Usa Thread

[kamui]

Great photo.

 

But seriously, who would you rather have on your side in a gunfight, Josey Wales or a porn star?

 

How often do you have a gun fights compared to sex?

[Flashermac]

Nowadays, not all that much difference.

 

 

 

 

 

[Hugh_Hoy]

Nowadays, not all that much difference.

 

Reload time slows down over the years, don't it?

 

HH

[Flashermac]

My M16A1 has turned into a Brown Bess musket.

 

Meanwhile, Barack Jose has adopted a new foreign policy!

 

 

 

 

 

[RayRay]

Quite frankly, there is no way I would teach in US public schools today. As CS says, discipline has gone to hell ...

 

Some say the decline started when they took prayer out of school. To that I say bullshit. The decline started when they no longer allowed snot-nosed brats that were acting up to get their ass beat.

 

In junior high school we had a principal named Mr. Washington. This guy was seriously bad news for anyone unfortunate enough to be on the receiving end of his paddle. Prior to his career in education he was a linebacker in the NFL. Needless to say most everyone tried their best to stay out of trouble.

[Flashermac]

I remember a paddle hanging in front of the classroom. And it was occasionally used. And oddly enough I cannot ever remember praying in the classroom. We said the pledge and got right to work. (And that was before "under God" was added to the pledge!) I also got swatted once for acting up in P.E. class in high school.

 

 

Meanwhile ...

 

Obama: Negative ratings in 37 states, but king of DC

 

 

Gallup has just released Barack Obama’s job approval rating for the first half of 2012, broken down by state, and the news is not encouraging for the president.

 

Obama’s approval rating is below 50 percent in 37 states, ranging from a 26 percent rating in Utah to a 49 percent rating in Michigan. Obama is at 50 percent or higher in just 13 states, from a 50 percent rating in Minnesota to a 63 percent rating in Hawaii. The president is most popular in Washington DC, where his job approval rating is an astonishing 83 percent.

...

 

“The 50 percent approval mark is significant because post-World War II incumbent presidents who have been above 50 percent job approval on Election Day were easily re-elected,†write Gallup. “Presidents with approval ratings below 50% have more uncertain re-election prospects. Historically, two presidents below 50% in their final approval rating before the election — George W. Bush and Harry Truman — won, and three, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H.W. Bush, lost.â€

 

My link

[kamui]

...

 

Obama: Negative ratings in 37 states, but king of DC

 

 

My link

 

If the GOP had chosen a better candidate, I guess Obama would be a clear loser already. But the GOP wasn't ready since it is undergoing a radical change, with the right wingers taking over and all moderates being kicked out.

 

How can a candidate win (Romney) who isn't loved (or is even loathed) by his own base?

 

But it's not over until the votes are cast. There is so much noise in US media, it's unbelievable for an outsider.

[kamui]

I think this opinion piece from a conservative standpoinst sums it up well.

Mr. Negative vs. Mr. Complacent

 

By ROSS DOUTHAT

DURING the dog days of last summer’s debt ceiling negotiations, with Washington gridlocked and the president’s approval ratings slumping, a narrative coalesced among disappointed liberals. President Obama was failing, they decided, because he was too moderate, too reasonable and too conciliatory. He didn’t have the ideological confidence required to actually fight for liberalism, or the brazenness required to really tear the Republicans apart.

 

Apparently somebody at the White House bought into this narrative, because so far Obama’s re-election campaign has delivered just about everything that liberal partisans were begging for a year ago.

 

Since the campaign kicked off, the president’s domestic policy rhetoric has become much more stridently left-wing than it was during the debt-ceiling debate. He’s dropped all but a pro forma acknowledgment of the tough choices looming in our future, and doubled down on the comforting progressive fantasy that we can close the deficit and keep the existing safety net by soaking America’s millionaires and billionaires.

 

On hot-button cultural issues, meanwhile — immigration and gay marriage, reproductive issues and religious liberty, even welfare reform — he’s moved away from Clintonian triangulation, offering a succession of explicit panders to Democratic voting blocs and interest groups instead.

 

To this bordering-on-McGovernite substance, he’s added Richard Nixon’s style, with a pitch to swing voters that started out negative and has escalated to frank character assassination. In Obama’s campaign ads, and in the rhetoric of his aides and allies, Mitt Romney isn’t just wrong on specific policies or too right-wing in general. He’s part Scrooge, part Gordon Gekko; an un-American, Asia-loving outsourcer; a tax avoider andpossibly a white-collar felon.

 

If you’re an undecided, stuck-in-the-middle kind of voter, the president isn’t meeting you halfway on the issues, or pledging to revive the dream of postpartisanship that he campaigned on last time. He’s just saying that you’ve got no choice but to stick with him, because Romney is too malignant to be trusted.

 

By taking this line, Obama is testing the conceit — beloved of MSNBC hosts and left-wing bloggers — that a harder-edged, more ideological liberalism would be a more politically successful liberalism as well. And at the moment, the president’s continued lead in swing-state pollsprovides modest but real evidence that his strategy is working. If the election were held today, I’d bet gingerly on the president eking out the necessary 51 percent.

 

But Obama’s current edge may have more to do with the Romney campaign’s complacency than with the genius of his McGovern-meets-Nixon approach.

 

In Romneyland, it seems to be an article of faith that 2012 will be a pure up-or-down vote on the president’s performance, and that the most generic sort of Republican campaign — hooray for free enterprise and low taxes, with the details To Be Determined Later — is therefore the only kind of campaign they need to run.

 

But as The New Republic’s William Galston has pointed out, even a referendum election tends to involve a two-step process, in which voters first decide whether they’re willing to eject the incumbent, and then decide whether they’re willing to roll the dice with his opponent.

 

In this case, that roll of the dice involves handing the White House back to the Republican Party just four years after the Bush administration failed (and then some) to deliver on its promises. And by running a generic campaign in the aftermath of those failures, Romney isn’t giving voters any reason to think that he won’t just deliver the same disappointing results.

 

The Romney campaign is clearly afraid of talking too much about its candidate’s biography (all that money, all that Mormonism ...) or offering anything save bullet points and platitudes on policy (because details can be used against you ...). But a Republican candidate who won’t define himself is a candidate who’s easily defined as just another George W. Bush.

 

A Romney campaign that loosened up and actually took some chances, on the other hand, might find that the Obama White House’s slash-and-burn liberalism had opened up some unexpected opportunities.

 

Because Obama has moved left on fiscal and social issues, there’s more space in the center — assuming, that is, that Romney can get over his fear of offending his own party’s interest groups.

 

Because Obama has gone so negative, there’s room to accentuate the positive, and run as the candidate of (right-of-center) hope and change.

 

Because Obama’s message depends so heavily on voters’ unhappy memories of the Bush era, Romney can do himself an enormous amount of good just by exploding the premise that he’ll govern as “Dubya, Part II.â€

 

Or he can keep doing what he’s been doing, in which case he stands a very good chance of losing oh-so-narrowly, and joining Thomas Dewey in the ranks of Republican presidential nominees who mistakenly believed that they could win the White House by default.

 

 

NYT

[kamui]

double post

[Flashermac]

You mean triple post.

 

US presidential elections drag on forever. Actually, a president virtually begins his reelection campaign after his second year in office. The Confederate constitution drew a lesson from the US constitution and specified that the president would serve one six-year term, with reelection not allowed.