Next US President

[zeusbheld]

You're obviously one of those people that can't do funny...

Look who's talking Webster

difference between the two of you... he's funny once in a while.

still waiting for *your* once.

[zeusbheld]

None of the above.

Perhaps McCain.

is that who you want?

or who you'd bet on to win?

or both?

Neither.. I don't give a f*ck.

Nothing will change.

Anyone who might try to wrest the power from the banks or military industrial complex is a dead man. It's been going downhill for sometime now.

fair enough. as to it going downhill, it was already in a valley by the time i was born, so i'm skeptical as to whether it was ever anything but ****.

however, some **** is more stank than others so i still vote. also, i tend to follow elections as if it were a sport, it's more fun and less depressing that way...

[zeusbheld]

All while that funny little thing called democracy runs its course, the US just failed to start another war today.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/iran/story/0,,2236771,00.html?gusrc=rss&feed=12

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/01/07/iran.us.navy/index.html

Iran deliberately attacks US (well those pesky little navy boats right in their faces at least, not somewhere in Hawai) - ha - ha - ha

Keep trying, there's another year for it guys.

And then another 20-30 more to 'clean up'.

"aggressive" actions. sorta like.. rodney king! writhing into those cops! tsk tsk. clear act of agression.

[zeusbheld]

Who cares? Like what effing difference will it make?

Once any of em's in power they'll be shafting everyone and anyone for their own (and their supporting club members) "embetterment" just like the resident one has.

it's a matter of degree. and 10 versus 11 can make a big motherfucking difference. this si the "dubya law."

Personally I'd prefer Clinton to win, as she's the one I'd prefer to see become an assassination target.

(And I heard she doesn't shave her chuff. Just passing on what I'd heard.)

i'd do her. but i'd do anything. even you.

<<as long as you don't wear them stanky gray panties.>>

[condotown]

Who cares? Like what effing difference will it make?

Once any of em's in power they'll be shafting everyone and anyone for their own (and their supporting club members) "embetterment" just like the resident one has.

Personally I'd prefer Clinton to win, as she's the one I'd prefer to see become an assassination target.

I agree 100%

I'll never forgive her husband's administration for removing all the "W" keys from the keyboards in the White House.... Never mind the Whitewater Scandal, Vince Foster's "suicide", missing and reappearing documents, and her $1000 stock investment that shot up to $100,000.

[zeusbheld]

One thing I feel, rightly or wrongly, is that maybe, just maybe, a new broom like Obama might just hold on to the ideals he purports to have and not be seduced by the lust of power that so many have succumbed to before him.

(Yes, I'm seriously thinking of sponsoring a "Total bollocks, but who knows? Line of thinking." Forum.)

well i'm in, and i vote. but only on the "lesser of available evils" principle. although it's humiliating as i'm now registered in new ******* jersey.

[zeusbheld]

new hampshire should be interesting. will the Obama surge continue? is the Huckabee campaign strong enough to unite libertarians and evangelical wingnuts? stay tuned to your news websites, results soon...

[robbie36]

Its amazing to think this whole thing is going to go on all year until eventually there is a new president in November.

Here we do things the other way round. We get the election over in a month and then we spend months fighting over who will run the country.

What we are also missing in Thailand is some good sex scandals with the politicians - most of them are too old. Rumour has it though, that Abhisit is a bit of a player.

[CocoaBrotha]

From looking at the final primary votes, Clinton eked out a win, but, does that really mean anything? Good comeback on her part I guess...

[Loburt]

Does that really mean anything?

Sure does.

She won. Despite being pronounced dead and done for, she fought back. And the voters gave her a win.

When the Red Sox win by one run, I don't hear you asking does it mean anything. They won.

Maybe, just as Obama's sudden surge can be attributed to some degree on people rebelling against the "inevitability" of a Clinton nomination, people turning out to give their support to Hillary are making a statement against this past week's deluge of pronouncements about Obama's "strength" and the "inevitability" of his win.

Also, if people have been making comments about Hillary's "likability" or lack thereof, frankly, I've found Obama this week to be less inspiring as a "frontrunner" and actually acting a bit smarmy.

Clinton is tough and experienced and has had to battle back during most of her public life.

Despite the buzzword of "change", experience is not a bad thing - depending upon what kind of experience it is.

I always thought this race would be close. There's a long way to go, and it will probably be close all the way.

Both candidates are pretty good. I hope they don't end up tearing each other down in the process.

[zeusbheld]

it is a major fuckup on obama's part that they built up their expectations based on the polls and strutted like they'd won it before the actual vote. showed they're new to this game.

i agree with Lobs it'll be close.

and hopefully they will stick to their lofty principles and not go too negative; odds on the loser will be the best choice to campaign with the winner as vice presidential candidate.

[Dave40]

Clinton is tough and experienced and has had to battle back during most of her public life.

She did shed a tear, and showed that she has a softer side!!!!

Don't know if this meant much to the average voter though!!

[Loburt]

Clinton is tough and experienced and has had to battle back during most of her public life.

She did shed a tear, and showed that she has a softer side!!!!

Don't know if this meant much to the average voter though!!

My suspicion is that it did. Although whether it meant something positive or negative, probably varied depending upon the voter.

[tech_noir]

Whoever it may be, let's hope for us non US nationals that the next guy in town is gonna be an even bigger screw up than Bush. About 5 years ago I visited Miami and loved it every bit. Back then I think I bought 1.1 us dollar for 1 euro and I thought KICK ASS!!! NOW it's already 1.48 us dollar for 1 euro so whenever I feel all latinish and also like to see a few more HEAT games downtown it's gonna be a very affordable stay. I might even be able to buy Jay Z a bottle of crys! to repay the beer he gave me then... NICE!

Amen

Since oil producers export in USD and Putin competes with middle asia it's good for the Eurozone.

[Loburt]

Whoever it may be, let's hope for us non US nationals that the next guy in town is gonna be an even bigger screw up than Bush. About 5 years ago I visited Miami and loved it every bit. Back then I think I bought 1.1 us dollar for 1 euro and I thought KICK ASS!!! NOW it's already 1.48 us dollar for 1 euro so whenever I feel all latinish and also like to see a few more HEAT games downtown it's gonna be a very affordable stay. I might even be able to buy Jay Z a bottle of crys! to repay the beer he gave me then... NICE!

Amen

Since oil producers export in USD and Putin competes with middle asia it's good for the Eurozone.

I hope the next US president bombs Bulgaria, and drops a few on Holland while they're at it. If we pull out of Iraq, we'll need to bomb someone so that those people working in defense industries don't end up unemployed. So why not your countries, seeing as you wish us ill?

Amen.

[tech_noir]

Again?!

That would be interesting indeed. Bombing a mountain NATO and EU country and a russian-european fuel artery, being a major weaponry exporter and after 50 years as cold war borderline, keeping lots of missiles designed especially against US aircraft.

Why you guys always take your hands on guns when something goes wrong (no matter whosefault it is). That are just facts. If it is bad someone to benefit of someone else's fall, why so much US indusries are sitated in poor countries with cheap labour and weak civil rights?

[Loburt]

Again?!

Why the hell not. It's good for us. Who cares about you?

That's exactly your rationale in your post, so you're in no position to complain.

If it is bad someone to benefit of someone else's fall, why so much US indusries are sitated in poor countries with cheap labour and weak civil rights?

For the same reasons so many Japanese, Chinese and European industries do. They've got most of the factories in this region and Africa. Not the US.

[tech_noir]

It's good for us.

Why? No oil here. Russia exports mainly natural gas (and values its pipelines).

BTW about 2/3 of my personal incomes are in USD, so I suffer too, trough woring to shange it.

[zeusbheld]

Whoever it may be, let's hope for us non US nationals that the next guy in town is gonna be an even bigger screw up than Bush. About 5 years ago I visited Miami and loved it every bit. Back then I think I bought 1.1 us dollar for 1 euro and I thought KICK ASS!!! NOW it's already 1.48 us dollar for 1 euro so whenever I feel all latinish and also like to see a few more HEAT games downtown it's gonna be a very affordable stay. I might even be able to buy Jay Z a bottle of crys! to repay the beer he gave me then... NICE!

Amen

Since oil producers export in USD and Putin competes with middle asia it's good for the Eurozone.

I hope the next US president bombs Bulgaria, and drops a few on Holland while they're at it. If we pull out of Iraq, we'll need to bomb someone so that those people working in defense industries don't end up unemployed. So why not your countries, seeing as you wish us ill?

Amen.

There will be no Amen until the US receives what it has sent, you have to know that.

clearly "amen" is a matter of point of view, or nobody would have ever bombed anybody.

personally i think bombing holland is a waste since it'll be under water in a few decades anyway. bulgaria's a tougher nut, but i've seen some hot bulgarian girls, can always wreck it by advertising it as a sex tourist destination.

but then... all those defense workers will be unemployed. <<sigh>> i'll never be president, the problems are just too complex.

[tech_noir]

some hot bulgarian girls, can always wreck it by advertising it as a sex tourist destination.

Sex tourism reqires some personal safety. It has been tried in early 90s, but faily organised crime networks (mob/mafia you call it) has ever been stronger and controlling businesses like that, assuring that the tourist would not have a cent at the end. Doesn't seem to be working, sorry.

Making legal business is more profitable having a good educational system and there is enough workforce shortage, so finding girls could be an issue (even if it was legal).

[Loburt]

I drop safe on squirrel.

Who gets hit with safe?

Me!

[zeusbheld]

some hot bulgarian girls, can always wreck it by advertising it as a sex tourist destination.

Sex tourism reqires some personal safety. It has been tried in early 90s, but faily organised crime networks (mob/mafia you call it) has ever been stronger and controlling businesses like that, assuring that the tourist would not have a cent at the end. Doesn't seem to be working, sorry.

Making legal business is more profitable having a good educational system and there is enough workforce shortage, so finding girls could be an issue (even if it was legal).

legal schmegal organized crime will be down wit it if they can make money off it. all we gotta do is make it more profitable for the gangsters than their current (admittedly high-yield) portfolio...

[Bruce551]

Libertarians Read, Right? Then Read This

Tony Long Email 01.10.08 | 12:00 AM

What to make of Ron Paul, the internet's poster boy for the presidency?

The Texas Republican, whose campaign traction seems confined almost entirely to the internet, is lagging after Iowa and New Hampshire. While he's no threat to win the GOP nomination, let alone the White House, the phenomenon of his online popularity bears scrutiny. For some of us who look more than 20 feet beyond our noses, it?s troubling.

If the internet has the power to legitimize the national candidacy of someone as extreme as Ron Paul, then maybe it should be regulated. (Kidding. Just kidding.)

It's not hard to understand Paul's appeal to the internet cognoscenti. He's a libertarian (to use the word in its simplest form), and if any political philosophy can be said to broadly appeal to inveterate online devotees, that's the one. And he brings impeccable libertarian credentials to the table, which manifest themselves in some very beguiling ways.

To wit:

* He opposed the Patriot Act, breaking ranks with his own party to do so.

* He voted against the imposition of a national ID card.

* He's on record opposing the National Security Agency's domestic-spying program.

* He favors lifting the embargo against Cuba. (I threw that one in for me, not you.)

This is catnip for many of you, I know. For me, too, actually. (Politics does make strange bedfellows, eh, comrades?)

He almost sounds rational. But he's not.

Like all absolutists -- and make no mistake, libertarianism is absolutism as surely as atheism is faith -- Paul is ill suited for this particular job. He's running for president of the United States, remember, not for a seat in some gerrymandered Texas congressional district. If elected, he would be leading the most powerful nation on earth, one whose every action has repercussions in every corner of the world.

We?ve already seen what happens when that trust is placed in the hands of the incompetent.

You can't be a good president in the 21st century when your chief concerns are the sovereignty of the American taxpayer and his right to bear arms. It?s too insular. Isolationism is no longer an option, and hasn't been for years. The world is too small and you can thank, or blame, technology for that reality. The stakes are far too high, as we've learned since Sept. 11, 2001, to act like we can do anything we damned well please anytime we damned well feel like it.

And this guy wants to pull us out of the United Nations. Terrific. The United States as rogue elephant. What a splendid idea.

Applaud Paul for championing your privacy rights if you will, but consider some of his other views, well documented, before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Speaking of babies, his libertarian defense of individual rights doesn't extend to women, apparently. Paul, an obstetrician in another life, opposes abortion. More specifically, he supports a state?s right to ban abortion. In other words, he doesn?t want Washington telling you that you can?t have an abortion, but if Montgomery, Austin, Salem or Richmond say you can?t, that?s OK.

He also equivocates on stem cell research, supporting it "generically" but again fobbing it off as a states-rights issue (like the old Confederacy, states rights is a major plank in the Paul platform). His chief concern isn't so much the morality of the research as who pays for it.

That's a new one on me: turning the stem cell debate into a taxpayer-rights issue.

But there?s more.

Domestically, a Paul administration would be so extreme in the defense of individual property rights as to make the Reagan years look like socialism. Paul says the federal government has helped damage the environment by ?facilitating polluters, subsidizing logging in the national forests and instituting one-size-fits-all approaches that too often discriminate against those they are intended to help.?

He?s right in the sense that the Bush environmental record is abysmal, but Paul?s solution -- let the private landowner protect his own land -- is naivetè bordering on sheer lunacy. If Chauncey Moneybags owns 40,000 acres up near the Idaho-Montana border and decides to cash in by letting the timber boys do a little clear-cutting, who?s going to stop him? Paul says Chauncey can do whatever he wants to with his land. How is that helping the natural environment? (I?m assuming here that?s the environment Paul refers to.)

There are 300 million of us now, not 30 million, and we can?t all go running around unsupervised. This is where libertarian ideals get a little unwieldy. Besides, we?re not all John Waynes, saddled up and gazing with flinty eyes across the prairie. Some of us can barely cope. Sometimes, Ron, them dad-gum polecats in Washington jest have to step in and take charge. Dang it all.

And the foreign policy of a Paul administration? Replace the eagle with an ostrich and you'll have some idea.

Paul says he?s for free trade and he wants ?to be friends,? but rejects the idea of the United States being part of any convention that subjects us to international law or restraint. He likens the United Nations to a modern-day Simon Legree -- that's my hyperbole, not his -- straddling Lady Liberty with a bullwhip and coldly, gleefully, stripping her bare.

The U.N. has been the bogeyman for American conservatives since the end of World War II because of its internationalist mandate. The right has never accepted that a U.N. vote contrary to the wishes of the United States does not translate to anti-Americanism. If there is anti-American sentiment along the East River these days, it's because we're swaggering around like the high school bully, and we've pissed a lot of people off.

As for military matters, Paul?s objection to the U.S. invasion of Iraq was not that we ignored world opinion and attacked unilaterally, but that we violated the Washingtonian-Jeffersonian doctrine of ?avoiding foreign entanglements.?

Iraq was deliberate aggression, a crime, but here?s a news bulletin just in for strict constitutionalists like Paul: George Washington and Thomas Jefferson have been dead for two centuries. Our world is just ever so slightly different from the one they knew. Realities have changed. If Virginia Sen. Tom Jefferson were roaming the halls of Congress today, he'd probably be a Democrat. Hell, he might not even own any slaves.

But this is the consciousness that Ron Paul would bring to the arena of international relations, the consciousness of 1796. The modern world is all about interaction, interdependence and active engagement, not isolationism. Sorry, Ron. I miss candlelight and hoop skirts, too, but you can?t go back.

Anyway, those two big oceans that used to insulate us from all that foreign chicanery have shrunk to the size of Walden Pond. Half my e-mail comes from ?out there,? where people talk funny. We drink French wine, drive German and Japanese cars, and talk to our service reps in Bangalore, India. The guys making shepherd?s pie at the Irish pub down the street are from Central America, and all the meter maids in this town are Chinese.

Avoid foreign entanglements? Who?s kidding whom here? If we avoid foreign entanglements what do we plan on doing for an economy? Who are we going to offshore all our jobs to?

I?ve been called a utopian and a fool and worse for my own humanistic philosophy, which, like libertarianism, preaches the value of a single human being (but in the the more rational context of one being part of the whole). Fine. I?m a fool. But when push comes to shove, I?d rather be my kind of fool than yours.

May the best candidate win. Oh, wait. I don?t have one.

Tony Long is copy chief at Wired News.

[Thomas_K]

[JackyB]

Bruce the points you laid against Ron Paul are not exactly right. I mean regarding abortion do you think that a few judges in D.C should have the say for millions of people in the U.S. Why not bring it back to the states and let the people decide.

His problem with the Iraq war was that the president never declared war. He said the if the president wanted to go there he should follow the constitution.

Whats the point of being in the United Nations if we are not going to listen to anything they say anyways.

He also wants to get rid of the IRS. Nothing wrong with that. Personal income tax is a small amount of the revenue the government receives. His point was if we can reduce spending to what it was 10 years ago it would easily make up for the mixed taxes. It shouldn't be that hard to do if we quit fighting bullshit wars.