Who will you vote for?
 

Now that it's close to the election, and early voting is happening in some states, everyone should be pretty well locked in.

Here's the Presidential ballot for 2012. Choose your candidate. Secret ballot, names do not show.

I like Gary Johnson. I saw a YouTube of him body surfing through his crowd at a campaign stop the other day.

Has it been your ambition to own a barber shop?....or what?

Hey, do you know of any good restaurants in Austin, Texas? Also, I'm looking for my winter coats. Do you know where I stored them in my attic?

spray!!!!



f,r&l-a!!





Will you kindly cut it with the kumquatery??

snort!

You,sir, are going to make Touch Of Grey Matter remember something!

I wanted to confirm that you are Morty/Clutch. Too many people posting under fake-fake names instead of real-fake names. Things got crazy when Riot allowed her gimp to get near her computer.

No big deal, although I hope you meant Clyde and not Clutch.


The way you said what you did really was a rib cracker regardless of why.Fine work.

The only reason I stopped back in was because one person made me do this thing.So I did and it was to be here just long enough to get that warm fuzzy from all one more time.

I'll be gone again before midnight,on my own or because of another reason.


Thanks so much, you've always been fun and hear the music well.

none of the above.

we can do better than these clowns.

i like the guy who plays romney on SNL.

You need to stop in more often. Ri(di)ot doesn't know how to handle you.

Your response to Touched in the Head's request for travel recommendations from complete strangers was a classic.

more rolling and laughing!!!!


snarf!





Oh now look what you have done. You made me laugh too much and now I can't do my planned last post....which is probably a good thing.

So thanks....oh,let TouchedInTheHead (!!) know that her wool thongs are tucked in her diary which has gone without an entry for 12 years because she forgot not only where she put it, but that it is hers in the first place.


Have fun ,dewd!!

Hey, Joey: did you know that crib notes are not allowed at the debates, but Romney brought and used some? It's on the video. He lies, and he cheats :D

Keep talking about teleprompters when you have Romney, who has proven he can't even talk in public without disaster, the past year. It's funny.

By the way: if Obama is the "worse president ever", why don't you guys ever talk factually about his policies, rather than repeating the 5-year-old memes of teleprompters? Muslims? Birth Certificates? Rev. Wright? Ayers? Soros?

Well, other than the 5 years of me being pretty consistent in the way I've always "handled" Morty ;)

Sometimes I really wonder if some Derby Trail members actually read Derby Trail .... ?

Well....they do

And that is the #1 reason you will never be a serious contender for junior ombudsman.

If there is no crack in your pipe, there should be.

Currently (at 7:20am EDT):

12 votes for Obama
13 votes for Romney
and
3 votes for Johnson

I hope those so inclined will see that a vote for Johnson is basically a vote for Obama. In other words the vote for the admittedly disadvantaged third party under our electoral system only raises the probability that the candidate you like the least (Obama even if you are Libertarian) will win.

I actually dislike Romney and Obama equally. I don't believe the Republican Party is conservative anymore, and I have disgust for their pandering to the religious right.

To me, Obama has been no different than Bush. I dont believe Romney will be any different than Bush. You guys are voting for the same man.

I'll stick with voting 3rd party.. as nothing will ever change unless the American people demand change.

I respect your principles - however the math of it shows you will be aiding Obama in re-election. Just keep that in mind. If that's OK with you, good. You should be aware of both your intention and the likely effect of your decision.

When did you become the father of the board?

Never said I was. Did what I said not make logical sense?

i suppose you think that saying it enough times will make it so.

unless a third party candidate garners enough votes to get electoral votes in his column, the only impact is on the overall popular vote. altho ross perot received 19% of the popular vote, thus keeping clinton from potentially receiving more than 50% of the vote, he received no electoral votes.

Are you kidding?

You are correct of course about the electoral vote, but obviously the vote that did not go to which candidate has a chance to win that is still more favorable to the third-party voter than the Democrat does have an impact.

Count the votes on the top of this page. If the Johnson votes went to Romney instead, doesn't the result become clearer? It is much more likely that the third-party voter will lose the election for Romney than win it for Johnson - astronomically so.

So again - in 2012 - with the polls where they are - even plus or minus 10% for Obama or Romney - a vote for Johnson is equivalent to a vote for Obama.

That is the math of it, and all the motivation, justification, and hand-wringing before and after casting the vote is meaningless. The MATH is all that MATTERS as that is what drives the RESULT.

Unless the Supreme Court is going to hand another election to the candidate that got the fewest popular votes like they did in 2000, the electoral college is the only thing that matters, which means that only 8 states matter, and all 8 states right now are clearly for or leaning Obama.

It's a shame that states that are predictably red or blue don't get visits or advertising from the candidates. For example, Kentucky is a democratic-majority registered state. Our largest population centers are clearly democratic. But we have McConnell and Rand Paul. The only candidate advertising here is Tea Party and aggressive republican, hardly any democratic candidate.

I'm wishing it would go to popular vote, I think, and do away with electoral college. Make each candidate have to win every state, every vote they can. Have to think on it a little more.

Only if ID is required...

Perhaps that wouldn't be the case if Romney didn't kowtow so far to the fringe right, to the point of excluding the majority of Americans. One thing for certain, that ain't Gary Johnson's fault, or problem.

The Republicans are something else man.... You could run an empty sack of potatoes against Obama and would win this election considering what an abject failure his presidency has been in virtually every measurement.

But no...Gotta stick an overstuffed,overprivileged fundamentalist with a recipe for financial disaster in there to insure you alienate the majority of the voting population, then cry about how a third party candidate "stole" your election from you.

good grief.

ID is required, and has always been required, Joey.

Except in actual measurements: foreign policy, domestic policy, preventing a depression ;).

Rude, seriously, look at the conservative side: who else would have been a viable candidate this cycle?

I can't think of anyone other than Jeb I'd consider qualified for national office out of what remains of that party. Do you have any?

And Jeb was too smart to lose against Obama this cycle. He's sitting out the Tea Party wingnut faction.

Who is going to throw in 2016? Rand Paul, Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush maybe ...

no, i'm not kidding. you might want to look up electoral votes, and the entire voting process for president.
presidents aren't elected by popular vote, or majority vote. each state has its own rules regarding electoral votes, and how they are obtained. in some states, whoever wins the popular vote wins the entire number of electoral votes. in others, they are apportioned. so, altho ross got almost 20% of the popular vote, his votes in each state weren't enough to garner a single electoral vote. he had, therefore, zero chance to win the presidency.

also, you're assuming that all votes for 3rd party candidates would go to romney if they didn't go to an alternative. what is that based on? they could just as easily go to obama.

at any rate, it doesn't matter one whit in how i decide to vote. i will vote my conscience, and it will not be for obama or romney. they don't deserve my vote.
as for your assumptions about where a 3rd party vote would wind up if one had to choose between romney and obama. i'd vote for the latter. but, i get to choose.

http://factcheck.org/2012/10/obamas-numbers/

Summary
For more than a year, we’ve been pointing out on a regular basis how President Obama, his allies and his critics all misuse or even fabricate statistics to give voters a skewed picture of reality. This time we’ll just offer the accurate numbers.

Here — in a graphic suitable for framing, embossing, emailing to friends or posting on social media — is an accurate statistical picture of key changes that occurred since Obama took office in January 2009. The indicators are all derived from the most authoritative and up-to-date sources available.


Readers may draw their own conclusions about how much credit or blame the president personally deserves for any of them. What we can vouch for is that these measures are the most recent available, from authoritative sources, and cover the time since Obama took the oath of office.

Zig,

The fact that my insurance has gone up and services down pretty much as long as I can remember really leads me to believe that regardless of Obama care costs are going to go up and I attribute that to unmitigated Greed of the health insurers.

At least with Obamacare I know if a loved one gets sick and loses their job there is a chance for them not to lose everything they have. That is a good thing. I suffer from severe bouts of empathy thus I am unfit for the Republican party.

and, more on the '3rd party candidate/spoiler' argument, this in regards to perot:

The effect of Ross Perot's candidacy has been a contentious point of debate for many years. In the ensuing months after the election, various Republicans asserted that Perot had acted as a spoiler, enough to the detriment of Bush to lose him the election. While many disaffected conservatives may have voted for Ross Perot to protest Bush's tax increase, further examination of the Perot vote in the Election Night exit polls not only showed that Perot siphoned votes nearly equally among Bush and Clinton,[26] but of the voters who cited Bush's broken "No New Taxes" pledge as "very important," two thirds voted for Bill Clinton.[27] A mathematical look at the voting numbers reveals that Bush would have had to win 12.2% of Perot's 18.8% of the vote, 65% of Perot's support base, to earn a majority of the vote, and would have needed to win nearly every state Clinton won by less than five percentage points.[28] Furthermore, Perot's best results were in states that strongly favored either Clinton or Bush, or carried few electoral votes, limiting his real electoral impact for either candidate.

yeah, it's been a yearly thing for us as well. i'm looking into insurance thru my job, as it appears to be lower than his has been.
as for costs, medical care costs have been going up at a very high rate for years. no surprise that premiums have as well. and yet, for our care getting more and more expensive, americans are no healthier. so why spend all that money if there's nothing to show for it? and i'm afraid obamacare hasn't done really anything to bring actual medical costs down. all they've done is informed doctors that medicare/caid reimbursements will drop. it's becoming very, very difficult for people to find medicare/caid doctors any more.

LOL I posted that on the wrong thread as a response to your insurance post.

no worries. i'll converse with you where ever you prefer. :D

Naw. You can be a "real" Republican: