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

man i hadnt looked at drudge in so long, glad its still exactly the same

well to be totally fair i guess, regardless what denton does with the $$, gawker is part of the democrat media complex. right there in the middle of that whole complex.

the "gawker does it too!" reaction vaguely less infuriating than the aggressively over-it reactions from financial journalists

financial journalists being all duh everyone does it is some exquisite expert level point missing

i do think its interesting that gawker is in the caymans tho, did not know that

NYT summarized the financial documents dump today.

extradite denton!

Hey, you know what I haven't seen yet? Any tandem Obama/Biden 2012 swag. Just Obama stuff. Are they waiting until after the convention?

its cause biden is gonna be replaced w/denton

the most important swag of your lifetime

What is Denton's official nationality?

hyperaggressive weirdoian

Biden for veep of the caymans

I bet the government in the Caymans lives large.

this tax guy saying mitt cheated http://victorfleischer.com/archives/306

p4reene is going to Tampa; love the guy but kinda hope he has some hurricane fun after that pro-Tony Scott column.

so you hope he drowns because he wrote something you don't agree with?

buy a fucking sense of humor, you wonderful man

nah he just hopes he ties himself to a bridge with skink tyree

apparently Romney named the hospitals he and Ann were born at and then said "nobody's ever asked to see our birth certificate...they know where we were born and raised..."

Noah Milmann: the Dems are Tom Friedman's conservative party.

"No one's ever asked to see my birth certificate, they know this is the place we were born and raised." - Romney at campaign event moments ago, via MSNBC.

WTF

so if someone asked to see mitts birth certificate then

how provocative

*twists fingers into the shape of a birth certificate*

gearing up for the debates, maybe?

More like the convention.

well i mean, it's a commonplace now that candidates try to get in the other's brain...

I think the problem is we've all seen inside Romney's brain.

This strikes me as unhelpful.

http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/rnc-on-romneys-birth-certificate-joke-he-was?ref=fpb

I'm now concerned about Gawker's chance at winning the nomination for.....wait, they aren't running for president?

max, Secretary of Things

So the position of Romney apologists is basically, if you meet the standards set by an internet gossip blog then you are eligible to try for most important position in world politics.

sounds good to me!

god, much as I do try to keep my head out of horse-race stuff i really can't help but kind of luxuriate in watching the GOP field such an utterly, horribly inept candidate. I mean, the birth certificate thing - - - all Obama has to do is completely ignore it, just let it hang in the news there as one more Super Awkward Uncomfortable Thing Mitt Romney Has Said.

Iatee bait from Bill James (part of a long explanation why there used to be a catcher bias in MVP voting):

Anyway, generations of sportswriters develop systems of belief, just as generations of political reporters do. Watching political news, I think if one more "analyst" tells me that this election is going to be decided by the economy, I'll scream. It's just something they all "know"; it's not necessarily true, but they all re-inforce one another's belief in this.

The belief of the time was that championship teams are strong up the middle. It's like all elections being decided by the economy; sometimes it's true, and sometimes we just decide to pretend it's true.

David Gergen gurgles/restates thread title with straight face

we need a gif of Gergen calmly and bipartisanly eating his own vomit.

“I’ve said throughout the campaign and before, there’s no question about where he was born. He was born in the U.S. This was fun about us, and coming home. And humor, you know — we’ve got to have a little humor in a campaign.”

This was fun about us, and coming home.

"“So it was great to be home, to be in a place where Ann and I had grown up, and the crowd loved it and got a good laugh.”

"And life is precious, and God, and the Bible."

“I’ve said throughout the campaign and before, there’s no question about where he was born. He was born in the U.S. This was fun about us, and coming home. And humor, you know — we’ve got to have a little humor in a campaign. Humor, you know. "Ha Ha Ha", ha ha. Ha. Love to laugh.”

"ha ha ha, ha ha. ha. love to laugh. he's black!!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pshzb5_uSBc&feature=relmfu

Governor Romney’s decision to directly enlist himself in the birther movement

re: iatee bait

the bias is towards seeing a world where one thing 'decides the election' instead of seeing things as the result of lots of intertwined variables, the most important of which is 'do people have jobs / money + believe they will have jobs / money in the future'. 'the economy didn't decide this election' is like 'pitching didn't decide the baseball game'.

Money is a big underlying factor on a multiplicity of issues, but when people talk about 'the economy" deciding an election, they're specifically referring to current trends in unemployment and maybe wage growth. They're not talking about things like tax policy, administration of health care, education, etc.

(So, in that sense, I think James is correct.)