Job Discussion Forums

[Mr. Kalgukshi]

Future off-topic postings will be deleted and members sanctioned, as appropriate.

It is also more than highly probable that the thread will no longer be available.

[johnslat]

Well, let's try to get this back on track.

OK, that's settled. The Republicans liked Ryan, the Democrats liked Biden. But it's the uncommitted voters who REALLY matter now.

"Poll: Biden takes debate over Ryan, uncommitted voters say

Fifty percent of uncommitted voters who tuned into Thursday night's vice presidential debate in Danville, Ky., said they see Vice President Joe Biden as the winner over Mitt Romney's GOP running mate Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., according to an instant poll taken by CBS News.

Of the 431 polled immediately following the debate, 31 percent deemed Ryan the winner, and 19 percent said they felt it was a tie. Party-wise it's a switch from last week's presidential debate, which uncommitted voters handed easily to Romney over President Obama.

Both Biden and Ryan gained ground on relatability and knowledge. The percentage of voters who say they believe they can relate to Biden spiked from 34 percent before the debate to 55 percent; 48 percent think Ryan is relatable, up from 31 percent before the debate. Meanwhile, after watching the two candidates debate, 85 percent of those polled think Biden is knowledgeable about the issues; 75 percent say that about Ryan.

Ryan, though, faced a loss among voters' opinions of which candidate would be an effective president, if necessary. Before the debate, he led Biden 45 percent to 39 percent; after the debate, 56 percent of those polled said Biden would be an effective president, with fewer - 49 percent--saying the same about Ryan.

The "uncommitted voters" who participated in this poll are either undecided or have chosen a candidate but say they could still change their minds. They are less likely than voters overall to identify with either of the two major political parties: 58 percent call themselves independents, 17 percent identify as Republicans, and 25 percent say they are Democrats.

This CBS News poll was conducted online using GfK's web-enabled KnowledgePanel?, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 431 uncommitted voters who have agreed to watch the debate. Uncommitted voters are those who don't yet know who they will vote for, or who have chosen a candidate but may still change their minds.

GfK's KnowledgePanel participants are initially chosen scientifically by a random selection of telephone numbers and residential addresses. Persons in selected households are then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in the web-enabled KnowledgePanel?. For those who agree to participate, but do not already have Internet access, GfK provides at no cost a laptop and ISP connection.

This is a scientifically representative poll of uncommitted voters' reaction to the presidential debate. The margin of sampling error could be plus or minus 5 percentage points for results based on the entire sample."

And he won BIG - 50% to 31%

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57531059/poll-biden-takes-debate-over-ryan-uncommitted-voters-say/?fb_action_ids=4227170129151&fb_action_types=og.recommends&fb_ref=fbrecT&fb_source=aggregation&fb_aggregation_id=288381481237582

[Captain_Fil]

I didn't really watch the VP debate. I heard it was basically a draw. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2012/10/11/cnn-poll-on-debate-winner-ryan-48-biden-44/?hpt=hp_t2

In the end, VP debates don't really matter that much. (Think Quayle.)

But now the pressure is on the President. If Obama fails the next two debates (looking timid, nervous or desperate), he will be toast.

Did anyone else see the VP debate last night?

I was watching the season premiere of The Vampire Diaries. (Better than Twilight and just as good as True Blood.)

[cairanya]

I've been following things by Klein and Silver, and I think Silver nailed it -- it's a hold for Biden. More impressively, his foot-in-mouth disease is cured!

Personally, I think the poor taste award goes to Ryan for the car accident remark. I don't even know where to start with that one.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/10/12/wonkbook-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-vp-debate/

[johnslat]

Dear Captain_Fil,

Regarding your source:

"CNN

CNN included this disclaimer, which places the poll in a reliability category similar to all those online polls in which anyone can vote:

A CNN/ORC International post-debate poll shows that 48% of likely voters think Paul Ryan won the vice-presidential debate, while 44% think Joe Biden won. SPECIAL NOTE OF CAUTION #1: This poll does not and cannot reflect the views of all Americans. It only represents the views of people who watched the debate. SPECIAL NOTE OF CAUTION #2: The sample of debate-watchers in this poll were 31% Democratic and 33% Republican. That indicates that the sample of debate watchers is about eight points more Republican than an average CNN poll of all Americans, so the respondents were more Republican than the general public. [emphasis added]"

Regards,
John

[choudoufu]

"The CNN poll was conducted by ORC International, with 381 registered
voters nationwide who watched the debate questioned by telephone."

"This CBS News poll was conducted online using GfK's web-enabled KnowledgePanel?, a probability-based panel designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The poll was conducted among a nationwide random sample of 431 uncommitted voters..."

i'm not a rockit scientist, but it seems these are awfully small samples.
shouldn't these news organizations have more than one intern available
to make phone calls?

[johnslat]

Well, I agree - but I suspect a few other posters on this thread won't

"Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The profound ignorance Ryan displayed was so terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all.

For the second time in as many presidential elections, Joseph Biden got to debate a young, attractive Republican candidate who was demonstrably less qualified to to be president than I am to be chairman of the World Bank. Joseph Biden is a very lucky man. The Great Political Matchmaker in the Sky keeps handing him people who are trying � and failing � to fight above their weight class, and he keeps blowing through what can now legitimately be called the Bum of the Quadrennium Club.

There is a deeply held Beltway myth of Paul Ryan, Man of Big Ideas, and it dies hard. But, if there is a just god in the universe, on Thursday night, it died a bloody death, was hurled into a pit, doused with quicklime, buried without ceremony, and the ground above it salted and strewn with garlic so that it never rises again. On foreign policy, Ryan occasionally rose, gasping, to the level of obvious neophyte. (He was more lost in Afghanistan than the Russian army ever was.) On domestic policy, his alleged wheelhouse, he was vague, untruthful, and he walked right into a haymaker he should have seen coming from a mile off, when he started bloviating about Biden's role in the "failed" stimulus program, only to have Biden slap him around with Ryan's own requests for stimulus money for his home district back in Wisconsin. He also made it quite clear that a Romney-Ryan White House will do everything it can to eliminate a woman's right to choose. This should make for some fine television commercials over the next few weeks.

(A brief note here about Martha Raddatz, who's an old pal from our baby journo days in Boston. She did a fine job holding feet to the fire until her last three questions. She asked the two men to define their Catholicism only through the issue of abortion, which is not only insulting, but also limited a more interesting line of inquiry, given the open opposition of the Catholic bishops to the zombie-eyed granny-starving that is the hallmark of Ryan's career. And that closing if-you-were-a-tree question was simply embarrassing.)

Moreover, the battering that Biden gave Ryan brought something into sharp relief that the Republican party has been fudging ever since Romney put the zombie-eyed granny-starver on the ticket � that, for his entire political career up to that point, on critical economic issues, Paul Ryan was an extremist even by the standards of the modern Republican party, which are considerably high indeed. He was for full privatization of Social Security. He was for the absolute elimination of the defined-benefit Medicare and Medicaid programs. Since being selected, it has become clear that the Romney people have forced him to soften these positions. (His stance on Medicare, for example, has evolved from Kill It Now to Arrange for Its Slow Death Later.) On Thursday night, Biden dragged out the old Paul Ryan � and, I would argue, the real Paul Ryan � and put him on display, and he made the new Paul Ryan own him. For one brief moment, he almost got Ryan to commit to Social Security privatization again. You could hear the screams from Romney headquarters all the way up the Charles to where I was watching.

Ryan got hit on the stimulus. He looked ridiculous trying to defend his refusal to specify what "loopholes" he and Romney plan to close to make the magic arithmetic in their tax plan work; Raddatz treed him completely on the mortgage-interest deduction, on the elimination of which neither Ryan nor his running mate will commit to a position. He looked even more ridiculous when Biden started pounding him on his career-long quest to end Medicare and throw old people onto the tender mercies of large insurance companies. Biden kept saying "vouchers" until Ryan, at one point, said, "It's not a voucher. A voucher is a check you get in your mailbox."

Wait. So if Paul Ryan gets his way, and Medicare as we know it gets eviscerated in favor of a pot full of offal on which Paul Ryan has slapped a label reading "Medicare," and my inadequate health-insurance allowance comes by e-mail, then it's not a "voucher" because it wasn't a check I got in the mail? And this is the issue on which Paul Ryan is supposed to be Genius on roller skates. This was humiliating enough, but when they started talking about war and peace, specifically in Afghanistan, Ryan looked like a toddler trying to cross the Hindu Kush.

He stammered. He vanished into his syntax. He gave Biden the chance to ask him if he preferred that American soldiers carry the fighting in the worst parts of the country rather than Afghan troops, a devastating comeback for which Ryan had no answer. He kept rambling about maintaining the country's "credibility" until, if you closed your eyes, he started to sound like Robert McNamara in 1965. And when Raddatz asked him, deftly, what would be worse, another war in the Middle East or Iran with a nuclear bomb, he leaped in precipitously with the latter, while about 75 percent of the country, including the two other people on stage with him, looked at Ryan as though he'd lost his mind. He did, however, demonstrate a certain talent for pronouncing long foreign words that his briefers had taught him on Tuesday. Also, he explained winter.

For years, Paul Ryan has been the shining champion of some really terrible ideas, and of a dystopian vision of the political commonwealth in which the poor starve and the elderly die ghastly, impoverished deaths, while all the essential elements of a permanent American oligarchy were put in place. This has garnered him loving notices from a lot of people who should have known better. The ideas he could explain were bad enough, but the profound ignorance he displayed on Thursday night on a number of important questions, including when and where the United States might wind up going to war next, and his blithe dismissal of any demand that he be specific about where he and his running mate are planning to take the country generally, was so positively terrifying that it calls into question Romney's judgment for putting this unqualified greenhorn on the ticket at all. Joe Biden laughed at him? Of course, he did. The only other option was to hand him a participation ribbon and take him to Burger King for lunch.

You know what's the difference between Sarah Palin and Paul Ryan?

Lipstick."

Read more: http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/paul-ryan-debate-joe-biden-13626962#ixzz29CMD3qN2

Regards,
John

[Captain_Fil]

Dear John,

Some polls show Biden won. Other polls show Ryan winning.
http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/vice-president-debate-poll-numbers-are-in-ryan-beat-biden-in-all-4-pollscnn-nbc-cnbc-and-a/question-3239141/

Ultimately, the VP debate does not really matter. (Remember Quayle?)

If Obama flounders in the next two debates, the election is over.

You will have to get used to saying, "President Romney" for the next four years.

Regards,
CF

[EFLeducator]

[johnslat]

Dear EFLeducator,

Time to wake up .

No, sorry - not yet. You have about another twenty-four days to indulge in your dreams.

But I'm sorry to say you're going to have a rude awakening.

Regards,
John

[johnslat]

Dear Captain_Fil,

I'm glad to see that you get your data from unbiased sources:

"Sodahead is a an opinion/polling site owned by former Myspace VP of operations, Jason Feffer. Wanna share your theory about how the President is actually from the planet Gleebor? Sodahead may be for you!

Read more: Sodahead | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/funny-2905-sodahead/#ixzz29DW6Hhxc


"In case you�ve forgotten, your president is: COMMIE OBAMA�Radical Communist, Islamic Terrorist-Supporting, POTUS Usurper. That�s from Commieblaster.com. It can also be found on Giveusliberty.com, Sodahead.com, and Teaparty.org. If you�re wondering who gives the orders, a headline across from it that says, Obama�s Boss� Boss? Vladimir Putin, with no actual article. Headlines below announce Obama�s Not Kenyan, He�s KGB, Poland Shaken by Soviet Agent Obama�s Words, and USURPER OBAMA, SOVIET AGENT."

http://www.chronogram.com/issue/2012/8/News+%26+Politics/The-UN-is-Coming-for-your-Guns

Can't get more "fair and balanced" that that .

Regards,
John

[choudoufu]

i received my early voting/absentee ballot this morning.

i can't see voting for either of the two major party candidates.
they're both evil. obama is assassinating us citizens without trial
(which romney would continue), and romney seems smitten with
bibi, so look for bombing runs over tehran to commence soon.

ron paul is out, although a write-in campaign is still being run
independently. not that it matters....in most states write-in
candidates are not permitted electors.

gary johnson is on 47 state ballots. he doesn't stand a chance and
would only take votes from romney. however, 5% would guarantee
independant party on all ballots in 2016.

write in mickey mouse? ahmadinajad? putin? none of the above?

why vote at all, even with a 'protest' write-in? voting implies
acceptance of the system.

jinkies! maybe i'll take my ballot to class monday. we can discuss
the 'merkan political system, and i'll auction off the ballot at the
end of class........

[cairanya]

[Captain_Fil]

[johnslat]

And what could be more "fair and balanced" than Fox News?

"Fox News Turns on Romney and Criticizes His Impossible Tax Cut Math

Fox News Sunday�s Chris Wallace turned on the Romney campaign today, called out their bogus 6 studies statistic and criticized their tax cut math that doesn�t add up.

WALLACE: All right, let�s talk about what David Axelrod brought up in the question of taxes. In the vice presidential debate, Paul Ryan, once again, got roughed up for failing to explain how you�re going to pay for the 20% cut in tax rates by limiting deductions. Let�s take a look. Here it is.

RYAN: We want to work with congress on how best to achieve this, that means successful. What we are saying, lower tax rates 20%, start with the wealthy, work with congress to do it.

WALLACE: Ryan is saying, we don�t want to get hemmed in. Let�s leave it to negotiations with congress to get into the details. Here�s my question. Why is it all right to tell voters about the candy � hey, everybody is going to get a 20% tax cut, cut in their tax rates, but let�s not tell them about the spinach, which is you�re going to lose some deductions?

GILLESPIE: We have talked about losing deductions�

WALLACE: But you haven�t given specifics.

GILLESPIE: Well, because Chris, in a campaign environment, to start negotiating in a campaign environment you�re going to lock in republicans, you�re going to lock in democrats�

WALLACE: But you locked them in on the 20% tax rate.

GILLESPIE: I think people understand that that is a broad principle, that that tax rate needs to come down and we need to broaden the base. That is the principle, the principle is also that we are not going to change the share of taxes paid by upper income earners, and we�re going to give tax relief to the middle class and it�s going to be deficit neutral. You can do all of those things and have people understand that this election was about this and we need this kind of pro-growth tax reform agenda. And, then work out the details in the same way, by the way, Ronald Reagan did with Tip O�Neill with working across the aisle. Governor Romney has a proven record of being able to work across this aisle.

WALLACE: But you�re not explaining � because there are a lot of question from independent people � how do you pay for it? And you refuse say how you�re going to pay for it.

GILLESPIE: What we have said is that we are going to pay for it with these, by limiting deductions and loopholes � and, by the way, making sure for the middle class, that protecting the home mortgage deduction and other important deductions for them, but at the high end you would eliminate deductions and, you know, a lot of special interest loopholes that would allow you to bring down the rate 20%. Six different studies have said this is entirely doable.

WALLACE: Those are questionable, some of them are blogs, some of them are from the AEI, which is hardly an independent group.

GILLESPIE: These are very credible sources�

WALLACE: One of them is from a guy who is � from a blog from a guy who was a top advisor to George W. Bush. These are hardly nonpartisan studies.

GILLESPIE: Well, Chris, I think if you look at Harvard an AEI and other studies, they are very credible sources for economic analysis.

WALLACE: You wouldn�t say that AEI is a conservative think tank?

GILLESPIE: I would say it is a right-leaning think tank. That doesn�t make it not credible.

WALLACE: Chris: It doesn�t make it nonpartisan.

GILLESPIE: It does make it nonpartisan. It�s not a partisan organization, I can tell you, there have been many instances where there have been things that AEI has come out with and said, that I didn�t find to be necessarily helpful to the Republican Party.

Fox News has been complaining about the fact that Romney won�t give them specifics since the general election campaign started, but Chris Wallace�s tough stance on Ed Gillespie shows how exasperated they have become with Romney.

What the Romney campaign doesn�t get is that Fox News is on their side, and would spin any details they gave them in a way that would help the Romney campaign. Romney could announce that he is going pay for his tax cut by cutting all food assistance to children and seniors, get rid of Head Start, and he is will be charging everybody $25 a year for the right to use the words United States and Fox News would still spin it in his favor.

It was also a bit surreal to see Chris Wallace do what most of the supposedly �neutral� mainstream media won�t do, by calling out Romney�s 6 studies statistic as completely bogus.

The reality is that Roger Ailes and Fox News see Romney�s lack of details as one of his major weaknesses. They know it could cost him the election. They are trying their best to help Romney out, but the Republican nominee�s campaign is either too paranoid or stupid to accept their assistance.

It is looking like the real reason why Mitt Romney won�t give the details about his tax plan is because there aren�t any. Romney might actually be telling the truth when he states that he is going to figure it out later with the Congress, but figuring it out later with the Congress is also political code for, �we�re not going to pay for this,� and that is a truth that the Romney campaign desperately does not want to admit.

The Fox News/Romney marriage should never be described as good. Much like most of the right, they are supporting Romney because he is the nominee. Chris Wallace�s questioning of Gillespie was more proof that Mitt Romney doesn�t trust Fox News, and Fox News doesn�t trust Mitt Romney."

http://www.politicususa.com/fox-news-tax-cut-math.html

Regards,
John