Negative Space: presidential elections
- 2012 Campaign Issues; Republicans urge Obama to act on gasoline prices
- New York Times criticizes Obama, airs Republican grievances over gas prices: “Is President Obama’s policy causing an inflationary spiral? Gas prices are a pocketbook issue, and polls show they are a concern across the country, with many saying gas prices have caused a financial hardship and some even calling it a crisis.”
- Big lizards give advice to John McCain
- The lizard brain is trying to help John McCain, and I think he’d do well to listen.
- Big Lizards stomp media misdirection
- Dafydd over at Big Lizards is really on a roll. If you haven’t added them to your RSS feed, you should.
- Blaming the financial crisis on the reformers
- Change, hope, and unmitigated gall. McCain, Bush, and Palin were right about Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac. Now can we start listening to them on social security?
- Branchflower’s misleading headlines
- The Branchflower investigation appears deliberately misleading so as to provide salacious headlines. It’s a data dump in a non-searchable format pushing conclusions that don’t make sense.
- Don’t wait—capitulate
- The ACLU’s doomed campaign against telecom immunity is a classic example of why you have to be willing to vote for Nobody if you want to be taken seriously in politics.
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972
- This is a powerful look at the 1972 presidential campaigns, well worth reading, and recommended for anyone interested in a turning point in the Democratic Party.
- Fighting for the American Dream
- Joe the Plumber writes about his experiences at the center of one of the most vicious smear campaigns in recent memory.
- Fred Thompson vs. Barack Obama
- What would a good election campaign be like? Is it possible to have an election season focussed on issues and principles? I think it is, and I think it will depend on which candidates we support during the primaries.
- Fred Thompson’s decision to withdraw
- If we continue to treat presidential elections as horseraces, we’re going to create a system that selects sociopaths for president.
- The Helter Skelter Media
- Joe the Plumber and the vengeance of the media.
- Hillary Clinton’s qualifications for president
- Charisma, experience, and principle: Two out of three ain’t bad, but zero out of three requires a lot of money and organization to overcome.
- A horse chestnut or a newspaper or a news show?
- Abraham Lincoln once famously asked whether a horse chestnut or a chestnut horse are the same thing. The mainstream media have started dropping a whole lot of horse chestnuts over Sarah Palin. It’s hard to imagine this is anything but bias, but it could be abject stupidity.
- If I were running for president…
- I’d make heavy use of short videos, and I’d record everything I did with the media.
- Is Iowa the end of the game, or the beginning?
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It depends on whether your job is to win, or to guess the winner.
- Kerry dumb, Bush smarter
- Coming up to debates, Kerry team portrays Bush as competent.
- Lord, thy will is hard
- We all fulfill God’s will. From the mightiest to the lowliest, we all are a part in God’s plan. Ask any Christian, and they’ll tell you that they believe this. Get down to the specifics, however, and you’ve touched on a central, and difficult, part of Christian faith.
- McCain sees the light: campaign finance reform dead
- Now, will he introduce bills to repeal those laws?
- McCain’s success is not surprising
- Is McCain’s success really a surprise given the available candidates? I don’t think so. Ditto for Huckabee. Their success may be simply that voters are still paying attention to the issues. Objectively speaking, McCain is a stronger conservative candidate than Giuliani and Romney.
- Moving on to John McCain
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The more I learn about John McCain the more I want to vote for him.
- Nobody for President Anti-Apathy Movement
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Feel like you got nobody to vote for? Fine: vote for Nobody.
- Nobody in 2000
- If you want to win in this election, vote for Nobody.
- Nobody Isn’t Partisan
- Partisanship always trumps principle, but this year is worse than any I can recall. If Nobody were on the ballot, he’d have a good chance of winning. With the election as close as any in recent years, Nobody might still garner a majority.
- Nobody Likes the Electoral System
- The “winner-takes-all” electoral system is an integral part of the United States system of checks and balances, balancing the rights of regional minorities against the power of national majorities.
- Nothing to fear but a brokered convention
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The reason someone smart would want a brokered convention is that it’s exciting, and it means media coverage, and even more, it means unfiltered media coverage.
- Obama campaign skirts campaign finance law
- I expected the New York Times to be silent on the illegal donations that the Obama 2008 campaign encourages. I should have known better: they’re trying to cover for the campaign. But the bigger issue is that laws that don’t get enforced are counterproductive; they encourage dishonesty and lawlessness.
- President Obama defeats Math Roundly
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President Obama edged out a two percent victory over Math on Tuesday night, promises perpetual peace, abundance for all.
- A proven reformer
- If one thing exemplifies the difference between the two main campaigns, it’s their encouragement of anonymous donors.
- Russ Feingold: Progressives United Against Voter Influence
- May 31: For Senator Russ Feingold, Wisconsin was a wake-up call. For the rest of us, it was the 2008 presidential election.
- Seattle Democrats school Floridians
- Florida Republican fears play out in King County, Washington.
- Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
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John Fund’s Stealing Elections is a concise, easy-to-read description of just how much of a disaster is looming toward us when vote fraud finally catches up to a major election—as may already have happened in places like Florida.
- Substantive answers cause misquotes
- Newspapers really just don’t like substantive answers. If you try to give one, they’ll just rewrite the question and attribute it to you.
- Super-president
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The best president we can have is not a cartoon character.
- Televised debates discourage intelligent discussion
- Debates are a spectacle designed to trivialize the issues facing the community. And they are counter-productive because they specifically select for candidates who bullshit their way through the decision-making process rather than act deliberately and responsibly.
- These are the lessons that we learn
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Some people want to serve, some just want to be president. It’s somewhat pointless to complain about the latter given the way we treat the former.
- Vote on performance, not promises
- If you’re disappointed that President Obama is the same wheeler-dealer he was when he was a Senator, take it as a lesson for future elections: vote performance and record, not promises.
- What voters want
- An around-the-blog summary of reactions to Fred Thompson’s type-A president remarks. Are we designing the presidential elections to select kooks?
- Your candidate is unelectable and stupid
- Unelectable and stupid is no way to go through life, son.
More Information
- Memebusters! The Osama Bin Laden Edition
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“Genes carry hereditary information. MEMES carry cultural information. Problem is, many memes are defective—they’re based on falsehoods. We used to have an immune system—called the ‘press’—that caught errors. Now the ‘press’ generates most of the falsehoods themselves.”
- Going Rogue: An American Life• (hardcover)
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When I heard that Palin was writing a book, I hoped it would be at least as much about her experiences in the campaign as a general autobiography. Sounds like that’s true. I’m looking forward to the Amazon preview. (Sarah Palin)
- Credit-card experts explain the extent of Obama’s deception
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“The value of ignoring the AVS responses is that multiple invalid transactions may be made without fear of being rejected by the authorization systems. This means that the real owner of the credit card account is willing to allow multiple transactions to be made on the account using different names and addresses that under normal conditions would be denied.”
- Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail 1972•
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A combination of Thompson’s eagle-eyed reporting and his Burroughs-like ramblings, this book is an incredibly fascinating read, especially if you’re a fan of political thrillers or political history.
