US PRESIDENTAL ELECTIONS

MITT ROMNEY HAS SAID 47% OF ELECTORATE WON'T VOTE FOR HIM BECAUSE THEY ARE DEPENDENT ON US GOVERNMENT.
WHO DO YOU THINK WILL GET INTO THE WHITE HOUSE IN 49 DAYS TIME?

Badboy wrote:MITT ROMNEY HAS SAID 47% OF ELECTORATE WON'T VOTE FOR HIM BECAUSE THEY ARE DEPENDENT ON US GOVERNMENT.
WHO DO YOU THINK WILL GET INTO THE WHITE HOUSE IN 49 DAYS TIME?

hope obama wins.
romney scares me w itless cause he is witless

Obama will get in because there isn't anyone with enough money to beat him.

Romney aint short of a bob or two

I think Obama will get in because he comes across better to the public. Don't like the guy though!

Anyone who tars all citizens with the same brush does not deserve to represent a country. Any country. Are there people who abuse welfare? Obviously so. But that only happens because those who are responsible for supervising their attribution aren't competent. People's taxes are meant for that too. To help those who, in moments of need, can't rely on anyone. I'd rather see my taxes be used for that than to fill the pockets of corrupt politicians. Children who don't ask to be born and old people who worked hard all their lives and are now in a difficult situation have the right to be protected.

AnnaEsse wrote:

A sharp operator indeed, he, his wife and his spin doctors tell more lies than Tom Pepper. How he's managed to avoided assassination speaks volumes of the security net he's had to employ..

malena stool wrote:

AnnaEsse wrote:

A sharp operator indeed, he, his wife and his spin doctors tell more lies than Tom Pepper. How he's managed to avoided assassination speaks volumes of the security net he's had to employ..

Obama is also so confident about his status that he felt no need to stay up late when he heard about the siege of the embassy in Libya.

Forget the 3 AM phone call. Obama couldn’t even be trusted with an 11 PM phone call. They say that only a man with a clear conscience, or no conscience at all, can sleep this way. But hey, he had to be rested for the next fundraiser and the next party. Jay-Z and Beyonce, unlike dead ambassadors and Libyan militias, actually matter.

Fox News’ Special Report informed us that Barack Obama knew of the attack on the Libyan consulate within 90 minutes of it beginning. There is no doubt that Obama knew that the attacks involved AK-47s, along with Rocket propelled grenades. He knew that his ambassador was in grave danger and yet knowing all of this, and not knowing the status of Ambassador Stevens, Obama allegedly went quietly to bed.

Imagine if Bush had gone to sleep after hearing that a plane was headed toward the World Trade Center?

http://www.rightsidenews.info/2012092317089/us/homeland-security/obama-went-to-bed-while-consulate-was-under-siege.html

As thick as a bag of hammers is just about the right description.....

THERE IS GOING TO BE A DEBATE IN ATLANTA IN A FEW DAYS,I BELIEVE.

A REPUBLICAN SENATOR HAS SAID SLAVERY WAS A GOOD THING FOR BLACKS

It has been a dirty campaign for a long time now....notice the report by Fox News, owned by Murdoch!!!!

I do think Obama cares for the poor and had a hard time pushing the Health care bill through because of repeated Republican vetos.

Politics in America and now Britain , I also suspect many more countries , is very corrupt, the days are gone when Politicians cared about the people they represent.

OBAMA GOT IN

He didn't win by a big majority so is going to have the same problems he had before trying to get anything done. Romney was gracious in defeat.....5 children and 18 Grandchildren , didn't he do well.!!! he also has a personal fortune of $150 million .

America is in dire straits financially and cannot afford to go for quantitive easing again. A discussion among Economists, Bankers and Investment Managers said it is time for both Parties to get together, forget politics and stop the bickering, put the best brains from both parties to creating jobs, the most important issue .

Panda wrote:He didn't win by a big majority so is going to have the same problems he had before trying to get anything done. Romney was gracious in defeat.....5 children and 18 Grandchildren , didn't he do well.!!! he also has a personal fortune of $150 million .

America is in dire straits financially and cannot afford to go for quantitive easing again. A discussion among Economists, Bankers and Investment Managers said it is time for both Parties to get together, forget politics and stop the bickering, put the best brains from both parties to creating jobs, the most important issue .

I think he won by a good majority, Panda. What the Dems don't have is a majority in Congress. So, they'll have the same problem they had before in getting anything passed. I expect Obama will be signing a few more Executive Orders.

AnnaEsse wrote:

Panda wrote:He didn't win by a big majority so is going to have the same problems he had before trying to get anything done. Romney was gracious in defeat.....5 children and 18 Grandchildren , didn't he do well.!!! he also has a personal fortune of $150 million .

America is in dire straits financially and cannot afford to go for quantitive easing again. A discussion among Economists, Bankers and Investment Managers said it is time for both Parties to get together, forget politics and stop the bickering, put the best brains from both parties to creating jobs, the most important issue .

I think he won by a good majority, Panda. What the Dems don't have is a majority in Congress. So, they'll have the same problem they had before in getting anything passed. I expect Obama will be signing a few more Executive Orders.

His majority was only a handful AnnaEsse in fact Florida came to the fore once again and Romney waited for the result before phoning Obama. One of the Group discussing the outcome said if the American Election had more than 2 Parties it is very likely that a coalition would get more done.

The main consideration now is to get the economy moving , never mind Politics and the discussion could not emphasise this enough .

Panda wrote:

AnnaEsse wrote:

Panda wrote:He didn't win by a big majority so is going to have the same problems he had before trying to get anything done. Romney was gracious in defeat.....5 children and 18 Grandchildren , didn't he do well.!!! he also has a personal fortune of $150 million .

America is in dire straits financially and cannot afford to go for quantitive easing again. A discussion among Economists, Bankers and Investment Managers said it is time for both Parties to get together, forget politics and stop the bickering, put the best brains from both parties to creating jobs, the most important issue .

I think he won by a good majority, Panda. What the Dems don't have is a majority in Congress. So, they'll have the same problem they had before in getting anything passed. I expect Obama will be signing a few more Executive Orders.

His majority was only a handful AnnaEsse in fact Florida came to the fore once again and Romney waited for the result before phoning Obama. One of the Group discussing the outcome said if the American Election had more than 2 Parties it is very likely that a coalition would get more done.

The main consideration now is to get the economy moving , never mind Politics and the discussion could not emphasise this enough .

Panda, I may be wrong, but I think Obama's majority was over 100 Electoral College votes.

AnnaEsse wrote:

Panda wrote:

AnnaEsse wrote:

Panda wrote:He didn't win by a big majority so is going to have the same problems he had before trying to get anything done. Romney was gracious in defeat.....5 children and 18 Grandchildren , didn't he do well.!!! he also has a personal fortune of $150 million .

America is in dire straits financially and cannot afford to go for quantitive easing again. A discussion among Economists, Bankers and Investment Managers said it is time for both Parties to get together, forget politics and stop the bickering, put the best brains from both parties to creating jobs, the most important issue .

I think he won by a good majority, Panda. What the Dems don't have is a majority in Congress. So, they'll have the same problem they had before in getting anything passed. I expect Obama will be signing a few more Executive Orders.

His majority was only a handful AnnaEsse in fact Florida came to the fore once again and Romney waited for the result before phoning Obama. One of the Group discussing the outcome said if the American Election had more than 2 Parties it is very likely that a coalition would get more done.

The main consideration now is to get the economy moving , never mind Politics and the discussion could not emphasise this enough .

Panda, I may be wrong, but I think Obama's majority was over 100 Electoral College votes.

Obama got 303 electoral votes and Romney 206. 270 were necessary to win the election so yes, it was a good majority although in terms of popular vote it was only around 3%.

US politics on international trial as fiscal cliff looms


From a certain angle, the Coalition government in Britain is going to look rather good in the run-up to Christmas. It will not be of much help to David Cameron, though, because the angle is only available in America.








Barack Obama's victory means the world is more likely to have a Federal Reserve chairman inclined to print money Photo: Reuters






By Richard Blackden, New York

8:12PM GMT 08 Nov 2012

35 Comments




Whatever you think of the Coalition, it has reached compromises and held firm under testing conditions.


Across the Atlantic, compromise has been the political equivalent of a rare species over the last four years. Something you are told exists but that you very rarely get the chance to see. President Barack Obama did not need it in his first two years, when the Democrats controlled Congress.


After the Republicans wrestled back control of the House of Representatives in late 2010, Washington could not achieve it except for last-ditch deals hatched in the shadow of potential calamities like national default. On Wednesday, as Democrats were still celebrating and Republicans beginning the painful autopsy of their campaign, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had its worst fall in a year.


Were the wealthy on Wall Street voicing their dismay that Obama kept his job? That seems doubtful given both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 climbed more than 50pc during his first four years in office. At the margin, Obama’s victory also means the world is more likely to have a Federal Reserve chairman – whether Ben Bernanke or his successor – inclined to print money. The Republican challenger Mitt Romney had voiced concerns about the policy.


A simpler and more convincing explanation for Wednesday’s drop is that investors were ringing the alarm bell over whether the political system in the US is up to the challenges that lie ahead of it.



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That may seem counter-intuitive given the world spent Tuesday watching the great wheels of American democracy turn. But it is not when you consider the bitterness of the fight, the closeness of the popular vote and Washington’s recent track record of division.

“The reality is that we’re going through a period that is historic in terms of its polarisation,” says Norm Ornstein, the author of The Broken Branch: How Congress is Failing America and How to Get it Back on Track. “An ideological polarisation has become almost tribal.”

Division in Washington is nothing new. Indeed, argument and a clash of opinion is an essential ingredient of democracy. Stark divisions are not particularly novel, either, according to Howard Rosenthal, a professor of politics at New York University. His analysis of Congressional voting records between 1897 and 2010 shows cross-party agreement on legislation began declining in the 1970s.

The increasing refusal to compromise is exacerbated by America’s punishing electoral cycle, which puts pressure on parties and presidents to spend more of their time in campaigning rather than governing mode.

It was easier for investors to ignore any discord in Washington when the economy was sailing along. Republicans and Democrats clashed bitterly as the financial and human cost of George W Bush’s decision to invade Iraq became clear, but it was at a time when financial markets were enjoying the US housing boom.

That the political risk of investing in the US can no longer be shrugged off is coming into sharp focus because of what has been dubbed the 'fiscal cliff’. You have probably read about the cliff – the alarming nickname for the combination of government spending cuts and tax rises that Americans face in early January.

Just as troubling is why the US is staring at this double helping of austerity. The fiscal cliff is a trap set last autumn by a Congressional committee of Republicans and Democrats that was tasked with delivering a major agreement to reduce America’s $16 trillion (£10 trillion) of debt.

The cliff would be triggered if both sides failed to reach a deal. Compromise may be painful, so the theory went, but the cliff would be so much worse. So much for that theory. Fast forward a year, and most economists believe that going over the proverbial cliff will be enough to choke America’s recovery. You can see why investors, G20 leaders, the International Monetary Fund and almost everyone else are rightly anxious.

Given the increasingly high stakes, investors should ask whether the acrimony hobbling policymaking in Washington simply reflects broader divisions in American society.

There is evidence that the gap in beliefs between Americans who identify themselves as Democrats and those who consider themselves Republicans has widened over the last 25 years. A survey published this year by the Pew Foundation found the gulf between such Americans is at its widest since 1987, with a far deeper divergence over the role of government than there once was.

That found an echo in an election in which Obama and Romney set out competing views on the role of government in the economy, deficits and taxation and almost split the popular vote between them. The exit polls also paint a vivid picture of the groups of voters Obama mobilised to return him to the White House.

He won 71pc of the Hispanic vote, 55pc of women and 60pc of those aged between 18 and 24. However, in a country as diverse as the US, Hispanics are just as likely to have been swayed by Obama’s support for immigration reform. Some women, in turn, will have been deterred by the Republican position on abortion.

So there are divisions among Americans. And, yes, some of them are animated by the competing views on the role of government in the economy that has been at the frontline of the war in Washington over the last two years. But not by any means all of them.

As the world looks on, it is also worth noting that both Republicans and Democrats have been allowed to keep digging their trenches because there has been no international pressure on America to make the painful decisions on which programmes to cut or who should pay more tax.

Bond investors have not pushed up yields to a level where it has become painful, as they have done across southern Europe and threatened to do in Britain. That is partly because the US government bond market remains the safe-haven of choice of investors, and the dollar the world’s reserve currency. They are advantages the US earned through more than a century of strong economic growth and political stability.

Prof Rosenthal fears that this week’s election will only deepen divisions in Washington. That partly reflects the pessimism in the US towards Washington at the moment. Just 10pc of voters approve of the job Congress is doing, according to an August poll. Should Rosenthal be right, America’s political system will be failing it just as its economy shows more encouraging signs of emerging from the four hard years since the financial crisis.

Having won a second election, Obama does not need to worry about winning a third. Painful as it may be for the winner, Obama should lead the charge for compromise on the tough decisions facing the US. It may help lift poll ratings for Congress and, importantly, shore up international faith in America’s politicians.

Claudia79 wrote:

Little or no change there then Claudia... It's almost as if their civil war never happened. The population of the Northern States carried Obama through.