Romney vs Obama 2012

[Fool]

Hey P, so over here the public is the primary funder of election campaigns (even before the latest Supreme Court rulling that allowed billionaires to fund their own campaign messages the main funding of presidential campaigns came from government funding) and the media kind of just watches things go down and reports on it, but in Britain, their campaign financing laws severely limit the public directly financing of campaigns. This has the benefit of not allowing billionaires to control the message (like happens here) but it has the negative effect of giving the media (newspapers in particular) has a monopoly on campaign messages and way too large role in choosing government officials as the pretty much have to lobby for different media endorsements to have an avenue for getting out their message.

How does it work down-under? Do you see a shit load of political advertisements al over the place funded by political groups or does everything go through the established media companies who pick a candidate to support? Rupport Murdoch is an Aussie, right? Does he run shit during campaign time because he owns all the papers/news channels?

[Pharaoh]

All media (IMO) tend to favor the Liberal Party more than Labour.. and that's to be expected because the Libs apparently are all about businesses and screwing the worker

[Uncle Mxy]

Note that "Liberal" has an almost entirely different meaning outside of Oz.

[DrRay11]

Mods,

Election is over. Please cease-thread.

DrRay11

[Uncle Mxy]

Awww, c'mon -- there's interesting tidbits to be had!

http://protectourelections.org/index.php?q=node/1107

[Uncle Mxy]

Fallout from Obama's re-election:

[Uncle Mxy]

It wasn't really that close. Give Mitt Romney 3% more of the popular vote and Obama still wins. The nature of the Electoral College really fucks up how elections play out. I'd love to have mandatory voting like y'all have in Australia.

Actually, give Mitt Romney 5% more of the popular vote in each state and Obama still wins.

[Glenn]

But they're having lunch together today.