the most important election of your lifetime: 2012 american general election thread

credit to him if he wasn't tbh

^^ not sure what you mean by this?

oh i just hate crazy weirdo fake-news stuff like that

missing white women!! sex crime!! dead children!!

Well, there's a kernel of newsworthiness in all of those things, but it takes 0.052 seconds for every one of these stories to become sensationalized.

guys can i ask that, given the topic at hand (repub war on woman and crazy magical thinking about rape and pregnancy), you don't act flippant about a story involving actual child rape and pregnancy? it's been a shitty couple of days to be a woman and i can acknowledge that stories get sensationalized but jesus let's not overlook the forest for the trees

I am genuinely surprised the GOP turned on Akin so quickly and forcefully. must be panicking about their "woman problem" lol

Every living Republican who has served as a Senator from Missouri

lol how many people is this, four? five?

john danforth, 1936-
john ashcroft, 1942-
roy blunt, 1950-
jim talent, 1956-
kit bond, 1939-

I am genuinely surprised the GOP turned on Akin so quickly and forcefully. must be panicking about their "woman problem" lol

Well yeah. This is pretty high on the list of things they don't want to be talking about the week before the convention. (Speaking of which, I wonder if Akin's going.)

"This" being, basically, "How pro-rape is the Republican party?"

they are forcibly pro-rape iirc

Legitimately so.

luckily American women have ways to shut that whole thing down

i think maybe ridicule of people who say 'forcible rape' would be better if they were asked not about 'consensual rape', but 'gentle rape'.

'so wait you think there's such a thing as GENTLE rape??'

What was it, some GOP went on about how extensively violent a rape had to be a couple years back before he'd think an abortion was valid.

not googling "GOP rape" sorry

http://www.salon.com/2006/03/08/bill_napoli/

emblematic of how this is standard MO for GOP, they're only sacrificing Akin cuz they're worried about nat'l electoral prospects at the moment

hilarious that this is what will send McCaskill back to the senate tho

Ding ding ding that's it

yeah well idk about that. mccaskill could still lose. they all have weeks to 'come around' on him.

oh come on, dude is gonna be broke and have no one to help him with his campaign, he's fucked

Money could creep back if the polls are still even.

what can i say, i'm a pessimist. i expect this to move the needle in MO only a little, and temporarily. and i expect that by the beginning of october much of the institutional GOP 'quietly' begins doing what it can to elect him.

He's a grenade with the pin out to the party outside MO, that's going to have to be some stealth money. But thanks to Citizens United...

if he wins it'll be a triumph for his kind of pathology.

has his polling tanked in MO? I haven't even checked. My impression was that prior to this the race was quite close, which was what made me assume that an incident like this would effectively tip it in McCaskill's favor

With an eye on the clock:

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/mitt-romney-calls-on-todd-akin-to-quit

I would expect that while GOP resources supporting Akin will dwindle, McCaskill can expect a corresponding influx of support from Dem sources that would allow her to secure her win... but I'm just speculating

Before his enormous boner, he was up by 9 points! I haven't seen anything since Sunday.

Yes, I said enormous boner.

so what happens/happened if he didn't resign in time for the deadline? his name stays on the ballot?

pretty sure that according to MO law, "shit gets real"

and can't republican party withdraw their support of him or are they contracted to him somehow?

wow he's still leading in the polls

okay maybe I spoke too soon

Party support or no, he'd be on the ballot. They've already said they're not spending a dime on him. He'd have to go to court to have himself removed, but that doesn't mean another Rep. candidate would replace him. Or that the court would grant his request.

their "woman problem"

Ie, the fact that those pesky women consider all rape "legitimate," "forcible" or no.

How much blowback has there been on Ryan yet, if any?

he still has over an hour 'til deadline

god there must be some crazy screamo phonecalls going on right now

I can imagine Akin just turning his phone off and going out back to pray for a bit before kicking back in a hammock.

"HE ACTUALLY STANDS BY WHAT HE SAID WHAT THE HELL DO I DO MITT!"

yeah pretty obvious dude is not gonna withdraw, not when he's clearly got a chance at winning

"Polls are good, I got my support, the Lord said so. Who are you, anyway?"

Wouldn't surprise me at all if he withdraws, who the hell knows.

so what happens/happened if he didn't resign in time for the deadline? his name stays on the ballot?

I think he would technically have to sue to get his name off the ballot, which the Dems would contest

100 bucks says he wins and the human slime who are still proudly backing him will chalk it up as another win against 'radical feminism' and squishy beltway RINOs

Allahpundit, the only one of the hotair.com bozos with a brain stem (also an open atheist, which drives a slew of the commenters up a wall), has some fun:

He can still quit after today’s deadline passes, but to do so he’ll need a court order. Can he get one? As Nate Silver notes, four of the six justices of the Missouri Supreme Court are Democratic appointees, and Akin has no stronger supporters in America right now when it comes to staying on the ballot than Democrats. Meanwhile, if Priebus and Cornyn are serious about withholding money from this guy in the assurance that conservatives will blame Akin for the eventual loss, not them, I think they’re kidding themselves. Once it’s clear that he’s in the race to the bitter end, the calculus among many of his critics will shift from “he’s a moron” to “he’s a moron but he’s our moron,” such that if the RNC and NRSC cut him off, the dreaded Beltway RINO establishment will be blamed for not having done everything they could to make the best of a bad hand. (That would be less likely if McCaskill utterly crushed him on election day, but she’s sufficiently weak that she probably won’t win by more than four or five points. He’ll be competitive, sort of, down the stretch.) Never mind that the money they save might prove critically useful elsewhere; once Akin proves he’s a “fighter,” willing to tell both Democrats and Republicans to go to hell, that’ll earn him a certain base of populist support that will demand financial support from GOP treasurers on his behalf. And if they don’t provide it, they’ll be scapegoated, not him.

seems like a reasonable assessment

Rush, Mitt, now Walker:

Governor Scott Walker released the following statement today calling on U.S. Representative Todd Akin (R-MO) to remove himself from his U.S. Senate bid to unseat Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO).

“Representative Todd Akin’s comments were ignorant at best and completely outrageous. For the good of his state and for the good of his party, he should step aside immediately and allow someone else to run.”

Who's left, anyway?

i think maybe ridicule of people who say 'forcible rape' would be better if they were asked not about 'consensual rape', but 'gentle rape'.

'so wait you think there's such a thing as GENTLE rape??'

― j., Tuesday, August 21, 2012 3:53 PM (59 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

ya someone needs to asks these drips what the other types of rape are

important question: what do rush, hannity and michael savage think about this? i'm going to visit my dad in a few weeks, and if i had to guess, he's going to be defending Akin because he opposes abortion so vehemently (once, in colorado, we strayed a few feet off of a mountain trail in colorado, onto some moss. a woman in a passing car yelled at us "stay on the trail!" because, understandably, there are signs instructing tourists to stay on the trail to keep the environment as pristine as possible. my dad's face turned beet red, and then he yelled "THAT'S the kind of person who gets an abortion!!!!"). at the same time, though, he believes whatever rush et al tell him to believe, so are they on the side of those condemning akin (somehow can't see rush doing that) or are they staying quiet until they can criticize liberals for making a big deal out of it?