well all things considered

[dellstart]

Have had other thing on my mind , living in NYC and all , but cant really say , im thrilled with the outcome of the election..

[the_scot]

Actually, it's a good basis for a constitutional amendment putting NON OF THE ABOVE on the ballot. 25% with no one with a majority and you start over with new choices. Should greatly improve our choices and and eliminate all the negative ads.

[zebuddha]

heh, yeah, I can imagine elections dragging out for year after year as the candidates keep getting rejected...
hmmm, although it might be a good way to stop them from spending those ridiculous amounts each time if there's no sure chance for success

[giddiani]

My thoughts on the whole process is...we spent $1.5 Billion to keep the status quo. O_o

[Bester]

I guess the way that I look at it is that, while I'm not an Obama fan, I actively disliked Romney and the entire Republican stance for this election cycle. They floundered between their entire campaign stance being "get Obama out of office!" and saying batshit crazy things (legitimate rape, anyone?); there were quite a few times I was wondering if the Republicans were actively trying to lose. Given the situation on the right (and the ongoing hijacking by the Tea Party), I'm just as happy to have Obama win, but without legislative majority. The deadlock will make it unlikely that anything can be done to actually make the situation worse (given modern politics, I've almost given up on the pipe dream of the government making things actually better).

Maybe one day someone will invent a virus that selectively eliminates lawyers and politicians; at that point, we will transcend into a golden age as has never been seen on this world before.

[the_scot]

.we spent $1.5 Billion to keep the status quo. O_o -----Try 6-8 billion and most of it was on negative ads.

The deadlock will make it unlikely that anything can be done to actually make the situation worse (given modern politics, I've almost given up on the pipe dream of the government making things actually better) ---- In the Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein said through one of his characters, American Democracy works... because it doesn't. Considering it was released in 1966, I thought it was an astute observation.

Maybe one day someone will invent a virus that selectively eliminates lawyers and politicians; at that point, we will transcend into a golden age as has never been seen on this world before --- Maybe that's why cmsix's Nanovirus was so highly popular.

[hermit-bob]

It is odd to think that elections the United States of America forces on other countries REQUIRES 60% of the populous to vote to even be considered legal, and yet this election had less that 50% of the REGISTERED voters actually vote...in any other country the U.S. Department of State would have required a new election to meet the legal requirements.

My head still hurts from trying to consolidate the Republican stance of following the Ideal of the Founding Fathers and what they actually say and do. Same with Democrats...

The U.S. needs a many party or no party system. This 2 party system will keep any effective social advancement from occurring from internally driven ideas.

[dragn982]

While I agree that the two-party system is crap, I can't see how a many-party system could be anything but worse. Would you want a president who's majority vote was 25%?

[bigthunder]

Rather than having party primary's have a primary that includes all of them and then have a runoff for the 3-4 with the most votes. As multiple party's would encourage coalition building and less deadlocking.

[Fel]

My thoughts on the election:

--Karl Rove is TOAST. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars, donated primarily by a handful of billionaires, to elect hand-picked sycophants that would do their bidding. Now Rove has to answer to said billionaires that for all the money he spent, NOT ONE of their hand-picked candidates won an election. Not one.

--related to Karl Rove, the average lay citizen proved that Citizens United and unlimited corporate money in our elections. can be overcome by voter determination, Republican attempts to blatantly suppress voters notwithstanding. It also sent a clear and stark warning to said corporations that you can't just BUY yourself an election in America, no matter how much money you throw at it. If your candidate is an obvious corporate shill, he WILL go down in defeat.

--actually, Republican attempts to suppress voters, I believe, was why they lost the election so badly. Simply put, they pissed off enough people who would not have otherwise voted into standing in line for 5 or 6 hours to do just that.

--The Republican Party will go the way of the Whigs in 16 years if they don't change. America is no longer dominated by old, fat, white Christian men who can do whatever they please because they can out-vote everyone else. American demographics now outright demand that any serious candidate for Congress or the Executive must appeal to more than ONLY old, fat white Christian men. The base of the Republican Party of today simply cannot survive after the election of 2020 without expanding its platform to try to woo hispanics, blacks, and asians into the fold. Unfortunately, this will not come to pass, because the current base of the Republican Party absolutely will not budge. If the Establishment Republicans attempt to do this, watch for the "evangelicals" who form a significant base of the G.O.P. to form a third party, which will effectively render them insignificant.

Evidence of this trend is already apparent in the Senate elections. Deprived of gerrymandered districts that basically ensure one party wins the election no matter how crazy they are, the Tea Party backed Republican candidates were utterly CRUSHED in the election. Only ONE of them, Cruz from Texas, won his election, and that was primarily becuase his Democratic opponent was scandal-ridden and Texas is a heavily Republican state that utilizes voting gimmicks to indirectly suppress its considerable Hispanic population, primarily the tactic of putting polling places as inconviently far from concentrations of Democratic voters as possible. But I digress...this trend shows that while the Republican zealots we shall call the Tea Party primary ELECTABLE Republican candidates like Richard Lugar and kick them out, their candidates are beaten by moderate and much less crazy-looking Democratic opponents.

--This election spells the doom of the Tea Party. The Tea Party was a knee-jerk reaction to the change of American demographics, and consists mainly of its most rabidly xenophobic, racist, and isolationist segments who consistently primaried establishment Repulicans in favor of right wing zealots, who then went on to get hammered in the general election. They've had their asses handed to them on a cheese grater platter, and if the Republican Party is smart, they'll smack the wingnut segment of their party down. The very survival of the Republican Party is at stake, and if they continue to kowtow to these zealot nutcases, they'll destroy the Republican Party.

[Mistra]

being european, i'm pretty happy obama won, Romney seemed like a bit of a prick (and i'm rather anti theistic, so the idea of any possible current republican candidate as president honestly scares me).

In Belgium we have the reverse of what fel describes happening, We traditionally have a multi-party system with 3 large party's, socialist(left, or near communist to the more conservative americans), democrats(center, or pretty close to the left of obama's politics) and liberals (right, somewhere just right of obama). But:

(i'm doing my very best not to sound racist, if you wanna call what i'm about to say something, it's gonna be closer to culturist... or something)
With an increase in north african refugees and imigrant looking for a better life here, our social network is getting severely strained. The older generations came to europe to work in the mines, these people worked hard and earn their rest, their children however are often a problem, their parents never learned any language other than arab and strictly hold to their culture. This clashes in ways that their children (now mostly in their 20's) often were controlled too strictly at home, or not at all on the streets, since european culture has no or less social control (people here are not expected to comment on the behaviour of someone else's child). adding to this is the fact that authority figures don't know the arab language, so teachers are having a hard time correcting wrong behaviour and since they had no insentive to respect the teachers, they have less respect for authority in general or, because of religious influence, women specifically. These people are finding it hard to find and hold jobs, but have no reason to change their behaviour because of the belgian social network, and the anti-rascism laws, (people yell rascism a lot here, i don't care if you're white, black or maroon, if you refuse to mop the floor when you were hired as a cleaning assistant, your boss has no use for you) that only seem to work uni-directional (a turkish man stabbing a french woman in belgium is never racist, the reverse always is... how does that work?) (i know a lot of exceptions to this, unfortunately, they are not the norm).
There's also a number of issues between the dutch north of the country, and the french south, but let's stay away from that one.

This amongst other reasons prompted new, more conservative parties, that are often shunned by the traditional 3. So at this moment we have a conservative party with about 30% of the votes, another extreme right (think slightly left of the republican party) with about 8% and an enviromentalist party(extremely left) about 12% of votes and the traditional parties with what remains and we're going to a system where it's right vs everyone else. (at the moment absolutely nothing happens cause the entire governement is pretty much in a deadlock)

my appologies for my english, i have no spellcheck here, and if someone thinks i'm wrong i am more than happy to be corrected, but please don't call me a racist, i'm not.

[artreus]

you summed it up nicely mistra,

you forgot the calimero tactics tho,
and maybe some 'antics' about the latest elections
-> half the parties complained about, despited being the largest in a city, not being in the coalition,
and doing the same in other cities where they are not the biggest

[Mac The Knife]

I've been hearing that Tea Party members are racist, but other than talking heads expressing an opinion, I haven't seen any proof of that. Are there any legitimate articles on this, or is it another one of those, "A friend of my ex-brother in-law's former employer's secretarie's gardener said...."

[Bester]

I don't think the group is per se racist. There are overtly racist elements in the group (at a lot of events, you can find racist signs and messages amongst the outlying group), but that doesn't mean all members, or even most, are racist. That said, the group is run by essentially rich, old, white guys, and there undoubtedly is a strong support of homogeneous white issues, to the detriment of any other demography. Of course, to a certain extent, the same could be said for a large portion of the Republican party as a whole.

[Mac The Knife]

Same can be said about some churches as well.