It really is because stupid people should be called out on being stupid. Anyway, I will retract that statement given what you have said, though I'm pretty sure you're wrong. Being a liberal means being socially liberal, not economically. Free-market guys are not liberals because being liberal is just a measure of social stuff.

America is most probably the only nation to define liberals as centralizing, but in an American context it's correct, so...


This, though.

Liberalism revers to freedom and equality. Any freedom and equality. There is economic liberalism, social liberalism, democratic liberalism. Take any adjective and you can stick liberalism to it. And that is where the confusion comes from. Republicans are economically far more liberal than Democrats, but socially far less. In Europe Liberalism generally revers to Economic Liberalism. European Liberals want business and the economy to grow and often cut in social spending to do so.

Yes. When American's talk about Liberals, typically it means the opposite (Democrats call themselves liberals, so Republicans call them liberals too). So essentially, republicans are the Liberals of america, from a European perspective (economic liberals, certainly. Social conservatives, though they actually do call themselves social conservatives, oddly). The american name for someone who is both socially and economically liberal (by definition jell gives) is a Libertarian. Libertarians typically fall under the Republican party.
One thing I was thinking about today is how america only has the two parties. I think outsiders don't quite realize that even though that's true, each party has several distinct subgroups, so each party is sort-of like a mostly permanent coalition in other countries. For instance, inside the republican party are the Libertarians, the evangelicals, and the "establishment" republicans. Evangelicals are typically socially conservative and economically liberal (for this and the future, I'll use jell's notion of these terms, or try to), while establishment republicans are typically socially and economically conservative. Why these three hang out is beyond me, but they do. You can see the conflict between these groups in the republican primary. So, essentially we do have a bunch of parties, it's just that certain ones cooperate with each other against a certain other set, but inside each set all the groups try to gain power before dealing with the outside set. If that made sense.

http://edition.cnn.com/election/2012/debates/first-presidential-debate

The debate starts in 30 minutes. I am excited.

I'm not.  It'll probably just be them throwing zingers at eachother. Any actual content they are asked to provide will either have already been said through commercials/interviews or just completely avoided. Both candidates. And it's kinda funny how you have more interest in American politics than some Americans,  lol.  

I'm confident there's someone in America being more excited about the Swedish elections than me...

If nothing else, Anderson Cooper! Wolf Blitzer! Whoooo!

So far, I think Romney is doing the better job.

Currently discussing the deficit, previously the taxes.

Okay now Obama's doing a great job.

This is...a decent debate. Nothing big so far. Romney still doesn't talk about a lot of specifics.

Hooray bank specifics!

Romney looks really awkward. He's like death staring Obama. Overall, Obama's much more natural...

I don't look a lot on their faces. They're pretty boring to look at when not talking, both of them. =p

Lol, now Romney is going populist.

"You put 90 billions into green energy! That's money you could have put into hiring teachers!"

Not mutually exclusive, dude!

Currently closing words.

The debate never really got heated, I had heard mostly everything before. Nobody won it, but nobody lost it either.

Meh. Unless future debates are at earlier hours, I won't watch any other ones.

So I missed this, and am going to a Zimmer for the next 3-4 days, so can anyone update me with what's happened, who leads, and how is it good for israel?

NOTHING was said about Israel, nor Palestine, Syria/Turkey was mentioned exactly once and that sentence lasted for roughly three seconds. This was all about domestic politics.

Obama leads in the polls conducted prior to the debate by ~3.5 points nationally, and he'll lead afterwards as well. I can't see the numbers changing a lot.

What do you mean? The money can only go to one place.

NINJA'D by shos

Well, according to the little tracker thing at the bottom, Romney edged out Obama by a tiny, tiny bit. Romney won among men, Obama won among women. Now the tracker thing was about voters in Colorado, so not the whole US. In general, I agree with Isa's conclusion that no one really won, and no one really lost. I think it was a good debate. I'm listening in the background and it makes me laugh how much this one CNN reporter really hates Romney, but other than that, not much news.

Yeah, this James Carville guy that CNN has is a senior Democrat. I don't know if they have any Republican to compensate. Not sure if he's who you means.

Anyway, CNN apparently thinks that Romney won the debate, but it seems to me that they think Romney won because he didn't lose the debate, which they had predicted prior to the debate (which I think was a pretty weird assumption).


And what I mean is that there's more than 90 billions in the budget. You can spend money on both teachers and green energy.

They made that assumption based on some horribly misleading polls which are normally the goto for this sort of thing. If you care about why the polls were misleading, I can talk about that.

Honestly, I don't like either of their stances on education. Having a federal education system seems like a terrible idea to me. I know it's been around forever, but it's just so obnoxious and bureaucratic. The federal education people don't educate anyone. But they do manage to spend billions administrating themselves (not the country's education system, they spend more doing that). I don't understand why we can't just take that money and give it to the states on a by population or possibly by need basis. What is so helpful about having education centralized? Having national standards makes sense, but you could do that with not very much money. Pay a couple of consultants from various industries to help write the standards, and pay maybe a few dozen to a few hundred people to inspect the schools. Tada! You could do that with a few million dollars, not billions. And even that might be more than is really needed. Given some more time, maybe I or someone more clever than I could come up with an even better system. Just pumping money in seems like a fool's solution.

I also am displeased that neither of them has expressed understanding of how budgets work. You don't buy stuff and THEN figure out how to pay for it. You look at how much you make and THEN figure out what you can buy. It makes me very angry that the government doesn't do this. I understand that predicting exactly how much the government will get in taxes is complicated, but you always have a rough idea. So, you do what any rational human being would do and low-ball it. If you get more money, woopie! Stick it into the deficit.

I will not claim to know anything about your federal education system, so I won't challenge you there. I think it's a shame that you have to pay so much money to get into college, though. The only money I spend on my education is the money it costs me to buy my literature.

Also, while we are on the topic of polls...what do you think of unskewedpolls.com?

If Romney wins this I will be angry....

Hardly looks like he will at this point, though.
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/

Lol isa, did you look at the math they use? Bayesian updating with a heavy prior. Really? Even if that wasn't a problem, these guys are suffering from the same thing that CNN was, that the polls they base their projections on are fundamentally inaccurate. Ok, the reason the polls are inaccurate is because they assume voter turnout rates similar to the 2008 election, but that's very unlikely because 2008 was an extremely unusual year in regards to voter turnout. You look at Obama's base, and anyone can see that it isn't as sturdy or excited as it was in '08. I'm not saying "Yeah, Romney will win for sure!", but these projections that he'll get crushed are just wrong.

Exactly, so read this. http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/30/base-turnout-strategy-may-be-too-narrow-for-romney/

I suggest reading it all, but here's a quote that summarizes it decently (there's images in the link to give you more details, as well as other links):

Throw in this as well for good measure:
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/obama-would-be-big-favorite-with-fired-up-base/
http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/22/sept-22-little-agreement-among-pollsters-on-enthusiasm-gap/

FiveThirtyEight already consider the fact that some polls are likely to tilt towards Obama because they poll registered voters rather than likely voters, and so apply a boost of roughly 2.5% to Romney - yet, you see these numbers.

(and if you think unskewedpolls.com has it right - http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/29/poll-averages-have-no-history-of-consistent-partisan-bias/ has it)