Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

You can’t love your country only when you win.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

fuckem (in honor of the late great efgoldman)

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

A thin legal pretext to veneer over their personal religious and political desires

And now I have baud making fun of me. this day can’t get worse.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Fuck the extremist election deniers. What’s money for if not for keeping them out of office?

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

T R E 4 5 O N

Do not shrug your shoulders and accept the normalization of untruths.

Yeah, with this crowd one never knows.

The revolution will be supervised.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Let us savor the impending downfall of lawless scoundrels who richly deserve the trouble barreling their way.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Bark louder, little dog.

You are here: Home / Balloon Juice / Readership Capture / Another Poll

Another Poll

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Foreign Policy Debate Poll

There were a few complaints about this polling widget last time, but a bunch of you used it, so here’s another one. The results can be viewed here.

Also, too: this will probably be my last post for at least a week, because I’m traveling to the heartland to help out a family member who isn’t doing too well. The election is going to be tight. Volunteer, call and help get out the vote.

Reader Interactions

140Comments

  1. 1.

    aimai

    OT but kind of not. I was bouncing around the internet and I stumbled on this peerless article by Hindraker from August of this year after he got a chance to hear Romney talk behind closed doors in Minn.

    While Romney spoke, I was flanked by two of Minnesota’s most dedicated conservative activists and donors. I asked each in turn, what better spokesman for conservative principles has our movement had in recent years? Like me, they couldn’t come up with any. Romney is as effective on the stump as any conservative I can remember. Of course, most voters will never see him this way. I think the Romney campaign needs to film him before audiences like tonight’s, and edit 30 or 60 second ads of him speaking to a friendly crowd the way he did tonight. Or, as one of my friends suggested, they could emulate Reagan and buy 30 minutes of network time for a more comprehensive speech. One way or another, Romney needs voters to see him unleashed and unedited.

  3. 3.

    Ash Can

    @aimai: Don’t tell me, let me guess — Hinderaker was among the first to pee himself when the 47% video was leaked, right?

    And good luck to your family member, mistermix.

  4. 4.

    quannlace

    I’m giving up polls for the next two weeks, for both my mental and bodily health. Won’t be easy. Now that the debates are over, polls are the only shiny toys the news networks have left to play with.

  6. 6.

    Linda Featheringill

    Good wishes for your whole family.

    We’ll spend our time chasing one shiny object after another until you get back. :-)

  7. 7.

    Todd

    Screw polls. I’m in Jamaica, and a hurricane is headed straight here. Not a snowballs chance in hell that I’ll get to dive, and we may wind up evacuated.

  9. 9.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I see Romney is releasing an national ad about the “apology tour”. I saw a lot talk last night about Romney’s performance suggesting he had strong internal polls and didn’t want to blow it. Returning to this low-rent, talk-radio demagoguery doesn’t look like a sign of strength to me. Has this shit gotten any traction over the last year, outside the FoxNews bubble (or Bullshit Mountain).

    ETA: and Old Man McCain being trotted out to whine about “cheap shots”. Again, doesn’t look like strength to me.

  10. 10.

    Cermet

    I’m traveling to the heartland

    Sorry, but for most of that area, the people have no heart. They are amerikan christians – translated: greedily, I got mine, selfish, indifferent, repug-a-thugs who happen to out number the decent democrats who live there. The real heartland is the Northeast and left West Coast.

  11. 11.

    Schlemizel

    All online polling is useless, these are more useless than that.

    Over at the Slog there is a marvelous picture of Anne pegging Willard after the debate. He seems to be enjoying it & she appears to be practiced at it.

    Best wishes to you on your trip & the family on their health.

  12. 12.

    Cermet

    @Todd: Believe it or not – that same storm may head for the mid-Atlantic and even combine with a Nor’easter! for a hell of a bad party. While the models say this is possible (could be further north or not happen), hopefully, it will not do this – the target date is Oct 29. Hope the computer’s are full of it.

  13. 13.

    parrot

    i don’t trust pie charts, only hockey stick oriented graphs … i’m Rmoney and i approve of this message

  14. 14.

    quannlace

    Man McCain being trotted out to whine about “cheap shots”

    Well, when you put out targets the size of a barn door, you gotta expect a couple of shots.

  16. 16.

    Culture of Truth

    BOCA RATON, Fla., Oct. 23 (UPI) – A CNN poll of registered voters who watched the debate put Obama ahead, 48 percent to 40 percent for Romney, but the results were much closer after factoring in the 4.5 percentage point margin of error.

  18. 18.

    Roger Moore

    @aimai:

    I think the Romney campaign needs to film him before audiences like tonight’s, and edit 30 or 60 second ads of him speaking to a friendly crowd the way he did tonight. … One way or another, Romney needs voters to see him unleashed and unedited.

    Consistency- it’s not for Republicans.

  19. 19.

    MikeJ

    @Culture of Truth: Funny how they always figure that a 8 point lead for a Dem with a 4pt margin of error means the Dem’s score is 4 lower, the republican is 4 higher. What if it means Obama won by 16, which comports better with the CBS poll.

    Of course it’s all silly because that’s not the way margins of error work.

  22. 22.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @aimai: One way or another, Romney needs voters to see him unleashed and unedited.

    Are the Obamans even using the 47% clip anymore? Seems like it would still work to me, to undermine the new moderate and would-be lovable Willard, but what do I know?

  23. 23.

    rlrr

    If the United States did something truly wrong, like accidentally shooting down a civilian airliner (or invading a country under false pretenses), does Romney think the US shouldn’t apologize?

  26. 26.

    MikeJ

    @me: BOCA RATON, Fla., Oct. 23 (UPI) – A CNN producer was found beaten to death, the apparent murder weapon a copy of “SPSS for Dummies”…

  30. 30.

    Roberta in MN

    Just wait, the ad war is just getting underway. Mistermix please have a safe trip and sending prayers to your family.

  31. 31.

    Tom65

    Freepers are posting pics of the Honor Guard at Arlington National Cemetery as proof that the military still uses bayonets. I’m not kidding.

  34. 34.

    01jack

    Poll is stupid.
    “Yes”, “No” – but there’s no question.
    If there were a yes/no question, then “Don’t care” wouldn’t be an answer.

  36. 36.

    ericblair

    Anybody have any idea on the where the weird focus on shipbuilding came from? Seems like a triple-bank shot you wouldn’t immediately pivot to if you were trying to get mouthbreathers to think you’re a real manly-man going after Scary Brown People. I’m guessing General Dynamics and their buds have a bit of a revenue problem and Willard’s promising to do them a solid, otherwise I’m stuck.

  38. 38.

    Yutsano

    @ericblair:

    Anybody have any idea on the where the weird focus on shipbuilding came from?

    Maybe Willard really does want to turn us into Greece.

  41. 41.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @ericblair: He had to find a way to attack Obama’s use of the military – handling pirates, killing bin Laden, pulling out of Iraq – you know, turn his strength into his weakness. And he probably decided on the number of ships as his best/only option.

  43. 43.

    Evolving Deep Southerner

    Standing in the early voting line in Raleigh. Good looking crowd here. And trying to post from the iPhone for the first time ever. Did it work?

  45. 45.

    Redshift

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: I agree that his strategy was to be sure not to blow it, but I don’t see that as evidence of strength. That’s one scenario where a candidate would be cautious, but the one I think was in play was that Romney knew foreign policy was Obama’s strong suit and not his, so “making news” was more likely to be bad for him.

    In addition, if he had strong polling and was playing it safe for that reason, he wouldn’t have been abandoning his policy positions and trying to appear bland.

  51. 51.

    Redshift

    @Schlemizel: Funny. I saw that and it looked to me like she was trying to make sure Mitt didn’t fall off the stage. It may have just been caution, since that wouldn’t have been a good news story, but it set off a new round of speculation between me and the Ms. about whether Romney has some undisclosed illness. There was that time in the summer when aides said he wasn’t campaigning in Florida because he was “exhausted” and then quickly walked it back, and the fact he took the week after the convention off. Rachel has also noted that he mostly hasn’t campaigned the day after each debate.

    It would be irresponsible not to speculate.

  56. 56.

    Hill Dweller

    @Redshift: Even the 48-40 number is ridiculous, because it was so heavily tilted to Republican callers.

    The MSM really has been appalling for the last month.

  58. 58.

    Judas Escargot, Acerbic Prophet of the Mighty Potato God

    Did anyone else watch any of the ‘pre game show’ on CNN, pre-debate? I was curious so I did.

    Granted, coming from MSNBC I’d expect to notice the difference in priorities/coverage/spin, but the extent of the pro-Romney tongue-bathing from Blitzer and Cooper was almost embarrassing to watch.

    They (just barely) fell short of using words like “Magnificence” and “Majesty” to describe Mitt Romney’s demeanor, but they really did seem to be fawning over him like 17th-century courtiers.

    Fucked up.

  59. 59.

    cckids

    @Schlemizel: Yeah, speaking of optics, I was struck by the contrast of after the debate, President Obama, easily down by the crowd (I envy him his knees), chatting away; Willard bending from the waist to reach & shake hands with Ann nervously all but holding the back of his coat so that he didn’t lose his balance. It was the first time that Romney looked physically old.

  61. 61.

    jibeaux

    @Omnes Omnibus: George Takei posts charming silly little joke mockups that people send him, and there are invariably 400 completely humorless comments arguing that the premise on which the joke is based is unfair. You’ll find the bayonet thing there, too, under a kitten picture. I really have no idea why people wonder why there are no good conservative humorists.

  62. 62.

    cckids

    @Tom65: The debate was barely over before Blitzer/Cooper were stating that “our special forces used horses in Afghanistan, and the Marines use bayonets”. What the everlovin hell?

  63. 63.

    Tom Q

    @Hill Dweller: I’ve long been in the “don’t attribute to malice what can be explained by thickness” camp, but the recent behavior of the press makes me question that benign take. For many days now they’ve taken as gospel the idea that Romney is rolling, with more voters poised to hop on board with him as long as he’s a non-threatening alternative. There’s no empirical evidence for this; if anything, polls have eased in Obama’s direction over that period, leading to ties or outright Obama leads in all but the most questionable surveys.

    And now they’re doing everything short of a pretzel twist to fit last night’s results into that narrative. Bad enough they ask viewers to mistrust the evidence of their own eyes; now they’re telling everyone to deny the rather strong showing Obama made in all the polling (including the designed-to-deceive CNN R-leaning sample). This is Mark Halperin’s “excellent news for John McCain” elevated to governing principle. It can’t be explained by simple dullness. This is an agenda at work.

  64. 64.

    jibeaux

    @cckids: It’s the best they’ve got. Unfortunately for them, the president said “FEWER” not “NO” and I’ll be fucked if anyone is going to successfully factcheck that we have fewer horses and bayonets than in 1916.

  65. 65.

    cckids

    @ericblair:

    Anybody have any idea on the where the weird focus on shipbuilding came from?

    Its because Norfolk, Virginia, is one of the hubs of shipbuilding. Swing state vote whoring.

  67. 67.

    TooManyJens

    @cckids: So they challenged a statement the President never made — he never said there were NO bayonets or horses — and left Romney’s whole “Syria is Iran’s path to the sea” fantasy alone? I am shocked, shocked.

  68. 68.

    cckids

    @jibeaux: Somehow I’m sure someone will try. They haven’t bothered to check the stupid ship remark of Romneys that is unreconstructed bullshit. They have to do something.

  69. 69.

    Jay C

    @ericblair:

    Anybody have any idea on the where the weird focus on shipbuilding came from?
    __
    …I’m guessing General Dynamics and their buds have a bit of a revenue problem and Willard’s promising to do them a solid…

    Bingo! The “size of the Navy” claptrap has been a staple of Republican talking-points since Reagan’s time at least: it hits a couple of points which reinforce each other: 1) its furthers the meme of blanketing the seas with a huge-ass Navy as a sure sign of American “strength” and 2) not coincidentally underwrites a giant sector of the MIC with lucrative contracts ad infinitum Win-win.

  70. 70.

    FlipYrWhig

    @Tom Q: I was at the gym last night, and (of course) one of the TVs in the room with the treadmills was on Fox News. Bill O’Reilly was on, and his whole opening pitch was about how Romney had the momentum and if he won the debate he’d win the election. No acknowledgment of the polls having turned back towards Obama over the last week or so. I expect disinformation from Fox, but, you’re right, this cycle it seems to be permeating every channel.

  72. 72.

    cckids

    @TooManyJens: That’s because the bayonets line was “the” line of the night, so they have to pile on like tweenagers on Facebook. The Syria factfail is about some boring brownish country, who knows where?? Real Americans don’t know/care about such things.

  73. 73.

    Jay C

    @Cermet:

    October 29? No sh*t? I still remember last Oct. 29 (’11) – due a spectacular case of bad timing, I had to make a 125-mile car trip: the last 123 of them in the worst blizzard in years (and the only one all season). Hopefully this year’s version will be tad better…

  74. 74.

    El Cid

    @Tom Q: Just choose the option which is most supported and logical — there’s no inherent superiority to assuming incompetence over malice when in a particular situation malice seems the more reasonable explanation.

    Elites love, love, love trying to get everyone to believe that every time they do something which screws over other people but attempts to benefit them, it’s just some sort of wacky mis-step.

    This doesn’t imply that either option is some default explanation to any given situation, but I am fiercely opposed to continually being asked to view an entire politico-economic system as a series of unfortunately self-interested events.

  76. 76.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Tom Q:

    the recent behavior of the press makes me question that benign take. For many days now they’ve taken as gospel the idea that Romney is rolling, with more voters poised to hop on board with him as long as he’s a non-threatening alternative.

    Jonathan Chait has a good take on this very subject

    In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win but win handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)
    This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    Surprise surprise, it’s a trick they learned from Rove. I think Romney is even better at playind the MSM than the Bush II team. Of course, I think the media is even dumber and weaker than it was 12 years ago. I didn’t have much use for Tim Russert, but he was several evolutionary rungs above David Gregory, or his pumpkin-headed spawn, and I suspect David Brinkley rolls in his grave every time Ann Coulter is a panelist on his old show (which, again, kinda sucked even when he was still at the helm).

  77. 77.

    quannlace

    @Redshift: I have people on FB nitpicking over whether the US military still used bayonets.

    Remind them that Obama didn’t say NO bayonets, just LESS bayonets.

    Don’t Marines still have ceremonial swords as part of their dress uniforms? I guess dueling at dawn won the Battle of the Bulge.

  78. 78.

    cckids

    @rlrr: Why would actual reality, such as what Obama really said, matter to the wingers. Christ knows they’ve run with “scandals” on WAY thinner ice than this.

  79. 79.

    smintheus

    I love how pundits have been insisting in unison, after Mitt’s hollowness was exposed during the last 2 debates, that he has still succeeded in clearing the bar of “looking presidential” and proving that he’s up to the job.

    What Mitt actually managed to prove to them is that he’s a rich white male.

  80. 80.

    Cassidy

    People on FB are either ignoring the debate completely and just declaring Mitt more presidential or they’re trotting out the bayonets stuff. I decided to troll with remembering that bayonet charge in Baghdad.

  81. 81.

    Roger Moore

    @quannlace:

    Don’t Marines still have ceremonial swords as part of their dress uniforms? I guess dueling at dawn won the Battle of the Bulge.

    WTF do the Marines have to do with it? It was the Army that won the Battle of the Bulge, not the fucking jarheads.

  84. 84.

    MikeJ

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy.

    And Democrats are far too stupid to do this themselves. One off night and half the left blogosphere wets their pants. Mitt gets pummeled last night and his foot soldiers are still out there cranking away.

    People love to talk about Obama’s great ground game, and he does have one. The Democratic pros know what’s going on. It’s the Democratic voters who haven’t figured out that people love winners and hate losers and if they want to help us win, the best thing to do is to act like we already have.

  86. 86.

    Roger Moore

    @smintheus:

    What Mitt actually managed to prove to them is that he’s a rich white male.

    Yes, and “rich white male” is an important part of the way they think Presidents are supposed to look. See, he looked a lot more Presidential by that standard than Barack “blackety black black” Obama.

  87. 87.

    Xecky Gilchrist

    “A man in an empty suit?”

    I think Romney is just an empty suit. Empty suits, by definition, don’t have anyone in them.

  90. 90.

    GregB

    @Cassidy:

    I finally got one of the wingnuttiest of my FaceBook friends to unfriend me.

    I think calling Romney a weakling was my coup de grace.

  92. 92.

    mdblanche

    @MikeJ: But that would be overconfidence and then everyone would stay home. Every Democrat knows the real way to motivate people is to spread doom and gloom because once you get people into a fetal crouch, they’re sobbing too much to waste time being complacent. Why else do you think the party mascot is a donkey?

  93. 93.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @MikeJ: My conclusion: This white man thinks that we still have some “black man isn’t as good” issues in our party, in part because they are expecting perfection. Double standards and all that.

  94. 94.

    Schlemizel

    @Redshift:
    Frankly, Willard may be the laziest campaigner for Prez in my lifetime. A few weeks ago he went days without a public appearance just daily private fund raisers. Even on days he does campaign stops they don’t seem to be that many.

    I had not thought of this as a possible physical/health problem; thought it was just the effects of wealth and privilege. You may be on to something there though – Woodrow Wilson II?

  95. 95.

    Tonal Crow

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Ding ding ding ding! With Republicans, it’s all Sovietsky/Baghdad Bob propaganda, all the time. Up is down, black is white, slavery is freedom, and voting for Romney will make rainbow-flavored unicorns burst out of everyone’s ass and bless each and every one of us with four mansions, three SUVs, two Gucci watches, and a partridge in a pear tree.

  96. 96.

    MikeJ

    Completely off topic, may I propose that anyone who writes authentication systems for online apps be rounded up and sent to a reëducation camp?

    Le me, going to online app I haven’t used in years. Log in, am told, “all users must reset passwords.” Go to new pwd form. Enter old pwd, create new pwd. New pwd isn’t allowed to have one of the non-alpha numeric chars my old pwd had in it. Come up with easy to remember substitute that fits new rules. Old pwd doesn’t fit new rules, pwd change system won’t let me change because pwd doesn’t work. This is after I logged in a was redirected to change pwd.

  99. 99.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @MikeJ: @mdblanche: Just turned on MSNBC, and Ed Rendell is using that platform to spread fearful concern trollery. With him, you have to add in his personal PUMA hatred of Obama, but I wish they would just leave him off the guest list for the next two weeks. TPM has a handful of national poll numbers this a.m., Obama has narrow leads in all but Rasmussen and a D-Kos tie. So the sky is falling under weight of Romney’s momentum.

  100. 100.

    Tom Q

    @MikeJ: I thought this applied in 2000 as well (when the Confidence Con Jim, Foolish Literalist talks about was used by Rove/Bush). Dems (including prominent pundits) early on bought into the idea that Bush was going to win because have-a-beer-with etc. Reputable forecasters (incuding the Keys system I’ve advocated here before) said Gore was favored, if only by a little, but Dems didn’t believe it. I honestly believe one reason the GOP steamrollered Gore in the aftermath (besides, of course, ultimately, the Supreme Court) was Dems were so unprepared for winning they had no idea how to deal with prosperity.

    Team Obama is alot smarter — and I think they’ll have a wider margin than Gore did, making their job easier — but too much of the sniveling Dem “base” is no help at all.

  101. 101.

    Schlemizel

    @Roger Moore: WTF do the Marines have to do with it? It was the Army that won the Battle of the Bulge, not the fucking jarheads.

    touchy touchy!
    The point is still valid, it was Patton tanks, Tony McAuliffe’s inability to verbalize ;-{D and poor resources the part of the Nazi’s not a bayonet charge that won the fight.

    The Marines were mostly enjoying a nice tropical vacation visiting colorful Pacific Isles at the time.

  102. 102.

    Tom Q

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: Something else no one is highlighting: all these tied/Obama slightly ahead polls are based on the tight LV screens that uniformly favor Romney. If either candidate has room to grow, it seems to me it’s the one that has a larger lead in the RV, given that not-infrequently the presidential election model has turned out to resemble that rather more closely than LV.

  105. 105.

    Roger Moore

    @MikeJ:
    And let me just say that anyone who comes up with complicated rules about what passwords are allowed is a big douche to start with. Just have a measure of password complexity with a minimum score, and let the user decide how to meet the desired score. If I want to use “correct horse battery staple” as my password, don’t spit it back out because it doesn’t contain a number or your algorithm is too stupid to handle spaces. And for FSM’s sake, don’t store the plaintext password on your servers; use a lot of rounds with a modern hash and adequate salt.

  106. 106.

    Narcissus

    Back a few months ago I wondered what the hell would happen when a campaign just fell apart, like the Romney campaign did.

    Turns out, the press will do it for him. So that answers that.

  108. 108.

    Tonal Crow

    @Roger Moore:

    And for FSM’s sake, don’t store the plaintext password on your servers; use a lot of rounds with a modern hash and adequate salt.

    This cannot be said enough. Also too, generate the salt using a physical source of random data (e.g., thermal static, radioactive decay).

  112. 112.

    Roger Moore

    @Tonal Crow:

    Also too, generate the salt using a physical source of random data (e.g., thermal static, radioactive decay).

    I’m not quite as sure about that one. I’m not going to argue against using a hardware RNG, but my impression is that /dev/urandom ought to be good enough, especially if adding users is a small enough part of your workload that you have plenty of time to accumulate entropy between requests. Or is this really because you’re going to be using up your entropy doing stuff like generating keys for SSL connections for your app?

  117. 117.

    Tonal Crow

    @Roger Moore: It’s good practice to get into the habit of using true random data for security-sensitive applications. Also, it’s difficult to quantify the actual amount of entropy in quantities derived from system counters and the like.

  118. 118.

    Redshift

    @Keith G: The first comment there is hilarious. “Nate Silver is not exactly non-partisan,” says a commenter, citing a critique from the National Review.

    Not. Fooling. Anyone. (Except perhaps himself.)

  120. 120.

    Seanly

    Obama didn’t even say that we have NO bayonets or horses. Just that we have a lot less than we used to. I loved the snarky bit about we have ships called aircraft carriers and others that go underwater – submarines.

    btw, where were Romney’s zingers? I thought he practised them for months.

  124. 124.

    scav

    So noe we see why the MittMoronmrntum was more than willing to letbDetroit die. He needed the brownfields and labor freed up for his horse and bayonet based military industril complex. Now he’ll just have to outsource the hurse production to China and ship them here via the Syrian canal. General Custer will not be best pleased.

  125. 125.

    Cassidy

    Woohoo! New and bright and shiny and….fuck. I thought I was commenting in a new thread. Carry on.

  126. 126.

    The Moar You Know

    Anybody have any idea on the where the weird focus on shipbuilding came from?

    @ericblair: California, Washington State, Virginia, Connecticut. The East Coast states I cite are where the military builds ships, one of those is a swing state. The West Coast states are where they used to. Think they still do some work up in WA, but not a lot. It’s a great job, high pay, great bennies, one of the few jobs left where you can be solid middle class without having been to college.

    And there are a lot of folks who lost those good jobs over the last twenty years, because we just don’t need the big boats like we used to. Those voters want the good ol’ days back, and who can blame them?

    It would have been a smart move on Romney’s part had he followed through with something about how we needed more ships to generate more good American jobs. Sadly for him, not only would that thought never occur to him, but the idea of creating more good-paying jobs is flat-out anathema to the GOP base, even if those jobs are building equipment to shoot brown people with.

  128. 128.

    Redshift

    @smintheus: My impression from watching Steve Schmidt and a few others is that all those pundits are taking their cue from Romney spinners.

    The one consistent message from them is “Romney’s goal here was to look presidential, and he met that.”

    If you have more brains than a pundit, your reaction is “So what?” Meeting your own low bar doesn’t mean you won or you succeeded, it just means you set the bar low enough that you couldn’t fail. (Then again, for W, the bar was “didn’t drool on himself” and he didn’t even have to set that, the press did it for him.)

  130. 130.

    Roger Moore

    @Tonal Crow:
    I can buy that. And it shouldn’t be too big a deal these days. Intel is apparently building hardware RNGs into its chipsets, so you don’t even need to go out of your way to get one.

  131. 131.

    Omnes Omnibus

    None of the bayonet nitpickers on FB have had a riposte to my comment that fewer does not necessarily equal zero.

  132. 132.

    trollhattan

    @me:

    Bring back trench warfare. Defeat the Hun!

    Had it been President Willard, we’d have been fighting with the Huns. Bain proved the man can smell a winner.

  133. 133.

    trollhattan

    @Omnes Omnibus:
    I have it on good authority there are a few folks employed shoveling coal into steam locomotive fireboxes, also, too. Perhaps not as many as in 1916, but “a few” means they totally exist, man!

  134. 134.

    Schlemizel

    @Cassidy:

    All 4 branches seem to have a thing about commercials.
    My fav of all time was the Army one subtitled “RUN AWAY!” to promote the army of one.
    USMC= the black knight or freestyle rock climber
    USAF= war is a video game – cool!
    USN= SEALS are cool
    USA= what are they doing these days? I have not noticed

  135. 135.

    Roger Moore

    @Raven:
    I won’t claim to be an expert, but a number of people I trust (like Bruce Schneier) recommend password safes- or even writing down important passwords and keeping them in your wallet- as good security practice. The basic argument is that people have a hard time remembering really secure passwords, so they tend to fall into security traps, using relatively weak and easy to remember passwords and/or recycling passwords between sites. A password safe lets you memorize just one password, so you can make it the toughest to crack password you can remember, and then the safe itself can generate and remember passwords that are beyond your own ability. As long as the program is well written and you keep the data on a medium that’s physically secure (e.g in a thumb drive you keep on your person) it’s probably eliminated bad passwords as the weak link in your security chain. Of course your account may still get hacked if the other guy’s security is weak, e.g. they store plaintext passwords or let people social engineer their password reset/recovery system, but the problem is unlikely to be on your end.

  137. 137.

    Schlemizel

    @Roger Moore:

    There have been some pretty good things coming out recently on password formats. Hackers find that the 1st char is usually a capital letter and the last char a special or a number. for instance.

    But, yeah, use really hard to remember passwords and keep them written down & your wallet if you have to. If its something you care about change it often.

    Still the bigger problem is that if there are weak passwords on systems hackers can leverage that into enough access to bust your info too. You are relying on a lot of morans and their D0gsname! password more than is healthy.

  138. 138.

    The Moar You Know

    Mississippi is where the new heavies are being built.

    @MikeJ: Whoops, forgot that one. You are correct. I don’t work with those so my knowledge of their supply chain is not what it should be.

    I see the fat douche managed to do something for his state besides get federal funding to fix his beach house, good for him.

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