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True, he is not. He just votes to support Bush's policies. Iraq, FISA, you name it.
Now AT&T is sponsoring the Dem's convention. Is that what the FISA vote was all about? A hand bag?
What they say and what they actually do are always different.
And *they* all work for the same people - big money. Not big oil. Not big pharma. Not the military-industrial complex. Not big media. Not big education. Not big steel. Not big union. No. These are all facets of the same thing, big money. The unfettered ability to transfer wealth pennies at a time from the little guy. Take the labor. Take the fruits. Take the wealth.
All of the debates over ideology and right and wrong can all be simplified when you just look for the money. This hunt for easy money begins at the lowest level of your government. It is the corruption of your town council or school board. The dirty dealings of your state legislators. The bad politics of your governor.
Ike did warn of the military-industrial complex. He certainly never claimed it was a republican thing. He knew it was really just big money and that it was all corrupting.
Change. Feh! It never changes.
If "life" means anything that would turn out to be a human, every married couple (who could afford it) should try to maximize their baby output. Every day that is not used for sex, means a potential life goes to waste. Think of the huge responsibiility that Gates should have. He could probably afford to impregnate thousands of women.
As Obama hasn't even served as much time in the Senate as I have in pre-school and kindergarten, your inexplicable foresight into his Presidential modus operandi is nothing more than a mental shot from the hip... while drunk and stoned. It'd have been better if you actually addressed specific supporting facts in your post, rather than repeat tired soundbites and rhetoric.
That's my two cents... keep the Change.
Think back eight years ago which is fairly similar to this election in many ways - a tarnished exiting President that the incumbent party's candidate (Gore) wanted little to do with - though Clinton was arguably more popular than Bush is now for obvious reasons. Bush had a phenomenal fund - raising machine (much like Obama now).
Many looked around and said, "George Bush has no foreign policy experience and he only has 6 years of actual executive experience as the Governor of Texas." However he was the first Governor of that state elected to two consecutive terms so people thought, "He must be doing something right."
The big line though was, look, he's got all these great advisors including his Cabinet with Condoleeza Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, and others with deep international experience. They will step in and support him as "learned advisors" to help him understand how to succeed in these endeavors.
Republicans were so anxious for change that W. looked like the golden son who would make it possible to regain the White House and bring moral integrity back to it (which really was one of the leading issues of the campaign). It was simply a question of W. is not Clinton. Sounds fairly similar to your argument that Obama is not Bush.
Many of us who voted for Bush back then ask ourselves how it might have been different if Bush had not won - because he turned out not to be the candidate we really wanted or believed he would be.
So you might want to ask yourself, what happens when this unknown cipher with NO experience in foreign policy and NO experience in executive office steps into the White House and attempts to lead us through one of the most difficult periods in the last 50 years. What then? Is it sufficient to say that he will lean on "learned advisors?" Will Obama turn out to be another bumbler just with a Blue background rather than Red background this time? His responses to the Georgia crisis give me serious concern that he will be in over his head.
I don't know who I am voting for yet come November, but I have serious concerns about both candidates. McCain is an arrogant, self-serving, ass, but at least he's a known quantity. Obama comes from my home state and he had little to no impact in this State prior to leaping up ambitiously to take over Peter Fitzgerald's office. And he's been running for President ever since then so honestly, many of us in Illinois - who know him best - would say he hasn't done much since then either.
As Mother Teresa said, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." In other words, careful what you wish for because you might just get it.
And now he's allegedly moving "toward the center?" I'm sure that's what the DNC want folks to think. Not from what I've seen. He's still the most left-wing major presidential candidate in my lifetime (and I'm almost 50).
Sure, an Obama presidency would bring change. Just the wrong kind of change.
The reality is that on a scale from 1-10, where 10 is George Bush and 1 is Fidel Castro, John Kerry is a 9.5 and Obama is an 8.5
But they still have political differences, just not right-wing / left-wing type of differences
Yeah, I'll cop to that. It's a modus operandi.... ;-)
The vast right wing conspiracy comes to mind.
Obama has proposed a increase in CGT to a rate of 20%, but certainly has not ruled out increases up to even 28% (source: ABC News).
Let's give him the benefit of the doubt & stick with 20%. That is still a one-third increase in the rate! For the same capital gains you realized with the Weblogs sale, under Plan Obama you would have paid $115,000 more in taxes. Ya know, a hundred-thousand here & a hundred-thousand there, & pretty soon you're talking about real money.
It's so obvious it almost... mathematical.
Face it the most wealthy Americans pay far less taxes (as a percentage of income) compared to anyone else in the country. That is not equitable.
Corporations have rigged the tax code so that they pay virtually no corporate income taxes. Compare the tax records from the 1950's to now. A very stark difference. This is inequitable. It's even more so when you consider all of the corporate welfare.
If corporate America is so great why do they need tax dollars and subsidies? Obama wants to reverse some of this. Is that so bad? If so, why?
They don't. I'm with you there. No federal tax subsidies of any kind to any company. But that alone is not a good enough reason for me to vote Obama.
The cap. gains tax, I admit, doesn't touch everybody, or perhaps even most people. I was just using Dave as an example. My only point is that Obama will raise taxes and raise spending to fund a potpourri of "programs."
If it were up to me I would eliminate huge portions of the federal government (IRS, Dept. of Education, Dept. of Commerce) to save money. Don't think either candidate is gonna go there, though....
I believe that government can work. I think there are many things that the public sector can and should provide for the PEOPLE of the United States. If Obama can come in and energize the citizenry and Congress to fix things then all the better. Sometimes the new guy with big ideas is what we need. If he can't get his ideas implemented then we vote him out. I am certain that McCain offers no new ideas.
In 2000 I liked McCain. I felt really bad that he got torpedoed by Bush. Now, he's too old, not terribly coherent, and he's making things up as he goes along. (I'm a Goldwater Republican, I'm a Teddy Roosevelt Republican, I'm just like Reagan, I'm for all the Bush policies but I'm not GW, etc.)
I just think using the "tax and spend" label for everyone in the Democratic party is unfair. Slapping a label on someone is the worst way to have public discourse. We've gotten too sound-bitten.
I'm willing to give a new guy a chance. McCain has not built anything by himself. He's lived off of the public teat all his life. Obama is young enough that his experience in local politics and community organization are still fresh in his mind. He's also a bright, well educated person. Being liked by the rest of the world is also a plus in my book.
I don't buy the argument that you need experience to be president. What experience does McCain have? Our country has a long history of inexperienced presidents.
I hate the two party system but I am very worried about what another Republican president will do to the Supreme Court. It's far too conservative.
Too many things to write about. I'm rambling. Guess I need a blog of my own!?
He was married to a model when he went to Vietnam. She was disfigured in an accident while he was imprisoned. She wrote him all the time to keep his spirits up. When he saw her when he got home he got a marriage license to his current super wealthy wife BEFORE he was divorced from wife #1. Opportunistic at the least.
Let's not forget McCain was part of the Keating Five.
The press is giving McCain a huge pass on large parts of his past.
The circumstances of the dissolution of McCain's first marriage don't really concern me. Marriage is the very personal business of those who are married. I seem to recall a 2004 candidate who also married into a great deal of money.
And the average voter under 40 doesn't even know what Keating Five means, but that fact notwithstanding, McCain (and John Glenn) were both exonerated by the Senate Ethics Committee in that case.
The corporate welfare often comes at the lower levels. No property taxes. Education subsidies for training programs. Free parking. Etc.
Followed up by the congressman "bringing home the bacon" to his district to keep a poor business/employer afloat or thriving.
When politicians talk about raising taxes on the wealthy and follow that up with raising income taxes on higher earned incomes instead of on cap gains/dividends, it is annoying.
Tax the wealth, not the payroll.
Of course, AARP would jump into that fight.
In 1984, I was one of two lower east side housing activists who established a liason with the student anti-aparthied coalition at columbia university. The anti-aparthied movement had been brewing for almost a decade, but that was the year it began to boil.
I approached the leadership of the movement with the concept of establishing linkage between the ethnicity-driven apartheid of South Africa with the economics driven divisions that were emerging in the USA and particularly NYC at the time.
Out of this emerged the Direct Action Network, which drove the divestment of NYC's assets from SA's economy. We did this by intefering with the daily operations of all of SA's NYC based operations through various non-violent (but decidedly disruptive) methods, and it worked. It's pretty likely Barack Obama was in the room at a lot of those meetings. I won't name names, but many of the people I worked with in those early days now hold significant positions in the left wing of the Democratic party, or what I prefer to call the post-left wing. That was a phrase we used amongst ourselves in those days to describe our politics, and the infamously hijacked phrase "New Paradigm". When Clinton hijacked that phrase it made me sick to my stomach, especially since his use of it bore no resemblance to our agenda.
Barack Obama didn't go to Yale. He went to Columbia. I'm a very litigious person, and I've worked with a lot of lawyers over the years. The Yaleies all act like they belong to a club, and your and your case are food for both sides lawyers. Ultimately, a Yale attorney works for the Yaleie legal elite. I have met NO exceptions to this rule. Columbia lawyers work for their clients. Yale is the most anglo-centric university in the Ivy League, Old Boy Elite U. Columbia is tied with Brown for most progressive, and easily leads the Ivy's in minority and economically challenged accessibility. Your school has a lot to do with how you see the world moving forward. Every thing you do with your life as an adult begins there. Columbia, in the early 80's, formed Obama's views. You can use the same words and phrases as another politician, and they can mean two entirely different things in practice. A welfare state, for example, to a Yaleie is the horror show we endured in the 70's and '80's: 4 out of 5 dollar budgeted for human services spent on making sure no one cheats, and hideous public housing projects that acted as incubators for poverty, drugs, disease, and despair, or for a Columbian, it means the very successful paradigm adopted by countries like sweden and Denmark, a system that vcatches you when you fall, prividess equal health services for all, and equal educvational opportunities for all.
In those day, any time you engaged in any political action left of the center, you invariably were inundated with people fighting over the last battles of the '60's. As I told RJ Smith of the Village vVoice in 1988, the principal differences between people my age and those even only a few years older than us was the way certain ideas were controversies for older people, but for us were simply a done deal. Gender, and ethnic equality, were simply the way it was for people my age raised in progressive families, not the way it would be someday. For us, it was that way then. It had never been otherwise in our lives in our communities, only in the minds of older or much less educated people form other parts of the country that we had so little in common with we might well have been from different epochs, let alone different countries.
That kind of nails it: Obama grew up in the America I grew up in: multi-ethnic, gender neutral, pro-choice, and mildly socialistic, but still entrepreneurial (hence post-left: Workers of the world.... relax.) and highly individualistic. The barriers we heard about on television seemed like transmissions from another planet, one we only visited when we went shopping on route 17 in New Jersey for bargains. Across the river, another planet.
I suppose I sound like an elitist. Well, Barack gets called that a lot, doesn't he? But he and I belong to a special fraternity. We're the kids who were raised for the future that died with the election of Ronald Reagan, and we are both two of the very proud few who didn't throw in the towel and resign ourselves to life in 'Murka, but stuck to our principles, critiqued the errors that led to the Reagan-Bush error, and re-invented America. His victory is my victory. There hasn't been a presidential candidate I could say that about before. The globe in his 1st grade classroom was surfaced with the apollo 7 photographs of earth, and there were no thick black lines around the countries all in different colors like they were just a few years earlier. That is change. Even if his agenda never deviates from the old party line, I can count on the fact that his implementation will, because he comes from the same planet I come from: the beautiful blue one with no thick black lines, where the borders are all in your mind.
BTW, I was born in March, 1961, at NY Infirmary on 14th st. In Manhattan.
The real tragedy of the past 30 years is the way in which common-sense issues like renewable energy sources, healthy dietary standards, reproductive freedom, inter-ethnic equality, gender equality, etc... got lost in a tug of war that mostly had it's roots in who got labled "uncool" and who got invited to the good parties at Yale and Harvard in the late '60's and early '70's. ANYTHING that was associated with the dirty h ippies got labeled un-american, even if it was something as common-sensical as a lower-fat diet.
Granted, that's a massive over-simplification, but I've always been a believer in party politics, i.e., that American politics is mostly about who's parties you get invited to. In a less frivolous context, you could really say that all politics is about the pursuit of alpha-status, that is, about mating privileges. The guy with the alpha female is automatically the alpha male, and vice-versa. If you look at it that way, it goes a long way towards explaining the disproportionate interest we seem to have with politicians sex lives. We want to believe our leaders are competent, but since alpha's never amount to more than 10% of a population, most of us don't want to be reminded that alphas get laid more than the majority of us do. When we're reminded of this, it sets off a dominance battle, which in our society is manifested as a media feeding frenzy, or an impeachment proceeding. Of course, cvonversley, if Clinton had been having an affair with say, Uma Thurman, the republicrats would have done their best to cover it up, because it would have contributed to his alpha-ness.
I used to breed and train big, primitive dogs (Malamutes, Belgian Sheepdogs, Wolves) for a living. You learn a lot about the importance of mating behavior in the construction of social heirarchies when you have to keep a dozen or so 100 lb. plus carnivores from killing each other every day.
Likewise, the resistance that each generation applies to it's successor is largely an expression of one's reproductive fitness. when you can't hold off the young wolves anymore, your mating days are over.
I mention all this, because such a disproportianate percentagve of the political log jams today stem from on-going conflicts between the percieved winners and losers of the late '60's/early 70's mating games. The dirty hippies got all the good (girls/boys), and everyone else is STILL jealous. The most perverse expression of this is the way the -self-perceived less-reproductively-successful try to get revenge by sabotaging the winner's offspring.
Thank FSM it's almost over.
Sorry, but losing my home is not the kind of Change I want to believe in.
Also, your buddy Jason Calacanis used a Columbo reference in his email newsletter yesterday as well!