|
On October 10 2008 17:04 a-game wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2008 10:10 Jibba wrote:
Uh.. plenty of us have been continually critical of this Democratic congress. They blame the P's veto power but they do nothing on their own anyways. We just also recognize that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powel, Gonzalez, etc. have done an extremely poor job as well. it's not just the presidential veto. the senate "filibuster" is completely imbalanced. republicans have made no efforts to acknowledge that the democrats have the majority in the senate and have filibustered at an unprecedented level. i don't think it's fair to blame the democrats until they have the actual power to pass bills in the senate (60 seat filibuster-proof majority). i think it's pretty ridiculous how thoroughly the republicans would have to be purged from the senate just to give the controlling party actual control of the senate there seems to be no acknowledgment in the media that the democrats don't actually have the power to pass bills, and thus i think their disapproval ratings are undeservedly large
On the other hand, the Republican congress led by Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years is considered to have had real power. And I don't believe that they had filibuster proof majority but I could be wrong. But that congress was a success which THIS congress that approval ratings lower than BUSH and also lower than any congress in history (I believe--will look for source)
|
Now, Obama is about to inherit a country in recession, 2 hard wars (that destroyed Bush), problems with Iran and oil that will most likely become expensive again.
It's not just two hard wars that have destroyed Bush, it is his role in getting us involved in them.
I think you have to be absolutely insane to want to be the president right now.
|
On October 10 2008 17:07 Jibba wrote:
Pelosi is a fucking weak speaker and her Bush tirade during the bailout preceding was a great shining example of that. It's still possible to act strong and they really haven't done that.
Seconded on all points. Not even democrats were happy with her Bushh tirade. It just made the bill harder to pass as it began to look like a partisan thing.
|
On October 10 2008 20:11 BlackJack wrote:my favorite is the Us Weekly covers
LoL, I thought that headline said, "...the girls rectals..." and I was like...uhhhh.....wow.
|
On October 11 2008 02:55 TeCh)PsylO wrote:Show nested quote +Now, Obama is about to inherit a country in recession, 2 hard wars (that destroyed Bush), problems with Iran and oil that will most likely become expensive again. It's not just two hard wars that have destroyed Bush, it is his role in getting us involved in them. I think you have to be absolutely insane to want to be the president right now.
Yes, right now it is much easier to be the underdog party who just takes all the bad stuff and blames it on the party in power. Hope the dems are ready for the storm.
|
On October 11 2008 03:06 Savio wrote:Show nested quote +On October 11 2008 02:55 TeCh)PsylO wrote:Now, Obama is about to inherit a country in recession, 2 hard wars (that destroyed Bush), problems with Iran and oil that will most likely become expensive again. It's not just two hard wars that have destroyed Bush, it is his role in getting us involved in them. I think you have to be absolutely insane to want to be the president right now. Yes, right now it is much easier to be the underdog party who just takes all the bad stuff and blames it on the party in power. Hope the dems are ready for the storm.
Congratulations, you win at politics.
|
http://cafehayek.typepad.com/hayek/2008/10/id-rather-liste.html
Earlier this afternoon I received an e-mail from a very sincere local retiree here in Fairfax who boasts about how he "canvas[es] for Barack Obama." This gentleman is concerned that the public doesn't know where Sen. Obama stands on economic issues. So he asked me if I would help him organize a visit by Sen. Obama to GMU's campus -- a visit to give the Senator an opportunity to talk about the economy.
Here's my reply.
Dear Mr. _______:
Thanks for your note asking if GMU Econ is interested in inviting Barack Obama to campus in order for him to outline his "economic plan."
I can't go along with your suggestion. First, and most practically, such an invitation would really have to come from either the Office of the Provost or the Office of the President -- not from the Chairman of the Department of Economics.
Second, and most importantly, I have negative willingness to be part of an effort to give any politician a platform to speak about economics. Very few of them have any knowledge of the subject, and even fewer of them are courageous enough to speak about it honestly.
Listening to politicians, regardless of party, discuss economics makes me sick both to my head and to my stomach. And the only people who are not similarly affected, I fear, are persons whose knowledge of economics is sufficiently scant -- or whose ethics are sufficiently perverted -- to protect their senses from being insulted by what issues forth from the mouths of politicians speaking on economic topics.
So as an economist, I am no more interested in having Sen. Obama (or Sen. McCain) come to GMU's campus to lecture us on "how to manage the economy" than I would be, say, to have O.J. Simpson come to GMU's campus to lecture us on how to manage one's marriage.
Sincerely,
Don Boudreaux
Professor and Chairman
Department of Economics
George Mason University
|
wheres mckinney? the crazy black cop-punching green party candidate?
|
|
|
What Palin is accused and certainly guilty of is symbolic of her being a pathetic and immature individual. Not what is required in a Vice President.
|
On October 11 2008 02:55 Savio wrote:Show nested quote +On October 10 2008 17:04 a-game wrote:On October 10 2008 10:10 Jibba wrote:
Uh.. plenty of us have been continually critical of this Democratic congress. They blame the P's veto power but they do nothing on their own anyways. We just also recognize that Bush, Cheney, Rice, Powel, Gonzalez, etc. have done an extremely poor job as well. it's not just the presidential veto. the senate "filibuster" is completely imbalanced. republicans have made no efforts to acknowledge that the democrats have the majority in the senate and have filibustered at an unprecedented level. i don't think it's fair to blame the democrats until they have the actual power to pass bills in the senate (60 seat filibuster-proof majority). i think it's pretty ridiculous how thoroughly the republicans would have to be purged from the senate just to give the controlling party actual control of the senate there seems to be no acknowledgment in the media that the democrats don't actually have the power to pass bills, and thus i think their disapproval ratings are undeservedly large On the other hand, the Republican congress led by Newt Gingrich during the Clinton years is considered to have had real power. And I don't believe that they had filibuster proof majority but I could be wrong. But that congress was a success which THIS congress that approval ratings lower than BUSH and also lower than any congress in history (I believe--will look for source)
if i'm correct, isn't the complete spam of the filibuster a relatively new thing? i mean i know it's been an available tool for forever, but isn't it only recently that the minority party actually had the balls to use it constantly and literally shut congress down like this?
|
William F. Buckley's Son Endorses Obama, it's a good read:
Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama
by Christopher Buckley
October 10, 2008 | 7:33am
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.
Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.
I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”
As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.
As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:
I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.
I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.
But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.
Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.
So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
URL: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-...se-for-obama/p/
|
United States22883 Posts
Holy god Savio, stop rationalizing what McCain/Palin have done at the end of this race. It's completely unethical and there's no justification for it anymore. People are shouting "KILL OBAMA" at Palin rallies now and she's continuing to instigate hostility. The campaign has become about hate mongering, and McCain can't even control it anymore.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14479.html
Fearing the raw and at times angry emotions of his supporters may damage his campaign, John McCain on Friday urged them to tone down their increasingly personal denunciations of Barack Obama, including one woman who said she had heard that the Democrat was "an Arab."
Each time he tried to cool the crowd, he was rewarded with a round of boos.
"I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States," McCain told a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who said he was “scared” of the prospect of an Obama presidency and of who the Democrat would appoint to the Supreme Court.
“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republicans crowd expressed their dismay at their nominee. Others yelled "liar," and "terrorist," referring to Barack Obama.
McCain passed his wireless microphone to one woman who said, "I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not he's not uh—he's an Arab. He's not—" before McCain retook the microphone and replied:
"No, ma'am," the Arizona senator assured. "He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]."
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14457.html
|
I agree 110% with the blogger pacifist posted, he just hit the nail with a bullet.
|
On October 11 2008 12:48 Jibba wrote:Holy god Savio, stop rationalizing what McCain/Palin have done at the end of this race. It's completely unethical and there's no justification for it anymore. People are shouting "KILL OBAMA" at Palin rallies now and she's continuing to instigate hostility. The campaign has become about hate mongering, and McCain can't even control it anymore. http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14479.htmlShow nested quote +Fearing the raw and at times angry emotions of his supporters may damage his campaign, John McCain on Friday urged them to tone down their increasingly personal denunciations of Barack Obama, including one woman who said she had heard that the Democrat was "an Arab."
Each time he tried to cool the crowd, he was rewarded with a round of boos.
"I have to tell you. Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as president of the United States," McCain told a supporter at a town hall meeting in Minnesota who said he was “scared” of the prospect of an Obama presidency and of who the Democrat would appoint to the Supreme Court.
“Come on, John!” one audience member yelled out as the Republicans crowd expressed their dismay at their nominee. Others yelled "liar," and "terrorist," referring to Barack Obama.
McCain passed his wireless microphone to one woman who said, "I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not he's not uh—he's an Arab. He's not—" before McCain retook the microphone and replied:
"No, ma'am," the Arizona senator assured. "He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]." http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14457.html
LoL, Jibba, what you need to learn about me is that sometimes I state my opinions and other times I like to just pontificate on what I observe happening (McCain going megatve because he has nothing to lose and the parties are changing positions now). My posts on McCain's negativity are the latter.
I don't know how in the world you thought me saying he had nothing to lose was "rationalizing".
These were observations. Rationalizing would be more like, "McCain isn't really going negative, its just that Obama's past is so dark that it looks negative when you bring it to light." or "McCain has to go negative because the media are on Obama's side and do Obama's dirty work for him"
You can probably imagine dumb people coming on here (maybe Evandi?) and rationalizing. But don't try to group me with them.
People are shouting "KILL OBAMA" at Palin rallies
Poor little Obama! I bet nobody has EVER shouted out for Bush's death. I bet nobody did that for Clinton, Reagan (let alone try to actually do it), Kennedy or any other President (I'm treating Obama as the presumptive next President now).
Sorry, Jibba, I have no sympathy for Obama here.
I doubt Bush feels sorry for him either.
|
I don't think I have ever heard Americans at the rallies of a mainstream candidate calling for the death of any political opponent let alone a non-incumbent one.
I don't think Oswald was at Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. rallies calling for Kennedy's death. And I don't think Hinckley was at Walter Mondale rallies calling for Reagan's death.
|
LoL, nobel peace prize winner says, "Right now, I could kill George Bush,".
The PEACE PRIZE winner. 
She apologized and said she didn't mean it and couldn't kill anyone.
Article on her apology.
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/DN-peace_12nat.ART.State.Edition1.43b8067.html
I just thought that was funny.
Anyway, I don't think it even matters what people yell that out at rallies. Rallies are kinda like football games right? Ever hear threats at sporting events? People get all riled up and they aren't always the smartest people anyway.
|
On October 11 2008 13:57 Savio wrote:LoL, nobel peace prize winner says, "Right now, I could kill George Bush,". The PEACE PRIZE winner. She apologized and said she didn't mean it and couldn't kill anyone. Article on her apology. http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/nation/stories/DN-peace_12nat.ART.State.Edition1.43b8067.htmlI just thought that was funny. Anyway, I don't think it even matters what people yell that out at rallies. Rallies are kinda like football games right? Ever hear threats at sporting events? People get all riled up and they aren't always the smartest people anyway.
Personally I am mortified to hear this. I don't keep track of the presidential campaign that much (I already know who I am voting for and very little will change that), but the last thing it should be about is mob rule/mentality.
|
51-41 in the latest Gallup poll today... For Obama!
Plus when this poll was taken the news of the oh so lovely Palin trainwreck with troopergate had not yet hit the people hard! Yay
|
this is kind of weird. i mean if the economic crisis continues to stay in the headlines, then obama's almost guaranteed a victory.
on the other hand though, if the economic crisis continues at this rate, he'll be president of a cardboard box... obama campaign aides say things like "this economic crisis is helping our campaign" - do they have any f'in idea what kind of cow pie they are going to inherit if the economy doesn't turn around quick?
are political campaigns truly such bubbles that they can't see this?
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT![[image loading]](http://www.swamppolitics.com/news/politics/blog/2008/06/18/US%20Weekly%20cover-thumb-300x407.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://www.nationalledger.com/artman/uploads/sarah_us_magazine_186.jpg)
