so so so typical when they ask him about positive things that have happened in the country. “Yes, that’s great, but Obama didn’t do it. Here’s why he gets no credit.”
• Santorum…Iran is not the biggest problem we face. I’ll buy that business experience doesn’t add up to presidential leadership though, nice little sound byte. 
• Gingrich would be the man to call others out for corruption, he has enough experience with it to know what it looks like by now.
• I always come away from these thinking if nothing else, Romney is a nice guy who just sort of bumbled his way into this and decided if he was going to do it, he was going to be good at it.
• JON HUNTSMAN I LOVE YOU, you precious precious man. Finally bringing the debate back to the real issue: jobs and the economy.
• I like how hard the moderators are trying to pit the candidates against each other.
• Someone teach Ron Paul how to speak into the microphone, gotta keep him calling everyone else out tonight.
• The debate is turning into Paul vs everyone which gives it an interesting angle. Paul has no problem calling someone out and holding his ground, grumpy old man that he is.
• “To say you’re a conservative is a stretch but you’ve convinced a lot of people of it.” AHAHAHAHHA YOU GO RON PAUL, way to verbally bitch slap Santorum.
• Hi I’m Rick Santorum and I have a Spendometor therefore I’m a real conservative.
• Perry makes a pretty legit point, Americans are looking for an outsider who isn’t corrupted by the process. 
• Well Santorum got one thing right, debt-ceiling increases have been regular for 200 years.
• “We have a serious trust deficit in this nation. The American people no longer trust our institutions of power and they no longer trust our elected officials…..Everybody knows congress needs term limits.” hit the nail on the head, Hunstman. 
• Oh my god Mitt Romney we get it Obama has never done anything or lived anywhere or accomplished anything past the point he was born we understand you can stop now. I want to hear about what YOU will do, not what he hasn’t done. 
• Gingrich the Chickenhawk…”Dr. Paul makes a lot of comments, it’s part of his style.” Isn’t it part of everyones…? I liked Gingrich’s answer to veterans affairs well enough, I’m glad it’s being talked about at all.
• And again Dr. Paul lays it down: ”I’m trying to stop the wars, but at least I went when they called me up.” “The Constitution has rules and I don’t like it when we send our kids off to fight these wars when those individuals didn’t go themselves and then come up and when they’re asked they say “Oh, I don’t think one person could have made a difference.” I have a pet peeve, that annoys me a great deal, because when I see these young men coming back my heart weeps for them.” I didn’t get any sense of false piety here. After Gingrich says he was married with a child and therefore couldn’t serve, Paul rebuts ”When I was drafted, I was married and had two kids and I went.”
• Paul drops the ball on his racist newsletters but picks it up and throws a damn touchdown with his rant about how racist the criminal justice system is. “How many times have you seen a rich white person get the electric chair?” Drug laws are being unfairly enforced, glad to see Paul bring it up. I’ve said this before but I’ll repeat: I really don’t think he’s going to get the nomination, and I don’t think he honestly thinks he will either so I think he’s using his temporary momentum to throw issues that he cares about into the forefront.
• Romney surprised me with his “I can’t imagine a state banning contraception…I can’t imagine a situation in which a state would want to do so.” “Contraception: it’s working just fine! Leave it alone!”
• Romney tried real hard to avoid Roe vs Wade but they got him. He would overturn. Typical and wrong.
• Ooooo ‘penumbra’ look at you Santorum, getting fancy
• Hunstman is not coming out like I wish he would for gay rights but neither is he being malicious. “I don’t feel like my marriage is threatened in any way by civil unions.”
• They all need to hop off of Murdoch’s dick, the media doesn’t have a liberal bias. Chill bros.
• hahahah Ron Paul “Please don’t interrupt me.” He’s cute.
• I think I’ve started to just tune Rick Perry out by accident. All I caught was some crap about a war on religion so I don’t feel like I missed much.
• Huntsman is about done with Afghanistan, “I don’t want to be nation building in SW Asia.” 
• Huntsman is schooling the hell out of the rest of them on foreign policy all the way around the globe, he seems to be the only one who really knows how to be a Commander In Chief 
• Gingrich makes a fair point in that “Afghanistan is a tiny piece of a huge mess that is very dangerous…..There is a region wide crisis that we have been mismanaging.”  I also agree with what he was saying about it not being a military problem, primarily. After that though, he loses me. 

I’m at the half way point in the debate so here is the first half of my NH reactions.

My friend Martin and I are talking about the potential consequences of Perry dropping out. I don’t think all the anti-Romney republican voters would go to Santorum (especially after he gets destroyed in New Hampshire) and boost him because I haven’t completely lost faith in the US of A, and I doubt all of the voters will convalesce behind one candidate. On the off chance that they do though, and pick Gingrich, who does have an edge in the national polls…the game is going to get a little more interesting.

New Hampshire is going to be the battle ground of Gingrich, Santorum, and Huntsman to see which one of them is going to be the real competitor to Mitt (unfortunately, it won’t be Huntsman). My money is on Gingrich: he’s quick, he’s been around the block a few times, and he has some Southern support that I suspect will transfer to mid-western support if it comes to it.

As you are well aware, the great bringer of nominees that is the Iowa Caucus was today. I’m not a huge fan of the caucus, I think it’s a little silly that a state as homogenous as Iowa has the first say about nominees but I digress because unfortunately the world doesn’t operate around what I find sensible. 

Paul came in third with Santorum and Romney more or less tied, which I found surprising. I know Santorum has been campaigning like mad all over Iowa but I’m a little surprised that it worked. I don’t think his sudden surge in popularity has all that much to do with his campaigning though- he’s just a fortunate victim of circumstance. He’s been so behind recently that people have been ignoring him and not digging for dirt (not that you really have to, he says crazy offensive shit fairly regularly). It isn’t that he is a good candidate, it’s that GOP voters haven’t yet taken the time to pinpoint what is so bad about him like they have with the others. Plus, evangelicals don’t like Romney the mormon, so Santorum was able to capitalize on that handicap. (why Iowa of all the states, why IOWA ugh) Santorum is really pushing that he is a “consistent conservative” as opposed to Romney’s less than stellar record…I don’t think that Iowa will give him that much momentum nationally since he polls pretty poorly in most of the country but if by some ungodly miracle he really picks up the pace he has the potential to be a serious pain in Romney’s side (but not one in Obama’s). Everyone else realizes or is in the process of realizing that he isn’t a general election candidate. He panders too much to an extreme audience and has said some things that have made him pretty much unelectable. (Diversity is bad, I don’t want to help black people, etc). I still choose Romney as the winner of the nomination. Sure, he’s bland and reminiscent of the guy who everyone friend zoned in high school, but come on GOP. He’s a mostly benevolent WASPy Mormon who just wants to be your nominee. Let him take you to the dance, it’s your best chance at winning Prom King against Mr. BHO. Fire will only take you so far, running a pleasant, uneventful campaign in this case has the potential to take you much further.

Paul is not going to be the nominee. He’s too old and too thinly spread. Some Democrats like him, some Republicans like him, some Libertarians and Independents like him, but not enough people in any one party like him enough to make him the nominee. Retire, Paul. You’ve had your turn.

Perry, Gingrich, and Bachmann were in the losers bracket so to speak, and Perry is now going to go home with his tail between his legs and “reassess his campaign” ie prepare to drop out. He has a nice gig as governor and has invested a lot of money in his campaign to lose so badly in Iowa. If he has any sense, he’ll cut his losses.

Bachmann is not in the race and at this point, she better know it.

Gingrich is the most not-Romney candidate out there but it didn’t do him much good today. People just don’t like Newt Gingrich. He polls fairly well in some southern states, South Carolina among them which is coming up, but he won’t end up with the nomination and he knows that. He just isn’t a general election candidate, but he’s along for the ride. I’ll admit, I sort of like Newt. He’s a terrible human being but the man is as sassy as they come, he keeps things interesting. If he drops out I’ll be sad to see him go.

Huntsman got something like 800 votes and wasn’t even part of the caucus. It’s okay baby, I still like you. You go Jon.