Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[SealyStar]

Time for some hypothetical guessing: is there any chance Hurricane Sandy could act as an October/November Surprise?

It's possible. Both Obama and Romney will end up having to reschedule/cancel some of their campaign engagements, and if the federal response is really botched if something bad happens (i.e. Katrinas it), it'll be held against Obama- but at the same time, if it goes remarkably well, he could get a boost.

And given that both Washington and Boston are on the eastern seaboard, the campaign offices might find some more-direct influence.

P.S. How come everyone here talks about the Green Party when they mention third parties? I'm more fond of the Justice Party myself, although it's even tinier.

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Time for some hypothetical guessing: is there any chance Hurricane Sandy could act as an October/November Surprise?

I'm calling it: Romney blames everything that happens on Obama.

[While it's still occurring.]

[kaijyuu]

It's true, us gays have been using our homosexual magic to create hurricanes. Hurricanes of love.

[mainiac]

And then we hold orgies while all the breeders are hiding in the storm shelters.

[Corai]

It's true, us gays have been using our homosexual magic to create hurricanes. Hurricanes of love.

/American/Quick, send the homosexual soldiers to hostile countries. Let us kill our enemies with hurricanes. Of love./American/

[Frumple]

I'm gonna' go ahead and pre-emptively blame any damage that occurs on living on/near the coastline of a meteorological active ocean. It's what I do whenever a hurricane uproots a tree and lands it somewhere unpleasant down here in Florida, so... yeah. Not sure why people feel the need to blame it on something else, unless they're trying to avoid the white elephant in the discussion... [/pseudo-faked cluelessness] More seriously, any blame that's to be partitioned for disaster damages is better placed on people in the past (building construction and maintenance, preparedness, etc.) than anything reactionary, imo. Though borking things up as badly as Katrina went doesn't exactly help things, I'll give that.

Am kinda' suddenly curious, though. Any election historian buffs know if major weather stuff-things have gone down previously on or around voting periods and if there were any notable impacts 'cause of it?

[SealyStar]

Then you'll have some guys blame it on homosexuals, then some on something equally stupid...

then you'll have a large majority blaming it on obama because, since he is the man at the top, he should have been able to coordinate the entire effort by himself!
then there'll be people blaming it on plain old bad luck/the government in general.

But political stupidity goes both ways... you'll probably find your [albeit small] share of arch-liberals claiming Romney paid a billion dollars to some Central American government to send up a hurricane and sabotage Obama.

[mainiac]

Then you'll have some guys blame it on homosexuals, then some on something equally stupid...

then you'll have a large majority blaming it on obama because, since he is the man at the top, he should have been able to coordinate the entire effort by himself!
then there'll be people blaming it on plain old bad luck/the government in general.

But political stupidity goes both ways... you'll probably find your [albeit small] share of arch-liberals claiming Romney paid a billion dollars to some Central American government to send up a hurricane and sabotage Obama.

False equivalence much?

[SealyStar]

Then you'll have some guys blame it on homosexuals, then some on something equally stupid...

then you'll have a large majority blaming it on obama because, since he is the man at the top, he should have been able to coordinate the entire effort by himself!
then there'll be people blaming it on plain old bad luck/the government in general.

But political stupidity goes both ways... you'll probably find your [albeit small] share of arch-liberals claiming Romney paid a billion dollars to some Central American government to send up a hurricane and sabotage Obama.

False equivalence much?

Of course it's false equivalence! But that's acceptable when you're joking about an equally fallacious claim.

I don't know if anyone caught my slight bit of sarcasm there.

[Shadowlord]

SealyStar: Of course not, it's the Internet. See Poe's Law.

About the political parties: I looked at the wikipedia articles on just about all of them. The Green Party appealed to me the most; It helps that they're not a party which only exists in one state. From what I can see from Wikipedia, they have the most ballot access out of all the third-parties in the US, and I like Jill Stein's platform: http://www.jillstein.org/issues

It helps that there's also no chance of my vote throwing the state to Romney (unless something spectacularly unexpected happens).

About the storm:
If you look at (non-fox?) news, you'll see reporting that stronger and deadlier storms have been expected as a result of climate change. You'll also see Governers already making plans, doing things (including Republican Governors) to prepare, and in some cases even pre-emptively declaring states of emergency, and power companies preparing as well. A lot of it is going to come down to roads being cleaned up and power companies having their shit in order to get any damaged infrastructure (what with our power lines all being above ground) fixed as soon as possible. Which, judging by precedent, may be up to 2 weeks after the hurricane leaves, or more due to it hitting a larger area than past disasters - unless they've really improved their numbers, amount of equipment, and time needed to get stuff working again.

[Zangi]

The radio says that stuff up in the New England area is better prepared.  They've already been bit by Irene... and Irene was weaker I think?

Governors/Utility Companies are going to get their arses chewed if their emergency response plan does not pull through, especially since they have some experience and expectations as to what could go wrong under their belt.

What could the President/Obama do anyways?  Other then send in some sort of federal aid and declare some kind of emergency or some such?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Obama has control over FEMA if I remember correctly.

But FEMA also possesses the ability to enact an emergency situation, suspend the Constitution, and place the nation under martial law, so Obama might not want to remind people of that.

[SealyStar]

Obama has control over FEMA if I remember correctly.

But FEMA also possesses the ability to enact an emergency situation, suspend the Constitution, and place the nation under martial law, so Obama might not want to remind people of that.

The FEMA camps! THE FEMA CAMPS!

I guess FEMA is doing a great job censoring the web, as the only records I have about their ability to declare martial law exist on black-background websites with all-white text that haven't been updated since 1997 [basically... you know what I mean]. While martial law is a threat in the US nowdays [coughNDAA2012cough], I don't think FEMA would be the agency responsible for such a declaration.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The camps are a stupid conspiracy theory, but the martial law thing isn't. They've just never used it and probably never will. Someone posted the law in question some time ago, but I don't have the will to go looking right now.

[Bohandas]

Then you'll have some guys blame it on homosexuals, then some on something equally stupid...

then you'll have a large majority blaming it on obama because, since he is the man at the top, he should have been able to coordinate the entire effort by himself!
then there'll be people blaming it on plain old bad luck/the government in general.

But political stupidity goes both ways... you'll probably find your [albeit small] share of arch-liberals claiming Romney paid a billion dollars to some Central American government to send up a hurricane and sabotage Obama.

And say that any errors in reporting, no matter how trivial, made by The Weather Channel (owned by Bain Capital) were deliberate.

Ultimately though, the best way for Obama to spin this hurricane if it does a lot of damage is to blame the severity of the storm on global climate change.