Election Night. Gimme My Fix.

[stelz]

How about saying someone needs to?

http://www.freep.com/article/20120908/NEWS15/120908012/Secret-Service-investigates-Ohio-teen-s-tweet-about-Obama

[Cain]

If the Secret Service have got nothing better to do than investigate patent bullshit on Twitter, they obviously need another job.

[Balls Wellington]

On the other hand, it's pretty hilarious to think about random ignorant cletii getting visits from the Secret Service over some patent bullshit on twitter.

[M. Nigel Salt]

Ace of Spades has more on the Republican web effort

http://ace.mu.nu/archives/334783.php

From the very start there were warning signs. After signing up, you were invited to take part in nightly conference calls. The calls were more of the slick marketing speech type than helpful training sessions. There was a lot of "rah-rahs" and lofty talk about how this would change the ballgame.

Working primarily as a web developer, I had some serious questions. Things like "Has this been stress tested?", "Is there redundancy in place?" and "What steps have been taken to combat a coordinated DDOS attack or the like?", among others. These types of questions were brushed aside (truth be told, they never took one of my questions). They assured us that the system had been relentlessly tested and would be a tremendous success.

That article was extremely interesting in light of the unusually low turnout among older voters. We had high youth turnout and I wondered what on earth happened to keep those normally avidly voting oldsters at home. Sounds like this might have been a contributor, which is pretty interesting.

[Cain]

The butthurt continues:

[M. Nigel Salt]

The butthurt continues:

Guess who has a Facebook page and a forum?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/114941581953393/
hxxp://theshootingbench.yuku.com/directory#.UJ65D4U_1Gc

[Cain]

"If you're turning down customers on the basis of people's voting preferences, than you are too stupid to own a business.  Capitalism is the American Way".

Someone stick that on a poster and I'll slap it all over his page.

[Cain]

Also, Mark Ames makes a persuasive case that Gary Johnson was a Republican gambit to split the Obama vote:

http://nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/gary-johnson-swindle

One statistic: The road-widening cost the state $345 million, which Gov. Johnson covered by tapping a federal bond program giving the state 20 years to pay back the interest. So the "principled" budget-conscious libertarian governor and libertarian businessman went crawling to the federal government to rack up a giant credit card bill, then dumped the $345 million construction cost on "Robert the Bruce, King of the Scots" Once you realize Johnson is a conventional hard-right Republican, it’s not surprising that the people running his campaign are some of the GOP’s nastiest dirty tricksters.

Exhibit A: Roger Stone, a self-described "GOP hitman" with a giant tattoo of Richard Nixon’s face etched across his back. Roger Stone —the skeeziest, meanest, most flamboyant and most Russian-nihilistic of any Republican dirty trickster working the field going back a few decades, the Satanic Zelig of Republican black ops, who’s had a hand in just about every major GOP election crime you’ve heard of, and lots more you haven’t heard of. Everyone seems to have forgotten already, but last spring, Roger Stone made a big public stink about how he’s fed up with the Republican Party and the two-party stranglehold, and joined Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party campaign. Pro bono. Because democratic idealism and principles are what Roger Stone is all about.

Let’s see if this makes any sense in the context of Roger Stone’s record. Starting with the 1972 Nixon re-election campaign, when a hippie-bashing college student named Roger Stone joined Nixon’s dirty tricks team, and impressed them with stunts like planting a fake check from the Socialist Party in a rival’s campaign fund kitty, then leaking that story to the press... Or planting a spy in Hubert Humphrey’s campaign and seeing to it that his spy becomes Hubert Humphrey’s favorite driver on the campaign trail...

Roger Stone had a hand in the "Willie Horton" ad; he masterminded the Florida "yuppie riot" on James Baker’s behalf, halting the recount long enough to let William Rehnquist decide the elections; and although he won’t admit it on record yet, Roger Stone is most likely responsible for destroying Dan Rather’s career by planting the fake National Guard documents on his producer.

That’s a small sampler, but it’s enough to make anyone with a functioning brain realize that when Roger Stone’s says he’s suddenly decided he’s had a political awakening and he’s now a hardcore libertarian doing volunteer "pro bono" political consulting for Gary Johnson’s campaign... you better assume he’s not telling you the whole story. The whole story is absurd, but obviously Roger Stone is onto something by offering the media such a hack storyline, knowing that precisely because it’s so Hollywood unreal, the Manhattan media elites will swallow it hook, line and sinker.

[M. Nigel Salt]

I'm pretty sure it's totally illegal to deny service to people based on their political affiliation.

I'm also pretty sure that's code for is "if you're Black or Hispanic we don't want your kind"

[Emo Howard]

I'm pretty sure it's totally illegal to deny service to people based on their political affiliation.

I'm also pretty sure that's code for is "if you're Black or Hispanic we don't want your kind"

Definitely illegal in California, due to the Unruh Civil Rights Act, but I can't find anything federal, or Arizonan stating that it is illegal for businesses to discriminate over political affiliation.

https://www.legalzoom.com/us-law/equal-rights/right-refuse-service


ETA: might be a legitimate safety concern if he's not sure he can trust the judgement of some of his patrons if someone were to come in there saying nice things about the president.

Could be a bloodbath.

[Suu]

On the other hand, it's pretty hilarious to think about random ignorant cletii getting visits from the Secret Service over some patent bullshit on twitter.

And then, "ERMAHGERD TEH GUVMINT!"

[Mangrove]

The butthurt continues:

Poster should read: If you voted for Barack Obama, you elected a democratic president that relaxed gun laws.

[Suu]

And then...Applebee's threatens to fire employees and freezes hiring.

http://thinkprogress.org/health/2012/11/09/1173181/applebees-ceo-obamacare/?mobile=nc

[Cain]

You know, if Applebees had thrown their weight behind, say, a universal payer system during the process in 2010 and that had passed, then there wouldn't be a burden on their profit margin at all, and they would save millions every year.

Yet I am fairly sure that Tankel would think such a system is a socialist abomination.  My only reaction: 

[Cain]

A depressing dose of reality from Ian Welsh:

Now that the silly season is over, let’s be really clear where events are headed.

1) Obama is reelected.  He never needs your vote ever again. What he does need, to become as rich as Bill Clinton, is people to buy his speeches.  If you don’t have 500K or so hanging around to pay for an ex-POTUS speech, you are no longer part of his constituency.  Practically speaking, he needs to make sure people in the financial industry have the money and inclination to make him rich once he’s no longer President.

2) Idiot triumphalism aside, the electoral count was deceptive.  The Republicans didn’t lose by that much in key electoral states.  The Democrats are not cruising for 20 years of control of the Presidency.  There will be a Republican president again, that is an existential certainty.  The Republicans didn’t want this election very much, and did not really push for it.  There are good reasons for that.

3) The Republican party are reactionaries, who want to repeal the 20th century.  The Democrats are conservatives.  There is no major left wing party in the US.  Since avowed left-wingers won’t even vote for third parties in states where Democrats will win for sure, like New York, third parties can be written off for the time being, especially on the left.  If there is a third party which will rise, it will be on the right.

4) The Republicans and the Democrats agree on many issues, disagreeing mostly on social issues.  Even on social issues, the differences are in the margins.  Obama deported more Hispanics than Bush, but is ok with letting college educated young Hispanics stay, which was enough to buy the Hispanic vote, since they came here to build a better future for their children.  Obama overruled his drug administration’s scientists to make sure that Plan B did not become an OTC medication, because as a father he would want to know.  (Of course, if an underage female needs Plan B, in a lot of cases it will be because her father or other family member raped her.)  Obama signed an executive order saying that federal money could not be used for abortion.

5) On civil liberties, as opposed to social issues, there is no real space between the two parties.  Obama has increased surveillance, arrogated the right to kill American citizens without a trial, and instituted more cases against whistle blowers than any President in history.

6) Obama wants a Grand Bargain.  This will mean some nominal tax increases on the rich, and a pile of cuts to the middle class and the poor, especially the young.  SS & Medicare will be cut.

7) Bush tried to cut SS, he failed.  Obama will succeed, cutting SS and Medicare is something only a Democrat can do.  Moreover he will make Dems vote for it, and the Republicans will only give him enough votes to pass, most of them will vote against it, thus making Republicans the party of SS and Medicare.  There will also be massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy and even further cuts to programs like food stamps (which continues to exist only because farmers want it.)

8 ) Obama is, thus, moving to austerity. The economy will be ok till he gets what he wants, then it will crater.  Give it two years, after the mid-terms, you’re toast.

9) Americans have decided they want catastrophe.  There is NO significant force in US society pushing against having a disaster.

10) The US is trying to become a petro-state through fracking.  It won’t help most Americans, and it will do massive environmental damage.  It will also accelerate global warming.  Yes, Obama is better on global warming than Republicans, but he’s not enough better to matter, he is, in fact, making it worse.  Your grandchildren will ritually curse your very names.

11) America will have another major war within 10 years.  That’s what empires in decline do.  It could be with Saudi Arabia, it could be with China, it could be with someone else.  It will happen, because a President will be in a bind, and think “I’ve got this big military, why don’t I use it to solve my problems?”

12) Inequality will continue to increase, with dips during recessions.  Wages and wealth of ordinary Americans will continue to drop.  There will be a small housing recovery, due to massive Fed intervention, keeping homes off the market and deliberate destruction of homes, but it will not get back to a bubble.

13) The Fiscal Cliff will most likely be averted this time, but it will happen again after the next financial crash.  If that one is avoided, it will happen again.  At some point, it won’t be averted.  The US will have no choice at that point but to move to full war footing.  If you don’t get a big war before that point, you will then.

14) The fiscal cliffs won’t be avoided forever because the rich aren’t really going to tax themselves at the necessary rates. If they do that, they don’t get ahead.  Every collapse, they have to bailed out by someone else, if they aren’t, they’re destroyed.  They know this.  The key financial assets they held, at the depth of the crash, before the Fed started accepting them, were worth 10 cents on the dollar at best.

15) Europe is not going to fix its problems until the Euro collapses.  There will likely be civil wars, Spain is one obvious place it may happen.  Greece is almost certainly going to be taken over by the Golden Dawn, who aren’t even neo-Nazis, but rather the real thing: straight up Nazis.  The rich would rather deal with Nazis than with the left.  That isn’t going to work out for them, but they don’t realize that.

16) In the 20s the Europeans relied on America to be the engine of growth, that didn’t work out.  In the current day, the world is relying on China to be the engine of economic growth, and that isn’t going to work out either.

17) After the fiscal cliff that isn’t managed, and after the big war, the US will have a full fledged economic collapse, on the order of Russia after the USSR collapsed, but worse because most Americans don’t actually own their houses (they have mortgages), don’t have gardens where they can grow food, and don’t have good public transit.

18) History is mutable.  This is now the glide path.  It is most likely.  The details can change, but the endgame is virtually certain.  Since no one in the US wants to stop collapse and catastrophe, it will happen.

19) After it happens, the current generation in power will be thrown out on their asses by the young, who will have to fix America.  We’ll see if they have what it takes to do it.  Expect them to be very cruel to the old, who they will view as having screwed up everything and put the entire bill on them.  Among other things, expect an end to so-called intellectual property (a misnomer), expect the financial class to be gutted and expect a radical rewrite of bankruptcy laws.

20) This is an optimistic scenario.  The less optimistic (but possibly realistic) scenario has a “charismatic leader” of some variety take over and institute a dictatorship of some variety.  Many Americans will be begging for such a figure to arise, feeling that only a strong man can make the country work again.