I am proud of America

i am a canadian, but last night, everyone was talking about the us election, and specifically, obama. it received alot more attention than our recent election.

i was very happy to see the unity, the excitement, and renewed hope. American deteriorated horribly under Bush. I do not believe he was ever legally elected....those electronic machines are owned by the Republican/Bushes.

Obama team was smart and had placed about 500 lawyers in Florida this time. They also patrolled the lines, so that people could not be turned away.

America really leads the world!

 

I was being the provocateur.

I think his governing and executive style will will be careful, measured, will operate from strength, seek consensus where possible, avoid blind ideological pitfalls and traps, while adhering to a centrist agenda.

In other words, a Bush antithesis.

 

I got an idea... let's get everyone from this thread together and then we will all take turns stomping on YOU until you shut the F up... and stop raining on everyone's eles parade! !

 

It's Obama
by Jed Babbin

"The most liberal U.S. Senator, Barack Obama of Illinois, won a huge victory yesterday over John McCain.

It wasn’t over until 11 pm when Obama went over the minimum 270 electoral votes by winning California, but the early results -- Pennsylvania going for Obama at 8:30 pm EST and Ohio an hour later -- were really all that Obama needed to win to make it impossible for McCain to eke out a narrow victory.

Pennsylvania -- along with Florida, Ohio, and Virginia were crucial to McCain’s chances. No Republican ever won the White House without winning Ohio, and John McCain was no exception.

Even my home state of Virginia -- which hadn’t voted for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 -- went for Obama. Eight years ago, George Bush carried Virginia by 56% to 41% for Al Gore. Florida, too, went for Obama narrowly.

Out of 538 electoral votes, Barack Obama won by a huge margin. After one a.m. the count, though incomplete, was 338 to 158. The popular vote was much closer, about 52% to 48%. This was the first time a Democratic presidential candidate earned more than 50% of the popular vote since Jimmy Carter in 1976. On this vote, Obama will claim a mandate for all his big-spending ideas.

Call it an earthquake, call it an electoral landslide, call it whatever you like. John McCain struck out even among key Republican constituencies such as evangelical Christians.

Though we’ll be analyzing the data for weeks and months to come, it appears that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t have the effect McCain intended. She may have excited parts of the Republican base for some brief time, but her influence wasn’t nearly enough to turn out many of the key conservative constituencies for the Republican ticket. And those constituencies were never comfortable with John McCain. The evangelical vote in Ohio should have been enough to win that state, but Palin apparently didn’t earn their votes.

McCain’s concession speech, which came at about 11:20 pm, was gracious. He called upon all Americans to show pride in their nation and pledged to help Obama reach compromises to solve the nation’s problems.

Obama’s midnight acceptance speech was another crowd-pleaser. He, too, was gracious but there was an edge: his chant of “yes, we can” was coupled to his promises of new entitlement programs for health care and college tuition for all.

But President-elect Obama is still an enigma: we really don’t know him well enough to know if he will make any effort to restrain his liberal ideology (and that of his overheated party leaders in Congress). By every measure we know, it appears that he will not.

In the Congressional lame duck session later this month, we’ll see a preview of next year. Nothing other than Republican filibusters will stop Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid from passing their entire agenda. President Bush will have to limber up his veto pen. We will learn a lot about the president-elect by what he says and does in this brief time.

Next year, we must expect the worst. Pelosi and Reid will -- in Obama’s first one hundred days -- pass a whole litany of extreme liberal measures. The infamous “card check” bill, which will deprive workers of the secret ballot in choosing to unionize, will certainly pass. The offshore oil drilling ban will be back. And there will be another “stimulus” package of borrowed money.

Barack Obama will support them all and ask for more. We can expect all that aren’t filibustered in the Senate to pass. As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) made clear, the “Fairness Doctrine” will be re-imposed to throttle conservative talk radio.

Schumer -- in a recent Fox News interview -- mocked the network’s “fair and balanced” motto and compared talk radio to pornography. Schumer said, “The very same people who don’t want the Fairness Doctrine want the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] to limit pornography on the air. I am for that… But you can’t say government hands off in one area to a commercial enterprise but you are allowed to intervene in another.”

Is Rush Limbaugh pornographic? Only someone who wants to destroy conservative talk radio could make that comparison. The First Amendment will be under attack as never before. We will defend it, and -- thanks to the Roberts court -- our defense will succeed.

And we must take Obama at his word. We will withdraw precipitously from Iraq and -- for all his bold talk -- Obama will not commit long to the war against the Taliban. And he will not resist Barney Franks’ call to cut military spending. What our armed forces desperately need will be forfeited to pay for whatever liberal spending plans are to be imposed upon us.

Despite all this, the conservative phoenix will rise, quickly, from the ashes of the McCain campaign and the Bush administration. It’s up to us, and we will gladly meet this challenge.

It’s a very good bet that Barack Obama will be a one-term president if Republicans recover from this awful campaign. The challenges of the war, our economic crisis and the realities of Washington politics won’t permit him to do all he wants to do. When America sees who he really is -- the most liberal candidate ever elected -- we will resist. Republicans must deny him the usual congressional “honeymoon.”

But the challenges facing the Republican Party are just as great. The Party will have to define-- and correct -- the problems that got it where it is today.

In his concession, McCain said his campaign was “challenged”: it was, by the baggage of the Bush administration, an unpopular war and the financial crisis that broke in the last months of the two-year struggle. And McCain was the wrong man to meet these challenges against the Obama phenomenon.

In 1996, it was Bob Dole’s turn to run for president, and the Republicans nominated the affable Dole who ran the worst campaign in memory. In 2008, it was John McCain’s turn. Affable, maverick, formerly a favorite of the Washington press corps, John McCain’s campaign was no better than Dole’s.

Republicans -- allowing huge cross-over Democratic and independent votes in the early primaries -- enabled those voters to choose a candidate who is not a conservative. The Republican Rules Committee has, in its most recent departure from reality, renewed those same rules for 2012. The rules must be changed. The Democrats require anyone who votes in their primaries to at least sign a statement that they’re Democrats. Republicans must make all their primaries closed to non-Republicans or Democrats and independents will do in 2012 what they did this year.

McCain never campaigned on issues and lost as Republicans always do when they fail to focus the contest on Democrats’ liberal ideology. He was a poor choice to do this because his own ideology is not conservative: his political successes have all been achieved by compromising with liberals. That is a poor foundation on which to build the coalition of conservatives and socially-conservative Democrats that is essential to winning the White House.

If Republicans fail to nominate a candidate in 2012 who is solidly -- reflexively -- conservative they will lose again.

For the next few days or weeks or months, Republicans will play the blame game over their failure this year. They should make it short, because that time that would be better spent on reorienting the Party to conservative principles.

Cong. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc) got it right last night. He said the Republicans need a housecleaning. They need to reclaim the title of the “party of big ideas.” Those ideas have to be conservative ideas: smaller government, strong defense, and individual freedom.

It would be a cardinal mistake for Republicans to start rallying around one possible 2012 candidate or another. If the Party rallies around principle, that person will arise. The conservative foundation is there, ready to be built upon. Let’s get to it."

 

<img src=http://osmoothie.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/crying-baby-party-56800676.jpg>

 

I'm former Navy and went with my gut for McCain-but you have to admit Obamas a great speaker. I'm dreading taxes/programs though (will kill my business) and don't really even mind Obama, its who he will put in office with him, but will give him a chance.

 

AN ELECTION THAT THE REPUBLICANS NEEDED TO LOSE — GOOD LUCK OBAMA
By DICK MORRIS

"If ever there was an election that was not worth winning, it was the contest of 2008. While it was hard-fought on both sides, had McCain won, it might have spelled the end of the Republican Party. As it is, the party is well-situated to come back in 2010 and in 2012, if it learns the lessons of this year.

Simply put, all hell is about to break loose in the markets and the economy. The mortgage crisis will likely be followed by defaults in credit card debt, student loans and car loans. We will probably be set for two years of zero growth, according to economists with whom I talk. And the federal efforts to protect the nation from the worst of the recession will probably lead to huge budget deficits and resulting inflation. We are in for stagflation that could last for years.

Had McCain won, he would be the latter-day Hoover, blamed for the disaster that unfolded on his watch. Now it is Obama’s problem. With the Republicans suffering a wipeout in congressional elections (although not as bad as they feared), the ball is now squarely in the Democratic court. Good luck!

If Obama raises taxes, the situation could get even worse. With a liberal Congress on his hands, he will be constrained to move to the left, if he needs any pushing. When Clinton was elected in 1992, the Democrats in control of Congress gave him a clear message: Either you govern within the four walls of the Democratic caucus or you won’t get our support. Crossing the aisle to get Republican votes, even including the GOP in negotiations, was a no-no for which the president would pay dearly if he transgressed.

The result was predictable. Moderate initiatives like welfare reform were scrapped, the Congress passed tax hikes and legislation became festooned with liberal amendments. Faced with the need to round up every last vote in the Senate and House Democratic caucuses, Clinton had no choice but to load up conservative bills like an anti-crime measure with liberal pork (like a provision for midnight basketball courts in urban areas) to get unanimous caucus backing.

Obama will have to move left to appease his caucus. He will become their hostage, and they his jailers.

This dynamic will produce extreme-left-wing governance, which the Republicans can blame for the continuation of the recession and for any worsening. The party will recover, fed by anger at Obama’s policies, and will emerge from this defeat stronger than ever.

But the Republicans must learn the lesson of MoveOn.org. Founded in the bleak days of the Clinton impeachment, MoveOn developed a grassroots Internet base. Building up its e-list of activists and contributors, MoveOn laid the basis for the incredible Internet appeal of the Obama campaign. At last count, Obama has 4.5 million donors, most online.

Conservatives cannot count on the Republican Party to fight their battles for them, and certainly cannot count on them to win. The right needs to develop cyber-roots conservative organizations to rival the power of groups like MoveOn.org. The stellar efforts of NewsMax.com and its ally, GOPtrust.com, illustrate the power of such efforts. Together, these groups raised $10 million for an independent expenditure on media in swing states featuring the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s anti-American bombast.

And their efforts worked.

Virtually all the polls agreed that Obama would win 52-53 percent of the vote, but the surveys varied in the amount of undecideds they found. On Election Day, virtually every undecided voter went to McCain, and Obama’s final vote share was no more and no less than the 52-53 percent the surveys had predicted. This unanimity among undecided voters is attributable to the endgame of groups like GOPtrust.com and NewsMax.com.

These groups have to lead the way in running media to battle against the leftist legislation that will undoubtedly emanate from the Obama administration and the liberal Congress America has just elected. Then they can become the basis for a Republican resurgence, just as MoveOn.org was this year for the Democrats."

 

Rahm Emanuel( Chief of Staff) Here we go... starting already!

We are screwed!

 

What kills me, is the fact that 90% of the posters here make less than 40k a year. They live in a fantasy world. Bush screwed them and Obama will actually not screw them. They make so little money they have no real stake in any candidate since their income is subject to so little taxation. They are one step away from welfare and food stamps. It's a suprise they can even afford a computer and an ISP.

The idea that if they earned the money the dream about would be taxed drives their votes is pitiful.

Elite trader. Really, it's a collection of losers.