crazy... Dems are seriously lowering the bar.

[Miasma]

theres probably a lot thats true in there. and theres probably a lot thats not. all one can do is go by what comes out of their own mouths and try to sift thru the bullshit.

Pretty much sums up how I feel about this election.

[Vedubin01]

Stupidest. Comment. Ever.

I guess you dont read much.... Communism is a branch of socialism and the way that Obama speaks, he is more of a socialist than capitalist. CNN is all up Obamas ass as proof of the two anchors that just got fired because being way to over the top. I could get into this more but might hurt someone's head.

[Farbin Kaiber]

Eh, whats going on?

I guess you dont read much.... Communism is a branch of socialism and the way that Obama speaks, he is more of a socialist than capitalist. CNN is all up Obamas ass as proof of the two anchors that just got fired because being way to over the top. I could get into this more but might hurt someone's head.

I will say, from someone not into the specifics of outside political systems, (Communism, Socialism, Marxism, etc.) but, after doing a bit of reading before tuning in to watch Keith Olbermann give him the soft stroke while Bill O'Reilly called him "Robin Hood Obama" (not in a good way) I did hear a bunch of things that could be construed as "Socialism"

[Hallen]

I am neither Red nor blue, but I recognize a waffleswaffleswaffleswaffles when I see it.

Have any of you seen the anti-Palin email floating around? Confirmed as true, a person who has basically known Palin all her life.

This one statement "Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah's attempt at censorship." pretty much invalidates that entire letter. It puts it into the category of disgruntled person who has an agenda. It's just the same as the emails lavishing praise on Palin. Chances are, the truth is nothing like any of those letters.

The censorship thing has been proven to be false.

That is my biggest problem with all of this stuff. It is getting more and more impossible to get out the truth; find out what the record really is; find out what these people really stand for. That is why shit like "It's time for change" (which was used by Bill Clinton to win and now is used by Obama) draws people in like moths to a flame. There is no substance. But people seem to like that because it doesn't lead to confusion and conflict by marring the dream with reality.
There are probably some facts in that letter. However, if you were really there, and you really had all the information, it would probably turn into a non issue altogether. You can't be in public office without making enemies and without doing things you would rather not do (its that ugly "compromise" thing that happens in politics). Anyway, Palin is probably too full of herself. Obama certainly is.

[kowalski]

You think that's bad, try following Canadian politics. We're only 48 hours into our federal election and we already have vicious attack ads flying left and right. Happens every single time.

and its being held a year early, after our very prime minister changed the law so that the elections would be held every 3 years. however, because the governor general felt it was a good time to have an election, WTF.

[uofom3]

McCain has decided to run attack ads that lie about Obama's positions. In one he states that Obama wants to teach kindergartner's sex education. This is a blatant lie that only conservatives would believe. Obama's aide calls McCain out over his lying and your post is that the Democrats are stooping too low? IMHO, McCain's ambition > his integrity.

It's not a lie. He gave a press conference where he backed up his previous decision.

Obama will never win the integrity battle with McCain. Sorry. That's why he's not picking that fight.

[uofom3]

The situation is FUBAR.

[ragged325]

It's not a lie. He gave a press conference where he backed up his previous decision.

Obama will never win the integrity battle with McCain. Sorry. That's why he's not picking that fight.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26649779/

The original controversy dates to 2003, when a bill to modify the teaching of sex education in Illinois was introduced in the Legislature. The proposal was supported by a coalition of education and public health organizations, including the Illinois Parent Teacher Association, the Illinois State Medical Society, the Illinois Public Health Association and the Illinois Education Association.

Mr. Obama voted for the bill in committee, where it passed, but it never came to a full and final vote. The proposal called for “age and developmentally appropriate” sex education and also allowed parents the option of withdrawing their children from such classroom instruction if they felt that it clashed with their beliefs or values.

In referring to the sex-education bill, the McCain campaign is largely recycling old and discredited accusations made against Mr. Obama by Alan Keyes in their 2004 Senate race. At that time, Mr. Obama stated that he understood the main objective of the legislation, as it pertained to kindergarteners, to be to teach them how to defend themselves against sexual predators.

“I have a 6-year-old daughter and a 3-year-old daughter, and one of the things my wife and I talked to our daughter about is the possibility of somebody touching them inappropriately, and what that might mean,” Mr. Obama said in 2004. “And that was included specifically in the law, so that kindergarteners are able to exercise some possible protection against abuse, because I have family members as well as friends who suffered abuse at that age.”

Misrepresenting 'comprehensive'
It is a misstatement of the bill’s purpose, therefore, to maintain, as the McCain campaign advertisement does, that Mr. Obama favored conventional sex education as a policy for 5-year-olds. Under the Illinois proposal, “medically accurate” education about more complicated topics, including intercourse, contraception and homosexuality, would have been reserved for older students in higher grades.

The advertisement, then, also misrepresents what the bill meant by “comprehensive.” The instruction the bill required was comprehensive in that it called for a curriculum that went from kindergarten and through high school, not in the sense that kindergarteners would have been fully exposed to the entire gamut of sex-related issues.

In another part of the advertisement, Mr. McCain maintains that Mr. Obama’s sole achievement in education was the sex-education bill. In reality, Mr. Obama not only helped administer a $49 million education project in Chicago in the 1990s, but also sponsored or co-sponsored measures that increased the number of charter schools in Illinois, and expanded federal grants to summer school programs and to historically black colleges.

As support for its contention that Mr. Obama is “wrong on education,” Mr. McCain’s advertisement cited criticism by Education Week, a trade publication. Mr. Obama “hasn’t made a significant mark on education” in his years in the Senate in Illinois and Washington, the advertisement asserts.

Education Week did indeed make that assessment in an article published last year. But in the same paragraph, the magazine also said that Mr. Obama “did promote early-childhood initiatives that advocates considered “innovative and progressive,” and also noted that “his biggest accomplishment in the field was the creation of a state board to oversee the expansion of early-childhood education in the state.”

'Vague answers' on education
The same publication has also criticized Mr. McCain, in language that was perhaps even stronger. Early this year, in an article titled “John McCain Where Art Thou?” it complained that he offered “a laundry list of fairly vague answers” on how to improve schools and did not make education a priority.

“McCain is a campaign-finance, foreign-relations, anti-abortion, tax-cut candidate,” the magazine said. “Education is not his thing. Depending on your perspective, McCain’s relative silence on education may be a good thing. If you think the federal government has grossly overreached into the state business of education, then he may be your guy.”

The Obama campaign expressed outrage over the commercial, with Bill Burton, a spokesman, describing it as “shameful and downright perverse.”

But Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for the McCain campaign, said, “the Obama campaign did not and cannot dispute a shred of the content in the ad.”

I suppose I'd need to cite a Fox News reference for you to believe any of this.

It's pretty hard to say that McCain has much integrity. If you listened to the Republicans in 2004, you'd think that they didn't like "flip-floppers'. If that were the case, they'd be calling out McCain as a villain.

[ragged325]

BTW, here's the commercial:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ln5cmj0UBX0

[uofom3]

Eh, whats going on?





I will say, from someone not into the specifics of outside political systems, (Communism, Socialism, Marxism, etc.) but, after doing a bit of reading before tuning in to watch Keith Olbermann give him the soft stroke while Bill O'Reilly called him "Robin Hood Obama" (not in a good way) I did hear a bunch of things that could be construed as "Socialism"

Farbin, nono, income redistribution is "neighborly" - isn't it funny how things are taken when you repackage socialism/wealth redistribution under the guise of being "neighborly".

[ragged325]

This is Mitt Romney's take on all of this.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pO1dIKgfPw&NR=1

Will someone please tell me if he is this ignorant or a liar? I'm not sure which is scarier.

[//MPower]

lowering the bar?

Congressional approval ratings are at their lowest point in the history of the United States.

Bush's approval ratings are lower than Nixon's were when he resigned.

I don't see how the bar could get any lower...

The pig comment was definitely taken way out of context. Rather than talk about actual political issues, mainstream news just blows up on meaningless things like this.

Obama (the so called anti-war candidate) is talking about actions against Russia and Afghanistan, and Iran, but what we get is this "he said" "she said" high-school mentality bullshit. It's pathetic.

[BMW_TUNER]

All I have to say is I was just in Wasilla and ther was no grocery tax. I can not believe people who receive those emails and think that they are somehow on a secret mailing list for the truth. I am sitting in Seatac on my way back from AK and all I have to say is the people (and I mean the people I met in AK ,35 or so) are all in suport of her. The only negative comment I heard was one lady in Talkeetna say that she hopes Palin doesn't win so that she can stay on as Gov. of AK. active research has given me my answer. For the rest of you children who refuse to find your own truths and only suckel at the tit of the media please GFY.

[ragged325]

There is a reason there is no grocery tax in Wasilla and the people all love Palin.

Basically, Alaska taxes the oil companies and gives the money to the residents. It used to be $2,000/resident per year. Palin raised it to $3,200/resident per year. I've heard a lot of Republicans talk about how we shouldn't tax corporations too much, if Palin's the one doing it, it's fine. Of course, the oil companies pass those taxes on to people that don't live in Alaska, so we're really the ones giving $3,200/resident to the Alaskans. Wonder why they want to drill more there?

Despite this, Alaska is one of the states that receive the most per capita in federal tax money. Again, I thought a lot of Republicans didn't like welfare states, but Alaska is different.

Welcome to the People’s Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state’s Republican governor. That’s $22,400 for a family of seven, like Palin’s. Since 1982, the Alaska Permanent Fund, which invests oil revenues from state lands, has paid out a dividend on invested oil loot to everyone who has been in the state for a year. But Palin upped the ante by joining with Democrats and some recalcitrant Republican state legislators to share in oil company windfall profits, further fattening state tax revenue and permitting an additional payout in tax funds to residents.

No wonder she is popular with voters in a state whose residents pay no income or sales taxes but are blessed with state coffers rolling in cash at a time when all other states are suffering. Indeed, when the oil companies pay more taxes to the state of Alaska, they get to write that off against their federal tax obligation, leaving the rest of us to make up the shortfall.

The state of Alaska owns most of the oil-producing land and was getting upward of 85 percent of its budget from the oil companies that lease the fields, even before Palin helped increase the state’s cut. While other states fire schoolteachers because of the economic downturn, Alaska has, as Palin indicated in accepting John McCain’s offer to join him on the GOP ticket, more money than it knows what to do with. In a display of plucky arrogance at her coming-out press conference, Palin boasted deceptively that if Alaskans wanted that infamous bridge to nowhere, “we’d build it ourselves.”

She originally had supported having U.S. taxpayers finance that boondoggle, before McCain and others in Congress blasted it.

Not that I blame Palin for wrangling for her state a bigger cut of oil company windfall profits; it’s just not an option that will work wonders for states without oil. Of course we can remedy that by having a federal windfall profits tax of the sort that Barack Obama dared propose, and which McCain and his fellow congressional Republicans have managed to quash. Their argument, rejected quite pointedly by Palin for Alaska, is that it would discourage oil companies from investing in boosting oil field yields.

McCain derided Obama’s call for the windfall profits tax, saying it would “increase our dependence on foreign oil and hinder exactly the same kind of domestic exploration and production we need.” I am far more interested in how McCain handles the contradiction between his and Palin’s position on windfall oil profits than whether he properly vetted her on her family-values commitment to the abstinence-only teenage sex education program.

Why is it a good thing for the folks up in Alaska to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation? Didn’t taxpayers from across the U.S. buy the place from the Russians? Isn’t it our federally collected tax dollars that have been subsidizing Alaska more lavishly than any other state, both before and after the bonanza of oil?

Just witness the success of Palin, who, as mayor of the hamlet of Wasilla, hired a big-time lobbying firm intimately connected with the state’s now-indicted Republican Sen. Ted Stevens and thus obtained $27 million in federal earmarks during her tenure. As The Washington Post calculated in a devastating report on Mayor Palin’s assault on the federal treasury, her home town of Wasilla (with about 6,000 inhabitants in 2002 when she was mayor) received $6.1 million, or $1,000 per resident in earmarks, almost as much as Boise, Idaho, got this year with a population that is 30 times larger.

It obviously helped to have Alaska’s now-indicted senator as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee. And despite McCain’s claims that Palin distinguished herself by breaking with Alaska’s discredited Republican establishment in February, the governor sent Stevens a request for $200 million to support various state projects. With representatives like that, it’s no wonder that Alaska, despite its oil boom, is still at the top of states subsidized by federal dollars, receiving $1.84 back from Washington for every $1 that Alaskans pay in federal taxes. (California receives 78 cents for every $1.)

Unfortunately, looking to Palin for advice on helping the rest of us during the oil crunch, as McCain has promised, is a bit like asking a Saudi oil minister or Russia’s Vladimir Putin to provide a model for our nation’s economic woes. They hardly feel our pain at the pump.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080902_palins_alaska_reaps_the_windfall_profits_mccain_decries/

[ragged325]

Bump. Where did the Republicans go? I thought you guys liked to argue.