Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Why ...

I'm house shopping in Europe. Cenk on the Obama presidency:

...

A young woman I talked to at the airport last week said that she will not vote in the next election. I hate to hear that. I think if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain the next time around. You have voluntarily ceded your voice in this democracy. I told her that and she said, "After Obama, what is there left to hope for?"

...


That about says it.

9 comments:

mandt said...

Vote fer Christ's sake, but not for Obummer!

Gordon said...

"After Obama, what is there left to hope for?"

The same things she hoped for WITH Obama. Yeesh. What a fuckin' sniveler. Get over it, lady. Quitters never win.

Who the hell else ya gonna vote for? Bachmann? Perry? Romney? No one, meaning you effectively vote for one of THEM? Thanks a great steaming pile.

Gordon said...

Should have been "no one or a third party candidate that ain't got a snowball's chance in hell".

A Dem primary challenger to Obama might win the nomination, but no one to his left will get elected in the general. The electorate may like Democratic principles but they won't elect a real lefty. Obama's about as far left as it's gonna get for 2012. That's just the way it is.

mandt said...

I'm voting for Rango!

mandt said...

House shopping in Europe? Please, please buy one with a garden shed large enough to hold two old duffers and a small dog. we work for free, but I do nod off frequently.

casey said...

Hello Fixer,

All you said it true but voting on phony voting machines or as I call them dial-a-vote (J. Stalin paraphrase "voters don't matter only the counters of the votes matter"). All 50 states have biased voting machines. Trust no results from these machines. Only paper ballots marked by #2 pencils put by your hand into a locked ballot box and then counted by people at the voting locations in plain sight with the results documented. Only results move to be tallied. The paper ballots are then moved to a secure storage facility after the results are known. The current system has flaws in counting even where there are paper ballots. For the most part the procedures are slipshod with gigantic holes that allow election fraud which is exploited for advantage by the side that wants only a minimum amount of people able to vote. It is happening even now while I am typing. Each and every day there will be less and less eligible voters. The smaller the number of voters the easier to fix elections especially if the people doing the excluding are mostly removing their political opponents. See this video on youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw
We seem to be fighting a rear guard action but the troops seem to be captured anyway.

CAFKIA said...

I disagree with the paper ballots as the answer. Rather I think the problem is that a private company manufactures and controls all aspects of the machines. I would rather use some sort of electronic voting but open source the software. Turn the nation's intellectual might loose on the s/w to find the holes and fix them.

As one who has used open source s/w on his home and laptop computer exclusively for a decade or more, and been virus free the entire time for it, I can attest to the quality of open source. There can be(and are) problems but they are typically addressed and fixed much more rapidly than with proprietary s/w.

In short, rather than letting the foxes design the hen house, let the smartest of the chickens decide what will protect them.

Dennis said...

I think Obama has done very well to keep his head out of the proverbial (or Teabagger prop) noose while countering radical right extremism.

If he had ended DODT by executive order, he would have been a lightning rod of homophobic backlash. So, he took the legislative route, built consensus, and so there is very little controversy.

He could have gone all 14th Amendment on the debt ceiling, but that would have unleashed all sorts of uppity Negro/liberal overreach/impeach him criticism. So, he made the Teabag children act like grownups and compromise (which they HATE to do - unlike us sensible liberals) and now the polls are showing that Teabaggers, not Obama, are losing credibility.

People often mistake a wise man's calm for weakness -- look at all those Steven Segal movies. But, over time, in the all-important court of undecided, independent, and swing voters (although clearly not with progressive hard liners), Obama is ...

D'uh winning!

Sometimes I think progressives get more upset when they see Obama's positive poll numbers than wingnuts.

Would any deny that we have a better chance of advancing education, Social Security, sensible defense, social justice with Obama that with a strident progessive ideologue or a right wing corporate stooge? He's only a politician fer chrissake. And, he's not even close to being the worst one of those.

DBK said...

Dennis, with all due respect, and not looking for a fight, but you're talking like you've been sleeping for the past several years. Obama had a Democratic controlled Congress and he didn't fight for a freaking thing for the people. He's been the Money Boys' president since day one. Then the Republicans, after getting all kinds of cooperation from Obama and the Blue Dogs, took over and Obama has been their best friend ever since.