I know of no one who voted for bush, but I know they’re out there 
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Is that stir or deep fried?
Well, that’s one feeble way to try to stop a third party run by either Trump or Cruz and an almost certain Libertarian run by Rand Paul.
The GOP is cooked because they set the middle class on fire against them. Their outsourcing, banking fraud, tax sheltering of the rich and foreign multinationals and endless wars policies (none of which worked the way Ayn Rand, Grover Norquist, Dick Cheney and Newt Gingrich said they would) are too much failure to overcome for any political party.
The GOP’s Far Right anarchists, Citizen United billionaires and social conservatives have insulted and bullied the 99% far too long. American workers believe in themselves again and are ready to fight back. There will be no more following any Republican candidate like sheep.
Suggesting that the party may come to an end if the TeaParty radicals don’t get in line with the Establishment isn’t going to work either. These dysfunctional factions run the party now. There are far too few of them to decide a national election.
There are too few Republicans left…period. Democrats and Independents are uniting around a progressive agenda that provides economic opportunities and civil liberties for all, as well as a good dose of common sense. Republicans are just plain stupid. The Far Right Republicans now blackmailing Congress and the country are just plain fascists.
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Reeses Pieces here got his job because of his association with the rising GOP superstar Scott Walker. Oh oh!!
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Agreed, he was not “easily” reelected, but his people knew he would be no matter what obstacles might arise party because he was deemed “likeable.”. People still seemed to believed Iraq was winnable, and so were willing to bring him back because of his so-called likeability which was lacking in Kerry. Which also reminds me of the theory going around after the first bush-Kerry debate which was that Kerry did so very well, bush’s performance was lamentable and Kerry would now surge confirming my own theory that the front runner remains the front runner after debates.
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or the one before that and before that and well before that…incompetence and corruption … hey their pretty good at those things …am I right?/
That’s about one of the worst ideas I have ever seen. Where do I start?
“Rational voting decisions” is of course, code for party loyalty tests. Which is about as anti-democratic as you can get this side of not holding elections or holding them with guns to people’s heads.
In essence, you are talking about a system where education, which is directly proportional to money, determines the electorate. Plutocracy is the word most commonly used for such a system, not Democracy. And your system is even worse, as you propose letting the party in power determine the basis for “rational voting decisions” aka, loyalty tests. So once a party is IN power, they stay…until violent revolution tosses them out.
The reality is that greater the voter participation is, the better for democracy, and currently, the better for Democrats. Instead of looking for excuses to disenfranchise people, perhaps you should spend some effort and finding ways to better engage and educate people to the election processes.
So if your “intellectual superiority” is so offended by having to vote with the unwashed masses, then yeah, I would agree with you…what we have doesn’t work for you. But it isn’t a democracy you are looking for. The good news is that we actually do have an open EMIGRATION policy in this country, so you can leave at anytime to go search for your Smart Utopia.
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He who wins the post debate spin doctoring, wins the debate. Kerry did much better than Bush in all of the debates, even with Bush using (and getting caught) a wire so he could be fed the answers. But the Bushies owned the spin doctoring in the MSM.
Compare that with the Romney-Obama first debate. Did Obama look flat? Sure. But the spin doctoring turned it into Romney having such a crushing performance that Obama should probably just resign from the White House immediately. Because they won the post debate spin. That was also the only time that Romney slipped ahead in the polls, for a few days in the entire campaign.
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There should be no “tests” to participate in elections in a republic. If you are a citizen, you have the same right to a ballot as anyone else. If not, we are operating as an oligarchy where only a few rule like an aristocracy.
I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but I don’t see anyone in the Top 1% smart enough to be managing their own trust funds that grandpa set up for them much less a nation of 300 million people. That takes the participation and cooperation of everyone…if you want civilization.
The days of kings, billionaires and multinationals calling all the shots just don’t work. Republicans proved that once and for all during the Bush/Cheney disaster.
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Do you recall the 10-day (D)-Chicken-Little-freakout that followed?
That churned my gut worse than the debate or the spin.
Then-- I saw UnskewedPolls.com-- and I was somewhat relieved seeing how the creative (R) math was being ciphered.
jw1
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Current debate formats are such that we still come away mostly under informed, but we do get hear great campaign speeches. So let’s allow each candidate to take a bigger chunk of time and make a speech. No need to turn to each other occasionally and say something about the other’s record. I’ll watch debates of course but this is my dream scenario, short to the point speeches, no overheated hyperbole and oneupmanship.
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Can you realistically envision conservative whites that for generations have been taught blacks are freeloading criminals sucking up their tax dollars gradually abandoning those attitudes and accepting blacks into the party? You see rigidly Evangelical Christians, a significant sector of the GOP, granting the same acceptance to the LGBT community? And all Republicans forsaking the notion Mexicans are just dandy additions to the nation’s diversity, not drug running moochers sucking the government teat and robbing “Real Americans!!” of their jobs? They’ve permanently alienated unions and teachers and academics. There are a few dozen other interest groups I could add that are hopelessly lost to the GOP. I don’t see the GOP getting from here to there, it’s too much of a chasm to leap.
The gop does not have to cater to the dixicrats. They can chose to go in a different direction. Easy? no. But after 2012 some started to try to move the party a little, unsuccessfully. It could happen again.
All those old bigots got to die sometime.
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The country was still suffering from post 911 shock syndrome when Kerry ran. But it was beginning to wear off fast. By 2006, Dems took back the Senate.
And by 2020 they will take back the House. Kerry, like Clinton, has earned the respect of the vast majority of Americans for their undying public service and unending hard work on behalf of this nation and its countrymen. They have never cut corners or been slackers.
That counts with voters when your electorate has now been reduced by the GOP to putting in so many long hours at increasingly low wages…with absolutely no respect.
The Republican Party has demonstrated that they care more about building factories and jobs in communist countries than rebuilding the crumbling infrastructure in this country…even their TeaParty base hates them for it. It’s not patriotic to be giving tax incentives to foreign multinationaals…or in keeping with the spirit of 911.
The GOP made a big mistake in attacking the American middle class and blaming them for their own mistreatment like conservatives always do the working poor. We are all the underemployed now. We were not greedy and slackers like the GOP Congress.
We were deliberately screwed by them. Ask any TeaParty protester waving a sign on the street what he/she thinks of the GOP Establishment. I dare any of the Republican presidential candidates to step outside their safe and sanitary political bubble.
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The only thing that makes me feel good about having Wasserman-Schultz as DNC Chair is the knowledge that the RNC Chair is (obvious acronym) Reince Priebus.
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Alright break out the cauldrons, the boiling oil, and the pitchforks, and let’s get this GOP COOK OFF started!
The Dixiecrats own the GOP now. You can’t kick out the ruling majority. Like Eisenhower warned the GOP in the 1950s, you can never cater to the Far Right (just like the military industrial complex)., They are toxic. The billionaires and bigots should have been kept to running only third parties. If you bring them in, they destroy your core.
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Well, yes, that’s true, but technology has really raised the problem exponentially. It has also provided a solution - compactness - and there are states with non-partisan redistricting commissions that work pretty well. California comes to mind. And interestingly, when the gridlock got bad enough, there was sufficient political will to push it through. I don’t know how we do this in states without ballot referenda mechanisms, but it is clearly the way out of this mess.
Teatroll Rosetta Stone: “Yes, we are absolutely desperate enough to abuse our congressional powers to engage in partisan political witch hunts as a 2016 campaign strategy.”
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