Over at Publicola, they have Elway Poll’s recent numbers for the initiatives. It looks bad for all of the initiatives.
The Elway poll, in contrast, shows three of the four statewide ballot measures (gay marriage, pot*, and the two-thirds rule) “teetering on the edge of victory,” with just 50 to 51 percent support. The fourth, charter schools, is leading but has the support of just 47 percent of likely voters.
It’ll be pretty awful if gay people can’t get married or if Washington State is still arresting people for possession of marijuana. Still, as an anti-initiative person, I’m always glad that it’s tough to pass an initiative. Of course R-74 isn’t an initiative, so that’s a little different.
But in general, if people in Washington are skeptical of the process, that’s probably good overall.
* Seriously, pot? I know the aim was brevity there, but “pot” makes the initiative sound so frivolous.
And you seem to be able to post in this one. Go ahead and consider this an open thread, and my apologies for the one below not working. I’ve let Goldy know.
Shouldn’t the two-thirds rule initiative have to pass by two thirds itself?
So Willard? Your justification is when you don’t have a script or a teleprompter that’s when your inner asshole REALLY comes out?
@3 The one-percenters should be proud of themselves for creating an economy that puts half of the American people on government assistance. That’s what they wanted, wasn’t it? A few people have all the money? This is what a world run by law-of-the-jungle-social-darwinians looks like.
The Tacoma paper came out with a yes on R-74 editorial today.
Nice to see the Tacoma Seattle and Spokane papers all coming out for it.
@ 3
Romney took only three questions at the presser, and dismissed the remarks as “off the cuff”
That doesn’t seem like many questions. Still, isn’t it three more than Obama has taken at press conferences since early June?
Just sayin’.
@ 5
There are times I am not a conservative and this is one of them. I think a divorce attorney for gays should be every bit as expensive as one for heterosexual couples.
Seriously, I just couldn’t come up with a justifiable reason why my nephew shouldn’t have the recognition that my wife and I have, if he elects to take the big leap.
Every so often ideology just is unsupportable. For me, this is one of those times.
Since this is an open thread and Romney’s candidacy is supposedly over, here’s a contrarian opinion:
http://themonkeycage.org/wp-co.....gaffes.png
No discernible or certainly consequential movement because of Obama’s two “gaffes.” The only movement after Romney’s comments about the Libya attack is in his favor, thanks largely to the probably inevitable tightening after Obama’s convention bump.
http://themonkeycage.org/blog/.....d-that-47/
Poll Confirms Romney’s Libya Remarks Fell Flat
Pew Research Center’s polling on Romney’s Libya response is as follows:
Obama’s handling of situation:
Approve – 45%
Disapprove – 36%
Romney’s comments on situation:
Approve – 26%
Disapprove – 48%
http://www.washingtonpost.com/.....n-1-chart/
Equal Right has advanced incrimentally, Marriage Equality will be adapted eventually if not this year.
@ 9
2. The situation in Libya, Egypt and beyond continues to evolve. The longer protests continue, the more the focus will likely shift from Romney’s statement last Tuesday to the efficacy of the policies that President Obama has put into place. And that added level of scrutiny — amid images of ongoing violence — could turn the issue into much more of a negative for Obama.
3. Foreign policy won’t decide the election — or come anywhere close to deciding it. People who followed the recent conflict in the Middle East may not have loved how Romney responded but there’s little evidence that anything outside of the economy and other domestic policy matters will be deciding influences on how voters — particularly those who are still undecided –make up their minds.
It’s still the economy. Stupid.
@7
See, now, I thought conservatives wanted government out of people’s lives and that gay marriage was a pretty good example of getting the government out of people’s lives. There are conservative arguments for gay marriage.
If I were to sit down and write out a political platform there wouldn’t be a single thing on it that I couldn’t justify using philosophical and historical precedents from both sides of the political fence.
@6
You might want to take a look at this video from August 20. Twenty-one minutes of Q&A but I didn’t count how many questions.
And while not press conferences per se, if you’re trying to claim that Obama is avoiding the press while Willard isn’t, can you explain lengthy interviews with Telemundo and 60 Minutes within the last seven days?
So, are you just repeating something you heard or read in the right wing world, were you mistaken, or were you lying to try to score a point?
The New Yorker confirms what I’ve been saying for a week now: Romney is incompetent at politics:
“Conspicuously absent from Romney’s foreign-policy advisory team are representatives of the less bellicose school of thinking that dominated Republican foreign policy before the neocons showed up. … What are we to make of … this? … My theory is that in this area, as in others, Romney has demonstrated that he’s a poor politician ….”
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin.....z26nMkavfq
The 2/3’s initiative has done better that pass by 2/3’s, it’s passed EVERY TIME it has been put to the vote.
By the way, how did this thread get morphed into Romney Hate? Oh never-mind, my bad, everything here is Romney Hate Obama King
Damn straight.
The Republicans fucked the economy up and nobody thinks Slick Willard will do anything but line his pockets and give the rest to his cronies.
Waaaaay coooool messaging don’cha think?
It’s gonna be this bad:
1964 Presidential Election Results:
Lyndon Johnson
Hubert Humphrey
Democratic
43,127,041 Pop, Vote
61.05%
486 Electoral Vote
90.3%
Barry Goldwater
William Miller
Republican
27,175,754 Pop. Vote
38.47%
52 Electoral Vote
9.7%
Read ’em and weep.
“Romney’s blundering during the past couple of days is of a piece with his entire campaign. A man … whose best hope of victory lay in portraying himself as a moderate … has self-destructed by aligning himself with some of the least credible and most voter-repellant groups in the G.O.P.”
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin.....z26nOAsSWR
The Romney melt-down is going to start having a VERY positive effect on down-ticket races!!!
@11 When the best comeback you’ve got is that Romney’s foreign policy blunders won’t matter if he doesn’t screw up on the economy (which he just did), well, that’s not the strategy I’d choose if I were a campaign manager.
@7 “Every so often ideology just is unsupportable. For me, this is one of those times.”
Why do you have so much trouble with taking this approach all the time?
@17 Yep, Dems now lead in WI and MA senate races. If this keeps up, Tammy Baldwin and Elizabeth Warren are gonna be senators.
Well, looookee here.
Notice where the greatest proportion of moochers who pay no federal income tax live?
Mississippi. Followed closely by Georgia and Oklahoma.
(puddy will be here any minute blaming the illiterate pregnant teen DUMMOCRAPTHS! in the cities for these statistics.)
Why are Mississippi, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, etc always ‘safe Romney’ if that’s where so many of the 47%-MoocherObamaVoters live?
Voter suppression?
Really dumb-ass electoral strategy?
Entitled fuck-tard who doesn’t know what he’s doing when he doesn’t have El Salvadoran murder cartel money to back him up?
Why is anyone surprised by Willard’s implosion?
What has he ever really done that was any sort of accomplishment?
All this vaunted ‘successful businessman’ bullshit was just that, bullshit, it seems. What did he really ever do? He was a rich, connected, entitled brat who went into the money business and took the money of other really rich people and used it to legally loot vulnerable companies. What sort of creativity or risk or hard work does that imply? None, as far as I can tell. It’s sort of bullying writ large.
The right-tard, Republican worship of money is really coming home to roost, with Willard showing his true venality, his true incompetence.
I hope Cap’n Crunch doesn’t have too bad a day tomorrow.
Drip, drip, drip……
That wasn’t some tree hugging liberal that said the above, it was David Brooks. I didn’t know David Brooks was capable of handing anyone their ass, let alone a fellow establishment Republican’s right before an election, but he did it. Brooks fucking destroyed Romney.
Go read it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09......html?_r=0
@25 More David Brooks:
“[A]fter adjusting for inflation, entitlement transfers to individuals have grown by more than 700 percent over the last 50 years. This spending surge, Eberstadt notes, has increased faster under Republican administrations than Democratic ones.”
If we were the leeches wingnuts portray us as, we’d be voting Republican.
“…47 percent of Americans are dependent on government checks…”
Well, that is true, if you count the retired military and government folks as part of the 47%. The question we really should be addressing is how we’re gonna pay those people if they’ve earned the bennies.
“If we were the leeches wingnuts portray us as, we’d be voting Republican.”
It’s not just welfare (corporate or otherwise). We just didn’t think this shit through very carefully. For example, no provision was ever made for Social Security payments given that life expectancy has increased rather substantially since 1935 when Social Security was enacted. Now we’re at the point where we have to make some serious choices, and all our politicians want to do is to get elected and stay elected.
We could save a substantial amount of money by ending the empire and downsizing the military to about 60% of its current size. Do we really need 900-plus bases overseas? Isn’t a good time to declare victory in WWII and withdraw from Germany? How much is all that shit costing us?
@28: not true that “no provision was ever made for Social Security payments given that life expectancy has increased rather substantially since 1935…”. That was actually factored into the original actuarial calcs. Lots of other things weren’t in the original bill; like the fact that to get SocSec thru a Dixiecrat-dominated Congress FDR had to carve out all sorts of exemptions for ag workers to make sure no blah sharecroppers would be eligible (fixed after WW2).