The Glade 4.0

From my perspective, the big concern is the mis-information that's spread around. Attack ads in particular often take one minor fact and then twist and spin it around into some overblown thing that it's not. I think there's some risk there for people who aren't skeptical to take that information at face value.

What do you have to say about Vindi's link then, Aizle? If that is true, then we should have seen an overwhelming victory for the Democrats in this election cycle.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

Well certain people couldn't run on the issue or their record around here so they just kept playing and playing and playing attack adds on the radio up until the polls closed. I'm pleased to say it didn't work.

It's like any other product really. You can't rely solely on the advertising to decide if you want to buy it, because the advertisement isn't there to inform you about the product it's there to make you buy the product.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Republicans won the advertising war because they had a clear message backed up by facts, and they hammered it home.

It's always amazing that when election season starts- every canidate is against taxes and a fiscal conservative. Simply put, conservatism wins elections, liberalism does not. Well unless you are in bizzaro land like Cali.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Me unelects politicians so dey can fight legal integration.

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The U. S. Constitution doesn't guarantee happiness, only the pursuit of it. You have to catch up with it yourself. B. Franklin

"A mind needs books like a sword needs a whetstone." -- Tyrion Lannister, A Game of Thrones

I disagree. I think claiming to be fiscally conservative while actually avoiding the hard questions is what wins elections. If candidates went out there and argued honestly for fiscally conservative positions (i.e. gutting everything from DoD to Medicare), they'd get their clocks cleaned. The truth is, most Americans like to call themselves conservative, but very few actually are when the sh*t gets real.

This.

Gutting DoD would not be fiscally conservative. You would cause a shift in the balance of world power that could very easily cause an overall loss of economic activity that could in turn cause a significant loss in revenue, cancelling out such cuts.

There is room for cuts in the DoD and I've gone over the nature of wise cuts before. Khross mentioned them recently as well. What you can't do is consider defense spending in a vaccuum, because it is a major component of overall national strategy, which is a major driver of economic conditions, which in turn affect revenues.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I don't think Vindi's link is necessarily directly relevant to my concern. There is misinformation thrown around by both sides.

I couldn't agree more.

Of course this is true, athough I would say it becomes more true at an advanced age due to time spent being forced to pay in with the promise of future benefit and a smaller time left in the work force. The truely insidious nature of these programs is that they were intentionally created in a way that made them politically impossible to end, regardless of the amount of damage they cause to the country.

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Ezekiel 23:19-20 

I took the point to be that its not only attack ads, as you claimed, but just the general claims espoused by those already in power. TheRiov didn't come to that erroneous conclusion by himself, he listed and believed the fear mongering of the liberal politicians about what would happen, and why they lost. The facts don't support that position.

Ok, since you broght it up in another thread (and I finally tracked down a transcript of the NPR Article I was referring to...)


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... =130836771

and just for good measure I went back and actually read this now (since I didn't really have time to originally)
a) The article you cite referrs to contributions specifically the the canidate campains, not to so-called third-party groups who dont have to declare a political leaning -- so called "issue ads" and the like (generally attack ads) Contributions directly to campains I seem to recall are still capped, but anyone can buy ad space now and say what they want.

Now all that said, pro-democratic spending DID pick up in the last weeks before the election (sorry, btw I was off by 2 weeks on the date) but there was still a large disparity. I think it ended up more like 2:1 but (and I'm sure you'll insist on it) I'll try to find the cite for you.

Nothing in that link substantiates your assertion without selective application. I'm afraid you'll need to find something more substantive than a knowingly biased source.

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Looks to me like what you stated and what you linked have only the most tenuous of similarity.

If only we knew how they defined "Republican Advocacy Group", from the examples they gave anything that ran counter to the Incumbent Democrat was a "Republican Advocacy Group", I guess by those standards, NPR is a "Democrat Advocacy Group".



Ummm, that's what PACs are. You know from your statement about...PACs.


Go for it, I have a feeling it won't support your statement either.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko