Messages posted by: hemlock09

gave andy five stars. nice.

why im voting democrat:

so i can take away your guns
so i can turn your children gay
so i can raise your taxes
so i can take over your property
so i can take away your free speech
so i can let terrorists overrun us
so i can divert all of our resources to stopping global warming, even though its all a farce
so i can slaughter your babies
so i can take businesses into bankruptcy
so i can install liberal judges to help further my socialist agenda

awesome list. i am now emailing this to all the democrats i know. this is going to be our new platform for reelection in 2012!

you're not likely to hear any of the juicy stuff unless you live in a battleground.

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/10/independent-gop.html

that link from abc says it's a $2.5m buy in 3 battleground states. as discussed here before though, the rove playbook is really dependent on the media picking up the ads and showing them at prime time for free. they're not supposed to be big buys, just news-making ads. because of all this white noise, this story is getting buried.

after the first ayers ad the group behind it said they were disappointed with the media for not running with it more. lack of media attention basically killed it.

on a side note, rancho has a point. this is, ironically, good news for obama. this is basically letting him run the clock down while the media is preoccupied. mccain's ad dollars about obama's redistributive interview and the new rev wright ad are not getting prime time news mentions.

between this and the todd thing last week, the mccain campaign has showed that they're clearly not owning the media.

^^ that should say nov 5 coronation speeches, not 2005

i think you're having trouble with the meaning of the word: fact. and probably also the words subjective and objective.

but more to the point, it doesnt matter. i dont care what you think of obama. who the hell are you? and i dont care what some op-ed guy thinks of obama. who the hell is he? unless there's a reason to think that op-ed guy will make the price of obama fluctuate at intrade.

now, if its a dem op-ed going for mccain and its respected enough to affect poll numbers, i care. then it makes a difference. i wouldnt really care what the guy said so much as what likely shift we'd see in the polls. but that's not what you're talking about. it sounds like you're trying to talk people into voting for mccain. i dont get why you'd do that here rather than at huffpo or politico or in the comments section at cnn. there are tons of liberals and indys at cnn who want to talk about who they're voting for.

the reason there are so many pro-obama articles here is the same reason there were so many anti-katrina articles. news is news. obama is way up in the polls and conservative pundits are endorsing him almost daily. that's all news thats going to affect trading. obama is a stock and news that affects the stock is fair game.

here's news: repubs have a new ad that focuses on rev wright. its having trouble getting headlines because stevens just got indicted, mccain asked for him to step down, and palin is so far silent. that's all bad news for mccain because there are only 7 days left, he needs to dominate the news cycles - and the stevens thing, palin's camp fighting publicly with mccain aides over who went to neiman's, and obama's half hour slot are going to make it tough for him. there is that nifty soundbite from obama in 2001 but the press seems to be willing to give him a pass on that because its being used slightly out of context. also, they seem to be knee deep in writing their 2005 coronation speeches.

if im holding mccain im concerned that he's not getting more airtime. what im not doing is caring if he's actually the best guy for the job.

im not trying to set anything. the forum is called "politics & current event markets". there are a number of great forums and comments sections i participate in to bounce ideological arguments off people - this just isn't one of them. according to most of the other people who post here and the context of the forum itself (a forum for political market traders) it seems a poor place for posting slanted op-ed pieces.

posting an op-ed piece in a conversation thread is bad form anyway, but here it seems even more out of place.

are you really on this site and in this forum to debate which candidate should be president vs which candidate will likely be?

i for one am not interested in debating who should be. there are better places for that.

effective at what? this is not a political discussion forum, its a political trading forum. do you not understand the difference?

whats the point of posting a bunch of slanted op-eds here? this is a forum for traders. do you have anything that speaks to a price change one way or the other? outside of these forums i may care who's president, but in here i really just care about my positions. i dont see how all this garbage is going to affect trading.

Delphi wrote:

Makes me wonder if we'll see any other semi-prominent Republicans jump ship to Obama. If you think that the election is a foregone conclusion and you're hoping for a high cabinet/agency position in an administration that's likely to want to make some bipartisan gestures coming out of the block (as I think Obama will), plus you genuinely like the guy (as I gather many Washington people who have dealt with him do)...

Wonder if Chuck Hagel is having second thoughts about not endorsing anyone.

i would argue that chuck hagel gave obama a passive political endorsement. hagel went with obama on his world tour when he knew it would help him against mccain. and obama uses hagel as basically his only example of "reaching across the aisle". its probably too much to ask for hagel to endorse obama explicitly, but he's sure done so passively. he could have endorsed mccain at any time to put a stake in the only real republican relationship obama has, but he never did. that to me is an endorsement. to me, that means theres a strong possibility hagel could have a place in an obama administration. that does two things for obama: it gives him a chance to extend an olive branch and it helps neutralize a very strong repub legislator - helping to mitigate some of the pain of taking biden out of delaware.

ouch.

The Wall Street Journal today rounds up the horde of prominent Republicans jumping ship to Barack Obama. Now one of McCain's actual advisers has switched sides:

Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School, has long been one of the most important conservative thinkers in the United States. Under President Reagan, he served, with great distinction, as Solicitor General of the United States. Since then, he has been prominently associated with several Republican leaders and candidates, most recently John McCain, for whom he expressed his enthusiastic support in January.

This week, Fried announced that he has voted for Obama-Biden by absentee ballot. In his letter to Trevor Potter, the General Counsel to the McCain-Palin campaign, he asked that his name be removed from the several campaign-related committees on which he serves. In that letter, he said that chief among the reasons for his decision "is the choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

GAW838 wrote:

I think MI was the right tactical choice, they just lost the spin war. My problem on CO is that I think it is an essential element of their path to 270, unlike MI.

one of the things that goes largely unreported is the massive local radio ad buys obama's campaign has made. he's apparently ubiquitous in swing states on the radio with negative ads. they feel (probably correctly) that they can keep the negativity mostly under the radar if its on the radio and not tv. the ad he was running relentlessly before mccain pulled out of MI basically said something to the effect of "blah blah blah mccain has 13 cars, 3 of them foreign, blah blah blah". they ran it til the tapes wore out.

its difficult to bet against obama knowing how much more money he has. mccain's got a new negative ad? great, obama has 3. mccain's going to wv? great, obama just sent in 500 paid staffers and opened 20 new field offices. mccain's got a new message? great, obama just bought half hour time slots on every network in prime time right before the election.

and to top it off, the mccain campaign is fighting with the local repubs in florida and virginia to the point where he cant gov crist to show up at a fundraiser and cant get local help for anything. at the end of the day, how much bradley effect do you need to overcome a 3-1 spending advantage and superior campaign organization?

i think if obama wins and has a dem majority, one of the first things they're going to act on is refining the voting process.

you posted an article from orson scott card as an example of the mainstream media? hahahaha

seriously? the same orson scott card whose a known republican donor and essayist?

and the original article by cnn wasnt about the press having an obama media bias. it was about them not covering the biden gaffe as extensively as palin's gaffe. anybody who knows media though recognizes that it doesnt reflect a bias, just a story arc. nobody is covering biden because he's not newsworthy. he doesnt get good press, he doesnt get bad press. palin on the underhand is a media star. everything she says, good or bad, gets covered. the mccain campaign uses that to their advantage relentlessly and then complains when biden's gaffes dont get the same play?

please. the other day the networks cut away from mccain to cover palin's stump speech. she's the story. that's the bias.

thats tortured logic. mccain has a list of associations with known racists and anti-semites a mile long. i mean, i guess we're not supposed to care because they're white - but its the same thing.

rev wright is out there. mccain's not bringing it up again because that's not the strategy that works. see, the strategy is that you drop a meme and the press runs with it. thats how they got kerry with swiftboating. they tried to do that this time with ayers but the press dropped the ball. mostly because it was covered extensively in the primary. stephanopolous asked obama about ayers directly in the primary debate. why would the press cover it more than that? its a non issue.

same thing with wright. there was a national referendum on wright. all the youtube videos are out there for anybody to see. obama was asked about it extensively. wright gave a whole bunch of interviews. obama gave a big speech, then it died down. its not going to play a significant role for two reasons:

1. mccain's campaign cant really push the story. that cant be a core message of a campaign. it would kill his image. he needs a third party group to bring it up, just like they did with ayers, just like they did with swiftboating. but that's not going to happen because the third party groups arent getting the funds they thought they would. the combination of mccain running an inept campaign, the financial crisis hitting big donors where it hurts, and mccain's losing momentum means donors like t.boone pickens (who funded the swiftboating campaign) just arent willing to throw good money after bad.

2. its old news. the only news org that can sell airtime around wright is fox. msnbc and cnn are where independents live and they dont care. they heard about it during the primary. millions of them went to youtube and saw it for themselves. then they heard obama asked about it in interviews and during the clinton debates. they were overwhelmed with it. now you think they want to hear about it again? or you think there are still people who arent familiar with it? what do you mean by "bring it up?" its up. people are still talking about it.