ronthecivil Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Well then I expect Mitt Romney to do well there. After all, he likes being able to fire people. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Oh no, an intellectual. God save us from the intellectuals in their big ivory towers. What do they know. Who we really need running the world is a good ole' country boy, a real blue collar American Joe, like George W Bush. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Navyblue Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Oh no, an intellectual. God save us from the intellectuals in their big ivory towers. What do they know. Who we really need running the world is a good ole' country boy, a real blue collar American Joe, like George W Bush. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gretzky's Mullet Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Why sure! Heck, if I don't support far left wing policies and ideas then clearly I must be aligned with the neocons! That whole "your with us or against us" move he used sure seems to have been an inspiration! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 No, actually my point was just how much you sound like most of the Republican field, in their race to the bottom to appeal to the "common man". By making himself seem as unintelligent as possible, a Yale and Harvard educated scion of the Bush family was able to beat out more intelligent, "intellectual" seeming men for the Democrats, who might, hypothetically, have not driven the entire American economy off a cliff. I'm not pulling for Ron Paul, not to the least extent, but I'll pay him a little respect for mostly not playing the stupid and clueless card like a number of his opponents. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satan's Evil Twin Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Well it's hard not to say something when someone acts smug and superior to our neighbours to the south who (don't tell this to most Canadians) are almost exactly the same as us!!!! But onto the topic if you want to actually be on topic which you did go to... I would actually be pulling for Ron Paul first since he would actually be the best guy and I like almost all his ideas (except for the gold standard, but even he admits couldn't be eliminated overnight). Romney would actually be pretty good too. The US government needs a term of being run like a business and if he treated the US governmnent the way he treated the companies he took over it would be a dramatic improvement to the situaton. Sure there would be jobs lost and hardship but if he actually balanced the books and mininised the government the short term pain would maximise the long term gain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
key2thecup Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Rick Perry dropped out today, so Romney - Paul - Gingrich - Santorum left. Gingrich and Santorum are both a joke, honestly between Mitt and Ron. Iowa caucus count unresolved There are too many holes in the certified totals from the Iowa caucuses to know for certain who won, but Rick Santorum wound up with a 34-vote advantage. Results from eight precincts are missing — any of which could hold an advantage for Mitt Romney— and will never be recovered and certified, Republican Party of Iowa officials told The Des Moines Register on Wednesday. GOP officials discovered inaccuracies in 131 precincts, although not all the changes affected the two leaders. Changes in one precinct alone shifted the vote by 50 — a margin greater than the certified tally. The certified numbers: 29,839 for Santorum and 29,805 for Romney. The turnout: 121,503. It's not a surprise that the ultra-thin gap of eight votes on caucus night didn't hold up, but it's tough to swallow the fact that there will always be a question mark hanging over this race, politics insiders said. The news comes at a pivotal point — two days before the South Carolina primary, the third state to vote in the nominating process, and just before another big debate tonight. Romney is under attack from all sides, and the other GOP hopefuls are struggling to convince voters that they are viable alternatives to the former Massachusetts governor. Expect the Santorum campaign to try to leverage today's news into extra momentum, strategists said. "It will be a story and Santorum will seize upon it, but it won't change the current political narrative," said John Stineman, an Iowa Republican operative. Santorum, a former Pennsylvania senator, is still battling Newt Gingrich, and to a lesser degree Rick Perry, for the conservative base, Stineman said. Even if Santorum had been the big headline on Jan. 4 as the Iowa winner, "it certainly wouldn't have changed how New Hampshire came out, nor (Romney's) status as the national front-runner," Stineman said. Romney has already soaked up the benefits of his declared win. With the Iowa caucuses, the prize is the immediate media attention and the credibility bestowed on the winner. But history now has an asterisk: It's not clear whether Romney is the first Republican since 1976 to win in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Over the last two weeks, the vote total seesawed wildly — just as it did on caucus night. "When I called Governor (Terry) Branstad to update him (Tuesday) night before I went to bed, I told him I could not tell him who was going to come out on top of the certified results," GOP Chairman Matt Strawn told the Register Wednesday morning. "Despite what had been in the media, it really was, even the night before the deadline, it really was too close to call," he said. Who led depended on the luck of the draw of which precincts rolled in next, said Chad Olsen, the party's executive director. Romney was ahead by 51 votes the weekend after the caucuses, Olsen said. On Tuesday night, Romney was up 24 votes. Then at noon Wednesday, Santorum was up by only three votes. The six precincts that happened to come in next boosted Santorum to a 34-vote lead. At 5 p.m. Wednesday — the deadline for volunteers to get their official "Form E" paperwork with caucus results to Republican Party of Iowa headquarters in Des Moines — the back-and-forth ended with 1,766 precincts certified out of 1,774. So who won the Iowa caucuses? "I can't speculate without documentation from the missing eight," Strawn said. "The comments I made at 1:30 a.m. Jan. 4 congratulating both Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum still apply. I don't think the certified vote totals take anything away from either Governor Romney or Senator Santorum." All 99 counties turned in their documented results —Howard County was the last and arrived by fax Wednesday — but party officials had to hunt down dozens of missing precincts. As far as party leaders could tell, no Form Es ever existed for the eight missing precincts, Olsen said. There's no chance those eight will certified, he said. "It's a split decision," Olsen said. Party officials saw no significant shifts until Friday, when Fayette County figures rolled in, Strawn said. In the tabulation room on caucus night, campaign representatives agreed they were comfortable with the numbers showing an eight-vote win for Romney. Everyone promised that as changes flowed in during certification, they would not disclose those vote counts or talk about them with reporters, agreeing that the back-and-forth would be misleading, Olsen said. Party officials confidentially told the Santorum campaign that Fayette County had lifted him by 99 votes. On the campaign trail in South Carolina on Friday, Santorum crowed that he might have won Iowa. Meanwhile in Iowa, the counting grew more complicated. More than 100 of the Form Es didn't comply with the party's instructions. The precinct chair and precinct secretary were both to sign the results verified by witnesses on caucus night. But results for some precincts came in on pieces of paper other than the official forms. Many more had only one signature, or the wrong signature (say, from a county chair). Another 18 documents had no signatures at all. All were accepted, party officials said. "Some are technically perfect in every way, and some are in a gray area, but we erred on the side of inclusion," Strawn said. "If the campaigns want to make it an issue, they can, but I want to best reflect how Iowans voted on the night of Jan. 3." In Fayette County, four of the Form Es were signed by the same two people — Irene Iben, a precinct secretary who backed Gingrich, and Janet Wissler, a precinct secretary who caucused for Perry. Wissler told the Register on Wednesday that the four precincts — Oelwein 1, 2, 3 and 4 — voted as a group. The Fayette County GOP chairwoman "probably handed them to me and told me to sign them," Wissler said. "It was the next day." All Form Es were supposed to be signed on caucus night, Olsen said. The muddled results make it impossible to declare a winner, Strawn said. "The numbers are what they are, and everybody will have an opportunity to inspect the forms from start to finish. This has been as open an electoral process as you'll find," he said. Politics watchers said an accurate caucus count is important to the credibility of the event, but it would be unfair for anyone to spin the new outcome as embarrassing for Iowa. "It's not Iowa's fault that the race was so close," said Kyle Kondik, a political analyst from Virginia. The ambiguous certified numbers do seem to take some of the luster off the event, but even if the Hawkeye State gets a brief black eye from inconclusive results, the press and the candidates will be back next time for the caucuses in 2016, Kondik said. Stineman said: "Even with some changes in the numbers, the Republican Party of Iowa ran a better reporting process than a lot of states do for their official elections." Bush-Gore 2000 in Florida was similarly tight, although the importance of that contest was on an entirely different level, Stineman said. That race was so close that election officials, even with the benefit of voting machines and trained auditors, couldn't decide who won. It took the U.S. Supreme Court to resolve it. The caucuses, in contrast, are a loose process in which colored slips of paper are gathered in cardboard boxes and plastic buckets and counted by hand as witnesses gather around — about as precise as choosing a class president. One Democratic political operative, Jerry Crawford of Des Moines, said no party, Democrat or Republican, can protect against a race this close. "If New Hampshire had been an eight-vote margin, they would be arguing about that for weeks, too. Matt Strawn did a fine job presiding over this process, and then the gods dealt him a bad final hand." Strawn explained why the certification took longer than he'd hoped: Not every county filed complete information. "Our staff played the role of Columbo, going around the state trying to track down wayward precinct results — and with few exceptions very successfully," he said. Totals Rick Santorum: 29,839 Mitt Romney: 29,805 Ron Paul: 26,036 Newt Gingrich: 16,163 Rick Perry: 12,557 Michele Bachmann: 6,046 Jon Huntsman: 739 Others: No preference, 147; Herman Cain, 45; Sarah Palin, 23; Buddy Roemer, 17; Fred Karger, 10; Gary Johnson, 8; Donald Trump, 5; Paul Ryan, 3; Condoleeza Rice, 2; Roy Moore, 2; Ben Lange, 2; Mike Huckabee, 2; Rudy Giuliani, 2; Tim Pawlenty, 2; Scott Walker, 1; John McCain, 1; Ralph Nader, 1; Pat Buchanan, 1; Robert D. Ray, 1; Jared Blankenship, 1. The eight missing precincts •Cerro Gordo County's Mason City Ward 2, Precinct 3 •Emmet County's Estherville Ward 2 •Franklin County's Geneva-Reeve •Lee County's Fort Madison 4A •Lee County's Fort Madison 4B •Lee County's Franklin-Cedar-Marion •Lee County's Washington-Green Bay-Denmark •Pocahontas County's Center-South Roosevelt-North Lincoln Troubles with caucus results Iowa's caucuses have a history of incomplete, imperfect results. After years of criticism, Republican Party officials turned over the counting to media organizations in 1988. Newspapers and television networks declined to continue that arrangement after 2004, and the GOP has been on its own for two cycles now. A review of results reporting over the years show a process that is getting better, but still is not flawless. Here's a history of some of the snafus for both parties: 1976: Iowa Democratic officials ignored a rule in calculating delegates, resulting in exaggerated projections of delegates for front-runner Jimmy Carter. The Register discovered the problem days later. 1980: The problems with the 1980 counts are legendary. It appeared on caucus night that George H.W. Bush scored an upset victory, beating Ronald Reagan by as much as 6 percentage points. But computer problems kept 165 mostly rural counties in which Reagan figured to do especially well from being included in the tally. Two days later, the party's re-examination showed a 2 percentage-point margin for Bush. CBS News had it even closer, with Reagan leading by less than 1%. The final numbers represented 94.4% of the precincts — 142 precincts never reported their results or didn't hold caucuses, according to Drake University political science professor Dennis Goldford, co-author of "The Iowa Precinct Caucuses: The Making of a Media Event." 1984: The News Election Service, funded by a consortium of national TV networks and the Associated Press, was created to gather raw vote totals rather than the delegate equivalents that party officials had provided since 1972. But Democratic Party officials refused to cooperate, and the news service managed to tally only 74% of precincts. The party's own counts proved unreliable: Party leaders were sure Walter Mondale had come in first, but they weren't certain where other candidates had finished. Many votes were never turned in. 1988: Democrats were still at odds with the news media. Questions were again raised about the validity of the News Election Service results, which were based on just 70% of Democratic precincts, Goldford wrote. Republicans, however, continued to work with the News Election Service to ensure accuracy and legitimacy, and Bob Dole's nearly 13 percentage-point lead was based on 98% of the GOP precincts counted. 1992: Again, Democrats refused to share caucus vote totals, only delegates won by each candidate. The GOP didn't hold a vote to save its sitting president, George H.W. Bush, any embarrassment from challenger Pat Buchanan. 1996: Republicans decided to do no official party count. Instead, the tabulating was handled by the Voter News Service, which replaced the News Election Service. Still, some GOP candidates thought the VNS results showing Dole first and Buchanan second were flawed. 2008: Republicans handled their own count and experienced some data entry problems. Mike Huckabee won, with Mitt Romney in second. Democrats reported a win for Barack Obama, with John Edwards and Hillary Clinton nearly tied for second. 2012: Iowa Republican officials moved their tabulating center from party headquarters to an undisclosed location to ward against hackers and protesters. County officials reported the precinct votes by phone with live call-takers or logged in to a security-code-protected website. http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/story/2012-01-19/iowa-caucus-count/52662346/1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
inane Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 Well it's hard not to say something when someone acts smug and superior to our neighbours to the south who (don't tell this to most Canadians) are almost exactly the same as us!!!! But onto the topic if you want to actually be on topic which you did go to... I would actually be pulling for Ron Paul first since he would actually be the best guy and I like almost all his ideas (except for the gold standard, but even he admits couldn't be eliminated overnight). Romney would actually be pretty good too. The US government needs a term of being run like a business and if he treated the US governmnent the way he treated the companies he took over it would be a dramatic improvement to the situaton. Sure there would be jobs lost and hardship but if he actually balanced the books and mininised the government the short term pain would maximise the long term gain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted January 19, 2012 Share Posted January 19, 2012 I don't say it often, but ROFL. I think I peed a little from laughter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
key2thecup Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Debate tonight @ 5PM on CNN folks. LOL Rick Santorum Carmel Catholic High School, class of '76 City: Mundelein, Ill. Awards/Activities: Yearbook did not list awards or activities for students. *** Herman Cain Samuel Howard Archer High School, class of '63 City: Atlanta, Ga. Awards/Activities:Band, Senior Honor Society, Student Council, Explorer Scouts Voted: Best All-Around, Most Likely to Succeed *** Ron Paul Dormont High School, class of '53 City: Pittsburgh, Pa. Awards/Activities: Lettered in Track, Tumbling award, Wrestling, Student Council president, Service award, National Honor Society Voted: Best All-Around *** Mitt Romney Cranbrook Schools, class of '65 City: Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Awards/Activities: Cross Country, Hockey, Glee Club, Pre-med Club, Church Cabinet, The Forum, Pep Club, Blue Key Club, American Field Service, World Affairs Seminar, Speculator’s Club, Homecoming Committee Chairmen, Assistant Editor of the yearbook, Inter-house council representative *** Jon Huntsman Highland High School City: Salt Lake City, Utah Awards/Activities: Huntsman played the keyboard in a band, dropped out of high school, and later received a G.E.D. *** Newt Gingrich Baker High School, class of '61 City: Columbus, Ga. Awards/Activities:Football, Debate Team, Thespian Society, National Merit finalist, Time Current Events Award winner Voted: Most Intellectual *** Gary Johnson Sandia High School, class of '71 City: Albuquerque, N.M. Awards/Activities: Track http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/05/rick-santorums-tragic-yearbook-photo/239515/#slide1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 ^ You need to include some pictures of Stephen Colbert with the Herman Cain pictures! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
key2thecup Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 ^ You need to include some pictures of Stephen Colbert with the Herman Cain pictures! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ronthecivil Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 You gotta agree Santorum has the best pic L O L Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
key2thecup Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Ya, but your ad reinforces the age of Paul, who was best dancer two years before my mother was born! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mr. Ambien Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 lol, sure but Paul is not your typical 76yr. He is in exceptional health, practices physical exercise (jogs,bike rides) ect. As a Doctor he's kept himself in great shape both mentally & physically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gretzky's Mullet Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 Well it's hard not to say something when someone acts smug and superior to our neighbours to the south who (don't tell this to most Canadians) are almost exactly the same as us!!!! But onto the topic if you want to actually be on topic which you did go to... I would actually be pulling for Ron Paul first since he would actually be the best guy and I like almost all his ideas (except for the gold standard, but even he admits couldn't be eliminated overnight). Romney would actually be pretty good too. The US government needs a term of being run like a business and if he treated the US governmnent the way he treated the companies he took over it would be a dramatic improvement to the situaton. Sure there would be jobs lost and hardship but if he actually balanced the books and mininised the government the short term pain would maximise the long term gain. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DonLever Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 An interesting day in Republican Land. Rick Perry has dropped out of the contest and endorse Newt Gingrich. The most fascinating thing is Gingrich's ex-wife who told the story that Newt wanted an open marriage when they were married. That meant keeping a mistress on the side. Gingrich blamed it on the liberal media for bringing up the topic instead of admitting it was true. So, please explain how can the Christian Right support a guy like Gingrich who had 3 wives including one that he divorced while she had cancer. According to the polls, Gingrich is ahead or near the top in South Carolina. At the same time the Christians pile it on Romney for being a Mormon. To some evangelicos, Mormons are evil despite sharing basically the same conservative philosophy. Apparently Mormons are NOT Christians. Romney had a model family life but that means little to some Christians unless he was born again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gretzky's Mullet Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 An interesting day in Republican Land. Rick Perry has dropped out of the contest and endorse Newt Gingrich. The most fascinating thing is Gingrich's ex-wife who told the story that Newt wanted an open marriage when they were married. That meant keeping a mistress on the side. Gingrich blamed it on the liberal media for bringing up the topic instead of admitting it was true. So, please explain how can the Christian Right support a guy like Gingrich who had 3 wives including one that he divorced while she had cancer. According to the polls, Gingrich is ahead or near the top in South Carolina. At the same time the Christians pile it on Romney for being a Mormon. To some evangelicos, Mormons are evil despite sharing basically the same conservative philosophy. Apparently Mormons are NOT Christians. Romney had a model family life but that means little to some Christians unless he was born again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GLASSJAW Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 oh my god, romney was so bad in the debate tonight Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
key2thecup Posted January 20, 2012 Share Posted January 20, 2012 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAi-TjK0Wg8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wwf7UFYQnM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VR_BPYfZBtA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9a22DNTnTw Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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