I am beginning to become scared that Romney/Ryan will win. Can smart people please post here and say reassuring things to convince me that he won't?

when the robot tells u to vote u have to or it will shoot u with lasers

"HEY JEWS" -Mamet

http://www.jewishjournal.com/opinion/article/the_final_obama_romney_showdown_a_note_to_a_stiff_necked_people

the diminution in employment and income will decrease their opportunity to marry

Oh right, he wrote Oleanna. Makes perfect sense now.

in case anyone isn't paying attention, David Mamet's late career has been as a reactionary zionist

(the existence of reactionary zionists would, of course, have left midcentury labor zionists totally dumbfounded)

david mamet makes reactionary zionist look bad

lol @ mamet. that is incredibly poorly written for a guy with so many awards:

Will you explain (as you have observed) that a large part of their incomes will be used to fund programs that they may find immoral, wasteful and/or indeed absurd? And that the bulk of their taxes go to no programs at all, but merely service the debt you entailed on them?

Morbs beleives in contrarianism.

anyone who makes this accuz and isn't a mindreader needs to stfu

I find the constant "yer into feeling SUPERIOR" sneer thrown at minor-party voters weird when I am regularly told by gung-ho Dem voters that I am a CHILD for 'throwing my vote away.' (In NY, of all places.)

one can be smug and foolish

constant "yer into feeling SUPERIOR" sneer thrown at you /= constant "yer into feeling SUPERIOR" sneer thrown at minor-party voters

get over yrself

don't feel sorry for the guy who pops into threads to throw out snide remarks about our moral failings and then plays the victim

boo hoo, woe is me

fuck off y'all

like sand through the hourglass... so are the days of our lives

Morbs we need to hug this out

it's a morbius strip (djp NO!)

so wait, someone just told me that mittens paid no taxes for 10 years per a new Bloomberg story, and I can find neither hide nor hair of it on the internetz. is it just being ignored?

It was linked yesterday but nobody really cares anymore

“An Open Letter to Nonvoters on the Left” by Ari Feld

Dear friends,

Representative democracy is not ideal. The Electoral College is faulty. The two party system stymies political innovation. Both Republicans and Democrats cozy up with dubious sources of funding. You are right to condemn the disingenuousness of politics— the unremitting hedging and double-talk, the pandering and outright silliness of both parties. You are wrong to believe that participation in electoral democracy legitimizes a hopelessly flawed system. Despite everything, voting remains the most powerful non-violent method of effective political action.

Voters elect the president. The president appoints Supreme Court justices and a host of other judges. Voters elect state and national representatives. These people work in concert (or conflict), with or without your permission, to arbitrate legal reality. Whether you like it or not, we are all subjects to their decisions. To say otherwise is foolish. To say that Democrats and Republicans pursue comparable domestic policies is a departure from reason. To say elections don’t affect you is, at best, to delude yourself. At worst, it disavows other people’s civil rights and empowers the most reactionary and destructive forces in our society.

Which political party advances women’s and minorities’ rights, gay rights, the rights of the poor, and sounder drug and environmental policies? In general, who does more of that, Democrats or Republicans? In the broadest strokes possible, which of these parties and their judicial appointees will enact and uphold laws to improve and protect the lives of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised citizens?

Your abstention facilitates Republican victories. I understand that you abstainers have personal convictions that make it difficult for you to vote for the Democrats. You certainly have a right to your conscience. Indeed, individual rights and freedoms are a cornerstone of our democracy. However, you take these precepts too far by elevating your desire to simply express them (by not voting) over seeking their full realization for all Americans. In other words, expressing your conscience comes at the expense of women’s access to safe, effective family planning services. Your conscience gets in the way of equal marriage rights for all. Your conscience has far less to struggle with than single mothers denied vital social services by Republican policies. Your conscience is of no avail to citizens imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses. Your conscience is merely self-righteous.

Self-righteousness disguised as conscience or personal conviction is the worst kind of American individualism. There are convictions and then there is trenchant unwillingness to acknowledge any reality beyond the frontiers of your own experience or circumstance. That is solipsism, not a conviction. Citizens of a democracy have a responsibility to share struggles that are not their own. This admonishment applies equally to those of you who would “vote your conscience” by supporting unelectable independents. Until you have succeeded in implementing instant run-off voting in your community, or unless this nation becomes a parliamentary democracy, someone will be elected and it won’t be your candidate. Compromise is the reality of politics, except in totalitarian states.

Progressive and radical citizens who refuse to compromise elicit comparison with the Tea Party and their debt-limit intransigence last year. Their refusal exemplifies the most anti-intellectual strain of American politics. But to say that I am arguing for all of us on the left to fall in with a party line is to utterly miss the point: we need votes not for the sake of Obama and the Democrats but for the sake of the most vulnerable people— women, children and the elderly—who will benefit from their policies.

Voters defer to reality. We shape it. We criticize and castigate. We honor those who are maimed and killed fighting for this right. We remember that not so long ago women and African-Americans in this country struggled in this way. Nonvoters must certainly remember such history as well. Perhaps today’s struggles seem less dire. Perhaps current candidates fail to excite you.

Make no mistake, the Democrats may be nothing to get excited about this year. Who cares if you’re excited? Your excitement is of great concern to no one (except possibly to you, which in itself is a luxury). The unemployed, the marginalized and unprivileged know that reality dictates acting for reasons other than excitement. Least-worst choices are all we have for the moment. There is no time to transform America during a presidential election. To say it another way, there is no time to re-make America in your own image this year. That’s what every other year is for. Realistically, though, all I hope for is a defense and perhaps a gradual advance of progressive domestic policy. It seems that only non-voters have lower aspirations.

Indeed, what are the politics of inaction? What do you hope to rectify with your power of inertia? What is the message of civil discourse that says nothing at the national level? Before you opt out, think about what’s at stake. And remember your awesome power: nonvoters make up a greater part of the potential electorate than either Democrats or Republicans and almost as much as both of them combined. If you persist in your abstention, you persist in subservience to a ruling elite: voters.

Sincerely,

Ari Feld

why does Ari Feld like killing children?

OK, I'm feeling pretty confident that Obama has a real lead in Ohio, but this stuff is making me feel extremely nervous:

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/ohio_republicans_sneak_risky_software_onto_voting_machines/

y'know, I love the term "to service debt". it makes it sound like our national debt is regularly receiving blowjobs

it is, didn't you know?

http://www.macrobusiness.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Happy-Wen-Jiabao.jpeg
you want happy ending?

OK, I'm feeling pretty confident that Obama has a real lead in Ohio, but this stuff is making me feel extremely nervous:

http://www.salon.com/2012/11/05/ohio_republicans_sneak_risky_software_onto_voting_machines/

Just gotta hope the vote fraud is less than a percent or two I guess, US Politics 2012

what happens if the exit polls show something completely different than the official results?

i am not swayed by Ari Feld

that shit makes me nervous as hell, but i'd hope that a US president is not without recourse if it even remotely looks like the outcome of his re-election was tampered with

re: ohio voting machines

response to the ohio voting software stuff

http://www.theawl.com/2012/11/the-truth-about-voting-machines

I'm cautiously reassured

Ok we can go back to worrying about the provisional ballot thing

I'd like to think no entity has the actual power/balls to successfully tamper with election results

figure that every time out there's some mercenary who dumps a couple hundred dem ballots in the trash and tbh it's probably balanced out by another mercenary doing the same to repub ballots.

big conspiracies don't usually work out so good because people are generally incompetent

saw that shit happen on battlestar galactica xp

Note that all of the big spikes on 538 are to the right of 288 = Obama most likely won't need it. Which will be handy, because it could be a long time before that state is actually settled.

This One Weird Old Trick To Get People To Vote

current first GIS hit for "fancy words for drinking"
http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2012/10/03/rendered/54ee622a09e4f3db08324ce3a6ca8bb4_400x280.jpg

smh at that Mamet piece. It's like he's had a head injury. It's not that he's a conservative, it's that he's such a moron about it.

he has dennis miller disease

hes so half ass abt it, like if youre not willing to put some effort in why bother

its not like he cant think and write good if he tries

what happens if the exit polls show something completely different than the official results?
― Moodles, Monday, November 5, 2012 4:03 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Then you know there were shenanigans, correct? Isn't that what happened to Kerry in '04 in Ohio?

constant "yer into feeling SUPERIOR" sneer thrown at you /= constant "yer into feeling SUPERIOR" sneer thrown at minor-party voters

<3 you balls but this is bullshit, sneering condescension toward minor-party voters is pretty consistent among Democrats. Also the "you want happy ending" line a couple posts later is a li'l racist maybe don't perpetuate bogus-ass Asian stereotype "hilarious" accent bullshit? cool thanks

<3 you balls, butt,

lol

this is bullshit, sneering condescension toward minor-party voters is pretty consistent among Democrats.

and annoyance with morbz is pretty consistent on ilx, outside of political threads

the democratic party is hardly the first thing i knew morbz felt superior to

There ought to be a poll.