If you’ve been under a stone, Barack Obama has been elected the next president of the United States. What did he have to say? Listen.
Tag: 2008 presidential election (Page 1 of 2)
Starbucks has just moved up a notch in my book. Vote on Tuesday and they’ll give you a free coffee.
The election is five days away and, while I would hope that everyone who’s voting has figured out where the candidates stand on the issues, I’m going to post this video to make it perfectly clear, to those who are interested, where Obama stands. This was broadcast over six or so major stations last night. It’s a thirty minute long “infomercial” and it’s an unprecedented move for a presidential candidate. The price tag on this is some three to five million dollars which pretty much no candidate ever has at this point in the race. He had this money because he’s had an enormous amount of donations. His average donation is around $100. Last month he raised $150,000,000 that way. That’s a lot of Americans handing over some hard earned cash for something they believe in. That’s not to say that anyone should vote for him because his numbers are impressive. No one wants an election to be bought. Those numbers should tell you that maybe there’s something going on with this guy that’s special though. Anyway, here it is:
Sarah Palin did and interview with Brian Williams recently, with McCain by her side of course, and was asked an interesting question:
Now obviously she doesn’t condone abortion clinic bombers but it’s a little ridiculous that she couldn’t call them terrorists. Why couldn’t she say the word? Is she associated with an abortion clinic bomber? Is she afraid of offending the abortion clinic bomber crowd? Is she just an idiot? The answer is probably the last suggestion there but that whole little conversation is interesting regardless.
Another interesting campaign story is the one about a girl who was “attacked by a big black man who carved the letter ‘B’ into her cheek”. This didn’t actually happen but guess who reported it anyway?
This was a McCain campaign volunteer who has obviously gone off the deep end either in her support for McCain or her hatred of black people. Seriously, she didn’t have to say that this imaginary attacker was a black guy but she did. That could have had some serious implications for the racial divide in that city and it would have been based on a lie. I kind of hope that she cut that deep enough into her face that she’ll be stuck with a ‘B’ on her cheek for the rest of her life. It would be like a cooler real life version of the Scarlett Letter where you don’t have to feel sympathy for the person branded.
Lastly, I got my sample ballot yesterday and I would like to point out to everyone that we are voting for more than just the president on November 4th. Just to make things easy on anyone who’s lazy but might have some inclination towards voting, here are some quick links to find out about these people.
For the US Senate:
- Frank Lautenberg
- Dick Zimmer
- Jeffrey Boss
Personally, I’m going for Lautenberg. Zimmer has some bad ideas on how prisons should be run like taking away all luxuries from the prisoners to save money. That sounds fine until you realize how much more dangerous a prison becomes when you don’t have some form of entertainment to keep those guys and gals docile. I know this because my dad runs a prison. He also seems somewhat along the lines of a neo-conservative. Lautenberg is a little more liberal than I like but he’s better than Zimmer, to me, by far. And Jeff Boss is just some crazy truther who thinks people in Mexico have tried to kill him to shut him up.
For the House of Representatives:
- David Kurkowski
- Frank LoBiondo
- Gary Stein
- Peter Boyce
- Costantino Rozzo
- Just some crazy Buddhist guy.
Personally, I’m going Kurkowski. LoBiondo is the incumbent and the last time I looked at his record he was pretty much a mirror image of Bush. He’s a partisan hack. The only thing I know of that he’s stood his own ground on is the bail out bill which he voted against but it’s questionable whether that was the best way to vote or not. In this case I’m kind of voting against LoBiondo instead of for Kurkowski. Kurkowski was a school teacher and is a small business owner and doesn’t have much to say but at least he’s not a Bush clone. The other three couldn’t even be bothered to make a proper web site that says anything about their ideas so I can’t be bothered to vote for them.
For Cape May County Sheriff:
- George Hallett
- Gary Schaffer
There isn’t much info on these two other than their resumes and I like Hallett’s more. He’s been in a secret service agent, a CIA agent, and a police officer. He also sounds level headed. Schaffer has just been a long time Ocean City cop. I trust the guy with the diverse background over the guy who’s biggest problem for the last 25 years has been rounding up underage drinkers. Also, I was told that Schaffer, while walking the streets campaigning, found a little girl and told her to bring his flyer up to someone’s door instead of doing it himself. Apparently this little girl didn’t have a clue what she was doing or who the guy was. That just sounds weird.
For Lower Township Mayor:
- Harvey roach
- Glenn Douglass
- Michael Beck
There’s hardly any info on these three. I’m leaning towards Beck because of some vague idea of his positions but I’m still unsure about this one. Check them out for yourself.
That’s the low-down though. If you’re voting on the 4th for president and don’t want to leave those other parts blank or just check off who you want based on party then it might be worth looking into these guys. It doesn’t take very long, honest.
There has been a lot of talk about ACORN. This is an nationwide organization that aims to register low income people and minorities to vote. Recently it’s been brought to the attention of the national media that in some areas ACORN has turned in a lot of fake registrations. You can hear daily from the Republicans about how this is voter fraud and evidence that Obama is trying to steal the election. It’s not.
First of all, the most important point, Obama has not used ACORN at all during the general election.
Now that that’s out of the way, there are very good reasons why this has become such an issue. ACORN was paying people by how many registrations they turned in. The natural reaction for some would be to write up a bunch of fake registrations and get a lot of money for no work. These people have, for the most part, been fired. The registrations they turned in were flagged by ACORN as being fake. In some states every registration collected must be turned in to the election board so that the board can be in charge of deciding if something is fake or not. ACORN followed this rule and sent the bad registrations with the good and flagged each to be clear. That’s it. That’s the whole situation. Now, somehow, ACORN is destroying democracy and they’re becoming a focal point of the election. Remember those issue things? Yeah, all that stuff about policy and the real problems our country is facing? The GOP would apparently like you to ignore those things and focus on manufactured crap like this ACORN “issue”.
Also, for the record, this isn’t voter fraud. Voter fraud would be someone actually showing up and voting illegally. Brave New Films has put out a video that gives a good explanation for all this. They get into stuff about how Republicans want voter turn out to be low, and I’m sure there are some that do, but that may be the unfair part of this video. Anyway, watch.
Honestly, I’m getting tired of hearing only three words from this five minute long conversation. It seems everywhere I turn there’s someone repeating the phrase “spread the wealth” as if those were the only words Obama said to Joe Wurzelbacher from Ohio. This is usually followed by claims that Obama is a socialist, a communist, and wants to punish successful people. This even sometimes flows into claims that Obama is a terrorist, un-American, and isn’t even a natural-born US citizen.
The level of xenophobia lately is crazy. In the news I’ve seen anything from a man cackling as he shows a camera his stuffed monkey with an Obama hat that he calls “Little Hussein” to someone’s Halloween decorations that include a lynched ghost with “Obama” written on it as well as “Husain” (yes, it was spelled wrong). There is such a huge amount of disinformation, racism, fear, and just plain hate lately that I wouldn’t even know where to begin to start correcting some of it so I guess I’ll just correct one thing.
Here is the entire “Joe the Plumber” conversation.
And before you get swept away in all the non-sense propaganda out there, take at least one look at FactCheck.org. Seriously, don’t be stupid.
I wouldn’t be surprised if you haven’t. It’s very easy and common to have a disconnect from the happenings in the world anymore. So even when we may have been witnessing the biggest financial catastrophe (or the greatest financial bet) in the last one hundred years most of you probably didn’t bat an eyelash. I think that’s a problem.
Yesterday the House of Representatives voted down the financial bail out bill. Some 40% of Democrats voted against the bill as well as the majority of Republicans. The bill failed by twelve votes and the market reacted with the biggest single day point drop, for the DOW, in history. That’s not in the last decade or two, that’s ever. This isn’t the biggest problem though, the biggest problem is that credit may just completely freeze up. Anyone who needs a loan for anything (a house, a car, payroll, to order inventory) may be out of luck. Our credit based economy could very soon come to a halt. Some people have even said that your ATM or credit card may not work anymore. That one is a bit of a stretch but I think it’s worth it to check the performance of your bank’s stock. ING has dropped from $48 to $20 in the last six months so I’ve seriously considered moving my money.
There is a really good side to this. The bet that a lot of politicians in the House are betting on is that doing nothing is doing the most to fix this problem. After all, why should we prop up failing businesses? Maybe we should let those businesses fail, even if it hits us hard in a lot of ways, so that better businesses can take their place. This may even be the best way to keep our market free while giving powerful firms a very good reason not to partake in the shady trading practices that helped get us here in the first place. The bill was going to include oversight on this kind of thing but wouldn’t it be nice if we instead told the market that if they screw up it’s completely on their shoulders? It’s like teaching a kid responsibility. You don’t help them learn this valuable skill by fixing all the problems they create for themselves.
Of course, there are very good reasons for propping these businesses up like I have mentioned already. In the end this all seems like a wild guess at which choice will help the most. No one is crunching numbers to find out and it wouldn’t really be helpful as economics is as much a social phenomenon as it is a mathematical phenomenon. Personally, I lean to the “let the crap fall out” side but I’m regularly going back and forth on the issue. The only thing I know for sure is that you should all be paying attention. As much as we all like to think we live in a vacuum, we really don’t. We elect the people who decide these things and their decisions could decide whether we enter another Great Depression or not. If we do, it’s not the politicians we should blame, it’s the people. We should blame the people who have become lazy and bought into the idea that nothing we do makes a difference. We should blame the people that take the success of their nation for granted and choose to forgo the voting rights that others in the past were willing to die for, whether they were soldiers or just minorities that wanted a voice. In short, inform yourself.
It appears John McCain really can’t decide whether he wants to pander to hardcore conservatives or moderates and liberals. He has spent the last week blasting the system that allowed the market to become deregulated to the point that we have financial meltdown and now he’s going on television saying that deregulations have helped grow the economy. This really is like the Twilight Zone. You can’t have it both ways. Either regulations were a bad thing or they were a good thing. This is just like when he went on TV and said that he’s an ardent supporter of George Bush and then went around campaigning as if he’s the polar opposite and will bring tons of reform to Washington. I really hope this sort of newspeak isn’t convincing anyone.
The first presidential debate is Friday at 8pm on just about every channel. Watch it.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/sep/17/uselections2008.democrats
My headline isn’t as one sided as it sounds. Apparently Republicans are using the foreclosure crisis to stop people from voting. If someone has been foreclosed on they want said person’s address placed on a list at the voting stations so that anyone who wants to vote and is listed as living at that address, can’t. A little fishy, eh? This is supposedly an effort to lower voter fraud, which may be true in some part, but my guess (and only a guess) is that it’s also an effort to stop black people, who according to polls and history are much more likely to vote for Obama, from voting.
The one face saver the Republicans have in this little dispute is the argument of responsibility. I’m not talking about being responsible enough to not be foreclosed on or earning the right to vote by making good financial decisions. I’m talking about being responsible enough to update your address on your voter registration card. You can change that address regardless of whether you own the home you’re now staying at. This is a good argument. My only counter is that some people don’t have a home after going through foreclosure. They also may have been forced to move as far as another state and only temporarily. If you have lived in location A for 30 years and 3 months before the election you’re forced to move to location B, you probably want to eventually move back to location A. Why should your vote be counted in a state that you have nothing to do with and won’t have anything to do with in the future? This is a way to redraw the electoral map although I admit this isn’t the greatest argument against saying people should be responsible enough to update their address.
Either way, I don’t see how this would combat fraud. Why would someone be able to vote in multiple locations just because their house is in foreclosure? Why would a foreclosed home be prone to being used by multiple people as their residence when voting? These things lead me to believe that this is just Republicans being incredibly screwed up.
And yes, foreclosures do affect minorities more than whites.
http://www.foreclosurelistings.com/blog/foreclosure-victims/minorities-worst-affected-by-foreclosures.htm
Today Obama gave a speech on the economy. The whole speech (38 minutes) is on YouTube. He basically lays out the actions he would take to straighten out the problems we’re having while simultaneously pointing out the fact that McCain has no idea what he’s doing. Check it out. Make up your own mind.
English
Français
Recent Comments