This morning, we are one step closer to achieving health care reform in the United States of America. Can I get a “hip, hip!”
Nancy Pelosi and The House voted 220-215 on Saturday night on health care legislation that would provide way past due relief to Americans struggling to buy or hold on to health insurance. One Republican, Representative Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana voted with the Democrats.
Some Democrats said they voted for the legislation so they could seek improvements in it. “This bill will get better in the Senate,” said Representative Jim Cooper, D-Tennessee who has been outspoken in his criticism of some provisions of the bill but decided to support it. “If we kill it here, it won’t have a chance to get better.”“Our plan is not perfect, but it is a good start toward providing affordable health care to all Americans,” said Representative Peter A. DeFazio D-Oregon.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and The Senate still have to bring their health care plan to the floor for debate. Once their decision is made then the House and Senate will bargain and hopefully reach a deal on a final bill that will go to President Obama for signing.
The health care legislature passed last night will be paid for through new fees and taxes along with strategic cuts to Medicare. The plan will extend coverage to 36 million people now without insurance while creating a government health insurance program. It would end insurance company practices like not covering pre-existing conditions or dropping people when they become ill. Most employers would have to provide coverage or pay a tax penalty of up to 8 percent of their payroll. The bill would significantly expand Medicaid and would offer subsidies to help moderate-income people buy insurance from private companies or from a government insurance plan. It would also set up a national insurance exchange where people could shop for coverage.
“We did what we promised the American people we would do,” said Representative Steny Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, but he also warned, “Much work remains.”
The successful vote came after President Obama traveled to Capitol Hill to make a personal appeal for lawmakers to “answer the call of history” and support the bill.
During the private meeting with Democrats in the Cannon Caucus Room, the President acknowledged the political difficulty of supporting major legislation in the face of unanimous Republican opposition and tough criticism from conservatives.
Lawmakers credited President Obama with converting a final few holdouts during his appearance at a closed-door meeting with Democrats just hours before the vote. Democratic officials said that the President’s conversation Saturday with Representative Michael H. Michaud, D-Maine, was crucial in winning one final vote.
After the vote, Mr. Obama issued a statement praising the House and calling on the Senate to follow suit. “I am absolutely confident it will and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year.”
But don’t forget, there’s lots of work still to be done. We will have to make calls, send letters and send emails to our Senators in the upcoming weeks so that they will pass a health care plan.
The New York courtship of LeBron James began in earnest when the scheduling gods curiously put his only appearance at Madison Square Garden on the same day as the Yankees’ World Series victory parade.
If you believe in conspiracy theories, then this is right up there with the “chilled” envelope pulled by David Stern in the 1985 Draft lottery, putting Patrick Ewing in New York. You mean LeBron, a die-hard Yankees fan, gets an up-close look while the city is being painted in pinstripes? Is there a better marketing opportunity?
Is this better than anything Madison Avenue could dream up?
The Knicks hope the intoxicating celebrity factor will be enough to sway LeBron next summer as a free agent, because that’s all the Knicks really have in their favor. They can’t offer more money. They can’t offer a better collection of teammates, at least not right away. They can offer Spike Lee while Cleveland offers Drew Carey. They can (and will, you watch) get Spike and Chris Rock, among other celebrity row fixtures, to make a recruiting film in which famous people explain to LeBron why playing in New York will be far more enjoyable than playing in Cleveland.
(Sample pitch from Rock: “Hey LeBron, where you celebratin’ after a tough game in Cleveland? Arby’s?”)
A handful of the Yankees, still smelling of champagne, will be strategically seated at courtside Friday, making LeBron the second-most loved athlete in the house … if Derek Jeter shows up.
Then there’s C.C. Sabathia, big basketball fan and friend of LeBron’s from when Sabathia played in Cleveland; he left for New York and scored an instant jackpot, both with money and a ring. The video screen will constantly show their faces and they’ll get a standing ovation, all designed to show LeBron what it’s like to be a champion in New York. And the fans, no doubt, will chime in, cheering LeBron at warmups (like, who else will they cheer this year?), gushing whenever he does something spectacular and chanting “MVP,” as they did last year, when he dropped 52 on the Knicks.
All this will play to LeBron’s ego and convince him that a star of his magnitude needs to be in New York. That theory, by the way, is obsolete. Maybe 20-25 years ago, a star could receive better perks in New York, as Reggie Jackson did when he left the small market A’s. But with the global media and advertising of today, that’s not really necessary. LeBron blew up commercially without ever leaving Cleveland, and that will continue to be the case if he stays in Cleveland.
Obviously, the big factor for LeBron is collecting championships and whether his best chance is in Cleveland with a Cavs’ team that’s probably third-best behind Boston and Orlando and lacks a starry supporting cast, or a Knicks team being furiously stripped and rebuilt on the fly. The Knicks hope it also comes down to the stars and whether LeBron wants to hang with his buddy Jay-Z after the game, or retire to his palatial pad in Cleveland and call it a night.
That’ll be LeBron’s decision to make next July. And guess what? The Yankees should be in first place then, too.
Friday, November 6 @ 8pm EST on ESPN Cleveland Cavaliers at New York Knicks!
It started way early this year. Walking around coughing. Runny nose. Deep congestion. Unsettled stomach. Waking up at 3am and not being able to fall back asleep. Despite the make-up I was wearing, I looked sick but I didn’t have a severe fever. Yes I had muscle aches and chills and went from hot to cold in a nanosecond and a temperature higher than 98.6 but I didn’t have a severe fever.
I live in Florida so usually the flu doesn’t hit us until February – not this year; the flu came early.
Everyone who looked at me, and saw me blowing my nose, or coughing, probably thought I had the swine flu. I stopped at a local pharmacy and bought cough drops, aspirin and two different types of flu and cold medicine, as well as a large carton of orange juice. As the cashier saw me approaching, her eyes got big. She began to hesitate — as if she didn’t want me to approach her register. I could tell she thought I had the swine flu.
I tried to comfort her — telling her it was simply a pre-emptive strike. I said I was fine, but simply had a sore throat. I said I wanted to start drinking orange juice early just to play it safe. I doubt she fell for anything I said.
It seems like the different viruses, colds and other bad bug strains out there may be packing a little bit more punch this year. Most folks who get sick now automatically assume they’ve got the swine flu. I did, and it was kind of scary. I even went to the ATM machine and took out money — fearing I could end up in the hospital in a matter of hours. Don’t ask the logic behind that thinking.
Since we don’t usually see a full blown outbreak of the seasonal flu in Florida until February health officials believe most of the influenza activity we are seeing right now is H1N1, and not the seasonal flu. So we could be looking at a double dose of flu activity this year. Swine flu now and seasonal flu later this winter. Hopefully that won’t be the case, but things are certainly off to a bad start.
It’s starting to look like we are in for a long and rough flu season. I’ve got my hand sanitizer ready. I’m sick now and I have no desire to get sick again.
The 2009 virus circulating the world isn’t strictly swine flu; rather, it’s a mix of swine, avian and human influenza that has never been seen before in humans. In the upcoming months, we’ll be dealt the double whammy of seasonal flu season and a potential second wave of swine flu.
Some people already have enough trouble determining if they have a cold or the flu; the symptoms are similar, although the flu’s symptoms are a bit more intense. But it may be especially difficult to know if you have swine flu or seasonal flu, since the symptoms are extremely similar. Symptoms include fever, cough, sore throat, stuffy or runny nose, body aches, headache, chills and fatigue. Swine flu patients also report diarrhea and vomiting, not usually present in seasonal flu.
A laboratory test is the only way to confirm a case of swine flu, but few tests have been done as most swine flu cases thus far look like a bout with seasonal flu. Many people recover without needing any medication or hospitalization, and some might not even know they’re ill. The mild nature of swine flu has led some to question why there needs to be any worry, as deaths have been far less than those attributable to seasonal flu.
However, because the current H1N1 influenza is completely new and no one has immunity, public health officials warn that swine flu could eventually cause more complications than seasonal flu does. Not only will there be more complications, they’ll likely be more serious. So far, doctors have reported that swine flu is more likely to result in viral pneumonia, as opposed to bacterial pneumonia often seen in seasonal flu cases; the bacterial version is much easier to treat than the viral kind.
Even if you don’t know if you have swine flu or seasonal flu, head to the doctor if you start to experience symptoms that aren’t part of a typical flu experience; these may be the warning signs of serious swine flu complications. That means everyone needs to remain vigilant about their health in the coming months.
Because swine flu and seasonal flu are transmitted in the same way, everyone should be on watch when it comes to prevention. Cover your mouth with your elbow when you cough or sneeze, wash your hands often, stop touching other people’s stuff in the office, don’t touch that door handle, stop talking in other people’s face and stay home when you’re sick.Whether you have seasonal or swine flu, you’ll be doing everyone around you a favor.
I’m GLAD that I don’t have the ‘swine’ — just a bad case of the good old seasonal flu which takes about five to ten days to shake — according to the doctor.
Do you have an election in your community this week? If you do, go out and VOTE and take a friend with you.
Folks, there are elections all across the country on Tuesday, November 3 and THEY MATTER.
We’ll see important elections for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia and important Mayoral elections in Atlanta, Houston, New York and other cities and we should be focused on them. Plus races for City Council, State Legislature and other positions are also up for grabs. These elections might not receive as much publicity and hype and may not seem to be as ‘sexy’ as the Presidential elections but they are more important in many ways.
These elections will affect our daily lives: The raising of fees, property taxes, making our schools more effective, fighting disparities in our criminal justice system are all determined by the City Council, Commissioner’s Court, Sherriff’s office and by local and state judges yet we ignore these elections. We should gladly spend time in lines to make sure our votes are counted in our local elections.
Even though President Obama is the leader of our country and the leader of the Democratic Party, once he authorizes monies to go to our communities our local elected officials are the ones who decide HOW to spend the monies.
Our President is VERY important but our local elected officials are the people who allocate these funds in a meaningful way or waste it to serve their own personal agendas.
In order for President Obama’s policies to be effective, we need local politicians in office who have a similar vision.
Know which local politician(s) in your community will do the most for you and your family. Share this information with your neighbors and friends and please make sure everyone in your household go out and vote and make sure each person takes a friend with them to the polls.
As he weighs whether or not to send more troops into the Afghan war zone, late last night President Barack Obama made a solemn trip to Dover Air Force Base to honor some of our fallen soldiers by being there personally to greet the 18 flag-draped caskets of young American soldiers killed in action this week.
When he arrived in Dover, Delaware our President travelled directly to a base chapel where he met privately with families of the fallen Americans. Former President George W. Bush visited the families of hundreds of fallen soldiers but did not attend any military funerals or go to Dover to receive the coffins.
The Dover base is about 100 miles from the White House and is the entry point for service personnel killed overseas.
As some Americans sit around huffing and puffing and thinking small; as they continuously work on dividing and conquering the United States of America, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met last week and made moves toward uniting socially and economically in an EU-style community which would encompass half the world’s population.
So as we continue to fight amongst ourselves in America and dither on the brink of insanity and weaken our social and economic infrastructure instead of working together to make America better and stronger leaders at a summit of 16 Asian nations met in Thailand and listened as the prime ministers of Australia and Japan set out competing visions for a regional bloc that would boost Asia’s global clout.
A central question at their summit was what role that the United States and China would play in any future grouping.
Not wanting to miss out on the potential power that the Asian bloc of countries have, Russia has applied to join the East Asia Summit – a group that includes China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia and New Zealand that works in conjunction with ASEAN.
In November U.S .President Barack Obama will hold the first ever summit with ASEAN leaders as well as attending the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Singapore to keep America relevant in Asia.
Some countries want the United States to be part of a future Asia regional framework as a counterbalance to China’s influence said one diplomat.
Japanese premier Yukio Hatoyama pushed his plan at the summit for an East Asian community that could “lead the world”. He said that he would not want to see an extensive US involvement with ASEAN or the East Asia Summit despite Tokyo’s close ties to Washington.
Australian leader Kevin Rudd’s vision for an Asia-Pacific Community by 2020 explicitly includes Washington.
“Whether we like it or not, I think we could not avoid a US role because the US is a big country which has powers both in economic and security matters,” said Chaiwat Khamchoo, an analyst at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University.
“Some countries in the region are suspicious of each other so they want the U.S. to play a role.”
After the distractions of Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States has only recently re-engaged with the region, particularly in Southeast Asia where Washington’s hard line on military-ruled Myanmar kept it at a distance.
With Japan kept busy by its economic woes, China has boosted its influence across the region in recent years, signing a free trade agreement with the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN).
India has tried to play catch-up, belatedly signing its own trade pact with the bloc.
Earlier this year US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced that the “US is back in Southeast Asia”.
Asian leaders agreed at this weekend’s summit that they need some new framework to hold together their diverse and sometimes fractious region. A closer community would help Asia capitalize on its relatively quick recovery from the global economic crisis and to cut its dependence on the West to drive growth.
Thai Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva said in his closing remarks to the summit on Sunday that the “old growth model in which Asia relies on consumption in the West will no longer serve us as we move into the future.”
Americans — united we stand, divided we fall. Let’s stand together and build a better and stronger U.S. of A!
This morning, while most Americans slept the Nobel Committee in Oslo, Norway announced that President Barack Hussein Obama had been awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee awarded this honor to President Obama for his “extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.” The committee also pointed out our President’s efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons, “He has created a new international climate,” the committee said.
There are many cynics who choose to pretend that they are naïve by saying that our President does not deserve this honor. I disagree. Our world has been in a state of turmoil with the potential of war bubbling to the surface in the Middle East and Asia for the past several years. Our President was courageous enough to go to South America, Egypt and Africa and Europe and speak peace to the world. He did the same thing at the United Nations. By his words and actions he has smoothed the feathers of leaders and put out fires that could easily be ignited in the East and West from North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il to Cuba’s Raul Castro to Russia’s Vladimir Putin to Palestine’s Mahmoud Abbas toIsrael’s Benjamin Netanyahu to Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Whether the cynics want to believe it or not, the fact is, our world is safer because of President Barack Obama and therefore this honor bestowed upon him is not premature.
Which other world leader has put their reputation on the line and has spoken peace and responsibility to the world in this bold manner?
Today in the Rose Garden President Obama said he was “surprised and deeply humbled” by the committee’s decision, and quickly put to rest any speculation that he might not accept the honor. Describing the award as an “affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said he would accept it as a “call to action.”
Here are President Obama’s own words:
OBAMA: Good morning. Well, this is not how I expected to wake up this morning. After I received the news, Malia walked in and said, “Daddy, you won the Nobel Peace Prize, and it is Bo’s birthday!” And then Sasha added, “Plus, we have a three-day weekend coming up.” So it’s good to have kids to keep things in perspective.
I am both surprised and deeply humbled by the decision of the Nobel Committee. Let me be clear: I do not view it as a recognition of my own accomplishments, but rather as an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations.
To be honest, I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many of the transformative figures who’ve been honored by this prize — men and women who’ve inspired me and inspired the entire world through their courageous pursuit of peace.
But I also know that this prize reflects the kind of world that those men and women, and all Americans, want to build — a world that gives life to the promise of our founding documents. And I know that throughout history, the Nobel Peace Prize has not just been used to honor specific achievement; it’s also been used as a means to give momentum to a set of causes. And that is why I will accept this award as a call to action — a call for all nations to confront the common challenges of the 21st century.
These challenges can’t be met by any one leader or any one nation. And that’s why my administration has worked to establish a new era of engagement in which all nations must take responsibility for the world we seek. We cannot tolerate a world in which nuclear weapons spread to more nations and in which the terror of a nuclear holocaust endangers more people. And that’s why we’ve begun to take concrete steps to pursue a world without nuclear weapons, because all nations have the right to pursue peaceful nuclear power, but all nations have the responsibility to demonstrate their peaceful intentions.
We cannot accept the growing threat posed by climate change, which could forever damage the world that we pass on to our children — sowing conflict and famine; destroying coastlines and emptying cities. And that’s why all nations must now accept their share of responsibility for transforming the way that we use energy.
We can’t allow the differences between peoples to define the way that we see one another, and that’s why we must pursue a new beginning among people of different faiths and races and religions; one based upon mutual interest and mutual respect.
And we must all do our part to resolve those conflicts that have caused so much pain and hardship over so many years, and that effort must include an unwavering commitment that finally realizes that the rights of all Israelis and Palestinians to live in peace and security in nations of their own.
We can’t accept a world in which more people are denied opportunity and dignity that all people yearn for — the ability to get an education and make a decent living; the security that you won’t have to live in fear of disease or violence without hope for the future.
And even as we strive to seek a world in which conflicts are resolved peacefully and prosperity is widely shared, we have to confront the world as we know it today. I am the commander in chief of a country that’s responsible for ending a war and working in another theater to confront a ruthless adversary that directly threatens the American people and our allies. I’m also aware that we are dealing with the impact of a global economic crisis that has left millions of Americans looking for work. These are concerns that I confront every day on behalf of the American people.
Some of the work confronting us will not be completed during my presidency. Some, like the elimination of nuclear weapons, may not be completed in my lifetime. But I know these challenges can be met so long as it’s recognized that they will not be met by one person or one nation alone. This award is not simply about the efforts of my administration — it’s about the courageous efforts of people around the world.
And that’s why this award must be shared with everyone who strives for justice and dignity — for the young woman who marches silently in the streets on behalf of her right to be heard even in the face of beatings and bullets; for the leader imprisoned in her own home because she refuses to abandon her commitment to democracy; for the soldier who sacrificed through tour after tour of duty on behalf of someone half a world away; and for all those men and women across the world who sacrifice their safety and their freedom and sometimes their lives for the cause of peace.
That has always been the cause of America. That’s why the world has always looked to America. And that’s why I believe America will continue to lead.
Washington Mutual, the struggling savings and loan, has been working on several efforts to save itself, including a potential sale.
Among the potential bidders that Goldman has talked to are Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and HSBC. But no buyers may materialize. That could force the government to place Washington Mutual into conservatorship, like IndyMac, or find a bridge-bank solution, which was extended to thrifts in the new housing regulations.
Citigroup is also considering an offer, but would likely be able to buy Washington Mutual only if it emerged from a receivership, according to a person close to the situation. JPMorgan is maintaining its posture that it will not bid unless it receives government support.
The announcement comes as the bank, which has suffered badly from losses on mortgages it had made, continues to stumble. Shares in Washington Mutual fell nearly 10 percent on Wednesday to $2.09; they have plunged 94 percent over the last 12 months. This week alone, investors have been frightened by Standard & Poor’s cutting of the bank’s debt rating to junk.
TPG, the private equity firm that led a $7 billion cash injection into Washington Mutual in April, said Wednesday afternoon that it would waive its right to be compensated if the bank sold more shares to raise capital. “Our goal is to maximize the bank’s flexibility in this difficult market environment,”TPG said in a statement.
While the bank has a strong deposit base, the uncertainty of the markets and the increasingly poor housing market have increased concerns about Washington Mutual’s outlook.
Since the FDIC doesn’t release the names of banks that are in trouble, but you can check the health of your own bank. Check out bankrate.com. This site will have a safe & sound rating system that can help you get a picture of your bank’s health.
If you want more detailed information about your bank’s financials, you can go to ambest.com.
Some signs to look for:
Pay attention to massive job layoffs or cutback in services at your bank.
1. If your bank doesn’t accept new loan submissions that’s a HUGE red flag.
2. If you start to see generous CD yields advertised – that could be a sign that the bank is in trouble so it’s trying to entice people to keep their money at the bank and get new deposits.
The McCain campaign has insisted that the Thursday, October 2 debate between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden have shorter question-and-answer segments than those for the presidential nominees. With this format there will be much less occasion for impromptu direct exchanges between Palin and Biden.
McCain advisers said they had been concerned that a loose format could leave Ms. Palin, a relatively inexperienced debater, at a disadvantage and largely on the defensive.
The bickering and power struggle was chiefly between the McCain-Palin camp and the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates which is sponsoring the forums.
Commission members wanted a relaxed format that included time for follow-up questioning and challenges between the vice-presidential candidates.Last week, the Commission rejected a proposal from advisers to Palin and McCain for few if any free flowing or flexible interactions. Advisers to Biden say they were comfortable with either format.
A commission member said that the new agreement on the vice-presidential debate was reached late morning Saturday. It calls for shorter blocks of candidate statements and open discussion than at the presidential debates.
Both campaigns see the four debates as pivotal moments in a presidential race that is not only extraordinarily close but also drawing intense interest from voters; roughly 40 million viewers watched the major speeches at the two parties’ conventions.
While the debates between presidential nominees are traditionally the main events in the fall election season, the public interest in Palin has proved extraordinary, and a large audience is expected for her debate debut.
The negotiations for the three 90-minute debates between Obama and McCain were largely free of any power struggle. The Obama and McCain campaigns have agreed to an unusual free-flowing format for the three televised presidential debates which begin this Friday, September 26. Teams Obama and McCain agreed to one substantive change to the format originally proposed by the debate commission, giving them two minutes apiece to make a statement at the beginning of each segment on a new topic.
Schedule of debates:
Friday, September 26, 2008: Presidential debatewith foreign policy focus, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS
Thursday, October 2, 2008: Vice Presidential debate, Washington University, St. Louis, MO
Tuesday, October 7, 2008: Presidential debatein a town hall format, Belmont University, Nashville, TN
Wednesday, October 15, 2008: Presidential debatewith domestic policy focus, Hofstra University, Hempstead (L.I.), NY
Unfortunately a four-point lead means little at this point in the game especially for a black candidate who needs to be up by 10 points in battleground states to be safe, the game isn’t over yet.
The next potential game-changer is his first debate with John McCain, and what he needs to do in the debates is precisely what he has not done thus far in that format, and what no Democrat other than Bill Clinton has done effectively in decades: to connect with voters in a way that makes them feel like they know and share his values, feel confident that he will keep them and their families safe, and will do right by people like them.
How does he do that? By following some basic principles, many of which Democrats would do well to follow in every debate at every level of government:
1. Think of your answers as sandwiches, with emotionally evocative and values-driven language at the beginning and end and with the “meat” in the middle. Emotionally evocative opening and closing statements serve three functions: they draw voters’ attention (one of the major function of emotions from an evolutionary standpoint), they signal voters what you are passionate about, and they provide the sound bites that will be replayed over and over on television. The emotional “bread and butter” at the beginning and end can elicit or address voters’ anger, hope, concerns, sense of patriotism, faith, or whatever informs your position and moves voters, or it can be a story from your own life or the lives you’ve encountered on the campaign trail. That is the bread and butter of what voters will remember. Follow it with the “meat”: first, how we got here (indicting the GOP for what it has done and making the causal link to the pain people are experiencing and our moral standing in the world), and second, a very brief bulleted description of what you plan to do (no more than three points, which is the most voters will remember). For example, on health care, start with something like, “I believe in a family doctor for every family. Right now, 50 million working Americans and their families can’t take their kids to the doctor, and the rest of us are watching our co-pays shoot through the roof and our security disappear as insurance companies are raking in record profits.” Then compare McCain’s “you’re on your own, pal” plan that would knock 150 million people off their employer-provided insurance (which would scare the hell out of most voters if they only knew about it — and for good reason) with your own, emphasizing the most central points of your plan: if you’re happy with your doctor or health plan, you will be able to stay with what you have; if you’re not, you’ll have choices, including not only an array of private plans that will have to compete for your dollar but the same plan members of Congress get. End with something that again inspires emotion, “If that plan is good enough for people like me in the Senate, its good enough for the people who pay my salary — the American taxpayer.”
2. Clearly enunciate your principles in virtually every response. Why do you take the position you do, and how does that principle reflect mainstream American values? Get to the specifics after you’ve established the principle, because it cues voters that you’re a person of conviction. The usual Democratic statements such as “I’m for the Second Amendment but for limited regulation of x,y,z” is not a principle, any more than was Al Gore’s debate response in 2004, that he supported regulation of new handguns but not old ones. (What’s the principle? That old guns are rusty? Voters saw through it and thought he wanted to support gun control but didn’t want to say it.) Here’s a principle, and one that distinguishes him clearly from McCain and the GOP: “My basic principle on guns is this: I believe in the rights of law-abiding Americans. That’s why I support the rights of law-abiding Americans to own firearms to hunt and protect their families, and why I support the rights of parents to send their kids to school in the morning and know they’ll come home safely.” That sets the framework for a principled position; for example, against assault weapons (e.g., “If you’re hunting with an M-16, you’re not bringing that meat home for dinner”).
3. Look at the audience and know where the camera is at all times. In his Saddleback performance, Obama split his eye contact between his interviewer, Rick Warren, and his shoelaces. He rarely turned to the camera and his broader television audience. Eye contact and body posture are crucial nonverbal cues in primates including humans, and voters unconsciously process those cues about dominance, sincerity, and so forth. Downcast eyes readily suggest shame, low status, or evasiveness. McCain had been coached by a good media coach to respond to his interview with direct eye contact, often using his name, and then to pivot away toward the audience within one to two seconds. Democrats routinely fail to make use of people who can help them enunciate their positions with strength, conviction, and humor.
4. Avoid dispassionate, meandering, intellectualized answers. Nuance and emotional appeal are not mutually exclusive. Sure, it’s harder to enunciate a principle that recognizes ambiguity than one that emanates from a Manichean worldview of the good guys vs. the bad guys. But people are often relieved when someone speaks to their ambivalence. It isn’t hard to say that business is the engine of our prosperity but that leadership is about keeping that engine on the right track. Nor is it hard to say what most people feel in their gut, that government shouldn’t be in the business of forcing one person to live by another person’s faith, which is why Sarah Palin has no right to plan our families for us, but that you ought to have a very good reason (e.g., the mother’s life or health is seriously in danger) to abort a late-term fetus.
5. Inspire and indict. As I argued in The Political Brain, and in multiple posts here, you can’t win a campaign with one story (about why you should be elected), and no one has ever won the presidency by saying only nice things about himself and his opponent. You have to control the dominant story of who you are (and answer attacks on that story directly and immediately) and the story of who your opponent is and why he’s not the right person for the job or the times.
6. Don’t run from any issue. State your principles clearly and with conviction, and if you worry that the public isn’t with you, turn that into a virtue (by making it a mark of genuineness and courage). The failure to state a clear position on hot-button issues has been a standard Democratic error for decades. Republicans never make this mistake. They’ve been running on a position on abortion that’s at 30% in the polls for years–that life begins at conception, and there’s no room for compromise–and this year they’ve even taken the more extreme position that every rapist has the right to choose the mother of his child. If Democrats don’t run on abortion and contraception this year, when Republicans have governed or threaten to govern with positions so far to the right that you can’t find them on a map of America (e.g., forcing teenagers to have their rapists’ babies, perpetuating the cycle of poverty by making contraceptives unavailable to poor women, teaching only abstinence when it’s nearly impossible to name a Republican who ever practiced it–they deserve another 3 Alitos and a Scalia for good measure.
Seven hundred billion dollars – that’s ‘11’ zeros.It’s almost incomprehensible to me.I had to write it out – $700,000,000,000. This is the amount of money George Dubya wants us to entrust Henry Paulson with.
This so called “bailout”of America’s failed financial institutions seems to me to be the greatest heist in America ever; this will be the greatest highway robbery in broad daylight, in the middle of day with everyone watching with our eyes wide open.
How can anyone with any common sense give $700,000,000,000of American citizens’ money; of middle class American’s money to ONE person to ‘handle’with virtually no oversight?
According to a draft of the bailout proposal, all decisions by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, “are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.” What the heck!!!
I don’t care if anyone tells me that I have to trust the ‘experts’.This just doesn’t sound right to me.Not at all.I don’t trust this solution. Not me, not today, not tomorrow. No way.
One thing that bothers me is that the very executives who destroyed their companies are going to get to put a share of hundreds of billions in their ‘pockets’. Plus they will get this money practically hassle free.Less hassle than it would take for you or me to get an unemployment check after working years and making a contribution to the system.These CEOs get to evade their responsibilities. That just doesn’t sit right with me.Not at all.
I am one of those people who believe that this ‘bailout’has to be inspected and dissected with a fine tooth comb with little or no room no trickery and thievery. There is just way too much of your dollars and my dollars at stake.Accountability and oversight has got to be paramount!The current proposal only requires one oversight report to Congress every 6 months.What kind of crap is that?This has to be the worst business decision ever…ever!
Dubya Bush is saying, just give us the money and trust us, we’ll handle it.Yeah, right, just like we trusted him with the WMD and the Iraq war.To quote George W. Bush, “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”You get the idea, right?
The Bush administration is urging Congress to quickly stabilize the financial system by temporarily transferring the bad debts of American financial institutions to taxpayers. The proposed plan would give the Treasury Secretary Paulson sole powerto manage the funds and the buying and reselling of mortgage debt.“This is something that has to work. I very much believe it will work”, said Paulson.
So we should trust Paulson (who said 2 weeks ago that the economy was strong!) because he simply believesit will work?!Where are the spreadsheets, economic forecasts, market analyses and scientific formulas?I want to see credible reports and projections!I want more than ‘I believe’ from Paulson.
I believe that I am going to come up with one of the most innovative business idea ever and become a billionaire overnight – that’s what I believe.Will a bank give me a loan based on what I believe???I think not!
Democrats measure progress by how many people can find a job that pays the mortgage; whether you can put a little extra money away at the end of each month so you can someday watch your child receive her college diploma. We measure progress in the 23 million new jobs that were created when Bill Clinton was President – when the average American family saw its income go up $7,500 instead of down $2,000 like it has under George Bush.
We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off to look after a sick kid without losing her job – an economy that honors the dignity of work.
The fundamentals we use to measure economic strength are whether we are living up to that fundamental promise that has made this country great – a promise that is the only reason I am standing here tonight.
Because in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.
In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.
When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.
And when I hear a woman talk about the difficulties of starting her own business, I think about my grandmother, who worked her way up from the secretarial pool to middle-management, despite years of being passed over for promotions because she was a woman. She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me. And although she can no longer travel, I know that she’s watching tonight, and that tonight is her night as well.
I don’t know what kind of lives John McCain thinks that celebrities lead, but this has been mine. These are my heroes. Theirs are the stories that shaped me. And it is on their behalf that I intend to win this election and keep our promise alive as President of the United States.
What is that promise?
It’s a promise that says each of us has the freedom to make of our own lives what we will, but that we also have the obligation to treat each other with dignity and respect.
It’s a promise that says the market should reward drive and innovation and generate growth, but that businesses should live up to their responsibilities to create American jobs, look out for American workers, and play by the rules of the road.
Ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves – protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools and new roads and new science and technology.
Our government should work for us, not against us. It should help us, not hurt us. It should ensure opportunity not just for those with the most money and influence, but for every American who’s willing to work.
That’s the promise of America – the idea that we are responsible for ourselves, but that we also rise or fall as one nation; the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.
That’s the promise we need to keep. That’s the change we need right now. So let me spell out exactly what that change would mean if I am President.
Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.
Unlike John McCain, I will stop giving tax breaks to corporations that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.
I will eliminate capital gains taxes for the small businesses and the start-ups that will create the high-wage, high-tech jobs of tomorrow.
I will cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95% of all working families. Because in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle-class.
The McCain campaign most likely is having a team meeting and writing a press-release which will accuse Katie Couric of being a sexist. Katie Couric has done a great public service by asking Palin some real questions and giving voters the opportunity to see how Palin answers.
So it seems that Palin disagrees with Roe v Wade but doesn’t understand the fundamentals of Roe v Wade since she believes in the ’privacy’ dynamic. Palin doesn’t seem to get the nuances of any issue. Just incredible.
Republican presidential nominee John McCain is pulling his resources out of Michigan in the midst of polls showing Obama building on his lead there.
McCain’s campaign manager Rick Davis called former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney to tell him of the decision just before Romney got on a conference call with reporters today. Romney, who grew up in Oakland County, was holding the call with McCain strategist Doug Holtz-Eakin to raise claims that Obama’s policies are no good for Michigan’s struggling economy.
Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Romney, confirmed the call took place but wouldn’t discuss the details. “They need to do whatever they think puts them in a position to win in November,” Fehrnstrom said.
A state Republican Party source had already told the Free Press that McCain was pulling out of the race in the state and moving workers to Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida — the latter two being states won by President George W. Bush in 2004 that the Republican needs to hold onto if he’s going to win the White House.
Recent polls have shown Obama increasing his lead in Michigan into double digits. A Detroit Free Press-Local 4 Michigan poll showed Obama with a 13-point lead last week, and today a poll by Public Policy Polling showed Obama leading McCain 51-41 in the state. Meanwhile, McCain’s earlier margins in Florida and Ohio were slipping.
Florida, in particular, is seen as key to a Republican victory, and a CNN/Time poll showed Obama leading there with a slim 51-47 lead this week.
According to the source, the Republican National Committee — which is the source of money for many of the 100 or so people working on behalf of the McCain campaign in Michigan — called state GOP Chairman Saul Anuzis this afternoon and told him the campaign would be moving workers out of the state and ceasing to buy local airtime in the state for ads.
No reason for the move was given. The McCain campaign’s Michigan spokeswoman, Sarah Lenti, wouldn’t immediately comment.
Palin came out swinging. I have to give her credit for fighting for her party – she held her own. But Palin didn’t debate, she came with talking points and we were going to hear them whether or not we asked her about them. Forget the rules; she was going to get out her talking points come hell or high water! Palin asked herself her own questions and answered her own questions – especially about energy, energy, energy, amazing!
I believe that Palin had a personal victory since she did not implode and she did better that she has been for the past 3 weeks. However, Biden won the debate because he spoke about polices, specifics and answered questions voters wanted to hear.
Palin’s entire performance was rhetorical and abstract and metaphoric – she had no specifics. She never said what the policies of a McCain presidency would be nor did she say how McCain’s presidency would differ from Bush’s – not on the economy, on Iraq, on Afghanistan or on Foreign Policy – her responses were all abstract, not literal and figurative. Based on substance she didn’t help the McCain campaign and it was ‘embarrassing’ that she didn’t know McCain’s record therefore she contradicted McCain on things like his same sex marriage policy.
Palin was folksy, energetic, cartoony, gimmicky and seemed to be ‘playing the role of a character’ as if she was in a play or movie. She didn’t listen to questions; she just answered her own questions based on her talking points.
What was of particular interest was when Palin said she would expand the role of the Vice Presidency by changing the constitution so that the vice president would have more legislative power – very curious indeed. Hmmm.
But is it still a debate if Palin didn’t answer the questions or follow the rules of debating?
Can you or your family afford to lose a job next week or next month? Barack Obama will be best protector of our economy which is in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.
“John McCain doesn’t seem to understand that this crisis isn’t two weeks old,” Ohio Governor Ted Strickland said earlier today in the Democratic Party’s address. “Maybe he doesn’t realize that we’ve lost jobs every month this year. He hasn’t said one thing he’d do to make his economy look any different than George Bush’s economy.”
Labor Department figures released on Friday shows that the U.S. lost 159,000 jobs in September, the most in five years! The jobless rate was unchanged from August at 6.1 percent but up from 5 percent as recently as April.
September’s unemployment data followed a 73,000 decline in jobs during August and showed that America’s economy – the world’s largest economy – may be headed for bigger job losses as consumers and companies cut back and economize on just about everything.
Obama strongly supports an economic recovery package. Following Friday’s jobs report, Obama said:
“Instead of Sen. McCain’s plan to give tax breaks to CEOs and companies that ship jobs overseas, I will rebuild the middle-class and create millions of new jobs by investing in infrastructure and renewable energy that will reduce our dependence on oil from the Middle East. I also call on Congress to pass an immediate rescue plan for our middle-class that will provide tax relief, save one million jobs, and save our local communities from harmful budget cuts and painful tax increases.”
McCain opposes a stimulus package for working families and did not take part in the Senate vote on the first stimulus bill last spring.
As bad as the new jobs data are, the underlying picture is even worst because the number of long-term unemployed workers (those jobless for more than six months and may have stopped looking for work) grew to 2 million in September, an increase of 728,000 over the past 12 months.
Senator Obama would create 2 million new jobs by investing in rebuilding crumbling infrastructure, roads, bridges, and schools, Strickland said. He would give tax breaks to companies that create jobs in America, he said.
Obama yesterday criticized Governor Palin for saying in the vice-presidential debate Democratic economic policies would “kill jobs.”
“When Senator McCain and his running mate talk about job killing, that’s something they know a thing or two about,” Obama said yesterday at a rally outside Philadelphia. “Because the policies they’re supporting are killing jobs every single day.”
Earlier in September, a Bloomberg/Los Angeles Times poll showed more respondents said Obama would do a better job handling the financial crisis than McCain, and almost half of the voters said they believed he had better ideas to strengthen the economy than McCain does.
No longer can we assume that a high-school education is enough to compete for a job that could easily go to a college-educated student in Bangalore or Beijing. No more can we count on employers to provide health care and pensions and job training when their bottom-lines know no borders. Never again can we expect the oceans that surround America to keep us safe from attacks on our own soil.
The world has changed. And as a result, we’ve seen families work harder for less and our jobs go overseas. We’ve seen the cost of health care and child care and gasoline skyrocket. We’ve seen our children leave for Iraq and terrorists threaten to finish the job they started on 9/11.
But while the world has changed around us, too often our government has stood still. Our faith has been shaken, but the people running Washington aren’t willing to make us believe again.
It’s the timidity – the smallness – of our politics that’s holding us back right now. The idea that some problems are just too big to handle, and if you just ignore them, sooner or later, they’ll go away.
That if you give a speech where you rattle off statistics about the stock market being up and orders for durable goods being on the rise, no one will notice the single mom whose two jobs won’t pay the bills or the student who can’t afford his college dreams.
That if you say the words “plan for victory” and point to the number of schools painted and roads paved and cell phones used in Iraq, no one will notice the nearly 2,500 flag-draped coffins that have arrived at Dover Air Force base.
Well it’s time we finally said we notice, and we care, and we’re not going to settle anymore.
You know, you probably never thought you’d hear this at a Take Back America conference, but Newt Gingrich made a great point a few weeks ago. He was talking about what an awful job his own party has done governing this country, and he said that with all the mistakes and misjudgments the Republicans have made over the last six years, the slogan for the Democrats should come down to just two words:
Had enough?
I don’t know about you, but I think old Newt is onto something here. Because I think we’ve all had enough. Enough of the broken promises. Enough of the failed leadership. Enough of the can’t-do, won’t-do, won’t-even-try style of governance.
I’ve had enough of the closed-door deals that give billions to the HMOs when we’re told that we can’t do a thing for the 45 million uninsured or the millions more who can’t pay their medical bills.
I’ve had enough of being told that we can’t afford body armor for our troops and health care for our veterans and benefits for the wounded heroes who’ve risked their lives for this country. I’ve had enough of that.
I’ve had enough of giving billions away to the oil companies when we’re told that we can’t invest in the renewable energy that will create jobs and lower gas prices and finally free us from our dependence on the oil wells of Saudi Arabia.
I’ve had enough of our kids going to schools where the rats outnumber the computers. I’ve had enough of Katrina survivors living out of their cars and begging FEMA for trailers. And I’ve had enough of being told that all we can do about this is sit and wait and hope that the good fortune of a few trickles on down to everyone else in this country.
You know, we all remember that George Bush said in 2000 campaign that he was against nation-building. We just didn’t know he was talking about this one.
Now, let me say this – I don’t think that George Bush is a bad man. I think he loves his country. I don’t think this administration is full of stupid people – I think there are a lot of smart folks in there. The problem isn’t that their philosophy isn’t working the way it’s supposed to – it’s that it is. It’s that it’s doing exactly what it’s supposed to do.
The reason they don’t believe government has a role in solving national problems is because they think government is the problem. That we’re better off if we dismantle it – if we divvy it up into individual tax breaks, hand ‘em out, and encourage everyone to go buy your own health care, your own retirement security, your own child care, their own schools, your own private security force, your own roads, their own levees…
It’s called the Ownership Society in Washington. But in our past there has been another term for it – Social Darwinism – every man or women for him or herself.
It allows us to say to those whose health care or tuition may rise faster than they can afford – life isn’t fair. It allows us to say to the child who didn’t have the foresight to choose the right parents or be born in the right suburb – pick yourself up by your bootstraps. It lets us say to the guy who worked twenty or thirty years in the factory and then watched his plant move out to Mexico or China – we’re sorry, but you’re on your own.
It’s a bracing idea. It’s a tempting idea. And it’s the easiest thing in the world.
But there’s just one problem. It doesn’t work. It ignores our history. Yes, our greatness as a nation has depended on individual initiative, on a belief in the free market. But it has also depended on our sense of mutual regard for each other, of mutual responsibility. The idea that everybody has a stake in the country, that we’re all in it together and everybody’s got a shot at opportunity.
Americans know this. We know that government can’t solve all our problems – and we don’t want it to.
But we also know that there are some things we can’t do on our own. We know that there are some things we do better together.
We know that we’ve been called in churches and mosques, synagogues and Sunday schools to love our neighbors as ourselves; to be our brother’s keeper; to be our sister’s keeper. That we have individual responsibility, but we also have collective responsibility to each other.
That’s what America is.
And so I am eager to have this argument not just with the President, but the entire Republican Party over what this country is about.
Because I think that this is our moment to lead.
The time for our party’s identity crisis is over. Don’t let anyone tell you we don’t know what we stand for and don’t doubt it yourselves. We know who we are. And in the end, we know that it isn’t enough to just say that you’ve had enough.
What is the trickle-down economy theory? It’s the set of economic policies based on the concept that you provide economic incentives to the wealthy by cutting their taxes (by letting them keep their money) while at the same time deregulating industry, you’ll let loose a tsunami of economic activities that will enrich even the least advantaged among us.
Wow, this sounds great in theory but as we all know now, it doesn’t work.
Trickle-down is largely a rationale for upward redistribution that’s been kept alive by those who benefit from it by paying less tax. Reagan put this stuff on the map, GW Bush brought it back with a vengeance and McCain intends to take it even further. McCain’s policy calls for an extension of the Bush tax cuts plus he adds pork fat of about $75 billion more in corporate tax cuts on top of that!
In the 1990s when Clinton came into office he would have nothing to do with allowing the rich to pay less taxes; he instead cut taxes on lower-income households and raised taxes on the wealthiest. Obama takes a similar approach.
Because of lowering taxes on the middle-class and raising the taxes on the wealthy in hind sight we see evidence of the strong real growth in median incomes and sharp declines in poverty that occurred during the 1990s compared with the opposite movement in the 2000s with Bush’s policies.
The income for the middle-class grew by 10% or by $5,200 in the 1990s (1989-2000); these same households saw a decrease of $2,000 in 2000s under Bush when he lowered taxes for the wealthy.If Bush had kept Bill Clinton’s policy of lowering the taxes for the middle-class, income would have continued to increase in the 2000s and middle class median income would have gone up $3,600 instead of falling $2,000.
So why do the republicans continue to push tax cuts for the rich?It seems that it is as simple as ‘because they and their friends are rich’ and it benefits them and their friends including heirs and heiresses.That’s straight-talk.
SARAH PALIN’S post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she “won,” as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about “the future,” as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
To understand the meaning of Palin’s “victory,” it must be seen in the context of two ominous developments that directly preceded it. Just hours before the debate began, the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan. That state is ground zero for the collapsed Main Street economy and for so-called Reagan Democrats, those white working-class voters who keep being told by the right that Barack Obama is a Muslim who hung with bomb-throwing radicals during his childhood in the late 1960s.
McCain surrendered Michigan despite having outspent his opponent on television advertising and despite Obama’s twin local handicaps, an unpopular Democratic governor and a felonious, now former, black Democratic Detroit mayor. If McCain can’t make it there, can he make it anywhere in the Rust Belt?
Not without an economic message. McCain’s most persistent attempt, his self-righteous crusade against earmarks, collapsed with his poll numbers. Next to a $700 billion bailout package, his incessant promise to eliminate all Washington pork — by comparison, a puny grand total of $16.5 billion in the 2008 federal budget — doesn’t bring home the bacon. Nor can McCain reconcile his I-will-veto-government-waste mantra with his support, however tardy, of the bailout bill. That bill’s $150 billion in fresh pork includes a boondoggle inserted by the Congressman Don Young, an Alaskan Republican no less.
The second bit of predebate news, percolating under the radar, involved the still-unanswered questions about McCain’s health. Back in May, you will recall, the McCain campaign allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate’s health records on the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Conspicuously uninvited was Lawrence Altman, a doctor who covers medicine for The New York Times. Altman instead canvassed melanoma experts to evaluate the sketchy data that did emerge. They found the information too “unclear” to determine McCain’s cancer prognosis.
There was, however, at least one doctor-journalist among those 20 reporters in May, the CNN correspondent Sanjay Gupta. At the time, Gupta told Katie Couric on CBS that the medical records were “pretty comprehensive” and wrote on his CNN blog that he was “pretty convinced there was no ‘smoking gun’ about the senator’s health.” (Physical health, that is; Gupta wrote there was hardly any information on McCain’s mental health.)
That was then. Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
Though CNN and MSNBC wouldn’t run a political ad with doctors questioning McCain’s medical status, Gupta revisited the issue in an interview published last Tuesday by The Huffington Post. While maintaining a pretty upbeat take on the candidate’s health, the doctor-journalist told the reporter Sam Stein that he couldn’t vouch “by any means” for the completeness of the records the campaign showed him four months ago. “The pages weren’t numbered,” Gupta said, “so I had no way of knowing what was missing.” At least in Watergate we knew that the gap on Rose Mary Woods’s tape ran 18 and a half minutes.
It’s against this backdrop that Palin’s public pronouncements, culminating with her debate performance, have been so striking. The standard take has it that she’s either speaking utter ignorant gibberish (as to Couric) or reciting highly polished, campaign-written sound bites that she’s memorized (as at the convention and the debate). But there’s a steady unnerving undertone to Palin’s utterances, a consistent message of hubristic self-confidence and hyper-ambition. She wants to be president, she thinks she can be president, she thinks she will be president. And perhaps soon. She often sounds like someone who sees herself as half-a-heartbeat away from the presidency. Or who is seen that way by her own camp, the hard-right G.O.P. base that never liked McCain anyway and views him as, at best, a White House place holder.
This was first apparent when Palin extolled a “small town” vice president as a hero in her convention speech — and cited not one of the many Republican vice presidents who fit that bill but, bizarrely, Harry Truman, a Democrat who succeeded a president who died in office. A few weeks later came Charlie Gibson’s question about whether she thought she was “experienced enough” and “ready” when McCain invited her to join his ticket. Palin replied that she didn’t “hesitate” and didn’t “even blink” — a response that seemed jarring for its lack of any human modesty, even false modesty.
In the last of her Couric interview installments on Thursday, Palin was asked which vice president had most impressed her, and after paying tribute to Geraldine Ferraro, she chose “George Bush Sr.” Her criterion: she most admires vice presidents “who have gone on to the presidency.” Hours later, at the debate, she offered a discordant contrast to Biden when asked by Gwen Ifill how they would each govern “if the worst happened” and the president died in office. After Biden spoke of somber continuity, Palin was weirdly flip and chipper, eager to say that as a “maverick” she’d go her own way.
But the debate’s most telling passage arrived when Biden welled up in recounting his days as a single father after his first wife and one of his children were killed in a car crash. Palin’s perky response — she immediately started selling McCain as a “consummate maverick” again — was as emotionally disconnected as Michael Dukakis’s notoriously cerebral answer to the hypothetical 1988 debate question about his wife being “raped and murdered.” If, as some feel, Obama is cool, Palin is ice cold. She didn’t even acknowledge Biden’s devastating personal history.
Hilarious! This skit shows also too a heck of a lot how difficult it is to get in all the ‘winks’ and mispronunciation of ‘nuculear’ in, also dog gone it also too, betcha!
Sarah Palin: “John McCain is the man we need to leave…uh lead” also.
“Our financial system in turmoil and John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy.”
The ad, slated to start running Monday on national cable, seeks to capitalize on John McCain’s response to the nation’s financial crisis while rebutting Republican attacks on Obama’s character.
As Congress worked to pass the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, McCain announced that he would suspend his campaign and skip the first presidential debate while he worked on a solution. He inevitably attended the debate even as the deal in Congress faltered.
Democrats say McCain tried to politicize the crisis with a campaign gimmick.
“No wonder his campaign has announced a plan to turn a page on the financial crisis, distract with dishonest, dishonorable assaults against Barack Obama,” the ad continues. “Struggling families can’t turn the page on this economy and we can’t afford another president who’s this out of touch.”
Last week we woke up to hear that Citibank “Citi” took over Wachovia’s banking/mortgage business.Citi was to have paid Wachovia $2.1 billion in stock in exchange for Wachovia’s banking and mortgage assets (over $700 billion in deposits+assets). Citi was also going to assume about $53 billion in debt.
Citi needed to cover losses up to $42 billion on mortgage related losses. Anything beyond that is guaranteed by the Federal government (FDIC). In exchange for that guarantee, the Feds would get $12 billion in preferred Citi stock, which pays 6% interest – so the Feds would most likely make money from the deal.
Wachovia owns a $300+ billion mortgage portfolio and has about $120 billion in option-ARM mortgages and expected losses on about 14% of those loans. The deal allowed Wachovia to keep its other businesses: Wachovia Securities, Evergreen Investments and Wachovia Insurance Services. The important question here is how much the remaining Wachovia businesses are worth – could Wachovia have sustained itself?
·Wachovia Securities is the nation’s second largest investment firm
·Wachovia Insurance Services is the 12th largest insurance brokerage firm
·Evergreen Investments is America’s 29th largest asset management company
So now each Wachovia share is worth $1 – a penny stock.
In pre-market trading last week, even before any details were announced, Wachovia stock dropped 90% and trading was halted at the NYSE on Wachovia (WB) for the day. In spite of everything the S&P still maintains its hold rating on WB but will revise its price target.
Up until early Friday October 3 your deposits at both Citi and Wachovia are safe and the FDIC didn’t need to spend any money to help those 2 banks. The only difference was that your local Wachovia would become a Citibank and Citibank had plans to move its banking headquarters to Charlotte, NC while keeping its investment headquarters in Manhattan. Since Citi and Wachovia don’t have much of an overlap in branches, not much was expected to change for depositors.
Late Friday the banking industry was shaken by news that industry regulators were working to resolve rival acquisition proposals by Citigroup and Wells Fargo for Wachovia.
Wells Fargo announced a surprise deal to buy Wachovia for about $15.1 billion in stock, four days after Citi agreed to acquire Wachovia’s banking operations in a government-backed deal valued at $2.1 billion.
So now we have a fight between Citi and Wells Fargo to see who will purchase Wachovia. Even though Wachovia said early Sunday that it is pressing ahead with its deal to sell itself to Wells Fargo for more money.
Wachovia responded to a judge’s order on Saturday to temporarily block the sale of the bank to Wells Fargo.But Wachovia says that it does not believe the order by the judge “has any effect on the validity of the Wells Fargo agreement with Wachovia.”
Meanwhile, across the pond, hopes of a formidable European response to their financial crisis dimmed ahead of a hastily arranged weekend summit by France, Germany, Britain and Italy. Germany has already rejected a French proposal to create an emergency EU fund for struggling banks. European governments have had to step in and bail out several major banks, including Britain’s Bradford & Bingley, Belgian-Dutch Fortis and Belgium’s Dexia.
The second presidential debate is scheduled for next Tuesday, October 7 at 9PM EST/8PM CST.
The debate will take place at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. The debate will be in the Town Hall format and questions will be taken from the audience and some from the internet.
Participants in the town meeting will pose their questions to the candidates after reviewing their questions with the moderator for the sole purpose of avoiding duplication. The participants will be chosen by the Gallup Organization and will be undecided voters from the Nashville, Tennessee standard metropolitan statistical area. During the town meeting, the moderator has discretion to use questions submitted by Internet.
The host will be Tom Brokaw of NBC who is a John McCain supporter. Mr. Brokaw has said that over the summer he had “advocated” within the executive suite of NBC News to modify the anchor duties of the MSNBC hosts Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews on election night and on nights when there were presidential debates. Brokaw thought that Olbermann and Matthews used their time on air to engage in ‘commentary’. NBC said earlier this month that the two hosts would mostly relinquish their anchor duties to Mr. Gregory, while being present as analysts during debates and special election coverage.
Brokaw also said he has conducted some “shuttle diplomacy in recent weeks” between NBC and the McCain campaign. His mission, he said, was to assure McCain’s aides that — despite some negative on-air commentary by Mr. Olbermann in particular — Mr. McCain could still get a fair shake from NBC News.
On the Sunday, September 28 edition of Meet The Press, Tom Brokaw moderated a debate between McCain strategist Steve Schmidt and Obama strategist David Axelrod on topics ranging from Iraq to the Wall Street bailout which Axelrod seemed to win. At the end, Tom Brokaw did something unusual, he opted to give himself the last word and told the audience:
“In fairness to everybody here, I’m just going to end on one note. And that is that we continue to poll on who’s best equipped to be Commander in Chief, and John McCain continues to lead in that category despite the criticism from Barack Obama by a factor of 53 to 42 percent in our latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Gentlemen, thank you very much. “
In fact, the latest NBC poll actually has no question about Commander in Chief. It turns out that Brokaw was referring to a poll taken weeks ago – right after the Republican convention and well before the September 26 national security debate. In each of NBC’s last two polls, Americans chose Obama over McCain so Brokaw was being quite dishonest.
Brokaw is very blatant and bold with his support of McCain; can he be a fair moderator?
Armchair quarterbacks at home all believe that we know how to debate much better than Obama and McCain does. We’ll be hurling epithets at the television screen when our candidate misses an opportunity to verbally mangle his opponent or launch a one-liner that will soar the politician into the Lloyd Bensten Hall of fame:
One thing is certain: folks watching the debates are tough!
Does either Obama or McCain have an advantage?
On the surface, it can be argued that McCain has the home-field advantage. The town-hall format is something he prefers and has demonstrated much skill in.
The format allows for direct questioning of the candidates by the audience.
How to win
So what are the keys to victory? Much like when Terry Bradshaw and Mike Ditka outline what each team must do in this hallowed and sacred part of the year known as Football Season, two armchair political quarterbacks will analyze what must be done at tonight’s debate.
In the ‘D’ corner:
Chris Lehane is a Democratic strategist, frequent television commentator and former staffer in the Clinton White House. He provided:
O’s Five Principals of Combat
1. Error free ball: The trajectory of this campaign will not change unless O makes a real mistake that plays into a negative storyline (inexperience, elite/arrogant). And the history of presidential debates is that they usually alter the fundamentals of a campaign only when a candidate makes a major mistake that plays into a negative typecast. Thus, no mistakes on something that matters.
2. Counter-punch like Muhammad Ali: Ali, one of the greatest heavyweights ever, knocked out big punchers like Foreman, Norton, and Frazier by counter-punching. Like Ali, Obama needs to hit back when McCain attacks, because voters absolutely want to know that the person in the Oval Office will stand up and fight for them, and because McCain’s chin will be exposed when he bull-rushes Obama.
3. Be Michael Coreleone and not Sonny or Fredo: Obama can’t be like Sonny and go in swinging away without a real plan and he can’t be Fredo and not fight back. He needs to be Michael – smart and shrewd in taking on his opponent.
And being Michael in this debate – and campaign – means homing in on a character compare-and-contrast focused on “who do you trust to make the right economic decisions for you and your family.”
Trust on the economy is where Obama wins when he counter punches – it is the cut above McCain’s eye that he should just pound on at every opportunity (as Biden did in the VP debate).
4. It is Oprah, not a Harvard vs. Yale debate: The public watches these debates to get a sense of the character of the candidates. Voters are not scoring it like a Harvard versus Yale debate, but watch it the same way they would watch Oprah.
Given that it is a town-hall style debate involving direct interaction with the audience, the premium on connecting in terms of a candidate’s character is even higher than in a moderated debate.
Candidates have made mistakes in the past that badly hurt them – not just because of what they said – but how they looked. Bush Sr. at his watch; Nixon’s darting eyes; Gore sighs.
5. You don’t have to win: Obama does not have to win in a conventional sense. He just has to avoid doing anything that changes the fundamentals of the campaign. Thus, don’t let a need to win the debate lead to Obama being “hot” or “out of character.”
I hope all you Obama supporters are smart enough to see that this is a good Kenyan witch doctor preacher praying over Sarah – the Bible states that in the ‘end-times’ all roads will lead to Alaska because you will be able to see hell (Russia) from Alaska and pergatory (Afghanistan) is a neighbor of Alaska. Rolling my eyes.
Obama supporters are just too blind to see the truth and too sophisticated to understand about witches!
Barack Obama won last night’s ‘Town Hall’ unequivocally, clearly, indisputably! It wasn’t even close. McCain looked shaky, uncomfortable and uncertain. Obama seemed fit, energetic and commanded the stage. At times, when McCain moved around he almost looked lost.
In addition McCain did nothing to change the dynamic of the race and change it is what he fervently needed to do. Before the ‘Town Hall’ Team McCain said they were taking the gloves off and would assault Obama on his character – McCain did not even lay a glove on Obama on the character issue – I guess he knows the hate he spews while campaigning is crap.
I am shocked and perplexed that McCain did NOT mention how he would help the middle-class; not even ONCE! He has no plans on how he would help the majority of Ameicans – no plans!!!
McCain was very repetitive – he repeated almost verbatim full sentences about Putin and other issues that he said in the first debate. McCain looked very old last night; he used old lines and tried to use old tricks. Yawn.
When McCain called Obama “that one” he seemed dismissive and it simply looked and sounded bad. McCain came off like a grumpy old curmudgeon.
Obama’s entire demeanor was perfect. He was relaxed but serious, confident without being cocky and detailed enough without delving deep into the abyss of policies. He sat on the stool and looked comfortable, confident and cool.Yup, cool.
McCain in contrast was clumsy and he looked miserable. He said “my friends” waaay too often (22 times) and made weird gestures. McCain had no game.
Obama did well on foreign policy, particularly on an Iraq answer towards the end when he hit McCain firmly on the chin: “Senator McCain, in the last debate and today, again, suggested that I don’t understand. It’s true. There are some things I don’t understand. I don’t understand how we ended up invading a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, while Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda are setting up base camps and safe havens to train terrorists to attack us. That was Sen. McCain’s judgment and it was the wrong judgment. When Sen. McCain was cheerleading the president to go into Iraq, he suggested it was going to be quick and easy, we’d be greeted as liberators. That was the wrong judgment, and it’s been costly to us.” Ouch!
The second best moment of the debate also came from Obama. McCain walked right smack into Obama’s gloved fist and almost knocked himself out when he talked about “speaking softly” with an ally like Pakistan. Obama responded by saying: “Now, Senator McCain suggests that somehow, you know, I’m green behind the ears and, you know, I’m just spouting off, and he’s somber and responsible.” McCain interjected: “Thank you very much.” Then Obama moved in for the kill: “Senator McCain, this is the guy, who sang, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran’, who called for the annihilation of North Korea. That I don’t think is an example of ’speaking softly’. This is the person who, after we had — we hadn’t even finished Afghanistan said, ‘Next up, Baghdad’.”
One thing that especially stood out to me was what happened AFTER the debate. Sometimes what a person chooses not to do is as important as what they do.
Instead of walking toward Obama to shake his hand, McCain instead walked to the audience and started shaking hands with people in the audience – peculiar. I’ve never seen that at the end of a debate before.
Obama started to approach McCain and backed off allowing McCain to continue what he was doing.When Michelle and Cindy came on stage for a few minutes it seemed that McCain had again forgotten how to behave politely especially in public when the eyes of the world was watching him.McCain seemed scornful of Obama and he avoided Obama’s offer of a handshake by instead handing over Cindy to Obama so that Obama shook Cindy’s hand, not John’s.Wow, how discourteous.
The most idiosyncratic thing though was when John and Cindy disappeared out the hall – they were gone; it’s like they vaporized into thin air – they were no where to be found almost immeadiately after the Town Hall ended. Damn, how unmannerly!
The Obamas stayed in the hall and graciously talked with the audience, shook hands and took lots of pictures for about 30 minutes.
John McCain has no diplomacy skills. He’s like a child who pouts because he didn’t get his way. Is this the person we want trekking around the world meeting with America’s friends and enemies to regain America’s status in the world? I think not!
Sometimes what a person doesn’t do is more important and telling than what they do.
Family and friends, now is the time to use your charm and personality to talk with people you meet each day. Don’t be shy.If someone is negative then don’t speak with them but we have to try and ‘touch’ each person that crosses our path each day.
We have to be ambassadors for Senator Obama.He can get us there 75% but we have to help him.Now is not the time to be comfortable or complacent no matter what the polls say.No is the time to work EXTRA hard for Obama.Onward!!!
Ask independents and undecideds what issue in particular is important to them as they make the final decision about who they will vote for.Is it the economy, healthcare, education, jobs, social security, Iraq, energy prices?
You can say something to them to the effect: I support Senator Obama because he UNDERSTANDS the struggles Americans are facing whereas John McCain does not.
Obama has been
·calling for an additional round of rebate checks to help Americans pay for the rising cost of gas,
·senior citizens WILL NOT have to file a tax return if they make less than $50,000
·Obama has offered a plan to make quality health care affordable and accessible for everyone,
·Obama will provide a middle-class tax cut of $1,000 per family for 95% of American families.If your family makes less than $250,000 your taxes WILL NOT increase by even a dime!
McCain will provide more tax breaks to corporations that ship American jobs overseas and McCain will provide NO direct relief AT ALL to more than 100 middle class families.
That’s why I support Obama, will you join us?
The presidential race is still too close to call and could come down to the very last weekend before voters decide if they like or distrust Barack Obama, a national pollster predicts.
“I don’t think Obama has closed the deal yet,” pollster John Zogby told the Herald yesterday.
Zogby’s latest poll, released yesterday in conjunction with C-Span and Reuters, shows Obama and John McCain in a statistical dead heat, with the Illinois Democrat up 48-45 percent.
Zogby said the race mirrors the 1980 election, when voters didn’t embrace Ronald Reagan over then-President Jimmy Carter until just days before the election.
“The Sunday before the election the dam burst,” Zogby said of the 1980 tilt. “That’s when voters determined they were comfortable with Reagan.”
Now voters are wrestling with two senators with opposite resumes – Obama, at 47, the unknown, and the established 72-year-old McCain.
This email comes from my friend Jeff Dearth, a media investment banker and former publisher of The New Republic. We also went to junior high and high school together in Michigan. He would not make this up. In 2005, Jeff attended a magazine industry conference at a casino hotel in Puerto Rico. (I was there, too, though not a witness to what follows.) The guest speaker was McCain. He put on a terrific performance, breaking up the friendly crowd by referring to journalists as “my base.” (To anyone who remembers this period in McCain’s history, his attempt this year to paint Barack Obama as Britney Spears or Paris Hilton because Obama is now the media darling seems especially cheap.)
McCain’s game is craps. So is Jeff Dearth’s. Jeff was at the table when McCain showed up and Jeff happily made room for him. Apparently there is some kind of rule or tradition in craps that everyone’s hands are supposed to be above the table when the dice are about to be thrown. McCain — “very likely distracted by one of the many people who approached him that evening,” Jeff says charitably — apparently was violating this rule. A small middle-aged woman at the table, apparently a “regular,” reached out and pulled McCain’s arm away. I’ll let Jeff take over the story:
“McCain immediately turned to the woman and said between clenched teeth: ‘DON’T TOUCH ME.’ The woman started to explain…McCain interrupted her: ‘DON’T TOUCH ME,’ he repeated viciously. The woman again tried to explain. ‘DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO?’ McCain continued, his voice rising and his hands now raised in the ‘bring it on’ position. He was red-faced. By this time all the action at the table had stopped. I was completely shocked. McCain had totally lost it, and in the space of about ten seconds. ‘Sir, you must be courteous to the other players at the table,’ the pit boss said to McCain. “DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM? ASK ANYBODY AROUND HERE WHO I AM.”
Both John McCain and Barack Obama took turns during the second presidential debate on Tuesday night claiming credit for having warned of an imminent economic crisis.
Obama has referred frequently to his 2007 letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. But Sen. McCain countered by saying that he had written a letter “warning of exactly this crisis.”As far as we can tell, this was the first reference McCain has made of such a letter, and we couldn’t find it. Despite multiple requests, the McCain campaign did not provide comment or the letter.
Obama likes to bring up the letter he wrote to Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Dated March 22, 2007, about six weeks after he’d declared his candidacy for the presidency, the letter stressed the need for immediate intervention to curb the “rising rates of home foreclosure in the subprime mortgage market”:
And while neither the government nor the private sector acting alone is capable of quickly balancing the important interests in widespread access to credit and responsible lending, both must act and act quickly.
Crediting the senator with a foresight others lacked, however, would be a stretch. The subprime mortgage crisis had been well underway for some time. See, for example, reporting by the New York Times in June 2005 on a growing housing crisis. A month later the Times wrote of the unease among federal banking regulators with regards to high-risk mortgage loans.
I think if we act effectively — if we stabilize the housing market, which I believe we can if we go out and buy up these bad loans so that people can have a new mortgage at the new value of their home; I think if we get rid of the cronyism and special interest influence in Washington so we can act more effectively — my friend, I’d like you to see the letter that a group of senators and I wrote warning exactly of this crisis. Senator Obama’s name was not on that letter.
McCain may have been referring to actions he took in support of the bill he co-sponsored in 2005 — the Housing Enterprise Regulatory Reform Act — which called for stricter regulations for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. When he joined as a co-sponsor in May 2006, about a year after it was first introduced, he made the following statement:
KITTANNING, Pa. — The steel mills and coal mines of western Pennsylvania helped fuel the nation’s economic engine. Today, old factory shells and boarded-up storefronts stand as bleak reminders of those once-prosperous times.
But the voters in working-class enclaves such as this still are a sought-after prize in presidential politics, and many are belatedly backing Democratic nominee Barack Obama.
In the Democratic primaries, working-class whites consistently supported Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton. Later polls showed them overwhelmingly favoring Republican nominee John McCain.
Now, driven by fears that their personal finances could further deteriorate, many see Obama as the better choice – their thinking in some cases driven more by concern about how McCain would handle the economy than any growing admiration for his rival.
“I don’t know that there’s anything I particularly like about him (Obama), but I dislike McCain, and I dislike the way the country is, and Republicans need to change,” said lifelong Republican Ruth Ann Michel, 64, a retiree shopping in a market in Butler on a recent day. She said her vote for Obama would be her first for a Democratic presidential candidate.
While talk in these parts is mostly about the economy, a prominent – if not unspoken subtext – is race. A study of the impact of racial attitudes on the election conducted by The Associated Press with Yahoo News and Stanford University found that whites without a college education were much more likely to hold negative views of blacks than those with a college education.
Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell says a drowning man doesn’t care what color the person is who throws him a life preserver.
“This election is going to be decided when a husband and wife sit at a kitchen table, or a single parent sits at the kitchen table, looks at their bills and figures out who is most likely to help them with their financial condition,” Rendell said. “If the answer’s Barack Obama, nobody’s going to care whether he’s black, green, orange, purple, fuchsia or whatever.”
If you’re drowning and someone throws you a rope, does it matter if the person is white, black, brown, red or yellow?
If Gov. Sarah Palin, by John McCain’s estimation, “knows more about energy than probably anyone in the United States of America,” then why is she getting such basic facts about our nation’s energy production wrong?
At a town-hall event in Wisconsin on Thursday, Palin was asked by a concerned questioner whether it was true that the United States was shipping 75 percent of its Alaskan oil overseas. She responded by proclaiming it impossible, since Congress had put strict bans on the amount of oil and gas that America could export.
No Alaska oil has been exported since 2004, and little if any since 2000, according to the Energy Information Administration and the Congressional Research Service.
And Congress has never imposed outright bans on oil exports. Congress prohibited exports of Alaska oil in 1973 when the Alaska oil pipeline was built. But that ban was lifted in 1996 when there were large volumes of Alaska oil coming down from the North Slope and U.S. demand was soft.
The Alaska ban has never been reinstated.
Unfortunately, for Palin, this was not merely an inconsequential misstatement but rather another in a series of errors when it comes to discussing what is supposed to be her policy strength. For a while on the trail, the Alaska Governor was fond of declaring that her job – as head of state – “has been to oversee nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of oil and gas.”
Alaska is the ninth largest energy supplier in the United States, accounting for a modest 3.5 percent share of the nation’s total energy production…
… After the non-partisan Factcheck.org pointed out Palin’s error in her interview with Gibson, the Alaska governor revised her claim somewhat, limiting it to oil and gas. But data compiled by the Energy Information Administration contradict her claim that she oversees “nearly 20 percent” of oil and gas production in the country. According to authoritative EIA data, Alaska accounted for just 7.4 percent of total U.S. oil and gas production in 2005.
One thing Palin did get right was her assertion that the U.S. does not ship three-quarters of its Alaska-drilled oil to other countries. The amount, in actuality, is quite minimal (523 million barrels of petroleum product), especially compared with the amount that the country imports (roughly 4 billion barrels).
After coming under much criticism, even from republicans, John McCain is trying to stamp out the flames of hate at his rallies. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday at Lakeville South High School in Minneapolis when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama’s character, he described the Democrat as a “decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.”
A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “treason,” “liar,” and even “off with his head” have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.
McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. One woman called Obama “an Arab.” McCain shook his head no and, taking the microphone from her, said that’s not true.
A voter said, “The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight.” Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama. McCain prompted boos from his crowd when he called Obama “a decent person” and told an expectant father that he does “not have to be scared if he is President of the United States.”
An Alaska state legislative investigator on Friday found that Governor Sarah Palin abused her executive power when she and her husband engaged in a campaign to oust her former brother-in-law from the state police force.
In a lengthy report released in Anchorage, Stephen Branchflower found that Palin also improperly allowed her husband, Todd, to use the governor’s office to pursue a personal vendetta against the trooper.
“Governor Palin knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: To get Trooper Michael Wooten fired,” said the report released by a bipartisan legislative committee.
The report will go to the Republican-dominated state legislature for possible further action.
Branchflower said Alaska’s ethics code discourages state employees from “acting upon personal interests in the performance of their public responsibilities and to avoid conflicts of interest in the performance of duty.” He identified 18 events to substantiate an effort over an extended period of time to get Wooten fired.
“She had the authority and power to require Mr. Palin to cease contacting subordinates, but she failed to act,” the report said.
Palin had been accused of dismissing Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, a career law enforcement official, after he rebuffed attempts by her, her husband and Cabinet officials to reopen an investigation into Wooten’s conduct years after Wooten was disciplined by his department.
The report said Palin knew that “the disciplinary investigation was closed and could not be reopened. Yet she allowed the pressure from her husband, to try to get Trooper Wooten fired, to continue unabated over a several month-period of time.”
After his firing, Monegan said he believed that comments from the Palins and others were an attempt to get him to fire Wooten.
Branchflower investigated the charges for six weeks, interviewing 19 people, after he was hired by the Joint Legislative Council. He concluded that although Monegan’s rejection of the plea played a role in his firing, other concerns such as budgetary issues and trooper vacancies also were factors.
“I find that, although Walt Monegan’s refusal to fire Trooper Michael Wooten was not the sole reason he was fired by Governor Sarah Palin, it was likely a major contributing factor to his termination as Commissioner of Public Safety,” Branchflower wrote. “In spite of that, Governor Palin’s firing of Commissioner Monegan was a lawful exercise of her constitutional and statutory authority to hire and fire executive branch department heads.”
Branchflower also dismissed the Palins’ assertions that they were afraid of Wooten because of threats they said he made. “Such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins’ real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family related reasons,” he wrote.
During the time Palin said she and her family feared Trooper Wooten, Palin at the same time reduced her security detail at home, at her office and at public events so it is not credible that ‘they were afraid of Wooten’.Furthermore if Wooten was fired as a Trooper he would have been more of a threat since the Trooper’s office would no longer have any authority over Wooten on a day-to-day basis.
You never know where you are gonna find a political scoop, but Lynn Zinser at her NYT hockey “Slapshot” blog just posted that Sarah Palin, in her much-ballyhooed appearance dropping the puck at the Philly Flyers’ opener, was greeted by “resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd.” The NY Daily News declared, “They booed.” There’s loud music in the backgound but watch the video and judge for yourself.
But Zinser’s post had a lot more in mind: “I would object to this sideshow whichever political party it involved. Having vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin drop the ceremonial first puck at the Flyers’ opener Saturday night was problematic not because it was Palin — Flyers owner Ed Snider’s decision under the flimsy excuse of ‘honoring’ hockey moms — but because it is injecting politics in a place it should not be.”
The biggest problem: when Palin came out to onto the Wachovia Center ice Saturday night — greeted by resounding (almost deafening) boos from the Flyers crowd — the two hockey players who had no choice but to appear with her in that photo op were turned into props in a political campaign. If Rangers center Scott Gomez or Flyers center Mike Richards wanted to make some sort of political statement that would be fine, but in this case, they were thrust into a situation not of their choosing. Snider put them there with his ill-advised mixing of politics and sports.
The level of discomfort has been palpable for the Rangers’ two Alaska natives, Gomez and Brandon Dubinsky, as they have been asked questions about Palin and the election in recent weeks. Dubinsky, a 22-year-old who has shied away from nothing since he broke in with the Rangers last year, looks petrified when the topic gets brought up. I think both would rather play goalie in a shootout than weigh in on the presidential election. -- Greg Mitchell
Speech is arguably man’s greatest gift and simultaneously it is his most dangerous liability.
It is impossible to estimate the good speech has done when great men and women have truthfully instructed and inspired others. At the same time we cannot measure how much evil the tongue has perpetrated when it bears falsehoods disguised as truth that have destroyed reputations and even nations.
A good and devout Christian is a person who loves their neighbor as themself. A person who lives by example, shares the Lord with others and by living a life of example they make non-believers want to become followers of Jesus Christ – Christians. A good Christian is Christ-like and he or she practices and teaches tolerance and is not narrow-minded nor speaks evil of others. God loves us ALL.
Here is one such Evangelical who understands the complete philosophy of Jesus. Christ was not a one-issue deity He knew that the world was filled with different people who had different points-of-view but who could come together and live as one in unity for the greatest good of all mankind.
Thou shalt not hate thy brother in thine heart: thou shalt in any wise rebuke [reason with] thy neighbor, and not suffer sin upon him. Thou shalt not avenge, nor bear any grudge against the children of thy people, but thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the Lord. Leviticus 19: 17-18 (KJV)
Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.Exodus 20:16
This forbids, speaking falsely in any matter, lying, equivocating, and any way devising and designing to deceive our neighbor or others.
WASILLA, Alaska — Levi Johnston, who’s having a baby with Sarah Palin’s daughter, can’t believe all the things he’s hearing.
No, he wasn’t held against his will on the campaign trail. No, he’s not being forced into a shotgun wedding with 17-year-old Bristol Palin.
“None of that’s true,” Johnston, 18, said in a rare interview with The Associated Press. “We both love each other. We both want to marry each other. And that’s what we are going to do.”
Standing in the driveway of his family home in this small Alaska town, Johnston spoke about the rumors swirling around him.
The soft-spoken teenager discussed his relationship with Palin and how life has changed with fatherhood fast approaching. He agreed to talk despite the presidential campaign’s advice in the days following Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination to avoid the media.
“They’re not telling me anything right now,” Johnston said as he checked his Blackberry. “It’s pretty chill.”
Not surprisingly, Johnston was a little shocked when he learned about Bristol’s pregnancy, but he says he quickly embraced the prospects of fatherhood. The baby is due Dec. 18. Johnston has dropped out of high school to take a job on the North Slope oil fields as an apprentice electrician.
Johnston hinted he’s expecting a boy, but he declined to discuss baby names.
“I’m looking forward to having him,” he said. “I’m going to take him hunting and fishing. He’ll be everywhere with me.”
Johnston, a Wasilla heartthrob, said he wanted to set the record straight.
For starters, he said his much-maligned MySpace page was a joke _ the one that claimed he said: “I’m a … redneck,” and “I don’t want kids.” Johnston said his friends created the page a few years ago and he had nothing to do with it.
Johnston said he has dated Palin since his freshman year in high school.
“We were planning on getting married a long time ago with or without the kid,” he said. “That was the plan from the start.”
While Johnston provided few details about next summer’s wedding, the planning has started: A cousin will likely be his best man, and he has asked two hockey buddies, Ben Barber and Dane Wilson, to be groomsmen.
Barber doesn’t think anyone pressured Johnston into marriage.
“If he thought it wasn’t the right thing to do he probably wouldn’t do it,” he said.
Johnston is an avid hunter. He’s dark haired, tall and muscular, sports a bit of stubble and drives a red Chevy Silverado truck. He’d be the perfect cover for Field & Stream.
He’s bagged bears, sheep, elk, and caribou. Some of the antlers are scattered about his yard. Last July on a caribou hunt he lost a “promise” ring that Palin had given him. He said he decided to tattoo her name on the finger and not bother with more rings because he’d just lose them anyway.
Johnston said he wasn’t forced to campaign with Palin’s mother. Bristol Palin invited him and Johnston jumped at the chance. It was a whirlwind experience for Johnston, who was seated with the Palins at the Republican National Convention.
“At first, I was nervous,” he said. “Then I was like, ‘Whatever.’”
While Barber said his friend is a celebrity now, Johnston said it hasn’t changed him.
“I’m still the same old boy,” said Johnston. “I’m just a workin’ man.”
And now he’s also about to become a family man.
“We’re up for it. I’m excited to have my first kid. It’s going to be a lot of hard work but we can handle it.”
Wasilla hockey coach Bill Sturdevant, who was invited to the wedding, said he was sorry to hear Johnston wasn’t going to return for his senior year of high school. But he said he believes Johnston, a talented hockey player, will find his way.
“He’s a tough kid,” Sturdevant said. “He’s taking everything in stride.”
What about Johnston’s politics?
The young man said he wasn’t an expert on politics by any stretch. Asked about Barack Obama, he replied: “I don’t know anything about him. He seems like a good guy. I like him.”
But Johnston still rooting for John McCain and Sarah Palin.
“I just hope she wins,” he said. “She’s my future mother-in-law. She better win.”
Senator Obama delivered a phenomenal and absolutely brilliant economic rescue plan for Americans this afternoon in Toledo, Ohio. It is a comprehensive four-part plan that deals with the immediate crisis that is currently affecting American workers, families and communities that are struggling. A plan that will grow our middle-class and create J-O-B-S!
Obama’s plan includes four new major ideas about job creation, relief to families, relief to homeowners and responding to the financial crisis. His plan also calls for temporarily eliminating taxes on unemployment insurance benefits; keeping all options on the table to help our automakers weather the financial crisis; having the Fed and Treasury prepare for guaranteeing a broader range of liabilities of the banking system; and instructing the Treasury to help unfreeze markets for individual mortgages, student loans, car loans, loans for multi-family dwellings and credit card loans:
Job Creation: A New American Jobs Tax Credit. Obama is calling for a temporary tax credit for firms that create new jobs in the United States over the next two years.
Relief to Families: Penalty-Free Withdrawals from IRAs and 401(k) s in 2008 and 2009. Obama is calling for new legislation to allow families to withdraw 15% of their retirement savings – up to a maximum of $10,000 – without facing a tax-penalty this year (including retroactively) and next year.
Relief to Homeowners: 90 day foreclosure moratorium for homeowners that are acting in good faith. Financial institutions that participate in the Treasury’s financial rescue plan should be required to adhere to a homeowners code of conduct, including a 90-day foreclosure moratorium for any homeowners living in their homes that are making good faith efforts pay their mortgages.
Responding to the Financial Crisis: A Lending Facility to Address the Credit Crisis for States and Localities. Obama is calling on the Federal Reserve and the Treasury to work to establish a facility to lend to state and municipal governments, similar to the steps the Fed recently took to provide liquidity to the commercial paper market.
Is it about to ‘pop off’ at Hofstra University at the 3rd debate? John McCain seems to be talking loudly and carrying a small stick.
Taegan Goddard reports that John McCain confirmed this morning he would try to bring up William Ayers at Wednesday’s debate. McCain appeared to blame Obama for the move:
In an interview on a St. Louis radio station, McCain said Obama’s comments that “I didn’t have the guts” to talk about William Ayers in the last presidential debate have “probably ensured” that the former 1960s radical will come up in Wednesday’s debate.
The Huffington Post’s Seth Colter Walls wrote Monday that Ayers was “expected” to come up at the debate.
When asked if McCain plans to “go after” Obama on these topics this Wednesday, Bounds added: “So much of a debate is determined by the moderator and the questions that are posed to the candidates. I expect it could come up and I expect John McCain will ask Barack Obama to speak truthfully about his relationship with friend and unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers. I think that voters deserve to know, deserve to vet these candidates to the fullest extent… Certainly, Bill Ayers raises questions. Certainly, Tony Rezko raises questions.”
If it is McCain’s intention to raise the issue of Ayers — with or without moderator Bob Schieffer’s prompting — it would serve as something of an answered prayer to many of the Arizonan’s town hall attendees, one of whom even begged McCain to bring on the character attacks in the last presidential debate of the season.
Debate is scheduled for 9PM EST/8PM CST on networks, CNN, MSNBC
Did Early Vote start in your state as yet? If yes, VOTE TODAY!
SurveyUSA has a lot of good habits as a pollster, and one of them is breaking out the results of early and absentee voting in states where such things are allowed. So far, SurveyUSA has conducted polling in five states where some form of early voting was underway. In each one, Barack Obama is doing profoundly better among early voters than among the state’s electorate as a whole:
We should caveat that these are not hard-and-fast numbers. Estimates of early voting results are subject to the same statistical vagaries as any other sort of subgroup analysis, such as response bias and small sample sizes.Nevertheless, Obama is leading by an average of 23 points among early voters in these five states, states which went to George W. Bush by an average of 6.5 points in 2004.
Is this a typical pattern for a Democrat? Actually, it’s not. According to a study by Kate Kenski at the University of Arizona, early voters leaned Republican in both 2000 and 2004; with Bush earning 62.2 percent of their votes against Al Gore, and 60.4 percent against John Kerry. In the past, early voters have also tended to be older than the voting population as a whole and more male than the population as a whole, factors which would seem to cut against Obama or most other Democrats.Now certainly, early voters tend to be your stauncher partisans rather than your uncommitted voters — just 1-2 percent of early voters in 2000 and 2004 reported that they would have voted differently if they’d waited until election day. So it’s unlikely that John McCain is actually losing all that many persuadable voters to the early voter tallies.
What these results would seem to suggest, however, is that there are fairly massive advantages for the Democrats in enthusiasm and/or turnout operations. They imply that Obama is quite likely to turn out his base in large numbers; the question is whether the Republicans will be able to do the same.
Keep in mind that there are veteran pollsters like Ann Selzer who think that most of her colleagues are vastly understating the degree to which youth and minority turnout is liable to improve in this election; Selzer’s polls have been 5-6 points more favorable to Obama than the averages in the states that she’s surveyed. So while these early voting numbers could turn out to be something of a curiosity, they could alternatively represent a canary in the coal mine for a coming Democratic turnout wave.
McCain came out fighting but it didn’t work.It was a mismatch. Obama was poised and presidential. McCain was angry and/or irritated.McCain’s best line of the last 6 months was, “Senator Obama, I’m not George Bush”.But the line fell flat because it seemed forced. This what Obama did with that line:
True … but you did vote with Bush 90% of the time,” says the announcer.
“Tax breaks for big corporations and the wealthy. But almost nothing for the middle class — same as Bush. Keep spending ten billion a month in Iraq while our own economy struggles — same as Bush.”
The spot, titled “90 Percent,” contains shots of McCain rolling his eyes, blinking and looking like a deer in the headlights — as sure a suggestion as any that the Obama campaign thought they won last night’s debate as much (if not more) on style as substance.
The ad will be airing across the country on national cable beginning today.
He’s an unlicensed and unregistered employee of a small plumbing and heating company in suburban Toledo, Ohio, who was mentioned 26 times during the 90-minute presidential debate — the war in Iraq received only six mentions. Go figure!
Before the debate was even finished, three local television stations had parked live satellite trucks outside Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher’s home on Shrewsbury Street in Holland, Ohio, and the networks were rushing to interview him.
Overnight, Joe the Plumber became a national celebrity.
Mr. Wurzelbacher is a 34-year-old plumber’s assistant and a registered Republican who thinks Barack Obama “can tap dance – almost as good as Sammy Davis Jr.”
On Sunday, he was playing football with his 13-year-old son outside his home, when Mr. Obama suddenly showed up to campaign in his neighborhood.
As Mr. Wurzelbacher watched his neighbours fawn over the candidate, he fumed.
“I didn’t think they were asking him tough enough questions,” he said on Thursday.
“So, I thought, you know, I’ll go over there. I’ve always wanted to ask one of these guys a question and really corner them.”
He shook hands with Mr. Obama and told him he wants to buy the business he works for, adding its income — $250,000 to $280,000 a year — would qualify for a tax hike under the Democratic candidate’s election proposals.
“Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn’t it?” he asked. Mr. Obama told him, “It’s not that I want to punish your success. I just want to make sure that everybody who is behind you – that they’ve got a chance at success, too.”
“Because you’re successful, you have to pay more than everybody else?” Mr. Wurzelbacher said on Thursday. “That’s a socialist view and it’s incredibly wrong.”
But Joe the plumber also acknowledged he earns substantially less than $250,000 ($40,000) which would make Joe eligible under Obama’s plan for a tax cut!
“It’s pretty surreal, man, my name being mentioned in a presidential campaign,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said on Thursday.
But that was just the beginning.
When he went to a gym on Thursday morning he returned home to find 21 reporters camped out in his driveway, and newspaper columnists and Internet bloggers across the country earnestly debating the impact Joe the Plumber will have on the November 4 election.
Obama’s campaign took advantage of Mr. Wurzelbacher’s sudden popularity to buy a Google search ad linking Internet users to a Joe The Plumber’s Tax Cut Web site, which has a calculator they can use to work out their tax cuts under an Obama administration.
After the Washington Post reported it was unable to find a listing for Mr. Wurzelbacher in the database of the Ohio Construction Industry Licensing Board, the local newspaper, the Toledo Blade, reported Joe the Plumber is an unlicensed employee of Newell Plumbing & Heating.
He is not registered to work as a plumber in Ohio.
The newspaper also reported Mr. Wurzelbacher had a lien against him by the Ohio Department of Taxation in January, 2007, for failing to pay $1,183 in property taxes.
When the president of the Plumbing, Heating, Cooling Contractors National Association in Washington issued a press release applauding Joe the Plumber for helping small business owners play a role in the debate on the nation’s economic future, the business manager of the Toledo local of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters & Service Mechanics issued a statement complaining Joe the Plumber hadn’t even undergone apprenticeship training. “When you have guys going out there with no training whatsoever, it’s a little disreputable to start with,” union boss Tom Joseph told the Toledo Blade.
“We’re the real Joe the Plumber,” he added, noting his union backs Mr. Obama.
“I’m kind of like Britney Spears having a headache,” Mr. Wurzelbacher said on Thursday.
63rd Annual Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner
When: Thursday, October 16, 2008
Where:The Waldorf=Astoria, New York City
Time:6:30 p.m.
Keynote Speakers:
Honorable John McCain, United States Senate, Arizona
Honorable Barack Obama, United States Senate, Illinois
Barack Obama and GOP rival John McCain traded their boxing gloves for formal wear – and some self-deprecating humor – at Thursday night’s Alfred E. Smith Dinner. The annual see-and-be-seen political roast, named for the famed 1920s New York governor, is “the last time they’re going to be together before the election,” said Smith’s great-grandson and namesake.
And with the excitement generated by the presidential candidates at the top of the marquee, this year’s sold-out soiree has surpassed its goal of raising $2.5 million for Catholic causes. Alfred E. Smith was the first Catholic to run for president of the U.S. and a former 4 time governor of New York.
Both McCain and Obama were very funny in their roast.
It must be nice to be Sarah Palin.The Associate Press requested copies of emails sent to and from Todd Palin to Alaskan officials.Governor Palin quickly said yes to the request but added a stipulation – cough up $15 million dollars!
Governor Palin’s office said it would take up to six hours of a programmer’s time to assemble the e-mail of just a single state employee, then another two hours for “security” checks, and finally five hours to search the e-mail for whatever word or topic the requestor is seeking. At $73.87 an hour, that’s $960.31 for a single e-mail account. And there are 16,000 full-time state employees.
Governor Palin’s office told the AP that if they send a check for $15,364,960.00 Governor Palin will gladly hand over the First Dude’s emails that showed that his wife gave him access to Alaskan state business that he should not have had access to.
In addition, the governor’s office says it can provide copies of the emails but AFTER November 4 and on paper only, not electronically. Why? Because lawyers need printouts so they can black out, or “redact,” private or exempted information. That task is more difficult because Palin and her senior staff have used government e-mail accounts for some personal correspondence, and personal e-mail accounts for much of their government correspondence. The photocopies of those printouts will be a relative bargain, only 10 cents a page.
Election Day is ONLY 17 days away and even though the polls reflect that Senator Obama is leading, I’m telling you – don’t be seduced by the poll numbers. Don’t believe the hype.
We (Democrats) can’t start celebrating in the 4th quarter; we have to end the game strong.We’re at the one yard line, now is the time to keep up the pressure, follow the game plan and guarantee the touch-down.
Senators Obama and Biden are depending on you personally – EVERY VOTE counts.Every person matters.Every state matters.
None of us should look at the numbers and think, ‘Obama is going to win anyway, so I don’t have to vote’.If enough people think that way Obama will not win.
Add that thinking to the allegations of illegal purging of voters all across the country – which will adversely affect newly registered voters – and it is even more obvious that every vote is needed to win this election.
A recent report in The New York Times stated that, “Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least 6 swing states have been removed from the voter rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law according to a review of state records and social security data by the NYT.”
The NYT said that this was attributed to errors in handling the registrations; it also said that it will adversely affect Democrats since there are more newly registered Democratic voters.This will also cause confusion and frustration on Election Day when all these newly registered voters who are excited to vote are challenged by election officials.
We only have to look at the stealing of the 2000 and 2004 elections to be reminded how seemingly ‘little things’ can change the results of an election. We only have to look at the current financial crisis in America and now globally to see that having the wrong person as president can and will affect us all and can result in loss of savings, loss of jobs, loss of opportunities and cause us to struggle with basic things such as putting food on the table.
“What a magnificent day the Lord has made,” Obama said. “And thank you for being here today.”
“Whoo! I am on a high to see so many people of so many colors,” said Nicole Brown, a young black woman who lives St. Louis. “I mean, I’m anxious — is this real?”
Saturday was also surreal for both Senators Obama and McCain.McCain was in North Carolina and Virginia defending red states while Obama was greeted by exceptionally huge crowds in Missouri which Republicans had considered safe just months ago.
According to the St. Louis Police Department about 100,000 people gathered to hear Obama speak at a rally earlier Saturday. If you live in Kansas City, Obama will be at the Liberty Memorial this afternoon.
Obama’s speech was focused on the economy.Here is an excerpt:
My opponent’s been talking a lot about taxes in his campaign. But here’s the truth Missouri – we are both offering tax cuts. The difference is who we’re cutting taxes for. It comes down to values – in America, do we simply value wealth, or do we value the work that creates it? For eight years, we’ve seen what happens when we put the extremely wealthy and well-connected ahead of working people. Now, John McCain thinks that the way to rebuild this economy is to double down on George Bush’s policy of giving more and more tax breaks to those at the very top in the false hope that it will all trickle down. I think it’s time to rebuild the middle class in this country, and that is the choice in this election.
Senator McCain wants to give the average Fortune 500 CEO a $700,000 tax cut but absolutely nothing at all to over 100 million Americans. I want to cut taxes – cut taxes – for 95 percent of all workers. And under my plan, if you make less than $250,000 a year – which includes 98 percent of small business owners – you won’t see your taxes increase one single dime. Not your payroll taxes, not your income taxes, not your capital gains taxes – nothing. It’ time to give the middle class a break, and that’s what I’ll do as President of the United States.
Lately, Senator McCain has been attacking my middle class tax cut. He actually said it goes to, “those who don’t pay taxes,” even though it only goes to working people who are already getting taxed on their paycheck. That’s right, Missouri – John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you are facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people “welfare.”
The only “welfare” in this campaign is John McCain’s plan to give another $200 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations in America – including $4 billion in tax breaks to big oil companies that ran up record profits under George Bush. That’s who John McCain is fighting for. But we can’t afford four more years like the last eight. George Bush and John McCain are out of ideas, they are out of touch, and if you stand with me in 17 days they will be out of time.
We need new priorities in Washington. I think it’s time to give a tax cut to the teachers and janitors who work in our schools; to the cops and firefighters who keep us safe; to the waitresses working double shifts, the nurses in the ER, and the plumbers fighting for their American Dream. These workers are the backbone of our country. They are the ones that Washington has forgotten. They’re the ones I’ll fight for. And while Senator McCain ignores the payroll taxes you pay to score a few political points, I’ll put a tax cut into the pockets of working people so you can pay the bills, put away some savings, and pass on a brighter future to all our children.
This morning, we are one step closer to achieving health care reform in the United States of America. Can I get a “hip, hip!”
If you believe in conspiracy theories, then this is right up there with the “chilled” envelope pulled by David Stern in the 1985 Draft lottery, putting Patrick Ewing in New York. You mean LeBron, a die-hard Yankees fan, gets an up-close look while the city is being painted in pinstripes? Is there a better marketing opportunity? 
The Knicks hope the intoxicating celebrity factor will be enough to sway LeBron next summer as a free agent, because that’s all the Knicks really have in their favor. They can’t offer more money. They can’t offer a better collection of teammates, at least not right away. They can offer Spike Lee while Cleveland offers Drew Carey. They can (and will, you watch) get Spike and Chris Rock, among other celebrity row fixtures, to make a recruiting film in which famous people explain to LeBron why playing in New York will be far more enjoyable than playing in Cleveland.
A handful of the Yankees, still smelling of champagne, will be strategically seated at courtside Friday, making LeBron the second-most loved athlete in the house … if Derek Jeter shows up. 
Then there’s C.C. Sabathia, big basketball fan and friend of LeBron’s from when Sabathia played in Cleveland; he left for New York and scored an instant jackpot, both with money and a ring. The video screen will constantly show their faces and they’ll get a standing ovation, all designed to show LeBron what it’s like to be a champion in New York. And the fans, no doubt, will chime in, cheering LeBron at warmups (like, who else will they cheer this year?), gushing whenever he does something spectacular and chanting “MVP,” as they did last year, when he dropped 52 on the Knicks.
All this will play to LeBron’s ego and convince him that a star of his magnitude needs to be in New York. That theory, by the way, is obsolete. Maybe 20-25 years ago, a star could receive better perks in New York, as Reggie Jackson did when he left the small market A’s. But with the global media and advertising of today, that’s not really necessary. LeBron blew up commercially without ever leaving Cleveland, and that will continue to be the case if he stays in Cleveland.
Obviously, the big factor for LeBron is collecting championships and whether his best chance is in Cleveland with a Cavs’ team that’s probably third-best behind Boston and Orlando and lacks a starry supporting cast, or a Knicks team being furiously stripped and rebuilt on the fly. The Knicks hope it also comes down to the stars and whether LeBron wants to hang with his buddy Jay-Z after the game, or retire to his palatial pad in Cleveland and call it a night.
Today in the Rose Garden President Obama said he was “surprised and deeply humbled” by the committee’s decision, and quickly put to rest any speculation that he might not accept the honor. Describing the award as an “affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations,” he said he would accept it as a “call to action.” 
Olbermann: Those Who Live In Ice Igloos Shouldn’t Throw Lipstick
Posted by Paulette on October 7, 2008
I hope all you Obama supporters are smart enough to see that this is a good Kenyan witch doctor preacher praying over Sarah – the Bible states that in the ‘end-times’ all roads will lead to Alaska because you will be able to see hell (Russia) from Alaska and pergatory (Afghanistan) is a neighbor of Alaska. Rolling my eyes.
Obama supporters are just too blind to see the truth and too sophisticated to understand about witches!
Posted in Barack Obama, Democrats, Election 2008, Elections, International, John McCain, McCain, News, Politics, Presidential Debates, Republicans, Thoughts, Women | Tagged: Keith Olbermann Special Comments, Kenya, Palin, Witch Doctor | 2 Comments »