American Presidential Debates Megathread

[Not Safe For Work]

There's very obviously no device in that picture. Stop lying.

You're right. There's only a goddamn piece of plastic in his ear. Maybe it's a habit he picked up back in Hawaii. You know those damned islanders just love to wear transparent jewelry in their ears.

I've been looking back at pictures from 2008. His ears always look like that.

Seriously, with the real issues that could be leveled at the Obama administration, why is it always the stupid conspiracy crap that gets the attention?

[Sdaeriji]

No, there's not.

Are you a brick wall by any chance?

Because I won't concede to your shameless lie, you resort to personal attacks. Fitting.

[Sulamalik]

I think the more pressing question here is, which ethnic minority/shadowy cabal group is controlling Obama?

My vote is for the Illuminati Homosexual Zionist Iranians.

[Frisivisia]

I think the more pressing question here is, which ethnic minority/shadowy cabal group is controlling Obama?

My vote is for the Illuminati Homosexual Zionist Iranians.

Gaytheist Gayluminati TansCommunist Zionist Arabian Chinese clons of Lenin and John Lennon.

[Greater Phenia]

No, there's not.

There is a convexity in his ear which is of slightly different coloring. You're telling me that you don't see anything out of the ordinary in the picture? It has the look of transparent plastic. The discoloration is slight but noticeable.

That "discoloration" is also visible above that part of the ear (that's not shown in the close-up). It's his ear dude. Unless maybe he has two earpieces, OMG that's twice as scandalous!

Really, this is the kind of 9/11 truther conspiracy nonsense that's getting kind of embarrassing to behold.

[Laerod]

I think the more pressing question here is, which ethnic minority/shadowy cabal group is controlling Obama?

My vote is for the Illuminati Homosexual Zionist Iranians.

I'll go with the Yeerks.

[Our Most Resplendent Goddess Sen]

Speaking as somebody with a hearing loss who wears hearing aids and is very familiar with what transparent earpieces look like...

...holy shitballs, THERE'S NOTHING THERE. Get the fuck over the fact that your candidate blows, republicans.

[Laerod]

Speaking as somebody with a hearing loss who wears hearing aids and is very familiar with what transparent earpieces look like...

...holy shitballs, THERE'S NOTHING THERE. Get the fuck over the fact that your candidate blows, republicans.

It's reminiscent of the North Korean soccer coach claiming Kim Jong Il had outfitted the team with invisible cell phones.

[Frisivisia]

There is a convexity in his ear which is of slightly different coloring. You're telling me that you don't see anything out of the ordinary in the picture? It has the look of transparent plastic. The discoloration is slight but noticeable.

That "discoloration" is also visible above that part of the ear (that's not shown in the close-up). It's his ear dude. Unless maybe he has two earpieces, OMG that's twice as scandalous!

Really, this is the kind of 9/11 truther conspiracy nonsense that's getting kind of embarrassing to behold.

It's probably the Gaylluminati feeding him information!

[Hurdegaryp]

Is it too late to invoke the Voice of Reason?

[Sulamalik]

Is it too late to invoke the Voice of Reason?

It was late on page 1.

[Laerod]

Is it too late to invoke the Voice of Reason?

It was late on page 1.

No, man. Voice of Reason is a perfectly legitimate answer to the question "What insidious power was whispering in his ear?"

[Hurdegaryp]

It was late on page 1.

No, man. Voice of Reason is a perfectly legitimate answer to the question "What insidious power was whispering in his ear?"

Tonight on Fox News Network...

[Quebec and Atlantic Canada]

Speaking as somebody with a hearing loss who wears hearing aids and is very familiar with what transparent earpieces look like...

...holy shitballs, THERE'S NOTHING THERE. Get the fuck over the fact that your candidate blows, republicans.

Obviously you're just an Obamunist agent.

[Greater Phenia]

There were conspiracy theories that Bush wore an earpiece in the 2004 presidential debates too.

I guess this is just a thing now.

[Neo Art]

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

[Khadgar]

There were conspiracy theories that Bush wore an earpiece in the 2004 presidential debates too.

I guess this is just a thing now.

Well W had a conspicuous rectangular lump under his suit jacket.

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

Now you know Obama can't think without a teleprompter. The only way he could have trounced W Romney was if he had help. Biden was feeding him lines I'm sure.

[Sane Outcasts]

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

You ask that question like the forums were ever rational to begin with.

[Greater Phenia]

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

I suppose we could talk about the substance of the debates?

Like the military with regards to foreign policy. Let's go back to that ships and bayonets and horses bit. Here's the point Obama was making:

We have all heard the point that this is the smallest fleet the Navy’s had since 1917. But comparing our fleet today to the one in 1917 is like comparing the telegraph to the smart phone. They’re just not comparable. The technology that we have today, the ability to use our fleet today is astoundingly different from what it was 100 years ago, but also what it was 20 years ago.

So, number one, the comment Obama made was not about bayonets or horses at all. Number two, it was a point that the Navy's leadership has already made, and which Romney was ignoring when he made the "we have less ships now" comment.

To the greater point, that we're not building enough ships to meet Navy's needs, well, Mabus also had this to say:

And speaking of history, history is important here. On September 11th, 2001, our fleet stood at 316 ships, and we had more than 377,000 Sailors. Yet, when I was sworn in as secretary less than eight years later, those numbers had declined by 33 ships and almost 49,000 Sailors. So during the time of one of the largest defense buildups in our nation’s history, our fleet got smaller and we lost Sailors. And the numbers were headed in the wrong direction. In 2008, for example, the Navy built only three ships.

At the start of this Administration, I made shipbuilding a priority and, now, in spite of a much tougher fiscal environment, in spite of having to defer some ships or decommission some early in order to meet the numbers of the Budget Control Act, the fleet-size numbers are moving in the right direction. I want to give you two facts, two numbers that are very important. At the end of this five-year budget, this FYDP, we will have at least as many ships in the fleet as we do today. But that fleet of 2017 will have many more, more capable ships.

And we are on track, as the 30-year shipbuilding plan we submitted to Congress recently shows, to reach a fleet of 300 ships by 2019 and keep it there. Given the circumstances, both current and historic, these two facts that I’ve just given you were considered improbable, at best, just a short time ago.

Getting to these numbers has not been easy, and some other factors made getting to this point harder still. When I took office, too many of our shipbuilding programs were, and there is no other way to put this, a mess. Ships were being designed while they were being built and the costs of too many of our ships were out of control. Let me give you some examples of what was the case and what has been done to correct the situation.

First, the LCS program in the early summer of 2009 had two ships in the water and two were being built. The first ships were still being designed while they were being built. And that is no way to build a ship.

When we bid out three more that summer, the bids came back astoundingly and unsustainably high. I made the decision to get the builders of the two variants to compete in a down-select to only one variant based mainly on price. This was in spite of the fact that the Navy wanted and had uses for both variants. The resulting competition came in almost 40 percent below the initial bids. And I want to brag on the two shipbuilders that did that.

So instead of buying 10 from the winner and then nine of the same type from the second shipyard we went back to Congress, we got permission to buy 10 of each variant. So, the Navy gets 20 ships instead of 19, and the Navy saves $2.9 billion in addition. Today, they're being built under fixed price contracts, and the 10th ship of each class, is going to cost significantly less than the first ship.

Next, the restart of the DDG 51 line. We have only two shipyards building these ships and we need them both, but we also needed competition in this class of ships or we wouldn't be able to afford the ones we needed. When we bid out the next three ships of these destroyers last year, the solicitation said that each yard would get one ship but the low bidder would get the third ship and the difference between the low bid and the high bid would be weighed against the high bidder’s fee. We got the three ships we needed, and we saved $300 million in that solicitation.

Finally, the new carrier, CVN 78. It’s a program that is still giving us some issues, but here, one more time, history is important. Or, put another way, as I said in my last round of budget hearings in Congress, I used the punch line of an old joke, that bed was already on fire when I got in.

When the Navy first started in the late ‘90s to plan a new carrier to follow the Nimitz class, the technology for this ship was to be phased in over three ships. But in 2002, the then-Secretary of Defense decided to put it all on one, which sent the risk absolutely through the roof.

It's a brand new ship. It has all new interior arrangements, a new island, a new arresting gear, new launch system, new propulsion system, new electrical system, new combat system. It’s a brand new ship. When the contract was signed in 2008, and it had been delayed by two years, the ship was only 30 percent designed. That is no way to build a ship. It has created cost overruns that continue to this day.

We've taken action to get it back on course. We've recouped fee from the shipbuilder and capped the amount we are going to pay so it’s not an open checkbook. The biggest thing we can do, though, is to make sure we capture the lessons learned from this ship and apply them to CVN 79, to make sure it comes in on budget.

So, we've stabilized our shipbuilding program and we’ve stabilized the fleet and we will grow the fleet to 300 by 2019. Since December 2010, we have placed an additional 38 ships, soon to be 40, under contract — most of these competed — all of these fixed price contracts. This compares to the three ships built in the year before I took office. I’m not sure this qualifies as a miracle, but I know it is a significant accomplishment for the Navy.

So to sum up, the Navy's had, in the past 2 years of Obama administration, at least 38 new ships built or contracted to be built. In the last year of Bush's administration, however, 3 ships were built. Overall it looks like not only does Romney not really know what he's talking about, but he's talking the typical Republican big-on-defense talk that in reality has not panned out as promised. And certainly, under the last Republican administration, our military was used ineffectually - chasing phantom WMDs in Iraq, failing to get the 9/11 terrorists; in comparison, Obama's use of the military seems to have been effective in the war on terror, and also in Libya.

I see Romney as the sort of president who like Bush thinks himself a "war president," will congratulate himself on "mission accomplished," but not actually do anything; while Obama is the sort of president who quietly got things done that needed doing.

[Free South Califas]

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

What is the sound of one hand asking after things it already knows?

[Wikkiwallana]

Has this thread spent the last several pages discussing whether Obama wore a hidden earpiece in his ear during the debates?

Has NSG sunk THIS low?

What is the sound of one hand asking after things it already knows?

FAP FAP FAP

[PapaJacky]

Bush started it.

Obama continued it. You're just proving my point that Obama, Romney, and Bush are basically the same. Bush gave $800 billion to Wall Street, Obama gave TRILLIONS. He just did everything Bush did and amplified it. Obama even used Bush's timetable for withdrawing for Iraq, and people here keep arguing with me acting like Obama kept his campaign promise.

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do." - Obama, 2007.

Today, there are 15,000 paid US contractors in Iraq and 5,000 armed mercenary contractors with full automatic weapons in Iraq. The war is still not over, it's just a mercenary war. A Halliburton and Blackwater war! Wasn't that the anti-war Left's worst nightmare? The Iraq war continues, and to the cost of billions of dollars that could be spent at home instead of training muslim soldiers who will inevitably turn against the USA in future conflicts.

I'm not proving your point, I'm telling you who is to blame for your assumptions on "assassinations without trial". Unfortunately, the only effective argument you can muster is the "atypical lesser-evil liberal" which is more true than not. Unfortunately as well, Obama can't give "trillions" to Wall Street, despite of giving billions to Main Street.

[Westgard]

I'm not proving your point, I'm telling you who is to blame for your assumptions on "assassinations without trial". Unfortunately, the only effective argument you can muster is the "atypical lesser-evil liberal" which is more true than not. Unfortunately as well, Obama can't give "trillions" to Wall Street, despite of giving billions to Main Street.

So if my predecessor to my current job murders people, I can do it blame-free? Wow. Cool. Didn't know that.

Love the "But Bush did evil things, so why can't Obama?!" argument.

And Obama has given trillions. Unless you want to argue the Federal Reserve is completely private and the President has no control over them (but that would be conspiracy theory land), after all the Federal Reserve even gave $15 trillion to European Banks during the crisis, more than the ENTIRE US Federal debt combined.

[New Sapienta]

The circlejerks in these threads seem to be getting more common as time goes on.

[Cannot think of a name]

The circlejerks in these threads seem to be getting more common as time goes on.

Because the last debate is five days ago, this threads relevance is shrinking.