Monday, October 13th, 2008
Fill in The Blank
Posted by Bossip Staff
“Obama Bin Lyin’ has been a popular theme at some recent McLame rallies that seem to be taking on a “KKK, where is the ni*ga at” vibe.
Fill in The Blank: Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking_____________________.
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Have me remembering the old segregated ways on the past.
Look at the crowd? I mean really where is the diversity?
What do you expect from supporters at a clan rally.
Thrice!!! That is trife. I am so scared for Obama…we need to pray for his safety!
I’m sorry I meant Klan rally
sad as shiggety. I thought America was better than this.
McLame and his supports can eat a *****! Obama 08 YES WE CAN!!!!
Unfortunately there are STILL some racist folk out there that would rather the USA continue to go in it’s fast downward spiral than a competent Black Man become President…
SMH @ the racist & prejudice folks…
Wow…thank GOD for the Electoral College…cause if the vote were popular vote purely, we’d have some serious problems.
Look at the hispanic or black lady in the lower right hand corner and the black man behind her, they werent expecting this *****, you can see their thoughts “its too many pasty **********as surrounding me to cause trouble, I’d better just stand here and grit my teeth dammit!”
All because of his “skin color” and funny name = *shallow stuff…
And not because he’s competent, intelligent, has good judgement and is personable…
SMH @ the foolishness…
McShame on them
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking the vast majority of white people are evil.
@ 6am
man, u r good… u counted 2 non-whites in that photo?
Every1 should try this with Republican rally pictures. It’s a game called “Where’s Negro?”
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAaaaaaaaa………
the kkk is still in effect!!
LMAOOOOO @6am ________________________________________________________
has me thinking that she needs to worry about firing the guy who wouldn’t fire her brother in law…..she has been found guilty of violating Alaska’s ethics codes …..that’s what she needs to worry about…I mean does she and McCain for that matter want this election to turn totally into a racist thing….their campaign is now based on enciting people’s fears and misunderstandings…….the McCain camp has alienated the muslims of America as well as those of Arab descent….keep it up McCain….apparently he doesn’t get it…. once you start down that slippery slope it’s hard to climb out of it
Why is there a “what I’m *****uming to be” Arab with a full beard in that crowd? Under the “Bin-lyin” sign?
McDummy…
have me thinking…only 22 more days until election day and they know that it is pretty much a wrap for the Re-*****-licans….
LMAO @ Chris Rock saying Bush made it hard for a white man to run for president…sad but true!! I would not vote for McShame if he was running against an alien from the planet Nomorebush…race has nothing to do with it. However, I am excited to be able to see a black president in my lifetime -
To the KKK (in the words of Jeezy) – if you touch him – we riding!!! Please believe it….
If McCain wins, I’m going to Ethiopia…no use tryin to live out here in fear of persecution…mi whole familia won’t be safe…
Those people should know McCain is playing to their lowest instinct. He has little if any real respect for them.
LMAO @ 6am…you’re so right.
Alright, I’m lying, I won’t be moving to Africa…but I’ll be in hiding, and wear masks…
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking this is the reason incest is illegal.
Let them have their fun. We will answer back in force on Nov 4.
Just a quick question…with all the negative press, threats against his life and rallies where the supporters carry on as such…how many of you believe and i mean TRULY believe that Barack Obama will win the 2008 Presidential Election?
@ SWAG-a-licious
To the KKK (in the words of Jeezy) – if you touch him – we riding!!! Please believe it….
So true!
That anger in their eyes says CHANGE – Can’t Help A N***** Get Elected.
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking OH lawd jeebuz !
The guys with the red shirt in the back are KKK leaders…
@ Wondering: I believe, for the first time since this race has started, the Barack Obama can and will win the Presidency. Will he have a chance to serve a full term? Without some nut trying to kill him? That’s what I’m most concerned about. I’m from Philly & if the way the city rallied around him last weekend–blacks and whites is any indication of how the country will vote, he’s got it in the bag. Yes there are still some redneck racists out here, but GREEN–or the lack thereof, is the most important color in the U.S. And bush has caused alot of (formerly) wealthy folks to lose their edge. No $ in the bank, no healthcare, no jobs? Better vote democrat. Barack the vote BABAY!!!
Wait. This just in from Clayton Bigsby.
They are saying; C.H.A.N.G.E – Can’t Have A N***** Getting Elected.
i dont like the way this election is heading at least not on McCains side, it’s so hateful
if anything happens to Obama, there is going to be plenty of white people that need to watch their back..black ppl (including myself) will take this very personally
@ Black Woman-I concur. That crowd is a direct result of too many TV dinners and inbreeding-racist *&^%$#@’s!!!
“When McCain loses a house, he’s calm, cause he’s got 5 more available. When Barack loses a house, he’s one of us.”
~Chris Rock
Barack/Biden 2008!
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking tHEY Enjoy MakING posters . .
@Wondering
Just a quick question…with all the negative press, threats against his life and rallies where the supporters carry on as such…how many of you believe and i mean TRULY believe that Barack Obama will win the 2008 Presidential Election?
_____________________________________________
I think that what people say and what they do are two different things. Many will profess to be open and liberal, but when the curtain closes on their voter registration booth, they will vote their interests and their tribe.
I do think that the election will be a LOT
I do think that the electin will be a LOT closer than most polls predict.
I don’t think that our country is ready for this kind of change.
If our votes REALLY count with the county in it’s current state. I think he really has a shot. Bush has almost single handedly ruined this county! It’s out of control, no jobs, no healthcare, no money, everyone losing their homes, lets not forget the war that were spending 10 BILLION dollars a month on and no one really knows what the hell were at war for. McLame policies are a mirror of Bush’s and lastly how can people really vote and support someone who feels healthcare should be a responsibility and not a right?
@al-anon,
McCain is done in politics after this. And the election won’t be as close as the polls indicate. Obama’s base is underrepresented by polls. You’re a McCain supporter, and it’s pathetic that you can’t come out and say so in these threads.
Fill in The Blank: Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking that the fundamentals of our economy are strong. Dumb-azzes.
Have me thinking they are about the attend a lynching at a klan rally
“All’s fair in Love and War, and Politics”
“MAY THE BEST MAN WIN”
Crackers are just mad because a Black man is beating that old, wrinkle, crusty forgetful minded McCain. They don’t know how to deal with that in a few weeks a they will have a black Chief Commander. Ha Ha
I’m not a McCain supporter, nor am I an adamant Obama supporter. I’m more like Mr T….”I pity the fool who gets this job.” We have serious economic problems and structural problems in our country. I don’t think either one of them are that great and I have serious reservations about both candidates. It’s more like picking between “Slim” and “None” but “Slim left town.
If Obama gets elected, I bet he won’t even get a honeymoon period like other Presidents.
The only mob mentality I’ve experienced is from my FELLOW black people when I tell them that I do not support Obama. Wanna talk about hate? Let’s talk about how my McCain/Palin mini poster was trashed at my desk, or how many times, I’ve been called a sellout or uncle tom by my co-workers. How many times my FELLOW black people who do not support Obama are called all kinds of names.
How some people on this very site call McCain and especially Palin all kinds of racist names (*****, *****, igloo trash). So spare me the “klan rally” bullshi#t. Some of you are some of the most racist people I have ever come across and the sad thing is some of you actually feel like it is justifiable.
If Obama looses, you only have yourselves to blame. I actually thought that Obama had a great shot, until the majority of his supporters started calling everyone who disagreed with him a racist or an uncle tom.
You see, that ***** wears out real quick.
November 4th will be something else.
@ Al-Anon
I’m not a McCain supporter, nor am I an adamant Obama supporter. I’m more like Mr T….”I pity the fool who gets this job.” We have serious economic problems and structural problems in our country. I don’t think either one of them are that great and I have serious reservations about both candidates. It’s more like picking between “Slim” and “None” but “Slim left town.
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100% co-sign. By the time one of them is actually even elected this country may be too broke to implement the plans they have for it.
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have me thinking I should have stayed out of the South.
Hello
Well, this is no surprise. . .On a side note, Obama gave a great speech today in Toledo. He unveiled a series of new economic proposals directed at the middle-cl*****, including a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures and major job generator initiatives.
Hi HF!
@Black.Woman
FYI, I came across this snippet from an NPR interview with Steve Schmidt. According to him, McCain will NOT use Rev. Wright as an “attack line”:
Schmidt took the opportunity to again hammer the campaign’s attacks on Bill Ayers.
The campaign has taken a one-two-punch strategy with Ayers. One: make it clear he was once considered a domestic terrorist. Two: say it’s not about that, but rather Obama’s response to their attacks, and candor about his relationship to Ayers, that makes him a liar.
“John McCain doesn’t much care about a washed-up old terrorist like Bill Ayers, who’s organization bombed the Pentagon and the Capitol,” Schmidt said. “But, what is true, and beyond debate in this race, is that Barack Obama has been untruthful about the dimension of this relationship… And, if Barack Obama had been honest with the American people about that relationship, it wouldn’t be an issue in the campaign.”
When asked about Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Schmidt made it clear McCain will not use that as an attack line.
@dubya
So I guess you’re not siked about Oliver Stone’s new flick, W, right?
That’s interesting Sydney. I think Senator McCain and Governor Palin would have went full throttle with Rev. Wright had it not been for the latest news that Palin violated the trust and baused her power-now, the one moral authority, as Palin has made herself to be, has no authority-she’s a hypocrite, and McCain knows that America is not buying it.
What’s more? The Clintons are out and swinging hard for Senators Obama ad Biden!
***************************************************
Clinton’s rejoinder: Jobs, baby, jobs By MARYCLAIRE DALE, *****ociated Press Writer
34 minutes ago
PHILADELPHIA – Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton offered a Democratic rejoinder to the Republican chant of “drill, baby, drill.” Said the one-time presidential candidate: “Jobs, baby, jobs.”
Campaigning for her once bitter rival Barack Obama in Pennsylvania, the New York senator told about 1,500 people at an historic farm in suburban Horsham, that her husband’s administration produced a balanced budget and a surplus.
“Now, eight short years later, we’ve had to add a digit to the debt clock,” she said, referring to the digital sign in New York City that tracks the national debt.
Clinton is trying to use her popularity in places like northeast Philadelphia and the city’s suburbs to help Obama beat Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain in this battleground state. She did well in both areas in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary six months ago, when she beat the Illinois senator by 10 percentage points.
At the Republican National Convention and various GOP rallies, an oft-repeated chant was “drill, baby, drill,” a plea for more oil drilling. McCain and GOP vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin back more offs***** oil drilling; Palin favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Clinton said Democrats have a better answer: “Jobs, baby, jobs.”
Earlier in the day, she told about 400 people at a Philadelphia Jewish community center that voters concerned about the country’s economy should support Obama because President Bush’s policies are not helping average households.
“The middle cl***** is invisible to this president,” Clinton said. “He doesn’t see how hard it is to make ends meet.”
Clinton’s visit to the Jewish community center in the far northeastern corner of Philadelphia was the first of two area stops on Monday.
Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, campaigned with Obama running mate Joe Biden on Sunday in Scranton, another area where Clinton did well in the primary.
Earlier Monday, Clinton said Obama is closing in on an Election Day win.
Clinton said in an interview taped for “Today” from Scranton that she thinks Obama has substantially improved his chances by the way he has handled questions about the country’s severe credit crisis. “I think he’s closing it,” she said.
Off topic, veteran journalist Ted Koppel will host a special, The Last Lynching, premiering tonight on the Discovery channel. Info below:
Ted Koppel Examines America’s Recent History of Racial Violence
Premieres Monday, Oct.13, at 10 p.m. ET/PT
Just weeks before the history-making 2008 presidential election, the first in which any political party has nominated an African American as its candidate, Discovery Channel presents a one-hour special on race in America. Some commentators are now speaking of a “post-racial” period in American history. While the nation has come a long way on the road toward racial equality, there is still much left to accomplish.
In this program, Ted Koppel focuses on three Americans whose lives were affected profoundly by incidents of hatred and racism as recent as a 1981 lynching in Alabama. This year, however, each was directly involved in naming Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party’s nominee for president.
I think that it is time for change they dont even realize this they only see the color of him instead of what he is tryin to accomplish now for Mcclain look at him he is bestfriends with the guy(Bush) who has brought our economy into a dirty mess…..lets be real and get real and make a change arent u tired of being broke!!!!!!spending too much money on gas…..BUT THAT WILL SOON CHANGE ON NOV.4
I think that it is time for change they dont even realize this they only see the color of him instead of what he is tryin to accomplish now for Mcclain look at him he is bestfriends with the guy(Bush) who has brought our economy into a dirty mess…..lets be real and get real and make a change arent u tired of being broke!!!!!!spending too much money on gas…..BUT THAT WILL SOON CHANGE ON NOV.4
I am from Mississippi and its a shame that RACISM is in full effect everywhere because IGNORANT people can’t get past color. I work around some REDNECK Republicans and they KNOW that I am OBAMA and if they got something to say THEY BEST say it among themselves!!! I am a RIDE OR DIE CHICK FOR OBAMA!!
YES
(Check me out!)
@ Al-Anon
I’m not a McCain supporter, nor am I an adamant Obama supporter. I’m more like Mr T….”I pity the fool who gets this job.” We have serious economic problems and structural problems in our country. I don’t think either one of them are that great and I have serious reservations about both candidates. It’s more like picking between “Slim” and “None” but “Slim left town.
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100% co-sign. By the time one of them is actually even elected this country may be too broke to implement the plans they have for it.
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Both of you are very right. I happen to believe that Obama’s plans for the economy WILL NOT WORK. There is no way in hell we are going to get “universal healthcare” given the bailout that just p*****ed. McCain’s 5,000 credit is a more workable solution given that it opens up health insurance to competition which means you and I can shop around for the best deals.
Another thing that has not been talked about is illegal immigration. Neither candidate has spoken on it as both are on the fence. However, I feel as if more can be done about illegal immigration under McCain.
Any black person who supports illegal immigration is signing their own death warrant. In addition to the illegal immigrants coming from South America and killing us up in our own neighborhoods, illegal immigrants will still be considered minority and you best believe that they will be given preference over blacks because they will represent a significant voting block. We already see signs of what is to come via La Raza.
And regardless of who’s elected, taxes will go up. They have to.
And do you honestly think that big businesses will sit around while they are taxed up the ***** under Obama’s plan? These same big businesses that hire many of us?
@Black.Woman
I think McCain also spoke out against the Wright ad launched during the primary, so he’s on the record as opposing that line of attack. Who knows. . .
Thanks for the Clintons article. I think they’re both on the road campaiging for Obama for the next few days.
Obama is also performing well on the fundraising front, according to the Los Angeles Times:
Obama had more than $77 million in the bank on Aug. 31, the close of the last reporting period, and is on a pace to raise at least $100 million more by election day. That would mean a cash advantage over McCain of better than 2 to 1.
In a sign of his flush finances, Obama plans a half-hour prime-time broadcast on CBS and NBC on Oct. 29, the first time in years that a presidential candidate has made such a substantial investment in national TV. Ross Perot, a billionaire who bankrolled much of his own campaign, drew an audience of 26 million to his 1992 simulcast on ABC and CBS.
Obama’s money advantage adds to the already tough climb McCain faces in the final three weeks of the race. Polls have shown momentum shifting strongly in the Democrat’s direction as the economic crisis has come to dominate the campaign. McCain has another chance — perhaps his last, best one — to reverse the direction of the race when the two men meet in their third and final debate Wednesday in New York.
At the start of the presidential campaign, common wisdom was that a candidate would need to raise $100 million to compete seriously in the early primaries. Obama, with his Internet-fueled fundraising machine, easily shattered that mark on the way to upsetting Democratic rival New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In all, Obama has raised $454 million through August; he will easily top $500 million by election day. McCain collected $210 million in coming from behind to win the GOP nomination.
@ dubya
The only mob mentality I’ve experienced is from my FELLOW black people when I tell them that I do not support Obama. Wanna talk about hate? Let’s talk about how my McCain/Palin mini poster was trashed at my desk, or how many times, I’ve been called a sellout or uncle tom by my co-workers. How many times my FELLOW black people who do not support Obama are called all kinds of names.
How some people on this very site call McCain and especially Palin all kinds of racist names (*****, *****, igloo trash). So spare me the “klan rally” bullshi#t. Some of you are some of the most racist people I have ever come across and the sad thing is some of you actually feel like it is justifiable.
If Obama looses, you only have yourselves to blame. I actually thought that Obama had a great shot, until the majority of his supporters started calling everyone who disagreed with him a racist or an uncle tom.
You see, that ***** wears out real quick.
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HALLELUJAH, LMAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Although I don’t agree with your choice, I couldn’t have said it better.
This is about politics for me and the idea that there are 2 viable, capable, alternatives to what seems will be 4 more years of Bush’s politics, policies and the Republican agenda is what has me excited.
If Obama is elected what happens after that remains to be seen as it would be for McCain given the legacy the Bush administration left behind, but you would be a “damn fool” to vote for someone merely based on the color of their skin.
Sydney, I’m an independent. I have no allegiance to Bush, Clinton, Carter…anybody. This will be the first time I will vote Republican because I feel McCain’s policies will best help us out of this bad economy.
Obama still wants to enable bad decisions. I can’t stand behind that.
I just might go see that movie!
THESE ARE THE SAME PEOPLE WHO COMPLAIN
THAT THERE ARE NO JOBS AND HAVE NO HEALTH CARE
JOHN MCCAIN HAS NO PLAN FOR THE ECONOMY AND HIS HEALTH CARE PLAN IS *****ED UP
WAKE UP THIS IS ALL ABOUT OBAMA BEING BLACK IF HE WERE WHITE IT WOULD OF BEEN OVER ALREADY
BUT THESE RACIST *****ERS GOT IT COMING TO THEM
BARACK OBAMA WILL BE PRESIDENT NOV.4
@dubya
“Obama still wants to enable bad decisions. I can’t stand behind that.”
No, that would be McCain. And I can’t stand behind him. But we may have to agree to disagree.
Yes, I think the movie looks pretty interesting. And I am interested in how Jeffrey Wright and Thandie Newton will portray Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.
From the transcript of Obama’s economic speech today in Toledo, Ohio, www(dot)nytimes(dot)com:
Over the course of this campaign, I’ve laid out a set of policies that will grow our middle-cl***** and strengthen our economy in the long-term. I’ll reform our tax code so that 95% of workers and their families get a tax cut, and eliminate income taxes for seniors making under $50,000. I’ll bring down the cost of health care for families and businesses by investing in preventative care, new technology, and giving every American the chance to get the same kind of health insurance that members of Congress give themselves. We’ll ensure every child can compete in the global economy by recruiting an army of new teachers and making college affordable for anyone who wants to go. We’ll create five million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in ten years, and we’ll create two million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.
But that’s a long-term strategy for growth. Right now, we face an immediate economic emergency that requires urgent action. We can’t wait to help workers and families and communities who are struggling right now – who don’t know if their job or their retirement will be there tomorrow; who don’t know if next week’s paycheck will cover this month’s bills. We need to p***** an economic rescue plan for the middle-cl***** and we need to do it now. Today I’m proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities, and help struggling homeowners. It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everyone’s mind, and it’s spelled J-O-B-S.
We’ve already lost three-quarters of a million jobs this year, and some experts say that unemployment may rise to 8% by the end of next year. We can’t wait until then to start creating new jobs. That’s why I’m proposing to give our businesses a new American jobs tax credit for each new employee they hire here in the United States over the next two years.
To fuel the real engine of job creation in this country, I’ve also proposed eliminating all capital gains taxes on investments in small businesses and start-up companies, and I’ve proposed an additional tax incentive through next year to encourage new small business investment. It is time to protect the jobs we have and to create the jobs of tomorrow by unlocking the drive, and ingenuity, and innovation of the American people. And we should fast track the loan guarantees we p*****ed for our auto industry and provide more as needed so that they can build the energy-efficient cars America needs to end our dependence on foreign oil.
We will also save one million jobs by creating a Jobs and Growth Fund that will provide money to states and local communities so that they can move forward with projects to rebuild and repair our roads, our bridges, and our schools. A lot of these projects and these jobs are at risk right now because of budget shortfalls, but this fund will make sure they continue.
Obama offers new proposals to help economy By CHRISTOPHER WILLS, *****ociated Press Writer
18 minutes ago
TOLEDO, Ohio – Democrat Barack Obama proposed more immediate steps Monday to heal the nation’s ailing economy including a 90-day moratorium on home foreclosures at some banks and a two-year tax break for businesses that create new jobs.
With the economic turmoil weighing down his Republican presidential rival, Obama also proposed allowing people to withdraw up to $10,000 from their retirement accounts without any penalty this year and next.
The Democratic presidential candidate said his proposals, with a price tag of $60 billion over two years, can be enacted quickly, either through the government’s regulatory powers or legislation that Congress could p***** in a special session after the election.
“I’m proposing a number of steps that we should take immediately to stabilize our financial system, provide relief to families and communities and help struggling homeowners,” Obama told a crowd of 3,000. “It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everyone’s mind, and it’s spelled J-O-B-S.”
Obama delivered his economic message in Toledo, a struggling blue-collar city in a state that could be critical to Obama’s presidential hopes. Polls show a close race between Obama and Republican John McCain in Ohio, which decided the 2004 presidential election. At stake are 20 electoral votes.
His call for action comes just two days before the final debate of the presidential race and at a time when McCain is sending mixed signals about how he’ll address the economy.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, a key McCain adviser, said Sunday the Republican candidate was considering a proposal to reduce taxes on investment, including a possible cut in capital gains taxes, but McCain offered no new economic proposals when he gave a new stump speech Monday morning promising a change in direction from the economic policies of President Bush.
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds accused Obama of planning to raise taxes if elected, something that would “have a devastating effect” on the already-troubled economy.
Obama’s plan calls for raising taxes only on the 5 percent of people who make more than $250,000 a year. The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center found that under Obama’s approach the wealthiest 1 percent of taxpayers would see their taxes go up on average by $93,709 in 2009, For McCain, those same wealthy taxpayers would see an average reduction of $48,860.
Obama is proposing tax cuts for those making less than $200,000 a year.
Obama’s latest proposals are in addition to other policies the Illinois senator has already offered as the stock market struggles, financial institutions wobble and tight credit chokes the economy.
Obama supported the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan and endorsed the latest twist on it: the government buying ownership in major banks and partially nationalizing them to keep them afloat. He also calls for tax breaks for most families, cutting capital gains taxes for investment in small business and extending unemployment benefits.
Obama proposed Monday that banks parti*****ting in the federal bailout should temporarily postpone foreclosures for families making good-faith efforts to pay their mortgage.
“We need to give people the breathing room they need to get back on their feet,” he said, adding that families living beyond their means share some of the responsibility.
“Part of the reason this crisis occurred, if we’re honest with ourselves, is that everyone was living beyond their means — from Wall Street to Washington to even some on Main Street,” Obama said.
He also called for a $3,000 tax credit for each additional full-time job a business creates. That means a business that adds five jobs would get a $15,000 break. That would end after 2010 and would cost $40 billion, the campaign estimates.
Obama proposes letting people withdraw up to 15 percent of their retirement funds, to a maximum of $10,000, without the penalty that now applies to early or excess withdrawals. The change would apply retroactively to all of 2008, as well as 2009. People would still have to pay normal taxes on the money. He said letting people dip into their IRAs and 401(k)s would help them get through tough times when money is tight.
State and local governments face a money crunch, too, and Obama called for new federal short-term loans to help them through the crisis. He called it a “funding backstop” to ensure that states and cities can meet payroll or keep projects moving.
He ended the speech with a call for people to unite and make sacrifices, as America did during the Great Depression, until the economy is back on track.
“Together, we cannot fail. Not now. Not when we have a crisis to solve and an economy to save. Not when there are so many Americans without jobs and without homes,” Obama said. “We can do this because we’ve done it before.”
Some things never change. I Had a white person on my job today ask me was I excited about the possibility of having a black president, I didn’t even respond I just gave him this ” Leave me the **** alone look. Please get out and vote people because i’m sick and tired of these silly white folks! And I hope he’s on another computer reading this. pathetic monsters
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
At Fort McNair, an army base located along the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, a chance reunion takes place one day between two former POWs. It’s the spring of 1974, and Navy commander John Sidney McCain III has returned home from the experience in Hanoi that, according to legend, transformed him from a callow and reckless youth into a serious man of patriotism and purpose. Walking along the grounds at Fort McNair, McCain runs into John Dramesi, an Air Force lieutenant colonel who was also imprisoned and tortured in Vietnam.
McCain is studying at the National War College, a prestigious graduate program he had to pull strings with the Secretary of the Navy to get into. Dramesi is enrolled, on his own merit, at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces in the building next door.
There’s a distance between the two men that belies their shared experience in North Vietnam — call it an honor gap. Like many American POWs, McCain broke down under torture and offered a “confession” to his North Vietnamese captors. Dramesi, in contrast, attempted two daring escapes. For the second he was brutalized for a month with daily torture sessions that nearly killed him. His partner in the escape, Lt. Col. Ed Atterberry, didn’t survive the mistreatment. But Dramesi never said a disloyal word, and for his heroism was awarded two Air Force Crosses, one of the service’s highest distinctions. McCain would later hail him as “one of the toughest guys I’ve ever met.”
On the grounds between the two brick colleges, the chitchat between the scion of four-star admirals and the son of a prizefighter turns to their academic travels; both colleges sponsor a trip abroad for young officers to network with military and political leaders in a distant corner of the globe.
“I’m going to the Middle East,” Dramesi says. “Turkey, Kuwait, Lebanon, Iran.”
“Why are you going to the Middle East?” McCain asks, dismissively.
“It’s a place we’re probably going to have some problems,” Dramesi says.
“Why? Where are you going to, John?”
“Oh, I’m going to Rio.”
“What the hell are you going to Rio for?”
McCain, a married father of three, shrugs.
“I got a better chance of getting laid.”
Dramesi, who went on to serve as chief war planner for U.S. Air Forces in Europe and commander of a wing of the Strategic Air Command, was not surprised. “McCain says his life changed while he was in Vietnam, and he is now a different man,” Dramesi says today. “But he’s still the undisciplined, spoiled brat that he was when he went in.”
McCAIN FIRST
This is the story of the real John McCain, the one who has been hiding in plain sight. It is the story of a man who has consistently put his own advancement above all else, a man willing to say and do anything to achieve his ultimate ambition: to become commander in chief, ascending to the one position that would finally enable him to outrank his four-star father and grandfather.
In its broad strokes, McCain’s life story is oddly similar to that of the current occupant of the White House. John Sidney McCain III and George Walker Bush both represent the third generation of American dynasties. Both were born into positions of privilege against which they rebelled into mediocrity. Both developed an uncanny social intelligence that allowed them to skate by with a minimum of mental exertion. Both struggled with booze and loutish behavior. At each step, with the aid of their fathers’ powerful friends, both failed upward. And both shed their skins as Episcopalian members of the Washington elite to build political careers as self-styled, ranch-inhabiting Westerners who pray to Jesus in their wives’ evangelical churches.
In one vital respect, however, the comparison is deeply unfair to the current president: George W. Bush was a much better pilot.
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Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
This, of course, is not the story McCain tells about himself. Few politicians have so actively, or successfully, crafted their own myth of greatness. In McCain’s version of his life, he is a prodigal son who, steeled by his brutal internment in Vietnam, learned to put “country first.” Remade by the Keating Five scandal that nearly wrecked his career, the story goes, McCain re-emerged as a “reformer” and a “maverick,” righteously eschewing anything that “might even tangentially be construed as a less than proper use of my office.”
It’s a myth McCain has cultivated throughout his decades in Washington. But during the course of this year’s campaign, the mask has slipped. “Let’s face it,” says Larry Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel who served as chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell. “John McCain made his reputation on the fact that he doesn’t bend his principles for politics. That’s just not true.”
We have now watched McCain run twice for president. The first time he positioned himself as a principled centrist and decried the politics of Karl Rove and the influence of the religious right, imploring voters to judge candidates “by the example we set, by the way we conduct our campaigns, by the way we personally practice politics.” After he lost in 2000, he jagged hard to the left — breaking with the president over taxes, drilling, judicial appointments, even flirting with joining the Democratic Party.
In his current campaign, however, McCain has become the kind of politician he ran against in 2000. He has embraced those he once denounced as “agents of intolerance,” promised more drilling and deeper tax cuts, even compromised his vaunted opposition to torture. Intent on winning the presidency at all costs, he has re*****embled the very team that so viciously smeared him and his family eight years ago, selecting as his running mate a born-again moose hunter whose only qualification for office is her ability to electrify Rove’s base. And he has engaged in a “practice of politics” so deceptive that even Rove himself has denounced it, saying that the outright lies in McCain’s campaign ads go “too far” and fail the “truth test.”
The missing piece of this puzzle, says a former McCain confidant who has fallen out with the senator over his neoconservatism, is a third, never realized, campaign that McCain intended to run against Bush in 2004. “McCain wanted a rematch, based on ethics, campaign finance and Enron — the corrupt relationship between Bush’s team and the corporate sector,” says the former friend, a prominent conservative thinker with whom McCain shared his plans over the course of several dinners in 2001. “But when 9/11 happened, McCain saw his chance to challenge Bush again was robbed. He saw 9/11 gave Bush and his failed presidency a second life. He saw Bush and Cheney’s ability to draw stark contrasts between black and white, villains and good guys. And that’s why McCain changed.” (The McCain campaign did not respond to numerous requests for comment from Rolling Stone.)
Indeed, many leading Republicans who once admired McCain see his recent contortions to appease the GOP base as the undoing of a maverick. “John McCain’s ambition overrode his basic character,” says Rita Hauser, who served on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board from 2001 to 2004. But the truth of the matter is that ambition is John McCain’s basic character. Seen in the sweep of his seven-decade personal history, his pandering to the right is consistent with the only constant in his life: doing what’s best for himself. To put the matter squarely: John McCain is his own special interest.
“John has made a pact with the devil,” says Lincoln Chafee, the former GOP senator, who has been appalled at his one-time colleague’s readiness to sacrifice principle for power. Chafee and McCain were the only Republicans to vote against the Bush tax cuts. They locked arms in opposition to drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And they worked together in the “Gang of 14,” which blocked some of Bush’s worst judges from the federal bench.
“On all three — sadly, sadly, sadly — McCain has flip-flopped,” Chafee says. And forget all the “Country First” sloganeering, he adds. “McCain is putting himself first. He’s putting himself first in blinking neon lights.”
THE NAVY BRAT
John Sidney McCain III has spent most of his life trying to escape the shadow of greater men. His grandfather Adm. John Sidney “Slew” McCain earned his four stars commanding a U.S. carrier force in World War II. His deeply ambitious father, Adm. “Junior” McCain, reached the same rank, commanding America’s forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.
The youngest McCain was not cut from the same cloth. Even as a toddler, McCain recalls in Faith of My Fathers, his volcanic temper was on display. “At the smallest provocation,” he would hold his breath until he p*****ed out: “I would go off in a mad frenzy, and then, suddenly, crash to the floor unconscious.” His parents cured him of this habit in a way only a CIA interrogator could appreciate: by dropping their blue-faced boy in a bathtub of ice-cold water.
Trailing his hard-charging, hard-drinking father from post to post, McCain didn’t play well with others. Indeed, he concedes, his runty physique inspired a Napoleon complex: “My small stature motivated me to . . . fight the first kid who provoked me.”
McCain spent his formative years among the Washington elite. His father — himself deep in the throes of a daddy complex — had secured a political post as the Navy’s chief liaison to the Senate, a job his son would later hold, and the McCain home on Southeast 1st Street was a high-powered pit stop in the Washington *****tail circuit. Growing up, McCain attended Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school across the Potomac in Virginia, where tuition today tops $40,000 a year. There, McCain behaved with all the petulance his privilege allowed, earning the nicknames “Punk” and “McNasty.” Even his friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as “a mean little *****er.”
McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father’s taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge.
McCain’s admittance to Annapolis was preordained by his bloodline. But martial discipline did not seem to have much of an impact on his character. By his own account, McCain was a lazy, incurious student; he squeaked by only by prevailing upon his buddies to help him cram for exams. He continued to get sauced and treat girls badly. Before meeting a girlfriend’s parents for the first time, McCain got so *****faced that he literally crashed through the screen door when he showed up in his white midshipman’s uniform.
His grandfather’s name and his father’s forbearance brought McCain a charmed existence at Annapolis. On his first trip at sea — to Rio de Janeiro aboard the USS Hunt — the captain was a former student of his father. While McCain’s cl*****mates learned the ins and outs of the boiler room, McCain got to pilot the ship to South America and back. In Rio, he hob*****bed with admirals and the president of Brazil.
Back on campus, McCain’s short fuse was legend. “We’d hear this thunderous screaming and yelling between him and his roommate — doors slamming — and one of them would go running down the hall,” recalls Phil Butler, who lived across the hall from McCain at the academy. “It was a regular occurrence.”
When McCain was not shown the pampering to which he was accustomed, he grew petulant — even abusive. He repeatedly blew up in the face of his commanding officer. It was the kind of insubordination that would have gotten any other midshipman kicked out of Annapolis. But his cl*****mates soon realized that McCain was untouchable. Midway though his final year, McCain faced expulsion, about to “bilge out” because of excessive demerits. After his mother intervened, however, the academy’s commandant stepped in. Calling McCain “spoiled” to his face, he nonetheless issued a reprieve, scaling back the demerits. McCain dodged expulsion a second time by convincing another midshipman to take the fall after McCain was caught with contraband.
@dubya..I think they are right..but you got it wrong…my employer health care plan costs me more than $5000 out of pocket and they already pay a large percentage of the total cost! $5K aint ***** and most people will use it to pay thier bills because it is not enough for health care.
On top of that, he wants to tax my employer provided health care (this will be the first time in history that health benefits will be taxed) and give tax credits to who…the insurance companies, who rip us off and tell us that we have to use generic medicine if they feel (not your doctor, but the customer service rep) that you don’t need the brand name Rx.
McShame is out of touch and don’t even know how much REAL AMERICANS pay for their health care.
Can you believe some people say she is smart!
I’m like what in da hell has she ever said that leads you believe she is smart?
They just look at me with a blank stir.
That’s when I say, “MAVERICK” {wink-n-gun}.
@Black.Woman
That Rolling Stone (and I don’t normally read that mag) piece was an eye-opener, don’t you think?
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
“He was a huge screw-off,” recalls Butler. “He was always on probation. The only reason he graduated was because of his father and his grandfather — they couldn’t exactly get rid of him.”
McCain’s self-described “four-year course of insubordination” ended with him graduating fifth from the bottom — 894th out of a cl***** of 899. It was a record of mediocrity he would continue as a pilot.
BOTTOM GUN
In the *****pit, McCain was not a top gun, or even a middling gun. He took little interest in his flight manuals; he had other priorities.
“I enjoyed the off-duty life of a Navy flier more than I enjoyed the actual flying,” McCain writes. “I drove a Corvette, dated a lot, spent all my free hours at bars and beach parties.” McCain chased a lot of tail. He hit the dog track. Developed a taste for poker and dice. He picked up models when he could, screwed a stripper when he couldn’t.
In the air, the hard-partying McCain had a knack for stalling out his planes in midflight. He was still in training, in Texas, when he crashed his first plane into Corpus Christi Bay during a routine practice landing. The plane stalled, and McCain was knocked cold on impact. When he came to, the plane was underwater, and he had to swim to the surface to be rescued. Some might take such a near-death experience as a wake-up call: McCain took some painkillers and a nap, and then went out carousing that night.
Off duty on his Mediterranean tours, McCain frequented the casinos of Monte Carlo, cultivating his taste for what he calls the “addictive” game of craps. McCain’s thrill-seeking carried over into his day job. Flying over the south of Spain one day, he decided to deviate from his flight plan. Rocketing along mere feet above the ground, his plane sliced through a power line. His self-described “daredevil clowning” plunged much of the area into a blackout.
That should have been the end of McCain’s flying career. “In the Navy, if you crashed one airplane, nine times out of 10 you would lose your wings,” says Butler, who, like his former cl*****mate, was shot down and taken prisoner in North Vietnam. Spark “a small international incident” like McCain had? Any other pilot would have “found themselves as the deck officer on a destroyer someplace in a hurry,” says Butler.
“But, God, he had family pull. He was directly related to the CEO — you know?”
McCain was undeterred by the crashes. Nearly a decade out of the academy, his career adrift, he decided he wanted to fly combat in Vietnam. His motivation wasn’t to contain communism or put his country first. It was the only way he could think of to earn the respect of the man he calls his “distant, inscrutable patriarch.” He needed to secure a command post in the Navy — and to do that, his career needed the jump-start that only a creditable war record could provide.
As he would so many times in his career, McCain pulled strings to get ahead. After a game of tennis, McCain prevailed upon the undersecretary of the Navy that he was ready for Vietnam, despite his abysmal flight record. Sure enough, McCain was soon transferred to McCain Field — an air base in Meridian, Mississippi, named after his grandfather — to train for a post on the carrier USS Forrestal.
With a close friend at the base, an alcoholic Marine captain, McCain formed the “Key Fess Yacht Club,” which quickly became infamous for hosting toga parties in the officers’ quarters and bringing bands down from Memphis to attract loose women to the base. Showing his usual knack for promotion, McCain rose from “vice commodore” to “commodore” of the club.
In 1964, while still at the base, McCain began a serious romance with Carol Shepp, a vivacious former model who had just divorced one of his cl*****mates from Annapolis. Commandeering a Navy plane, McCain spent most weekends flying from Meridian to Philadelphia for their dates. They married the following summer.
That December, McCain crashed again. Flying back from Philadelphia, where he had joined in the reverie of the Army-Navy football game, McCain stalled while coming in for a refueling stop in Norfolk, Virginia. This time he managed to bail out at 1,000 feet. As his parachute deployed, his plane thundered into the trees below.
By now, however, McCain’s flying privileges were virtually irrevocable — and he knew it. On one of his runs at McCain Field, when ground control put him in a holding pattern, the lieutenant commander once again pulled his family’s rank. “Let me land,” McCain demanded over his radio, “or I’ll take my field and go home!”
TRIAL BY FIRE
Sometimes 3 a.m. moments occur at 10:52 in the morning.
It was July 29th, 1967, a hot, gusty morning in the Gulf of Tonkin atop the four-acre flight deck of the supercarrier USS Forrestal. Perched in the *****pit of his A-4 Skyhawk, Lt. Cmdr. John McCain ticked nervously through his preflight checklist.
Now 30 years old, McCain was trying to live up to his father’s expectations, to finally be known as something other than the *****-up grandson of one of the Navy’s greatest admirals. That morning, preparing for his sixth bombing run over North Vietnam, the graying pilot’s dreams of combat glory were beginning to seem within his reach.
Then, in an instant, the world around McCain erupted in flames. A six-foot-long Zuni rocket, inexplicably launched by an F-4 Phantom across the flight deck, ripped through the fuel tank of McCain’s aircraft. Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the belly of McCain’s stubby A-4, the Navy’s “Tinkertoy Bomber,” into the fire.
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McCain’s plan:
Three weeks from now, you will choose a new President. Choose well. There is much at stake.
These are hard times. Our economy is in crisis. Financial markets are collapsing. Credit is drying up. Your savings are in danger. Your retirement is at risk. Jobs are disappearing. The cost of health care, your children’s college, gasoline and groceries are rising all the time with no end in sight. While your most important *****et — your home — is losing value every day.
Americans are fighting in two wars. We face many enemies in this dangerous world, and they are waiting to see if our current troubles will permanently weaken us.
The next President won’t have time to get used to the office. He won’t have the luxury of studying up on the issues before he acts. He will have to act immediately. And to do that, he will need experience, courage, judgment and a bold plan of action to take this country in a new direction. We cannot spend the next four years as we have spent much of the last eight: waiting for our luck to change. The hour is late; our troubles are getting worse; our enemies watch. We have to act immediately. We have to change direction now. We have to fight.
I’ve been fighting for this country since I was seventeen years old, and I have the scars to prove it. If I’m elected President, I will fight to take America in a new direction from my first day in office until my last. I’m not afraid of the fight, I’m ready for it.
I’m not going to spend $700 billion dollars of your money just bailing out the Wall Street bankers and brokers who got us into this mess. I’m going to make sure we take care of the people who were devastated by the excesses of Wall Street and Washington. I’m going to spend a lot of that money to bring relief to you, and I’m not going to wait sixty days to start doing it.
I have a plan to protect the value of your home and get it rising again by buying up bad mortgages and refinancing them so if your neighbor defaults he doesn’t bring down the value of your house with him.
I have a plan to let retirees and people nearing retirement keep their money in their retirement accounts longer so they can rebuild their savings.
I have a plan to rebuild the retirement savings of every worker.
I have a plan to hold the line on taxes and cut them to make America more competitive and create jobs here at home.
Raising taxes makes a bad economy much worse. Keeping taxes low creates jobs, keeps money in your hands and strengthens our economy.
The explosion of government spending over the last eight years has put us deeper in debt to foreign countries that don’t have our best interests at heart. It weakened the dollar and made everything you buy more expensive.
If I’m elected President, I won’t spend nearly a trillion dollars more of your money, on top of the $700 billion we just gave the Treasury Secretary, as Senator Obama proposes. Because he can’t do that without raising your taxes or digging us further into debt. I’m going to make government live on a budget just like you do.
I will freeze government spending on all but the most important programs like defense, veterans care, Social Security and health care until we scrub every single government program and get rid of the ones that aren’t working for the American people. And I will veto every single pork barrel bill Congresses p*****es.
If I’m elected President, I won’t fine small businesses and families with children, as Senator Obama proposes, to force them into a new huge government run health care program, while I keep the cost of the fine a secret until I hit you with it. I will bring down the skyrocketing cost of health care with competition and choice to lower your premiums, and make it more available to more Americans. I’ll make sure you can keep the same health plan if you change jobs or leave a job to stay home.
I will provide every single American family with a $5000 refundable tax credit to help them purchase insurance. Workers who already have health care insurance from their employers will keep it and have more money to cover costs. Workers who don’t have health insurance can use it to find a policy anywhere in this country to meet their basic needs.
If I’m elected President, I won’t raise taxes on small businesses, as Senator Obama proposes, and force them to cut jobs. I will keep small business taxes where they are, help them keep their costs low, and let them spend their earnings to create more jobs.
If I’m elected President, I won’t make it harder to sell our goods overseas and kill more jobs as Senator Obama proposes. I will open new markets to goods made in America and make sure our trade is free and fair. And I’ll make sure we help workers who’ve lost a job that won’t come back find a new one that won’t go away.
The last President to raise taxes and restrict trade in a bad economy as Senator Obama proposes was Herbert Hoover. That didn’t turn out too well. They say those who don’t learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. Well, my friends, I know my history lessons, and I sure won’t make the mistakes Senator Obama will.
If I’m elected President, we’re going to stop sending $700 billion to countries that don’t like us very much. I won’t argue to delay drilling for more oil and gas and building new nuclear power plants in America, as Senator Obama does. We will start new drilling now. We will invest in all energy alternatives — nuclear, wind, solar, and tide. We will encourage the manufacture of hybrid, flex fuel and electric automobiles. We will invest in clean coal technology. We will lower the cost of energy within months, and we will create millions of new jobs.
Let me give you the state of the race today. We have 22 days to go. We’re 6 points down. The national media has written us off. Senator Obama is measuring the drapes, and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending, take away your right to vote by secret ballot in labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq. But they forgot to let you decide. My friends, we’ve got them just where we want them.
What America needs in this hour is a fighter; someone who puts all his cards on the table and trusts the judgment of the American people. I come from a long line of McCains who believed that to love America is to fight for her. I have fought for you most of my life. There are other ways to love this country, but I’ve never been the kind to do it from the sidelines.
I know you’re worried. America is a great country, but we are at a moment of national crisis that will determine our future. Will we continue to lead the world’s economies or will we be overtaken? Will the world become safer or more dangerous? Will our military remain the strongest in the world? Will our children and grandchildren’s future be brighter than ours?
My answer to you is yes. Yes, we will lead. Yes, we will prosper. Yes, we will be safer. Yes, we will p***** on to our children a stronger, better country. But we must be prepared to act swiftly, boldly, with courage and wisdom.
I know what fear feels like. It’s a thief in the night who robs your strength.
I know what hopelessness feels like. It’s an enemy who defeats your will.
I felt those things once before. I will never let them in again. I’m an American. And I choose to fight.
Don’t give up hope. Be strong. Have courage. And fight.
Fight for a new direction for our country.
Fight for what’s right for America.
Fight to clean up the mess of corruption, infighting and selfishness in Washington.
Fight to get our economy out of the ditch and back in the lead.
Fight for the ideals and character of a free people.
Fight for our children’s future.
Fight for justice and opportunity for all.
Stand up to defend our country from its enemies.
Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. America is worth fighting for. Nothing is inevitable here. We never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.
Now, let’s go win this election and get this country moving again.
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Thank you all for disagreeing nicely!
But his health insurance tax credit will allow you to shop around for insurance which will open up competition. That is what these health insurance companies need..competition. Obama cannot give you universal health care. Not with this economy.
Sad state of affairs. I’m not scared for Obama. God’s will will be done (no matter what). He is a smart man, and if anyone thinks they’ll get away with harming him, they have another thing coming. We can’t live our lives in fear. That’s what they want. They (anyone trying to stop destiny)can’t have that much control in our destiny, I won’t let them!
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
McCain, who knew more than most pilots about bailing out of a crippled aircraft, leapt forward out of the *****pit, swung himself down from the refueling probe protruding from the nose cone, rolled through the flames and ran to safety across the flight deck. Just then, one of his bombs “cooked off,” blowing a crater in the deck and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and fire extinguishers. McCain was stung by tiny bits of shrapnel in his legs and chest, but the wounds weren’t serious; his father would later report to friends that Johnny “came through without a scratch.”
The damage to the Forrestal was far more grievous: The explosion set off a chain reaction of bombs, creating a devastating inferno that would kill 134 of the carrier’s 5,000-man crew, injure 161 and threaten to sink the ship.
These are the moments that test men’s mettle. Where leaders are born. Leaders like . . . Lt. Cmdr. Herb Hope, pilot of the A-4 three planes down from McCain’s. Cornered by flames at the stern of the carrier, Hope hurled himself off the flight deck into a safety net and clambered into the hangar deck below, where the fire was spreading. According to an official Navy history of the fire, Hope then “gallantly took command of a firefighting team” that would help contain the conflagration and ultimately save the ship.
McCain displayed little of Hope’s valor. Although he would soon regale The New York Times with tales of the heroism of the brave enlisted men who “stayed to help the pilots fight the fire,” McCain took no part in dousing the flames himself. After going belowdecks and briefly helping sailors who were frantically trying to unload bombs from an elevator to the flight deck, McCain retreated to the safety of the “ready room,” where off-duty pilots spent their noncombat hours talking trash and playing poker. There, McCain watched the conflagration unfold on the room’s closed-circuit television — bearing distant witness to the valiant self-sacrifice of others who died trying to save the ship, pushing jets into the sea to keep their bombs from exploding on deck.
As the ship burned, McCain took a moment to mourn his misfortune; his combat career appeared to be going up in smoke. “This distressed me considerably,” he recalls in Faith of My Fathers. “I feared my ambitions were among the casualties in the calamity that had claimed the Forrestal.”
The fire blazed late into the night. The following morning, while oxygen-masked rescue workers toiled to recover bodies from the lower decks, McCain was making fast friends with R.W. “Johnny” Apple of The New York Times, who had arrived by helicopter to cover the deadliest Naval calamity since the Second World War. The son of admiralty surviving a near-death experience certainly made for good copy, and McCain colorfully recounted how he had saved his skin. But when Apple and other reporters left the ship, the story took an even stranger turn: McCain left with them. As the heroic crew of the Forrestal mourned its fallen brothers and the broken ship limped toward the Philippines for repairs, McCain zipped off to Saigon for what he recalls as “some welcome R&R.”
VIOLATING THE CODE
Ensconced in Apple’s villa in Saigon, McCain and the Times reporter forged a relationship that would prove critical to the ambitious pilot’s career in the years ahead. Apple effectively became the charter member of McCain’s media “base,” an elite corps of admiring reporters who helped create his reputation for “straight talk.”
Sipping scotch and reflecting on the fire aboard the Forrestal, McCain sounded like the peaceniks he would pillory after his return from Hanoi. “Now that I’ve seen what the bombs and napalm did to the people on our ship,” he told Apple, “I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.” Here, it seemed, was a frank-talking warrior, one willing to speak out against the military establishment in the name of truth.
But McCain’s misgivings about the righteousness of the fight quickly took a back seat to his ambitions. Within days, eager to get his combat career back on track, he put in for a transfer to the carrier USS Oriskany. Two months after the Forrestal fire — following a holiday on the French Riviera — McCain reported for duty in the Gulf of Tonkin.
McCain performed adequately on the Oriskany. On October 25th, 1967, he bombed a pair of Soviet MiGs parked on an airfield outside Hanoi. His record was now even. Enemy planes destroyed by McCain: two. American planes destroyed by McCain: two.
The next day, McCain embarked on his fateful 23rd mission, a bombing raid on a power plant in downtown Hanoi. McCain had cajoled his way onto the strike force — there were medals up for grabs. The plant had recently been rebuilt after a previous bombing run that had earned two of the lead pilots Navy Crosses, one of the force’s top honors.
It was a dangerous mission — taking the planes into the teeth of North Vietnam’s fiercest anti-aircraft defenses. As the planes entered Hanoi air*****e, they were instantly enveloped in dark clouds of flak and surface-to-air missiles. Still *****y from the previous day’s kills, McCain took the biggest gamble of his life. As he dived in on the target in his A-4, his surface-to-air missile warning system sounded: A SAM had a lock on him. “I knew I should roll out and fly evasive maneuvers,” McCain writes. “The A-4 is a small, fast” aircraft that “can outmaneuver a tracking SAM.”
But McCain didn’t “jink.” Instead, he stayed on target and let fly his bombs — just as the SAM blew his wing off.
To watch the Republican National Convention and listen to Fred Thompson’s account of John McCain’s internment in Vietnam, you would think that McCain never gave his captors anything beyond his name, rank, service number and, under duress, the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line. His time in Hanoi, we’re to understand, steeled the man — transforming him from a fighter jock who put himself first into a patriot who would henceforth selflessly serve the public good.
Good afternoon all
This is some real bs
tax credits for new hires only works if businesses are hiring. In this economy, expansion of work force is not happening, cutting costs is what is happening. That means, no new investments, no new hires.
LOL @ Just Sayin
I’ve also been reading/hearing that the McCain campaign has been appearing increasingly disjointed, sort of like Hillary’s during the primary. NY Times columnist William Kristol today recommended that McCain scrap his current campaign and start over.
Where are all your the black supporters in this pic?
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
McCain was eager to make up for lost time — and the times were favorable to a high-profile veteran willing to speak out in favor of the war. With the Senate moving to cut off funds for the Nixon administration’s illegal bombing of Cambodia, the president needed all the help he could get. Two months after his release, McCain related his harrowing story of survival in a 13-page narrative in U.S. News & World Report, at the end of which he launched into an energetic defense of Nixon’s discredited foreign policy. “I admire President Nixon’s courage,” he wrote. “It is difficult for me to understand . . . why people are still criticizing his foreign policy — for example, the bombing in Cambodia.”
In the years to come, McCain would continue to fight the war his father had lost. In his meetings with Nixon, Junior was known for chomping on an unlit cigar, complaining about the “goddamn gooks” and pushing to bomb enemy sanctuaries in Cambodia. His son was equally gung-ho. “John has always been a very bellicose hawk,” says John H. Johns, a retired brigadier general who studied with McCain at the War College. “When he came back from Vietnam, he accused the liberal media of undermining national will, that we could have won in Vietnam if we had the national will.”
It was the kind of tough talk that made McCain a fast-rising star in far-right circles. Through Ross Perot, a friend of Ronald Reagan who had championed the cause of the POWs, McCain was invited to meet with the then-governor of California and his wife. Impressed, Reagan invited McCain to be the keynote speaker at his annual “prayer breakfast” in Sacramento.
Then, at the end of 1974, McCain finally achieved the goal he had been working toward for years. He was installed as the commanding officer of the largest air squadron in the Navy — the Replacement Air Group based in Jacksonville, Florida — training carrier pilots. It was a post for which McCain flatly admits, “I was not qualified.” By now, however, he was unembarr*****ed by his own nepotism. At the ceremony commemorating his long-sought ascension to command, his father looking on with pride, McCain wept openly.
BOOZE AND PORK
If heroism is defined by physical suffering, Carol McCain is every bit her ex-husband’s equal. Driving alone on Christmas Eve 1969, she skidded out on a patch of ice and crashed into a telephone pole. She would spend six months in the hospital and undergo 23 surgeries. The former model McCain bragged of to his buddies in the POW camp as his “long tall Sally” was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches.
By any standard, McCain treated her contemptibly. Whatever his dreams of getting laid in Rio, he got plenty of ***** during his command post in Jacksonville. According to biographer Robert Timberg, McCain seduced his conquests on off-duty cross-country flights — even though adultery is a court-martial offense. He was also rumored to be romantically involved with a number of his subordinates.
In 1977, McCain was promoted to captain and became the Navy’s liaison to the Senate — the same politically connected post once occupied by his father. He took advantage of the position to buddy up to young senators like Gary Hart, William Cohen and Joe Biden. He was also taken under the wing of another friend of his father: Sen. John Tower, the powerful Texas Republican who would become his political mentor. Despite the promotion, McCain continued his adolescent carousing: On a diplomatic trip to Saudi Arabia with Tower, he tried to get some tourists he disliked in trouble with the authorities by littering the room-service trays outside their door with empty bottles of alcohol.
As the Navy’s top lobbyist, McCain was supposed to carry out the bidding of the secretary of the Navy. But in 1978 he went off the reservation. Vietnam was over, and the Carter administration, cutting costs, had decided against spending $2 billion to replace the aging carrier Midway. The secretary agreed with the administration’s decision. Readiness would not be affected. The only reason to replace the carrier — at a cost of nearly $7 billion in today’s dollars — was pork-barrel politics.
Although he now crusades against wasteful military spending, McCain had no qualms about secretly lobbying for a pork project that would pay for a dozen Bridges to Nowhere. “He did a lot of stuff behind the back of the secretary of the Navy,” one lobbyist told Timberg. Working his Senate connections, McCain managed to include a replacement for the Midway in the defense authorization bill in 1978. Carter, standing firm, vetoed the entire spending bill to kill the carrier. When an attempt to override the veto fell through, however, McCain and his lobbyist friends didn’t give up the fight. The following year, Congress once again approved funding for the carrier. This time, Carter — his pork-busting efforts undone by a turncoat Navy liaison — signed the bill.
In the spring of 1979, while conducting official business for the Navy, the still-married McCain encountered Cindy Lou Hensley, a willowy former cheerleader for USC. Mutually smitten, the two lied to each other about their ages. The 24-year-old Hensley became 27; the 42-year-old McCain became 38. For nearly a year the two carried on a cross-country romance while McCain was still living with Carol: Court do*****ents filed with their divorce proceeding indicate that they “cohabitated as husband and wife” for the first nine months of the affair.
Although McCain stresses in his memoir that he married Cindy three months after divorcing Carol, he was still legally married to his first wife when he and Cindy were issued a marriage license from the state of Arizona. The divorce was finalized on April 2nd, 1980. McCain’s second marriage — rung in at the Arizona Biltmore with Gary Hart as a groomsman — was consummated only six weeks later, on May 17th. The union gave McCain access to great wealth: Cindy, whose father was the exclusive distributor for Budweiser in the Phoenix area, is now worth an estimated $100 million.
McCain’s friends were blindsided by the divorce. The Reagans — with whom the couple had frequently dined and even accompanied on New Year’s holidays — never forgave him. By the time McCain became a self-proclaimed “foot soldier in the Reagan Revolution” two years later, he and the Gipper had little more than ideology to bind them. Nancy took Carol under her wing, giving her a job in the White House and treating McCain with a frosty formality that was evident even on the day last March when she endorsed his candidacy. “Ronnie and I always waited until everything was decided and then we endorsed,” she said. “Well, obviously, this is the nominee of the party.”
THE CARPETBAGGER
As his marriage unraveled, McCain’s naval career was also stalling out. He had been p*****ed over for a promotion. There was no sea command on the horizon, ensuring that he would never be able to join his four-star forefathers. For good measure, he crashed his third and final plane, this one a single-engine ultralight. McCain has never spoken of his last crash publicly, but his friend Gen. Jim Jones recalled in a 1999 interview that it left McCain with bandages on his face and one arm in a sling.
So McCain turned to politics. Receiving advance word that a GOP congressional seat was opening up outside Phoenix, he put the inside edge to good use. Within minutes of the in*****bent’s official retirement announcement, Cindy McCain bought her husband the house that would serve as his foothold in the district. In sharp contrast to the way he now markets himself, McCain’s campaign ads billed him as an insider — a man “who knows how Washington works.” Though the Reagans no longer respected him, McCain featured pictures of himself smiling with them.
“Thanks to my prisoner-of-war experience,” McCain writes, “I had, as they say in politics, a good story to sell.” And sell it he did. “Listen, pal,” he told an opponent who challenged him during a candidate forum. “I wish I could have had the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life in a nice place like the first district of Arizona, but I was doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived the longest in my life was Hanoi.”
Page 6
Mccain supporters are really showing their ignorant side.
From Wall Street Journal in regards to Obama’s Tax cuts! Please read, it sums it up nicely
Obama’s 95% Illusion
It depends on what the meaning of ‘tax cut’ is.
One of Barack Obama’s most potent campaign claims is that he’ll cut taxes for no less than 95% of “working families.” He’s even promising to cut taxes enough that the government’s tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% — which is lower than it is today.
[Review & Outlook] AP
It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-cl***** tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”
For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:
[Review & Outlook]
- A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to “make work pay” that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.
- A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.
- A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).
- A “savings” tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.
- An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.
- A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.
- A “clean car” tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.
Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.
The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data *****ysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.
The total annual expenditures on refundable “tax credits” would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as “tax credits,” the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.
The political left defends “refundability” on grounds that these payments help to offset the payroll tax. And that was at least plausible when the only major refundable credit was the earned-income tax credit. Taken together, however, these tax credit payments would exceed payroll levies for most low-income workers.
It is also true that John McCain proposes a refundable tax credit — his $5,000 to help individuals buy health insurance. We’ve written before that we prefer a tax deduction for individual health care, rather than a credit. But the big difference with Mr. Obama is that Mr. McCain’s proposal replaces the tax subsidy for employer-sponsored health insurance that individuals don’t now receive if they buy on their own. It merely changes the nature of the tax subsidy; it doesn’t create a new one.
There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.
Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.
Is this a work day
Why doesnt the major news stations call this out for what it obviously is, blantant racism, Angry mobs, because that is exactly what it is, a angry mob mentality.
I have read of many reports about John McCain’s temper and I am concerned. You can fix inexperience, but you can’t fix temperment. Having a bullheaded temper and unforgiving nature does not make for good leadership. Anyone who has ever worked for a person like that knows what I mean.
John McCain’s treatment of his first wife shows a great deal about his character. If this is how you treat those closest to you……then how do you treat those who would disagree with you or oppose you.
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
Unfortunately, any lessons McCain learned from the Keating scandal didn’t affect his unbridled enthusiasm for deregulating the finance industry. “He continues to follow policies that create the same kind of environment we see today, with recurrent financial crises and epidemics of fraud led by CEOs,” says Black, the former S&L regulator. Indeed, if the current financial crisis has a villain, it is Phil Gramm, who remains close to McCain. As chair of the Senate Banking Committee in the late 1990s, Gramm ushered in — with McCain’s fervent support — a m*****ive wave of deregulation for insurance companies and brokerage houses and banks, the aftershocks of which are just now being felt in Wall Street’s catastrophic collapse. McCain, who has admitted that “the issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” relies on Gramm to guide him.
McCain also did his part to loosen regulations on big corporations. In 1997, McCain became chairman of the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, which oversees the insurance and telecommunications industries, as well as the CEO pay packages of those McCain now denounces as “fat cats.” The special interests with business before the committee were big and well-heeled. All told, executives and fundraisers *****ociated with these firms donated $2.6 million to McCain when he served as the chairman or ranking member.
The money bought influence. In 1998, employees of BellSouth contributed more than $16,000 to McCain. The senator returned the favor, asking the Federal Communications Commission to give “serious consideration” to the company’s request to become a long-distance carrier. Days after legislation benefiting the satellite-TV carrier EchoStar cleared McCain’s committee, the company’s founder celebrated by hosting a major fundraiser for McCain’s presidential bid.
Whatever McCain’s romantic entanglements with the lobbyist Vicki Iseman, he was clearly in bed with her clients, who donated nearly $85,000 to his campaigns. One of her clients, Bud Paxson, set up a meeting with McCain in 1999, frustrated by the FCC’s delay of his proposed takeover of a television station in Pittsburgh. Paxson had treated McCain well, offering the then-presidential candidate use of his corporate jet to fly to campaign events and ponying up $20,000 in campaign donations.
“You’re the head of the commerce committee,” Paxson told McCain, according to The Washington Post. “The FCC is not doing its job. I would love for you to write a letter.”
Iseman helped draft the text, and McCain sent the letter. Several weeks later — the day after McCain used Paxson’s jet to fly to Florida for a fundraiser — McCain wrote another letter. FCC chair William Kennard sent a sharp rebuke to McCain, calling the senator’s meddling “highly unusual.” Nonetheless, within a week of McCain’s second letter, the FCC ruled three-to-two in favor of Paxson’s deal.
Following his failed presidential bid in 2000, McCain needed a vehicle to keep his brand alive. He founded the Reform Institute, which he set up as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit — a tax status that barred it from explicit political activity. McCain proceeded to staff the institute with his campaign manager, Rick Davis, as well as the fundraising chief, legal counsel and communications chief from his 2000 campaign.
There is no small irony that the Reform Institute — founded to bolster McCain’s crusade to rid politics of unregulated soft money — itself took in huge sums of unregulated soft money from companies with interests before McCain’s committee. EchoStar got in on the ground floor with a donation of $100,000. A charity funded by the CEO of Univision gave another $100,000. Cablevision gave $200,000 to the Reform Institute in 2003 and 2004 — just as its officials were testifying before the commerce committee. McCain urged approval of the cable company’s proposed pricing plan. As Bradley Smith, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission, wrote at the time: “Appearance of corruption, anyone?”
“HE IS HOTHEADED”
Over the years, John McCain has demonstrated a streak of anger so nasty that even his former flacks make no effort to spin it away. “If I tried to convince you he does not have a temper, you should hang up on me and ridicule me in print,” says Dan Schnur, who served as McCain’s press man during the 2000 campaign. Even McCain admits to an “immature and unprofessional reaction to slights” that is “little changed from the reactions to such provocations I had as a schoolboy.”
McCain is sensitive about his physical appearance, especially his height. The candidate is only five-feet-nine, making him the shortest party nominee since Michael Dukakis. On the night he was elected senator in 1986, McCain exploded after discovering that the stage setup for his victory speech was too low; television viewers saw his head bobbing at the bottom of the screen, his chin frequently cropped from view. Enraged, McCain tracked down the young Republican who had set up the podium, prodding the volunteer in the chest while screaming that he was an “incompetent little *****.” Jon Hinz, the director of the Arizona GOP, separated the senator from the young man, promising to get him a milk crate to stand on for his next public appearance.
During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain’s wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was “getting a little thin up there.” McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: “At least I don’t plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you *****.” Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place.
In the Senate — where, according to former GOP Sen. Bob Smith, McCain has “very few friends” — his volcanic temper has repeatedly led to explosive altercations with colleagues and constituents alike. In 1992, McCain got into a heated exchange with Sen. Chuck Gr*****ley over the fate of missing American servicemen in Vietnam. “Are you calling me stupid?” Gr*****ley demanded. “No, I’m calling you a *****ing jerk!” yelled McCain. Sen. Bob Kerrey later told reporters that he feared McCain was “going to head-butt Gr*****ley and drive the cartilage in his nose into his brain.” The two were separated before they came to blows. Several years later, during another debate over servicemen missing in action, an elderly mother of an MIA soldier rolled up to McCain in her wheelchair to speak to him about her son’s case. According to witnesses, McCain grew enraged, raising his hand as if to strike her before pushing her wheelchair away.
McCain has called Paul Weyrich, who helped steer the Republican Party to the right, a “pompous self-serving son of a *****” who “possesses the attributes of a *****ensian villain.” In 1999, he told Sen. Pete Domenici, the Republican chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, that “only an *****hole would put together a budget like this.”
Last year, after barging into a bipartisan meeting on immigration legislation and attempting to seize the reins, McCain was called out by fellow GOP Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. “Wait a second here,” Cornyn said. “I’ve been sitting in here for all of these negotiations and you just parachute in here on the last day. You’re out of line.” McCain exploded: “***** you! I know more about this than anyone in the room.” The incident foreshadowed McCain’s 11th-hour theatrics in September, when he abruptly “suspended” his campaign and inserted himself into the Wall Street bailout debate at the last minute, just as congressional leaders were attempting to finalize a bipartisan agreement.
At least three of McCain’s GOP colleagues have gone on record to say that they consider him temperamentally unsuited to be commander in chief. Smith, the former senator from New Hampshire, has said that McCain’s “temper would place this country at risk in international affairs, and the world perhaps in danger. In my mind, it should disqualify him.” Sen. Domenici of New Mexico has said he doesn’t “want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” And Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi weighed in that “the thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He is erratic. He is hotheaded.”
McCain’s frequently inappropriate humor has also led many to question his self-control. In 1998, the senator told a joke about President Clinton’s teenage daughter at a GOP fundraiser. “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?” McCain asked. “Because her father is Janet Reno!”
Page 8
2 NahNah(Check me out!)
Where are all your the black supporters in this pic?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It seems like anywhere the McCain supporters are is a dangerous place to be. Imagine walking to your car after a McCain/Palin rally! There’s one of dem Obama supporters! Get em yal… Let’s get mavericky on his nigroid *****! Quick hop in the General Lee so’s we can catch em!
Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa….
:-/
Things are only going to get worse as the election gets closer!!! I’m actually scared to think of what these crazy racist ppl are going to come up with!!!
From Wall Street Journal in regards to Obama’s Tax cuts! Please read, it sums it up nicely
TRUTH ABOUT OBAMA’S TAX CUTS!!!!!!!!
Obama’s 95% Illusion
It depends on what the meaning of ‘tax cut’ is.
One of Barack Obama’s most potent campaign claims is that he’ll cut taxes for no less than 95% of “working families.” He’s even promising to cut taxes enough that the government’s tax share of GDP will be no more than 18.2% — which is lower than it is today.
[Review & Outlook] AP
It’s a clever pitch, because it lets him pose as a middle-cl***** tax cutter while disguising that he’s also proposing one of the largest tax increases ever on the other 5%. But how does he conjure this miracle, especially since more than a third of all Americans already pay no income taxes at all? There are several sleights of hand, but the most creative is to redefine the meaning of “tax cut.”
For the Obama Democrats, a tax cut is no longer letting you keep more of what you earn. In their lexicon, a tax cut includes tens of billions of dollars in government handouts that are disguised by the phrase “tax credit.” Mr. Obama is proposing to create or expand no fewer than seven such credits for individuals:
[Review & Outlook]
- A $500 tax credit ($1,000 a couple) to “make work pay” that phases out at income of $75,000 for individuals and $150,000 per couple.
- A $4,000 tax credit for college tuition.
- A 10% mortgage interest tax credit (on top of the existing mortgage interest deduction and other housing subsidies).
- A “savings” tax credit of 50% up to $1,000.
- An expansion of the earned-income tax credit that would allow single workers to receive as much as $555 a year, up from $175 now, and give these workers up to $1,110 if they are paying child support.
- A child care credit of 50% up to $6,000 of expenses a year.
- A “clean car” tax credit of up to $7,000 on the purchase of certain vehicles.
Here’s the political catch. All but the clean car credit would be “refundable,” which is Washington-speak for the fact that you can receive these checks even if you have no income-tax liability. In other words, they are an income transfer — a federal check — from taxpayers to nontaxpayers. Once upon a time we called this “welfare,” or in George McGovern’s 1972 campaign a “Demogrant.” Mr. Obama’s genius is to call it a tax cut.
The Tax Foundation estimates that under the Obama plan 63 million Americans, or 44% of all tax filers, would have no income tax liability and most of those would get a check from the IRS each year. The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data *****ysis estimates that by 2011, under the Obama plan, an additional 10 million filers would pay zero taxes while cashing checks from the IRS.
The total annual expenditures on refundable “tax credits” would rise over the next 10 years by $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center. This means that the tax-credit welfare state would soon cost four times actual cash welfare. By redefining such income payments as “tax credits,” the Obama campaign also redefines them away as a tax share of GDP. Presto, the federal tax burden looks much smaller than it really is.
The political left defends “refundability” on grounds that these payments help to offset the payroll tax. And that was at least plausible when the only major refundable credit was the earned-income tax credit. Taken together, however, these tax credit payments would exceed payroll levies for most low-income workers.
It is also true that John McCain proposes a refundable tax credit — his $5,000 to help individuals buy health insurance. We’ve written before that we prefer a tax deduction for individual health care, rather than a credit. But the big difference with Mr. Obama is that Mr. McCain’s proposal replaces the tax subsidy for employer-sponsored health insurance that individuals don’t now receive if they buy on their own. It merely changes the nature of the tax subsidy; it doesn’t create a new one.
There’s another catch: Because Mr. Obama’s tax credits are phased out as incomes rise, they impose a huge “marginal” tax rate increase on low-income workers. The marginal tax rate refers to the rate on the next dollar of income earned. As the nearby chart illustrates, the marginal rate for millions of low- and middle-income workers would spike as they earn more income.
Some families with an income of $40,000 could lose up to 40 cents in vanishing credits for every additional dollar earned from working overtime or taking a new job. As public policy, this is contradictory. The tax credits are sold in the name of “making work pay,” but in practice they can be a disincentive to working harder, especially if you’re a lower-income couple getting raises of $1,000 or $2,000 a year. One mystery — among many — of the McCain campaign is why it has allowed Mr. Obama’s 95% illusion to go unanswered.
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking they’re would-be **********ins.
I hope that if Obama is elected that he’s able to follow up on what seems to be his desire to unite this country regardless of ethnicity, religion or race. I’m so tired of the *****ing slave mentality so many people are so willing to hold onto and be proud of. Some of you mother*****ers need to pull your head out of your *****es, step outside your “funky ***** hoods”(black,white and everyone else in between) and take a look around. I’m willing to bet that most mother*****ers on here constantly going on and on about white people this and black people that were misinformed by television, ignorant ***** adults, your ignorant ***** friends or still believing and holding on to what the so-called white power structure has taught you. It’s always amazing to me to meet someone who has traveled outside of their comfort zone “actually have gotten to know people “different” from them and how much less inclined they are to be racist because they’ve seen the same ***** coming from every race, ethnicity or religion and yes that includes me.
Make-Believe Maverick
A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty
By TIM *****INSON Oct 16, 2008
Rolling Stone Magazine
More recently, McCain’s jokes have heightened tensions with Iran. The senator once cautioned that “the world’s only superpower . . . should never make idle threats” — but that didn’t stop him from rewriting the lyrics to a famous Beach Boys tune. In April 2007, when a voter at a town-hall session asked him about his policy toward Tehran, McCain responded by singing, “bomb bomb bomb” Iran. The loose talk was meant to incite the GOP base, but it also aggravated relations with Iran, whose foreign minister condemned McCain’s “jokes about genocide” as a testament to his “disturbed state of mind” and “warmongering approach to foreign policy.”
“NEXT UP, BAGHDAD!”
The myth of John McCain hinges on two transformations — from pampered flyboy to selfless patriot, and from Keating crony to incorruptible reformer — that simply never happened. But there is one serious conversion that has taken root in McCain: his transformation from a cautious realist on foreign policy into a reckless cheerleader of neoconservatism.
“He’s going to be Bush on steroids,” says Johns, the retired brigadier general who has known McCain since their days at the National War College. “His hawkish views now are very dangerous. He puts military at the top of foreign policy rather than diplomacy, just like George Bush does. He and other neoconservatives are dedicated to converting the world to democracy and free markets, and they want to do it through the barrel of a gun.”
McCain used to believe p*****ionately in the limits of American military power. In 1993, he railed against Clinton’s involvement in Somalia, sponsoring an amendment to cut off funds for the troops. The following year he blasted the idealistic aims of sending U.S. troops to Haiti, taking to the Senate floor to propose an immediate withdrawal. He even started out a fierce opponent of NATO air strikes on Serbia during the war in the Balkans.
But such concerns went out the window when McCain began gearing up to run for president. In 1998, he formed a political alliance with William Kristol, editor of the neoconservative Weekly Standard, who became one of his closest advisers. Randy Scheunemann — a hard-right lobbyist who was promoting Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi — came aboard as McCain’s top foreign-policy adviser. Before long, the senator who once cautioned against “trading American blood for Iraqi blood” had been reborn as a fire-breathing neoconservative who believes in using American military might to spread American ideals — a belief he describes as a “sacred duty to suffer hardship and risk danger to protect the values of our civilization and impart them to humanity.” By 1999, McCain was championing what he called “rogue state rollback.” First on the hit list: Iraq.
Privately, McCain brags that he was the “original neocon.” And after 9/11, he took the lead in agitating for war with Iraq, outpacing even ***** Cheney in the dissemination of bogus intelligence about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein. “There’s other organizations besides Mr. bin Laden who are bent on the destruction of the United States,” he warned in an appearance on Hardball on September 12th. “It isn’t just Afghanistan. We’re talking about Syria, Iraq, Iran, perhaps North Korea, Libya and others.” A few days later, he told Jay Leno’s audience that “some other countries” — possibly Iraq, Iran and Syria — had aided bin Laden.
A month after 9/11, with the U.S. bombing Kabul and reeling from the anthrax scare, McCain *****ured David Letterman that “we’ll do fine” in Afghanistan. He then added, unbidden, “The second phase is Iraq. Some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.”
Later that month on Larry King, McCain raised the specter of Saddam’s weapons of m***** destruction before he peddled what became ***** Cheney’s favorite lie: “The Czech government has revealed meetings, contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Mohamed Atta. The evidence is very clear. . . . So we will have to act.” On Nightline, he again flogged the Czech story and cited Iraqi defectors to claim that “there is no doubt as to [Saddam's] avid pursuit of weapons of m***** destruction and the means to deliver them. That, coupled with his relations with terrorist organizations, I think, is a case that the administration will be making as we move step by step down this road.”
That December, just as U.S. forces were bearing down on Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora, McCain joined with five senators in an open letter to the White House. “In the interest of our own national security, Saddam Hussein must be removed from power,” they insisted, claiming that there was “no doubt” that Hussein intended to use weapons of m***** destruction “against the United States and its allies.”
In January 2002, McCain made a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. While he was there, he dropped by a supercarrier stationed in the Arabian Sea that was dear to his heart: the USS Theodore Roosevelt, the giant floating pork project that he had driven through over President Carter’s veto. On board the carrier, McCain called Iraq a “clear and present danger to the security of the United States of America.” Standing on the flight bridge, he watched as fighter planes roared off, en route to Afghanistan — where Osama bin Laden had already slipped away. “Next up, Baghdad!” McCain whooped.
Over the next 15 months leading up to the invasion, McCain continued to lead the rush to war. In November 2002, Scheunemann set up a group called the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq at the same address as Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress. The groups worked in such close concert that at one point they got their Websites crossed. The CLI was established with explicit White House backing to sell the public on the war. The honorary co-chair of the committee: John Sidney McCain III.
In September 2002, McCain *****ured Americans that the war would be “fairly easy” with an “overwhelming victory in a very short period of time.” On the eve of the invasion, Hardball host Chris Matthews asked McCain, “Are you one of those who holds up an optimistic view of the postwar scene? Do you believe that the people of Iraq, or at least a large number of them, will treat us as liberators?”
McCain was emphatic: “Absolutely. Absolutely.”
Today, however, McCain insists that he predicted a protracted struggle from the outset. “The American people were led to believe this could be some kind of day at the beach,” he said in August 2006, “which many of us fully understood from the beginning would be a very, very difficult undertaking.” McCain also claims he urged Bush to dump Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. “I’m the only one that said that Rumsfeld had to go,” he said in a January primary debate. Except that he didn’t. Not once. As late as May 2004, in fact, McCain praised Rumsfeld for doing “a fine job.”
Indeed, McCain’s neocon makeover is so extreme that Republican generals like Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft have refused to endorse their party’s nominee. “The fact of the matter is his judgment about what to do in Iraq was wrong,” says Richard Clarke, who served as Bush’s counterterrorism czar until 2003. “He hung out with people like Ahmad Chalabi. He said Iraq was going to be easy, and he said we were going to war because of terrorism. We should have been fighting in Afghanistan with more troops to go after Al Qaeda. Instead we’re at risk because of the mistaken judgment of people like John McCain.”
MR. FLIP-FLOP
In the end, the essential facts of John McCain’s life and career — the pivotal experiences in which he demonstrated his true character — are important because of what they tell us about how he would govern as president. Far from the portrayal he presents of himself as an unflinching maverick with a consistent and reliable record, McCain has demonstrated an unwavering commitment to taking whatever position will advance his own career. He “is the cl*****ic opportunist,” according to Ross Perot, who worked closely with McCain on POW issues. “He’s always reaching for attention and glory.”
McCain has worked hard to deny such charges. “They’re drinking the Kool-Aid that somehow I have changed positions on the issues,” he said of his critics at the end of August. The following month, when challenged on The View, McCain again defied those who accuse him of flip-flopping. “What specific area have I quote ‘changed’?” he demanded. “*****ody can name it.”
Page 9
……have me thinkin the snakes are no longer in the closet
@ Black.Woman
Dat’s why I love me some Black Women!
Keepin it really real!
Great Post,
@dubya
Yes, it’s true, whether McCain or Obama wins, the next president will be constrained by the current financial crisis.
In regards to health care, yes, it will be a challenge to provide universal health care to Americans for either candidate; however, I believe that under Obama’s plan, more Americans will have an opportunity to have affordable health care. He also believes Americans have a right to care, as he expressed in last week’s debate. With roughly 48 million uninsured Americans, including many children, this is a crucial life-and-death issue.
have me thinking…. they all can kiss my black behind as I throw bags and bags of confetti rejoicing in Obama’s win on 11/4! Backward azzholes!!!
Dear God! These are great posts, but jeez…why post long azz posts on a thread?
@dubya
Recent column by the NY Times’ Paul Krugman, who just won the Economics *****el prize, www(dot)nytimes(dot)com:
October 6, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Health Care Destruction
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Sarah Palin ended her debate performance last Thursday with a slightly garbled quote from Ronald Reagan about how, if we aren’t vigilant, we’ll end up “telling our children and our children’s children” about the days when America was free. It was a revealing choice.
You see, when Reagan said this he wasn’t warning about Soviet aggression. He was warning against legislation that would guarantee health care for older Americans — the program now known as Medicare.
Conservative Republicans still hate Medicare, and would kill it if they could — in fact, they tried to gut it during the Clinton years (that’s what the 1995 shutdown of the government was all about). But so far they haven’t been able to pull that off.
So John McCain wants to destroy the health insurance of nonelderly Americans instead.
Most Americans under 65 currently get health insurance through their employers. That’s largely because the tax code favors such insurance: your employer’s contribution to insurance premiums isn’t considered taxable income, as long as the employer’s health plan follows certain rules. In particular, the same plan has to be available to all employees, regardless of the size of their paycheck or the state of their health.
This system does a fairly effective job of protecting those it reaches, but it leaves many Americans out in the cold. Workers whose employers don’t offer coverage are forced to seek individual health insurance, often in vain. For one thing, insurance companies offering “nongroup” coverage generally refuse to cover anyone with a pre-existing medical condition. And individual insurance is very expensive, because insurers spend large sums weeding out “high-risk” applicants — that is, anyone who seems likely to actually need the insurance.
So what should be done? Barack Obama offers incremental reform: regulation of insurers to prevent discrimination against the less healthy, subsidies to help lower-income families buy insurance, and public insurance plans that compete with the private sector. His plan falls short of universal coverage, but it would sharply reduce the number of uninsured.
Mr. McCain, on the other hand, wants to blow up the current system, by eliminating the tax break for employer-provided insurance. And he doesn’t offer a workable alternative.
Without the tax break, many employers would drop their current health plans. Several recent nonpartisan studies estimate that under the McCain plan around 20 million Americans currently covered by their employers would lose their health insurance.
As compensation, the McCain plan would give people a tax credit — $2,500 for an individual, $5,000 for a family — that could be used to buy health insurance in the individual market. At the same time, Mr. McCain would deregulate insurance, leaving insurance companies free to deny coverage to those with health problems — and his proposal for a “high-risk pool” for hard cases would provide little help.
So what would happen?
The good news, such as it is, is that more people would buy individual insurance. Indeed, the total number of uninsured Americans might decline marginally under the McCain plan — although many more Americans would be without insurance than under the Obama plan.
But the people gaining insurance would be those who need it least: relatively healthy Americans with high incomes. Why? Because insurance companies want to cover only healthy people, and even among the healthy only those able to pay a lot in addition to their tax credit would be able to afford coverage (remember, it’s a $5,000 credit, but the average family policy actually costs more than $12,000).
Meanwhile, the people losing insurance would be those who need it most: lower-income workers who wouldn’t be able to afford individual insurance even with the tax credit, and Americans with health problems whom insurance companies won’t cover.
And in the process of comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted, the McCain plan would also lead to a huge, expensive increase in bureaucracy: insurers selling individual health plans spend 29 percent of the premiums they receive on administration, largely because they employ so many people to screen applicants. This compares with costs of 12 percent for group plans and just 3 percent for Medicare.
In short, the McCain plan makes no sense at all, unless you have faith that the magic of the marketplace can solve all problems. And Mr. McCain does: a much-quoted article published under his name declares that “Opening up the health insurance market to more vigorous nationwide competition, as we have done over the last decade in banking, would provide more choices of innovative products less burdened by the worst excesses of state-based regulation.”
I agree: the McCain plan would do for health care what deregulation has done for banking. And I’m terrified.
Obama and McCain Tax Proposals
According to what I read on the new *****ysis by the Tax Policy Center, Barack and John are both proposing tax plans that would result in cuts for most American families. Obama’s plan gives the biggest cuts to those who make the least, while McCain would give the largest cuts to the very wealthy. For the approximately 147,000 families that make up the top 0.1 percent of the income scale, the difference between the two plans is stark. While McCain offers a $269,364 tax cut, Obama would raise their taxes, on average, by $701,885 – a difference of nearly $1 million.
My question is, why do people who make above $250,000 deserve bigger tax cuts than those who make less? Would you like to answer, Dubya?
THE CRACKER WILL DO WHAT HE DOES!
@ Black Woman
I see you. McCain must have been being “groomed” to run because he started “flip flopping” way before he started campaigning.
McCLAN has allowed the negativity in his campaign to go too far.
Somebody find me an Obama rally so the press can take my picture with a sign that says “Obama May Have Bin Lyin, But Sarah Palin Is *****ing Retarded, Don’tcha Know!”
@Re
We’re having a friendly political Columbus Day battle. Sorry.
@dubya
Paul Krugman also wrote another column, “The 3 a.m. Call,” in which he said:
We’ve known for a long time, of course, that Mr. McCain doesn’t know much about economics — he’s said so himself, although he’s also denied having said it. That wouldn’t matter too much if he had good taste in advisers — but he doesn’t.
Remember, his chief mentor on economics is Phil Gramm, the arch-deregulator, who took special care in his Senate days to prevent oversight of financial derivatives — the very instruments that sank Lehman and A.I.G., and brought the credit markets to the edge of collapse. Mr. Gramm hasn’t had an official role in the McCain campaign since he *****ounced America a “nation of whiners,” but he’s still considered a likely choice as Treasury secretary.
And last year, when the McCain campaign announced that the candidate had *****embled “an impressive collection of economists, professors, and prominent conservative policy leaders” to advise him on economic policy, who was prominently featured? Kevin H*****ett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000.” Enough said.
Now, to a large extent the poor quality of Mr. McCain’s advisers reflects the tattered intellectual state of his party. Has there ever been a more pathetic economic proposal than the suggestion of House Republicans that we try to solve the financial crisis by eliminating capital gains taxes? (Troubled financial institutions, by definition, don’t have capital gains to tax.)
________________________________________
How can we trust a candidate who, before the economy went bust, said that the “fundamentals are still strong?” Whose former economic adviser called us a “nation of whiners?”
Thanks for the post BlackWoman. I just read it, and it’s a shame that more folks won’t take the time and dissect the words of “The Maverick”. BTW… not taking anything away from his service to our country, but what exactly did he do to become a “hero”. If flying over a country and getting shot down then held captive (even if you were a POW for 5 yrs), automatically makes you a hero, why can’t every soilder who lost his or her life in this animated war gain posthumous(sp?) hero status as well?
Heads up:
To read the full article, go to rollingstone(dot)com
@ Terminator Hex(Check me out!)
Somebody find me an Obama rally so the press can take my picture with a sign that says “Obama May Have Bin Lyin, But Sarah Palin Is *****ing Retarded, Don’tcha Know!”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
LMAO
Whose former economic adviser called us a “nation of whiners?”
This adviser was tied into the Keating 5 scandal, I think.
GOD BLESS AMERICA FOR REAL.BECAUSE IF THIS WAS JAMAICA,THEY WOULD KILL YOU DEPENDING ON WHO YOU VOTE FOR.***** MCAIN AND EVERYTHING HE STANDS FOR!!!!THIS IS HIS LAST RESORT,PLAYING THE RACE/TERRORIST CARD.IF KKK WANNA RISE AND START SOME *****,BRING IT,CAUSE THE BLACKS AND HISPANICS ARE THE MAJORITY NOW.AND WE GOT GUNS,I GOT MY STRAP ON DECK.GET READY YALL,ITS GONNA HIT THE FAN.SIGNS OF THE TIMES.
@dubya
Also, I’m sorry for the mistreatment that you received for your political views — and the destruction of your property (you may want to get another mini-poster and have it laminated. . .just a thought). While many of us have strong opinions on which candidate and issues we support, there’s no excuse for rudeness. We can disagree in a mature fashion.
@ Book Worm
McCLAN has allowed the negativity in his campaign to go too far.
———————————————–
(whispering) shhhhh, McCain might hear you, LMAO !
I came in here specifically to speak to Sydney.
What’s up Syd?
@Sydney
@dubya
Also, I’m sorry for the mistreatment that you received for your political views — and the destruction of your property (you may want to get another mini-poster and have it laminated. . .just a thought). While many of us have strong opinions on which candidate and issues we support, there’s no excuse for rudeness. We can disagree in a mature fashion.
——————————————-
Here here !
Racism is a hell of a drug, that a lot of people are hooked on, who can’t see their lives without it.
What will they do?, who will they be?……….
@Black.Woman
Yeah, I think Gramm did play a role in the S&L scandal.
That’s the irony of this whole “*****ociations” game — McCain has his own unsavory past ties, as does just about every politician.
BTW, the Washington Post also ran a story not too long ago on McCain’s first marriage, and how he met Cindy McCain, while he was still married, I might add. He has his own skeletons. . .
Hey Man! *hugs*
You’ve entered the land of endless long posts, lol.
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking DAMN MCCAIN MUST BE REALLY SLIPPING!
I, too think it’s important for us to disagree in a mature fashion. As my husband and I always say, “there’s your side and there’s my side and then there’s the TRUTH!”
We all see something different and I know all of us WANT something different. I’m just not sure what best yet.
Bump the fill in the blank b.s. WTF?! Who is minding the trailer parks dammit?
They need to show more of this bullsh*t on TV, so normal white people will be thinking, “God forbid I should vote for John McCain and be thought of in the same cl***** as those ingrates…” SMH
@Sydney
Oh yes! The Rolling Stone magazine article made it clear that John was still married when he filed for a marriage license to marry Cindy Hensley. Throughout John’s career and life, he has had misogynistic views toward all women. John called his own wife a *****, and he has even faced charges of obscenity when he was younger because of his hatred to women. Now, if we are going to elect on characte issues-let’s look at the fact that even though reprters witnessed John verbally abusing his wife-John denies it! John has been caught by reporters lying on everything you can think of. You do the research. John is not a maverick. Hre is a sidekick, and he needs counseling.
Sorry about the long posts, folks, but I want voters to be educated. I think sydney is doing that as well. I was asked to talk to voters by the Obama campaign. I guess you can say I am campaigning-but online.
@YES
“I hope that if Obama is elected that he’s able to follow up on what seems to be his desire to unite this country regardless of ethnicity, religion or race.”
Yes, Obama wants to unite the country, and, if elected, I believe he would set the tone, but we have to work collectively to make unity a reality. I am buoyed when I watch an Obama rally on TV, and I see whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc. standing side-by-side with their Change signs and optimism on their faces. It may sound Pollyanna-ish, but there’s a lot of beauty in that diversity. Honestly, I’ve watched some of the coverage of recent McCain rallies — before he decided to change his tone — and it hit me like a rock in my stomach. That kind of hatred and division should be a relic of the past. We are all Americans, and our diversity is our strength and we should revel in it.
@ sepia830(Check me out!)
Bump the fill in the blank b.s. WTF?! Who is minding the trailer parks dammit?
They need to show more of this bullsh*t on TV, so normal white people will be thinking, “God forbid I should vote for John McCain and be thought of in the same cl***** as those ingrates…” SMH
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa
@Black.Woman
I honestly think that if McCain respected women, he woulnd’t have picked Palin as his running mate. She’s clear in over her head, and I don’t even think that he’s fully communicating with her. Just his past weekend, she publicly stated an opinion on North Korea that differed from his issued statement. She also told the press that she didn’t know that he had pulled out of Michigan after it happened. Some Republican women have called him out for treating her as if she’s a staffer, and not the candidate for the no. 2 position in the country.
I also think that he and Cindy often look strained when they appear together — their chemistry seems off to me. I get a totally different vibe when I see Barack and Michelle — They seem like a genuine loving team.
Sydney
(Check me out!)
@YES
“I hope that if Obama is elected that he’s able to follow up on what seems to be his desire to unite this country regardless of ethnicity, religion or race.”
Yes, Obama wants to unite the country, and, if elected, I believe he would set the tone, but we have to work collectively to make unity a reality. I am buoyed when I watch an Obama rally on TV, and I see whites, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc. standing side-by-side with their Change signs and optimism on their faces. It may sound Pollyanna-ish, but there’s a lot of beauty in that diversity. Honestly, I’ve watched some of the coverage of recent McCain rallies — before he decided to change his tone — and it hit me like a rock in my stomach. That kind of hatred and division should be a relic of the past. We are all Americans, and our diversity is our strength and we should revel in it.
————————————————-
I stand and applaud you. Reading that gives me hope that one day every American will wake up and realize the same. Thank You !
That this is 1950 and Jim Crow is still very real. They have me thinking they have people twisted up because America is the real terrorist. Oh they have me thinking they think this about every black person.
My personal opinion? I agree.
*******************************
A lot of Americans have become so insulated from reality that they imagine that America can suffer defeat without any inconvenience to themselves.
Pause a moment, reflect back.
These events are actual events from history…
They really happened!!!
Do you remember?
1. 1968 Bobby Kennedy was shot and killed by a Muslim male extremist.
2. In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and m*****acred by Muslim male extremists.
3. In 1979, the US emb*****y in Iran was taken over by Muslim male extremists.
4. During the 1980’s a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by Muslim male extremists.
5. In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by Muslim male extremists.
6. In 1985 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked and a 70-year-old American p*****enger was murdered and thrown overboard in his wheelchair by Muslim male extremists.
7. In 1985 TWA flight 847 was hijacked at Athens , and a US Navy diver was murdered by Muslim male extremists. (Remember, the pilot of this flight was from Richmond , MO. )
8. In 1988 , PanAm Flight 103 was bombed by Muslim male extremists.
9. In 1993 the World Trade Center was bombed the first time by Muslim male extremists.
10. In 1998, the US emb*****ies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed by Muslim male extremists.
11. On 9 /11/01, four airliners were hijacked; two were used as missiles to take down the World Trade Centers and of the remaining two, one crashed into the US Pentagon and the other was diverted and crashed by the p*****engers. Thousands of people were killed by Muslim male extremists.
12. In 2002 the United States fought a war in Afghanistan against Muslim male extremists.
13. In 2002 reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and murdered by– you guessed it– Muslim male extremists.
No, I really don’t see a pattern here to justify profiling, do you? So, to ensure we Americans never offend anyone, particularly fanatics intent on killing us, airport security screeners will no longer be allowed to profile certain people… Absolutely No Profiling!
They must conduct random searches of 80-year-old women, little kids, airline pilots with proper identification, secret agents who are members of the President’s security detail, 85-year-old Congressmen with metal hips, and Medal of Honor winner and former Governor Joe Foss, but leave Muslim Males alone lest they be guilty of profiling.
According to The Book of Revelations:
The Anti-Christ will be a man, in his 40’s, of MUSLIM descent, who will deceive the nations with persuasive language, and have a M*****IVE Christ-like appeal….the prophecy says that people will flock to him and he will promise false hope and world peace, and when he is in power, he will destroy everything.
And Now:
For the award winning Act of Stupidity Of all times the People of America want to elect, to the most Powerful position on the face of the Planet — The Presidency of the United states of America .. A Male of Muslim descent who is the most extremely liberal Senator in Congress (in other words an extremist) and in his 40’s.
Have the American People completely lost their Minds, or just their Power of Reason ???
I’m sorry but I refuse to take a chance on the ‘unknown’ candidate Obama…
Let’s send this to as many people as we can so that the Gloria Aldreds and other stupid attorneys along with Federal Justices that want to thwart common sense, feel ashamed of themselves — if they have any such sense.
As the writer of the award winning story ‘Forest Gump’ so aptly put it,
‘Stupid Is As Stupid Does’
@Man
I spoke to you earlier, in case you didn’t see my post.
@Yes
I think this election is testament of the strives we have made towards making that a reality. Does racism still exist? Oh, yes, it does, but so does tolerance, love, and understanding.
Today, I listened to a Native American woman talk about Obama, and how she believes that he understands the everyday plight of people in this country. I think that’s what draws people to him. He gives off such an aura of positivity and unity. I have no illusions that the next presidency is going to be a rough four years, but I want a president who offers equanimity and respect for all people, even those who disagree with him.
@Sydney
And, you are not the only person who see the attraction of Barack and Michelle. When you see the result of that union in their daughters Malia and Sasha-I tell you, they are so smart and pretty-they speak beautifully-and they have a good sense of humor and wisdom to only be babies. In my opinion-we need great role models like Barack and Michelle in the White House! Barack reallt loves his wife and two little girls and they come first tto him. He has managed his home very effectively-to the lever of excellence.
I have an idea, though. They should let Barack & Joey play John & sarah for the White House in a 2 on 2 game of basketball since Sarah played in her youth days. But, Barack has a killer 3, and good blocking and *****ists (I saw him play on youtube, it was neat)!
If they did that-Brack would still win!!!
LOL @ Black.Woman
Actually, with all the recent tension, I think a game of 2-on-2 would be great.
And I do think Barack would win.
I also love how Joe and his wife Jill interact with Barack and Michelle. You can tell they sincerely like and respect one another — it’s more than just a campaign thing.
When McCain himself paid Obama respect, you know Barack has to be a good man.
*listened to a Native American woman on NPR*
It was one time I saw John with Sarah, and he was checking out her body on camera playing with his wedding ring. I was shocked.
I sat and watched Joe with his wife when they were with the Clintons. Jill introduced Bill. Then Joe hugged his own wife that was seemingly sustained as he was whispering something in her ear. He loved that lady whe he first saw her, and it’s written all over his face. We need people in the Oval Office who have love for their families-because America then would be their family, and they would take care of us the way Barack and Joe talks about. I can’t wait.
I think “For Real” might just have gone full retard on us.
@Black.Woman
Yeah, I’ve heard of that video of John checking out Sarah. I know the campaign says that Cindy helped pick her, but I don’t know. . .
Oh, Joe has made it clear that he loves his wife. I think their story is very touching — he went through a lot after his wife and child were killed, and it seems like she really helped him heal from the tragedy. So, yes, we need two loving, family-oriented couples in the White House.
@Black.Woman
I’m going to log off now, but it was great talking with you!
Take care, everyone
I agree with you there…about McCain and his “fundamentals are strong”. Well, they kind of are–the fundamentals that is. What’s happening now is a correction.
For those of us who are living within our means (no credit card debt, no ARM on an overvalued house, a decent job) we are not affected. This whole crisis comes about from GREED which led to an overvalue of EVERYTHING.
It’s a correction. If the fundamentals were not strong then we would have seen a catastrophic chain of events that would have affected EVERYBODY. Of course, for some, it is catastrophic–loosing your home/job is–but I wonder, did these people read the fine print before signing? I doubt it.
Obama’s plan still enables bad decision making. Withdrawing from your 401k/IRA is just another bad policy. It’s just a band-aid. Who knows…Later down the road, will we have to bail out those who borrowed too much from their retirement?
Obama is also for moratorium on mortgage foreclosures. Surprisingly, he had it right when Hillary Clinton proposed the same solution awhile ago (He was against it then):
THIS IS WHAT OBAMA SAID:
In San Antonio on Tuesday, Obama said that Clinton’s foreclosure freeze was potentially “disastrous,” rewarding “people who made this problem worse” by benefiting banks that profit from high mortgage rates.
A “blanket freeze,” Obama added, might “drive rates through the roof for those trying to buy or refinance. Experts say the value of homes will fall even more, and even more families could face foreclosure.”
————————————————-
so, I don’t know why he is changing his position. Nothing has changed to make is less disastrous.
Just to play devil’s advocate–talk about McCain checking out Sarah, check out Obama getting “up close and personal” with some blonde chick!
drudgereport.com
@Terminator Hex
I think “For Real” might just have gone full retard on us.
—————————————————
“For Real” definetly is not working with a full deck or is just plain ignorant and thats for real
What do you expect for a hoodless KKK rally?
oh they dont want to see no black president.
what he lying about? I have not heard him say a damn thing anyway but his wife be talkin too much ***** is whaz up. Im still gonna vote his ***** up doh.
I will ignore this a**holes!!!! I just got my huge Obama for president yard sign today and I told people already that if fu**ing rednecks want to f**k around and vandalize my sign… THEY WILL GET FU**IG SHOT!!!!
Obama supporters are afraid to put their signs up around where I live… that is crazy!!! this is 2008!! WTF????
Hey Everyone!
First – if anyone can name a President that knew it all from Day One, please tell me. Part of bring a great President is being smart enough to select the right people to support you. By his picking of Sarah Palin alone, McCain has shown a severe lack of judgement in the folks to be close to him in office. He has run a campaign based on people that helped Bush get into office, and seeing as how we have seen his policies fail over and over again, why have any of these individuals helping him with anything.
I expect Obama to choose Cabinet members who are smart, articulate, and experts in their fields of expertise. I think he will appoint Joint Chiefs that will advise him wisely, and will work in the best interests of the troops. Obama will have amb*****adors, Secretaries, and staff memebers who are eager to show the best they have to offer. And Obama has already shown he knows how to listen and respond accordingly.
And let’s not forget about the personal issue. I not only want a smart, savvy, and wise President, I want one who actually loves his family, not just for the cameras, but all the time. He has a steady temperment, and has been demonstrating that he is more than that – he is Presidential.
For Real -
Blow that Nostradamus ***** out of your crazy *****. First of all Islam did not exist when the book of Revelations was written, which makes it impossible for there to be a description of the anti-christ being Muslim and in his 40’s in the bible. There is no description in the bible of the Anti-Christ. Do some research or read the bible before you make such dangerously moronic statements.
*being*, not bring, sorry about the typo.
@ rozza
100% co-sign
anybody who says racism is dead or over is crazy as ***** because these rallys are proof that plenty of whites still hate and fear black men and want us dead.
Ridiculousness at its finest. McCain needs to be slapped and his little puppet Sarah Palin needs an ***** whoopin’. The real question we should be asking is who the hell is John McCain. This is a man who came in 5th to last in his cl***** of over 800, yet he’s ‘qualified’ to be President and a law school graduate from Harvard is not? Based on what? Experience in Congress??? The man sat in Congress for umpteen years, and I can’t think of one MAJOR thing he has done, overturned or supported for the benefit of middle cl***** America. How can he relate?? He’s an old surly, cantankerish, racist who had to resort to vile, nasty campaign tactics in order to try to ’steal’ the White House. If this man gets elected…as Bernie would say…”there’s gonna be some smoke in the city”….
….thinking that it’s 1958, not 2008—-it’s a wrap, McCainers, HOLLA!!!
How racism works:
What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating cl*****?
What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said ‘I do’ to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?
What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to pain killers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama were a member of the ‘Keating 5′?
What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are? This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.
Mary M. *****
Sosland Family Professor of Romance Languages and
Literatures
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Undergraduate Adviser for Romance Studies
424 Boylston Hall, Harvard Yard
Cambridge MA 02138
Ph: 617-49… ; Fax: 617-496-4682
–
Jane R. *****ie
Professor of Psychology and Women’s Studies.
Hope College.
Holland, MI 49423
This is Your Nation on White Privilege
By Tim Wise
For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.
White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.
White privilege is when you can call yourself a “*****in’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you’ll “kick their *****in’ *****,” and talk about how you like to “shoot *****” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.
White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.
White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most=2 0medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all ***** on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”
White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office–since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s–while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.
White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.
White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede 20 from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you’re black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.
White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do–like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor–and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a cl***** she took in college–you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.
White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a “second look.”
White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.
White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.
White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.
White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a “light” burden.
And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…
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ahhh well.. if you want to be a politician .. take the heat!
To have a black president was not a good idea in the first place. There is no way in this world that america is gonna allow a black person to take over! And this is the truth no matter what people say. It’s gonna be far now,more racists are gonna come up and america is gonna change A BIG TIME. Obama is not safe and is probably gonna get killed if he gets president.
Yes siree Dubya, you got the idea, we need more negroes like you coming over to our cause. Slavery was a northern lie.The truth is plantation negroes were happy ,they had free food and a place to sleep. Why we even had some good negroes who kept them liberal negroes in line. Dubya i think your great great granddaddy could have been one of them. John McCain rightfully voted against a Martin Luther King holiday.King was no hero, he was a terrorist, just like Barack Hussein Obama. King caused with his rhetoric all them liberal negroes to go out and burn buildings and riot. Dubya i am glad you got it right.
The South Will Rise Again
Fill in The Blank: Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking damn they just like Obama Supporters.
The People from either sides of the fence know what the ***** is really going on…..
Harvard graduate, editor of the Harvard Law Review = Obama
graduated 5th from last in a cl***** of 800 = McCain
YOU DO THE MATH!!!!!!!!!!
The People from either sides of the fence DONT know what the ***** is really going on…..
Lord help! I’m done with these people, white or black, if they’re McCain supporters they’re obviously oblivious to what’s going on in this country. God’s will WILL be done in the end. Just show your support for Obama (if he’s your choice) and get out and vote. BUT don’t think for one-minute that these Republicans (or Independents voting republican) are going to go out without a fight. We may very well be left with McCain/Palin in office. GOD forbid his old ***** dies! The only thing we’ll have left is prayer because this country will have no hope with Palin as President. Then we’ll see what these same white folks have to say. SMH
***OBAMA ‘08***
Necy(Check me out!)
I will ignore this a**holes!!!! I just got my huge Obama for president yard sign today and I told people already that if fu**ing rednecks want to f**k around and vandalize my sign… THEY WILL GET FU**IG SHOT!!!!
*******************************
Lmao, I have my OBAMA sign up too and had my fiancé put in one of those sensor lights by the front door, so if one of these whites comes into my yard to mess with my sign I have the RIGHT to shot ‘em… I’ll definitely aim for a leg though. This is Texas so they should already know people don’t play when it comes to tresp*****ing! But I dare one of ‘em to touch my sign! LoL I also have a poodle that hears everything, she’ll be at the door before they can even reach the sign, which is my cue to start shooting!! Good thing my friends and family know they better call before coming, I don’t like people showing up unannounced!
MORON.
they have to be MORON,why else they hold a name of bin…. above their head.
see the black ***** on the bottom right of this pic.that evening she got shanked 2 times and this did’nt even make the news.
Governor Palin, McCain, and some of their “mob-like” supporters have you thinking “if the black man on the right knows he is in a bad place right now” And I see that high yellow broad in there trying to “p*****” like its 1850 and her name is queen. smdh
Why are people so surprised that white people will vote for McCain /Palin simply because they are white, when some black people are only voting for Obama because he is black?
During a recent forum discussing Obama, I asked several people why they were voting for Obama. I heard “history” “it’s about time” “Black people about to come up”.
What about issues? Stance on economy? Foreign affairs? And if the only reason that you registered to vote is because you there is a black candidate, why are you offended that white people will vote for a white candidate?
“these **********as beter chill before Black folks decide to SNAP. This ain’t the 1960’s *****es!”
Robert E. Lee:
Negro Please.
Redd Tony aka Earth Sign
(Check me out!)
The People from either sides of the fence DONT know what the ***** is really going on…
————————————
Really? As in…..? I know EXACTLY what’s going on and will vote accordingly.
As I’ve said before and will say again. It will be Obama supporters who will cost Obama the election before anyone else will. People are tired of being painted into a box just because they don’t support Obama. You best believe it.
Now, please explain to me exactly how Obama’s “tax cuts” will help the economy? Oh, right, I did not think they would.
@LalaLovely
LMOL,( I have a poodle at the door) HILARIOUS!!!! but seriously, I live in Florida and like Texas you can shoot their ***** if they come on to your property and pose a threat!!!! and a REDCNECK COMING TO ANY MINORITIES PROPERTY POSES ALL KINDS OF THREATS…
Pervster
(Check me out!)
“these **********as beter chill before Black folks decide to SNAP. This ain’t the 1960’s *****es
——————————————-
Ooooh, violence..I’m scared…as if it is not already a common occurrence in our neighborhoods..well, at least you will be directing it away from the community this time…it’s a start.
registered to vote and voting..
Obama 08
that is just plain disgusting and PURE ignorance right there.
Thinking about moving to Paris if MKKKain wins!
All I know is this…The closer Obama gets to the presidency…the more indignant and ignorant these pink toes act…just proof that Obama is gonna win it. pink toes are sore losers…..
Sydney wrote
also love how Joe and his wife Jill interact with Barack and Michelle. You can tell they sincerely like and respect one another — it’s more than just a campaign thing.
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HAHAH, that is laughable.. are you really that gullible..
So lets see.. which biden do we believe.. the one who said that obama was not qualified and was not ready to be president.. or the one that after being picked for vp, now all of a sudden has all this “love and respect” for obama…
This is the problem with most people.. you will believe anything and everything these people tell you, no matter what… its obvious from your above statement… you do know he’s acting right, he’s playing a part and lying through his teeth..
he was either a liar prior to being picked for vp, or he’s lying now.. you pick..
Dubya..
You sir, are the most intelligent poster on this site.. not only for your insight into how the economy actually works, but to also point out how racist the people on this site are… Im not sure if any of you see the irony if posting about something that could be considered prejudiced, only to call somone else a cracker or pink toe..
99% of the people on this site are full blown hypocrits.. and like dubya said, you somehow find a way to justify it.. ridiculous..
@me
Hello, O arrogant and condescending one. Have a wonderful Tuesday! Smooches
If Obama wins..May God blessed him and his family. We all know whitey will be after them. It’s really sad that we have Not moved on. Seems some people still like being stuck on stupid!
If they weren’t talkn about my boy I would have been crackin up at that. But these fools are ignorant just like the people they are voting for.
Oh yeah to add THOSE fools DO NOT want to see REAL Obama supporters and say that shyt that is why they hide in their rallys and come out tight lipped like a ***** *****a’. *****ing *****S they only do that ***** behind closed doors.
If ANYTHING happens to Obama I could see a pure race war and that is something I don’t want to see and MOST DEF “they” don’t wanna see it fo’ sho’!
They make me think that if he gets into the white house, that we are all going back to slavery!! You know he was around during those times.
McCain’s selection of Palin open a can of racist worms.
Because of the perception of Palin, anything negative she points out about Obama ignities that element of the white race that mainstream America tries to pretend doesn’t exist on a large scale.
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