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Post by wdmundt on Jan 2, 2008 17:10:17 GMT -4
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 2, 2008 17:15:09 GMT -4
Yeah, that's an attempt at a religious smear attack alright.
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Post by wdmundt on Jan 2, 2008 17:37:19 GMT -4
Any guesses as to the source? I'm not a fan of that kind of crap from either side of the fence.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 2, 2008 17:53:37 GMT -4
I wouldn't know. Someone with access to the standard anti-Mormon tactics, in any case.
To a Mormon like myself it's pretty obviously not authentic, as either an LDS document or one produced by a sensible political campaign. In fact the LDS Church would object rather strenuously to any political candidate using a picture of one of its buildings - the Church makes a specific point of never endorsing any particular candidate or party and refuses the use of Church facilities for political purposes.
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Post by Ginnie on Jan 2, 2008 19:04:04 GMT -4
Yep, definitely looks like the card was designed to create a backlash against Romney (who I must admit am not too familiar with).
Hopefully, it hasn't created any damage to his presidency nomination or whatever it's called. It's too easy to be a sh@t disturber in this world, isn't it?
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Post by gillianren on Jan 3, 2008 4:19:38 GMT -4
Candidacy, Ginnie. Nominees won't get chosen until this summer, an agonizing seven months or so from now. Dirtiest campaign? Probably not--I could cite even more than I already have about dirty campaigns. But I'm already sick of it, and I actually care about politics.
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Post by BertL on Jan 3, 2008 7:25:39 GMT -4
When it's about politics, I'm glad I don't live in America. No offense, but all the campaigning for the US precidency seems to be so... obscene and sensational. I don't blame the people, of course.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 3, 2008 12:05:50 GMT -4
When it's about politics, I'm glad I don't live in America. No offense, but all the campaigning for the US precidency seems to be so... obscene and sensational. I don't blame the people, of course. Well, when it comes to politics I'm glad I don't live in Europe. It took Belgium more than six months after their last election to finally put a working government together. Spain lets terrorists decide their elections. And what's the point of keeping a mostly powerless royal family around, like England and the Netherlands (and a few others) do? And then there's taxes that in some countries are close to twice what they are in the U.S. I will admit that the political season seems very long this time around (for some reason they all started months and months early), but it's at least an interesting race - there is still no telling, at this point, who the final party candidates will be. After the first few primaries in the next few days we might finally be able to settle down to the few candidates who actually have a chance and get more serious and less sensational.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Jan 3, 2008 15:45:29 GMT -4
I honestly don't know how Americans deal with 2 years of it. We have 6 weeks and that's long enough.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 3, 2008 18:32:31 GMT -4
I don't know who decided it needed to be two years of campaigning this time around, but I think they need to re-think that decision. Two years is too much.
On a note related to the thread topic, apparently some pastors in Iowa who have endorsed Mike Huckabee have reportedly now received letters warning them that their churches may loose their tax-exempt status because they are supporting him.
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Post by gillianren on Jan 3, 2008 20:14:12 GMT -4
There is, Gods know, no perfect political system. I would like to think that we're above the petty mudslinging, but clearly, we're not. Now, I have my opinions about various of the candidates; I won't go into them here. The universal opinion I have of all of them, however, is that they started campaigning too soon. There are people on both sides of the aisle that I respect, in fact, but that doesn't matter to my base judgement, here. For Gods' sakes, Robert Kennedy didn't announce his candidacy until March 16, 1968! (I think he had a decent shot of winning at least the nomination, too, if it hadn't been for Sirhan Sirhan.) Hell, the very idea of campaigning for the job is recent; for a very long time, it was considered unseemly.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 4, 2008 0:18:21 GMT -4
It would be nice if the campaigning happened after, say, the 4th of July each year, so we only had to endure about 4 months of it, but it would be unamerican to force such a limit on the political process.
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Post by echnaton on Jan 4, 2008 9:56:19 GMT -4
The main difference between our system of President elections and Parliamentary elections is who selects the executive. In the Presidential system, literally anyone can (and does) run for a party nomination. In a campaign season like this one, with no incumbent or even frontrunner on either side, it takes a lot of time for each candidate to make an impression on voters. Four months would hardly be enough time to sort out among the eight or so candidates in each party. That is particularly true for voters that don’t have a strong party affiliation.
In the old days of nominations, before the voting in primaries, candidates were selected through a series of conventions in many states. In Texas it worked like this. You went to a precinct convention at your polling place after the voting was closed. That convention selected delegates to go to a state convention. That convention selected delegates for the national convention where the candidates were actually selected.
The result of all this was that candidates were selected by political deals in smoky back rooms. Becoming the nominee was as much a result of insider political clout as it was of popular support. The primarily election for candidates reduces the need for inside clout because anyone with sufficient financial support can make a realistic attempt at the nomination. This broadens the base of potential candidates.
Candidates are still selected at conventions, but election laws bind delegates in casting votes based on the result of the primary vote. The primary election system is much more democratic and correspondingly much more rough and tumble before the voting, but much smother at the national conventions, where TV coverage provides tremendous scrutiny over every step.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Jan 4, 2008 12:02:15 GMT -4
Actually I think that with todays communications technology that 4 months is adequate time for a candidate to make their case. It would help if we had debates that were really debates rather than sound-bite fests.
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Post by Ginnie on Jan 4, 2008 18:30:16 GMT -4
I actually think that U.S. elections are more interesting than ours. One thing about Canadian politics is that the people running for office are for the most part extremely boring, unless your last name was Trudeau. He was voted the most popular and least popular Prime Minister of all time in Canada.
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