Who are you voting for, for President?

[trumpetguy]

Exactly!  I want to be able to own a tank if I felt the need for it.

Please show me that plank in any party platform of your choice.  (insert sound of crickets here)

Even the Republicans support control of automatic weapons and heavier weapons.  So in this argument, McCain is just as "bad" in your estimation.

[frankieG]

well if you got a tank you need 3 more qualified people to crew it so blllaaaaa    after watching mccains choice as vp i think he is sunk.  i mean gawd he might as well nominated his wife.  just another piece of arm jewelry.   put a thermometer in him cuz he is done done and done.

[jserio]

mccain's vp choice actually makes sense given the way this election is going.  i think it was a smart move for mccain.  and if obama had any brains/balls he would have had clinton as his vp.

[frankieG]

no on want Hillary...that shrill voice and fat ass no way.   even though bill was a good president we have seen enough of him too.   obama's choice , in my opinion, is bang on.  this moose stew Alaska chick shows just how out of touch mccain and the republicans are.   the more i see of mccain on tv the older he looks...like he is going to keel over any time.

[yamahonkawazuki]

no one will take my guns, tehy can disappear, and be found quickly. so im not too concerned YET, now frankie, why is palin a bad veep choice? quote facts not opinions please, id like to know from a liberal side of this fine argu/discussion

either way no matter who wins, this election will be a historic event. on two fronts. not many senators were ever elected pres. now weve got two in the mix. AND if Obama wins, well have a black pres. ( quite historic), or if Mccain wins well have a woman Veep. again quite historic

[jserio]

we don't need to ban guns. gun bans do not work!! don't believe me, look at washington, d.c.  criminals are the ones who misuse guns. do you think they're gonna give a shaZam! if the gun they have is banned or not when they knock off the local 7-11? "oh, wait dude, we can't use the ar-15, it's banned." "right, i forgot, lets take the .45 s&w instead." come on, give me a break. what we need are stricter penalties. especially for gun crimes. many countries have very harsh penalties, but also low crime rates. steal something, loose a hand kinda penalties. but no, we won't do that here in america because in america, the criminals have rights!  f%$king idiots. i can take ANY gun, no matter the size or capacity.....load it....lay it on my coffee table.... and i promise, it won't harm a soul until someone picks it up and pulls the trigger. 

[Kasumi]

we don't need to ban guns. gun bans do not work!! don't believe me, look at washington, d.c.  criminals are the ones who misuse guns. do you think they're gonna give a shaZam! if the gun they have is banned or not when they knock off the local 7-11? "oh, wait dude, we can't use the ar-15, it's banned." "right, i forgot, lets take the .45 s&w instead." come on, give me a break. what we need are stricter penalties. especially for gun crimes. many countries have very harsh penalties, but also low crime rates. steal something, loose a hand kinda penalties. but no, we won't do that here in america because in america, the criminals have rights!  f%$king idiots. i can take ANY gun, no matter the size or capacity.....load it....lay it on my coffee table.... and i promise, it won't harm a soul until someone picks it up and pulls the trigger. 

Often the reason for not having stricter punishments is the cost/benefit etc idea.

Many people think you do something wrong your a criminal the criminal system is just a system which takes bad people punishes them and then lets them go or they die in the longterm. However the criminal justice system is just a buisness, paid for by your taxes. Nearly every country in the world has prison overcrowding. Theres not enough space to hold the number of people they want to punish therefore they do a cost/benefit analyasis. Say if we extend the length of time armed robbery suspects get locked up by just 1 year, throughout the whole prison system that could equate to thousands of spaces lost for other criminals. So they say well adding a year isn't going to accomplish that much for these people so we won't we will add a year to this.

Etc.... Its a buisness not a limitless hole. Much as it would be nicer to have harsher punishments for a lot of things, at 100% throughput something has to give for something to get harsher.

[pkhoff]

So armed citizens shooting said armed robbers would be a pretty cost effective solution.

[frankieG]

now the alaska chicks 17year old daughter is 5 months preggo.  to make matters worse she says he daughter is going to marry the father.  so two kids are going to get married, for no logical reason,  just to avoid a political "scandal"   republicans/conservatives are such f%$king hypocrites.  you have mccain who walks around like he is wearing a jacket two sizes too small with his trophy wife speaking like the is a robot.  he decides to get a no body eye candy trophy running mate so he can have more hotties around him.   wait maybe he is the daughters baddy daddy and the mother made him make her the running mate or she was going to tell all?  hrm....primary colors?  any chance mccain had of winning must have gone out the window with his terrible choice as running mate.   can you imagine her as president?  oh my is my hair ok, my moose stew done and did my hubby get his new ski-doo?  gawd what a farce.

[frankieG]

i guess they are saying her daughter already has a child

http://dailygleaner.canadaeast.com/canadaworld/article/403046

[The Buddha]

<snipped>  this moose stew Alaska chick <snip>

If she was 10 years younger and I was single ... man  I'll do her ... 
Cool.
Buddha.
Yes yes the buddha is a pervert.

[frankieG]

LIAR u would do her now and chuck in the daughter for a 3 some

[Kasumi]

I hate how the newspapers go mental and jump on stories like this. Half those newsreaders probably have daughters who got stupidly pregnant really young. f%$king hypocrits. One day the people should turn round and make news about the people who currently generate the shitty news and see how they feel.

Yes the daughter is pregnant however her situation is now made a hundred times worse, her mother doesn't believe in abortion so that would have been difficult anyway but now everybody knows about it the mother is clearly forcing the daughter to get some sort of shaZam! together to make it look slightly legitimate like it was planned even if ill informed for being too young. Rather than sleeping around. So she is forced to marry the man who got her pregnant and told to make it work or you'll f%$k up your mothers career.

If i was the daughter id of said f%$k it if im going to be forced into basically creating a life just so mum doesn't lose out on the career of a lifetime then i might as well go make it somewhere else without her.

[frankieG]

the conservatives/republicans are against sex education and against birth control.  so this is what you get.   i hate the republican party and all the god damn bull shaZam! of it.  for the most part they are a bunch of religious nuts.

[The Buddha]

Yea the daughter is unmarried and pregnant and they are applauding her for keeping the baby ... just like duck Cheney's daughter was a lesbian and he was in the party of no ghey rights ... WTF ... much more of the "do as I say, not as I do politics" ... its a common theme with religious zealots. Like the catholic preists preaching celibacy while molesting choir boys.

Pitiful, however this IMHO reflects poorly on the republican establishment, not McCain, however why did he pick her ... anyone else and he had a clean way to the White house. Now if he was younger, like 52 instead of 72 ... this choice will have been glazed over ... Now its likely that when he sees the actual deficit (53 trillion instead of 9 trillion) he's gonna drop dead and she has 3 years and 11 months of presidency ... ergo, we will be electing her as president, more than likely 50-60% of his time will be her time.

He could have picked any of a 100 ... Leibermann would have made an excellent choice ...

Democrats made an excellent VP choice. On the nose.
Cool.
Buddha.

[Juan1]

The Palin pick reeks of desperation. 

McCain's reasoning:  Obama is ahead in the polls.  Barack has been effective as branding McCain as Bush III, yet McCain's claims that Obama is too inexperienced and lacks substance haven't swayed polls much.  Palin is an outsider, and so she was chosen to insulate McCain against Obama's branding attempts.  McCain is willing to sacrifice his attacks against Obama's inexperience in order to weaken Obama's attacks.

The problem:  Palin is completely undefined and most think she was an unexpected choice.  If Obama can define her as too inexperienced, people will view Palin as a reckless pick, and then McCain is vulnerable to claims that he is reckless and impulsive just like G.W.

When you've even got conservative Peggy Noonan confessing (in what she thought was private) that Palin was a terrible pick, it isn't looking good.

[frankieG]

mccain is 72 years old and has had 4 bouts with cancer.   how on earth could this woman with 5 children, one with down syndrome and a grandchild she will have to be responsible for oh and a son off to Iraq is supposed to take over the presidency?  i really hope Obama becomes president and brings back respect to the office of president.  gets our guys out of Iraq and concentrate on Afghanistan where we belong.   don't get me wrong i think she is a good politician, mother and American just not ready to be president by any stretch of the imagination.

[The Buddha]

And yea, Oh yea, women looooove the overacheiving basketball player, beauty queen super duper mom of 5 one of whom has Down's syndrome, and is about to become a grandma and she's just 40 and looks a very hot 30, who has been on the PTA and then mayor and then a state governor and is now going to be Vice president of the whole country and will be president as soon as McBain croaks ... they just looooove that.

OK fine if I was single, and she wasn't such a school marm ... I'd do her. And no, I aint going anywhere near the 17yr old preggo. I have some class, if its over 10 years younger than me, I'd stay away ... I'm not some dirty old man ... yet.

BTW ...

Hey, I just figured it out ...
She's gonna help McBain win a "big state" ... in fact the biggest state ... almost 2.5 times the size of TX ... yea the biggest.
Oh ... electoral college, you mean its not related to the land area ... that's not right ... can we change it ... no ... Oh crap. Where is my metamucil.

Cool.
Buddha.

[yamahonkawazuki]

i love it when all a few people can do is pick on a person daughter because she is pregnant. but then again, where were they when kennedy killed that girl many years ago?, ( drunken driving car sunk in lake etc), hell if all aperson can do is pick on someones child, then that is bullshit. the girl refuses to have an abortion, and wants to marry the father. well i say fine. it, ( and the child has no relevance to teh political scene AT ALL). palin has managed alaska well, and properly, and has more executive experience tehn obama does, she as governor runs the alaska national guard, so she has some mil. experience as well. or at least knows a lil something about it

[trumpetguy]

i love it when all a few people can do is pick on a person daughter because she is pregnant. but then again, where were they when kennedy killed that girl many years ago?, ( drunken driving car sunk in lake etc), hell if all aperson can do is pick on someones child, then that is bullshit. the girl refuses to have an abortion, and wants to marry the father. well i say fine. it, ( and the child has no relevance to teh political scene AT ALL). palin has managed alaska well, and properly, and has more executive experience tehn obama does, she as governor runs the alaska national guard, so she has some mil. experience as well. or at least knows a lil something about it

What's funny is that the media and the Dem campaign wasn't touching the story until Palin "broke" it.  There's all kinds of talk about how she was getting beaten up over it, but I haven't seen it.  Anybody who wants to pick on her over that hasn't had teenaged children!

The only thing that story is good for is to point out what a sham it was to spend a billion taxpayer dollars on abstinence education.  Statistics show NO IMPROVEMENT and maybe an uptick in teen pregnancy and an earlier age of first sexual experience.  Pretty sorry return on $$$, but it satisfied Bush's base.