Just got back from Denver – 100,000 strong in attendance!

Friday at the Hillary rally for Obama in Aurora, we volunteered to work with the ADA group seating and wheeling those who were not fully capable into a special area (required by law).  Today (Sunday) we volunteered again to work with the ADA.  As we were working with the ADA people we had excellent position to watch and listen and clap and holler!  This is the view we had.  I was able to spend some time talking to a staffer from the Obama campaign, which was very interesting for both of us, as he was very curious about what 1968-72 were like, particularly the DNC in Chicago with the police riots and all.  He started with Obama when he was 30 points down in the Primary. The chanting of “Yes We Can!” was more hope than belief.  As we chanted it today, it felt very much like it was about to happen.  We pray, Oh Lord, keep Barack safe in these last 8 days, and the years to come as we bring to pass much of what we have worked for, for so many years since the assassinations of John, Bobby and Martin.  “Yes, We Can and Will Change this Nation and the world around it, God willing!”

For those who are cynical about politicians in general,friday, we had an old lady in a wheel chair who wanted desperately to meet Hillary and thank her for all she had done for Barack.  We grabbed Sen. Ken Salazer and got him to help us get they lady up to Hillary and she spent about 5 minutes speaking with her very graciously with her whole attention.  It was thrilling.

Four years ago Time photographer Callie Shell met Barack Obama backstage when she was covering presidential candidate John Kerry. She sent her editor more photographs of Obama than Kerry. When asked why, she said, “I do not know. I just have a feeling about him. I think he will be important down the road.” Her first photo essay on Obama was two and half years ago. She has stuck with him ever since.

View the “Obama” Gallery

LINK TO ORIGINAL [this brought me to tears.  RWS]

This morning Claudia and I were talking about voting. I explained to her that if you were over 18 and a United States citizen you got to pick who you wanted to be your leader. I tried to simplify it (I don’t even think I could explain the electoral college if I wanted to) and I told her that whoever got the most votes would win.

To illustrate this point I did what any good mommy blogger would do – I Googled a picture of Barack Obama and John McCain.

I pointed at each man and said this is Barack Obama and this is John McCain. Then we looked at a different picture of them and I pointed them out again. Then we looked at another.

I asked Claudia if she could tell which one was which.

She pointed at the man on the left “This is Narack Ofama” (meh, close enough for a four year old) “and this is John McCain. You know how I can tell?”

I asked her how.

“They have different color hair.”

While I sit here and worry that there are Americans out there that won’t vote for a good man just because of the color of his skin I can be assured that at least one of the next generation of voters didn’t even notice the difference.

That gives me hope.

An Open Letter to Bishop Sheridan, Colorado Springs Diocese

[Since I wrote this appeal, and copied Bishop Sheridan, I have been informed by those who are expert in the field that it is a violation of federal tax law for this material to be distributed by a church.  It should be noted that while Dobson attempted to disguise the fact that the material was from his organization by using a front out of Castle Rock easily traceable back to Focus, Sheridan blatantly distributed the information in a plastic mailer with the Catholic Herald.  Seeing as how the government is desperate to find ways to generate more income, it's probably not a good time to be violating the laws which keep religious institutions tax exempt.  I would personally be disappointed in Bishop Sheridan, except he has done it before.  Both the Church and the federal government have forbad this type of activity, yet he apparently considers himself "a law unto himself" and will no doubt answer for it at some point.  There have been so many blatant examples by Right Wing religious organizations over the last several decades that it may be years before the feds get it all sorted out - if they want to.  I have to consider favoring removing the tax-exemption for religious organizations as a reasonable action in response to these willful violations of Church and federal law.]

Dear Bishop Sheridan,

We love you because you are our brother in Christ, and because, in our Church, we look to you for guidance and leadership in living the Christian faith.  However, since I have received materials from Dr. James Dobson, a Christian of a different political stripe than myself, included with my copy of the Catholic Herald, which is your newspaper for you to communicate with the people of the Diocese of Colorado Springs, I have been contemplating writing this letter.

I object to blatant political propaganda being sent out by my Bishop.  It may be appropriate to point out that the money it takes to print and distribute our newspaper comes from your people in the diocese.  I believe it is wrong to attempt to influence how people vote because of your own political persuasions using your office.  Certainly, you, like every American, have every right and responsibility to decide for yourself how to vote, and, as an individual citizen, you have every right to attempt to persuade others to believe as you yourself do.  But when you do it as Bishop, you misuse your position.  I believe JPII was pretty clear on that, and that Benedict has reiterated that the clergy should not be active in politics.  This would be particularly true, I think, of a Bishop.

Unfortunately, you are not the only one in America misusing your office.  Other Bishops across the nation have stated outright that if I as an American vote for someone who does not “toe the line” of Catholic theology in every detail, they should separate themselves from the Catholic Church and not receive at Eucharist.  This is a horrible prospect for most Catholics.  We love the Church, our Pastors and our communities.  They are our family.  We love the Lord Jesus Christ, without whom we would have no Life.  If we cannot receive his body and blood, then we are denied the most precious source of Grace we possess as Christians.

Yet, we are also persuaded in this particular election that an administration of the federal government under John McCain would be perhaps even more disastrous than that of the eight years under George Bush, if that were possible.  For most of us, a particular persons view on legal issues regarding maternity is secondary to the things that will effect all of us; economic policy, foreign policy, social policy.  We believe that Barack Obama, also a Christian by his account, who holds a different view on who should be making medical decisions for a woman than you do, is better equipped than the other candidate to help this country survive the awful situation the Bush administration has left to us.

I know “Right to Life” is very important to you personally.  It is to me too.  With Joe Biden, I agree and accept the authority of the Roman Catholic Church in my own life.  However, as an American, I also believe that others have the right to reach their own conclusions in these matters.  I also agree with the Supreme Court when it states that slavery in this country is illegal, and that when a conflict arises between the Mother and the unborn, the Mother, with her doctor, are the only ones who can make these decisions.  If the Mother chooses to involve a Priest, so much the better from my viewpoint.

However, in no way does my faith dictate that I have a right, nor the government, nor the Church, to impose into that situation my political religious views.  How arrogant to believe that anyone who is not directly involved in the situation at hand, including Congress or the President or the Bishop or Pope, has any right whatsoever to dictate their preferences to another citizen in what is a private medical decision.  How can a reasonable American citizen reach any other conclusion?

Just as slavery and lynching of those less fortunate than ourselves is absolutely unAmerican and certainly anti-Christ, just as witch trials and burning at the stake of unbelievers is not accepted in our society nor our Church, neither do we as a society or our government dictate to people what they can do with their own bodies in heartbreaking medical situations.

To tell your fellow Catholics from your position of power and influence that it would be a sin to vote for someone who does not meet the test of being “the right kind of Christian” is just wrong.  You owe your diocese an apology, and so do other Bishops across America.  Not only for this Presidential campaign, but for the previous two as well.

General Powell on hate

“I am also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, “Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim.” Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he’s a Christian. He’s always been a Christian. But the really right answer is – what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, ‘He’s a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.’ This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son’s grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards — Purple Heart, Bronze Star — showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn’t have a Christian cross, it didn’t have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life.”

Obama’s random act of kindness

from Norwegian blog translated from a Norwegian newspaper, VG.

Mary Menth Andersen was 31 years old at the time and had just married Norwegian Dag Andersen. She was looking forward to starting a new life in Åsgårdstrand in Vestfold with him. But first she had to get all of her belongings across to Norway. The date was November 2nd, 1988.

At the airport in Miami things were hectic as usual, with long lines at the check-in counters. When it was finally Mary’s turn and she had placed her luggage on the baggage line, she got the message that would crush her bubbling feeling of happiness.  “You’ll have to pay a 103 dollar surcharge if you want to bring both those suitcases to Norway,” the man behind the counter said.

Mary had no money. Her new husband had travelled ahead of her to Norway, and she had no one else to call. ” I was completely desperate and tried to think which of my things I could manage without. But I had already made such a careful selection of my most prized possessions,” says Mary.

Although she explained the situation to the man behind the counter, he showed no signs of mercy.  “I started to cry, tears were pouring down my face and I had no idea what to do. Then I heard a gentle and friendly voice behind me saying, ‘That’s OK, I’ll pay for her.’”

Mary turned around to see a tall man whom she had never seen before. He had a gentle and kind voice that was still firm and decisive. The first thing I thought was, Who is this man? Although this happened 20 years ago, Mary still remembers the authority that radiated from the man. He was nicely dressed, fashionably dressed with brown leather shoes, a cotton shirt open at the throat and khaki pants, says Mary.  She was thrilled to be able to bring both her suitcases to Norway and assured the stranger that he would get his money back.

The man wrote his name and address on a piece of paper that he gave to Mary. She thanked him repeatedly. When she finally walked off towards the security checkpoint, he waved goodbye to her. The piece of paper said ‘Barack Obama’ and his address in Kansas, which is the state where his mother comes from.

Mary carried the slip of paper around in her wallet for years, before it was thrown out. He was my knight in shining armor, says Mary, smiling. She paid the 103 dollars back to Obama the day after she arrived in Norway. At that time he had just finished his job as a poorly paid community worker in Chicago, and had started his law studies at prestigious Harvard university.

In the spring of 2006 Mary’s parents had heard that Obama was considering a run for president, but that he had still not decided. They chose to write a letter in which they told him that he would receive their votes. At the same time, they thanked Obama for helping their daughter 18 years earlier.

In a letter to Mary’s parents dated May 4th, 2006 and stamped ‘United States Senate, Washington DC’, Barack Obama writes: ‘I want to thank you for the lovely things you wrote about me and for reminding me of what happened at Miami airport. I’m happy I could help back then, and I’m delighted to hear that your daughter is happy in Norway. Please send her my best wishes. Sincerely, Barack Obama, United States senator’. The parents sent the letter on to Mary.

This week VG met her and her husband in the café that she runs with her friend Lisbeth Tollefsrud in Åsgårdstrand. It’s amazing to think that the man who helped me 20 years ago may now become the next US president, says Mary delightedly. She has already voted for Obama. She recently donated 100 dollars to his campaign. She often tells the story from Miami airport, both when race issues are raised and when the conversation turns to the presidential elections. I sincerely hope the Americans will see reason and understand that Obama means change, says Mary.

A little insight into the real Bill Ayers

McCain continues to attempt to link Obama to terrorists by bringing up the fact that Obama was once chair of an advisory board of an educational program, paid for by the long time Republican supporter, close Reagan friend and multi-millionaire Philip Annenberg, which attempted to improve educational opportunities for the least among us.

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Professor William Ayers, whose father is CEO of Commonwealth Edison, and who is a recognized expert in the field of education, also was a member of that same board.  And, oh yea, he lives down the street from Obama.

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Okay – so even if you want to believe that an eight year old boy (as Obama was at the time) could somehow be seriously involved with “domestic terrorists,” here’s an interesting column giving some facts about the actual events, or rather, the non-events, of 40 years ago. Quite a bit different than the wild claims being made now.

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It’s understandable how both presidential campaigns are handling the phony issue of Sen. Barack Obama’s connection with Bill Ayers, a University of Illinois education professor who, 40 years ago, helped found the militant anti-war group, the Weathermen.

McCain is blanketing Wisconsin and much of the rest of the nation with a massive automated telephone campaign claiming Obama “has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge’s home and killed Americans.”

The reason McCain is spending so much money on deceptive charges that have nothing to do with the real issues in the presidential race is that McCain is on the wrong side of the real issues in the presidential race.

Obama, on the other hand, can only point out he was 8 years old when the Weathermen engaged in radical anti-war activities. And that his association with Ayers amounted to sitting on two boards distributing funds to improve Chicago schools and to support worthwhile community projects.

What Obama is not free to say during the presidential campaign is what anyone who knows the work of Bill Ayers over the past 25 years knows to be true—that Bill Ayers is a good man doing good work and no one running for president should ever have to apologize for associating with him.

If Obama were to utter that truth, it would immediately appear in another negative McCain ad, “Obama praises terrorist bomber!”

Since it’s politically impossible for Obama to give Ayers the accolades he deserves right now, allow me. I know Bill Ayers a little bit. I don’t pal around with him or anything, as the know-nothing Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin claims about Obama.

But I interviewed Ayers in the late ’90s when I was editor of Shepherd Express alternative weekly, after he published a book, “A Kind and Just Parent,” about the need for reform in the juvenile justice system.

Later, Ayers participated in a conference on criminal justice reform at UW-Milwaukee organized by my wife, Kit, who is executive director of the Benedict Center, an organization that advocates for fairness in the criminal justice system and effective community alternatives.

Ayers and his wife, Bernardine Dohrn, an honors graduate from Whitefish Bay High School, know about criminal justice first hand. They lived in hiding for 11 years to avoid federal charges connected to the 1969 Days of Rage anti-war protest in Chicago.

As a Milwaukee Journal reporter, I covered the emergence of Ayers and Dohrn from the underground in 1981 when they turned themselves in to then States Attorney Richard Daley, the son of their ’60s nemesis.

All charges against the two ended with a legal whimper after Dohrn pleaded guilty to a reduced misdemeanor charge and was fined $1,500.

How does all that square with McCain’s inflammatory charge that Ayers bombed the Pentagon, U.S. Capitol and killed Americans?

No such deaths were attributed to any bombs connected to Ayers. The so-called bombing of the Pentagon amounted to a small bomb placed in the drain of a restroom toilet. But in 1970, a townhouse in Greenwich Village where bombs were being assembled exploded. The Americans killed were three friends of Bill and Bernardine, idealists like themselves whose passion against the Vietnam War somehow began echoing the violence of the war makers.

That event, more than any other, helped shape the rest of Ayers’s life.

“My deepest regret,” Ayers told me in 1997, “is the townhouse explosion where three very, very dear people were killed. I feel culpable. I feel responsible. And I don’t know what to do about that responsibility except to live forward. To make a fairer, more just, more humane world as they would have.”

When McCain began demonizing Ayers, I checked to see what Ayers had written in our copy of his memoir, “Fugitive Days.” It says: “To Joel and Kit, With admiration for all you do for social justice, and with hope—wounded but alive—for a world at peace. Best wishes, Bill Ayers.”

The same to you, pal.

Joel McNally is a syndicated columnist. His e-mail address is jmcnally@wi.rr.com.

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Published at: http://www.GazetteXtra.com/news/2008/oct/20/little-insight-real-bill-ayers/

“The ‘real’ America, really” from the LA Times

According to Sarah Palin, she and John McCain “believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation.”

Um, very, um. … Yeah.

Palin later backed away from these remarks, but the McCain-Palin campaign’s staff and surrogates — and even the guy at the top of the ticket — keep hammering the same message: Some parts of America — and some Americans — are just more authentic and “pro-America” than others.

On Saturday, for instance, McCain advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer suggested that although northern Virginia may have “gone more Democratic,” “real Virginia” (the “part of the state that’s more Southern in nature”) will be “very responsive” to McCain. Rep. Robin Hayes (R-N.C.) joined the chorus, telling the crowd at a McCain rally, “Liberals hate real Americans that work, and accomplish, and achieve, and believe in God.”

Hayes, like Palin, later forswore his remarks, but on Tuesday in western Pennsylvania — one of the few parts of the state where Barack Obama doesn’t hold a clear lead — McCain worked the same theme: Western Pennsylvania “is the most God-loving, most patriotic part of America.”

The GOP code isn’t hard to crack: There’s the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there’s the “real” America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are … well … white.

The divisive GOP rhetoric we’ve been hearing lately is hardly new. But with each passing year, the “real” America of GOP mythmaking bears less and less resemblance to the America most Americans live in.

About 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, not small towns. A third of us are ethnic and racial minorities, but that’s changing: Already,nearly 45% of children under 5 are minorities. Although 88%of us believe in God, 70% think that religions other than our own are equally valid routes to truth. And while 59% of us think that wearing an American flag pin is a decent way to show patriotism, even more of us (66%) think that protesting U.S. policies we oppose is a good way to show patriotism. These days, more than half of us say we prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Given this, why do McCain, Palin and their team keep pushing the message that the America where most of the electorate lives isn’t “real”?

The GOP hasn’t been the party of reality-based thinking for some time now. “When we act, we create our own reality,” a “senior Bush advisor” (assumed to be Karl Rove) told journalist Ron Suskind in 2002, and this became the administration’s version of a game plan. Thus Donald Rumsfeld’s conviction — shared by McCain — that we would be “greeted as liberators” in Iraq. For GOP leaders, the Iraq that erupted into a violent insurgency just wasn’t the “real” Iraq.

We’re now seeing the same pathology at work in the McCain-Palin campaign. McCain and Palin look at America and see what they wish was there, rather than what’s actually there: an America in which they’ll be greeted as liberators and rightful heirs to the mantle of leadership. America, after all, has been led by white Anglo-Saxons for the last two-plus centuries and, for the last 40 years, mostly by Republicans. For that to change is almost unthinkable. And so Team McCain just edits out the inconvenient America that doesn’t seem likely to vote GOP. That America’s not real. It just can’t be.

I’m not entirely without sympathy. Behind the anger and the us-versus-them rhetoric we’ve seen at recent McCain-Palin rallies, there’s a palpable sense of dislocation and anxiety: the anxiety of those who feel that things are slipping away from them, that the world is changing too quickly and too uncomfortably. Change has come fast — and change hurts.

But that’s how it’s always been. Our culture was built by immigrants and shaped by wars, social upheavals, economic crises and further rounds of immigration, each time from places that seemed deeply “foreign” to those who had already settled in. Each round of change was painful to those used to the temporary status quo — but each round of change also gave us a richer, stronger nation.

That’s the real America: a land of change and perpetual renewal.

Let’s stand up for it.

from the LA Times

McCain/Palin call Obama Tax Plan “Socialism”

“I’ll say anything to win” McCain continues to describe Obama as a “Socialist” because he incorporates into his proposals the promise to use the same tax system that the US has always had since the inception of the IRS; a progressive income tax.  It is a system where the more one makes, the more tax one pays, and the ones who make the least pay the least.  Any other alternative will not work.

A “regressive” income tax would be where the poorest pay the most and the richest pay the least.  How well would that work, do you think?  Who would pay the most for infrastructure than those who benefit from it the most?  “Redistribution of wealth” is something which goes on at every level – most of the wealth collected by Washington comes back to those who are taxed in the form of roads, bridges, schools, defense, etc.

It has never been otherwise except under Bush where an ever increasing transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy has taken place, to the point where the engine that drives the economy, the middle class, has been bankrupted under Bush. These are the people who pay for everything, not the wealthy.  These are the people making less than $250,000, the hourly worker, the middle manager.

These are not the blessed few who have more money than they know what to do with – who practice conspicuous consumption while the average family is trying to meet the mortgage, send their children to college, and maintain their health care.  Rolling back the tax changes made under Bush to the system under Reagan lowers the tax on the middle class and raises the tax on those that make more than $250,000 a year to Reagan levels, thus allowing the middle class to re-stimulate the economy.  Does that attack small business?  No, 90% of small business pays personal taxes, not corporate taxes, and do not net income more than $250,000 a year.  You can’t call Obama “socialist” unless Ronald Reagan is a socialist as well.  Warren Buffett, the richest capitalist in the world, endorses Obama, not McCain, who advocates more of the same.

That’s what got us to this point!

Al-Qaeda site backs McCain

Al-Qaeda supporters have said they are hoping John McCain becomes the next US President, as the “impetuous” Republican candidate would be more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a message posted on the password-protected al-Hesbah website this week, Al-Qaeda supporters said McCain had “pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier”. He was the best choice for President, if Al-Qaeda wanted to exhaust the UD both militarily and economically: “Al-Qaeda will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush.”

The message also suggests that the best way to usher in a McCain presidency would be to carry out a pre-election terror attack.

“If Al Qaeda carries out a big operation against American interests,” the message said, “this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it.”

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Maryland, monitors the Web site and translated the message.  Reported by Newsdesk

No to Abortion:Posture, Not Policy

By Dennis O’Brien

It is clear that the Catholic Church has a moral position on abortion. It is not clear that it has a political policy on the issue. Moral positions do not automatically create public policies. I may be morally opposed to the use of addictive drugs, but I may also think that the U.S. public policy of highly punitive jail sentences for drug use is wrong. My grounds for rejecting current drug policy would be that it is ineffective (it does not eliminate the problem), counterproductive (it makes the problem worse by criminalization of use) and immoral (long jail terms for drug use are immoral). Presumably the church’s public policy is “repeal of Roe v. Wade.” If that is the extent of the church’s policy, one could ask whether repeal would be effective (would it eliminate abortions), counterproductive (would it be make the problem worse) or even immoral (would there be moral consequences of repeal that would be repugnant).

If the church’s policy is simply “repeal of Roe,” it is a vacuous policy, since it does not address the legal effect of repeal. In Roe the Supreme Court in 1973 declared a constitutionally protected right of “privacy” in regard to abortion. If Roe is reversed, the legal situation would revert to the individual states, which would be free to legislate in the field of abortion. One could expect a wide range of state laws, from prohibitive to permissive. In short, repeal of Roe would not by any reasonable stretch of the imagination abolish abortion within the United States. Abortion would be like divorce in the old days, when one had to go to Reno for a quick and easy divorce. Oregon could become the abortion and euthanasia capital of the United States.

In seeking repeal of Roe, some may fancy an amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would have the same broad-scale effect as Roe but in the opposite direction: a ruling that would constitutionally ban abortion as a violation of a protected right of the fetus. Given the sharp divisions in the American populace over the legitimacy of abortion, the chances that any such amendment could muster the broad approval necessary for constitutional change are remote to the vanishing point.

Repeal of Roe would, therefore, result in the recriminalization of abortion either nationally-constitutionally (unlikely) or in certain states (very likely). As long as one is simply morally opposed to abortion, the scope of the legal restrictions and the problem of levels of criminality and punishment need not be raised, but they cannot be avoided if abortion is recriminalized. Will the church advocate a ban on all abortions? What will the church say about abortions for pregnancy after rape or incest? (There is significant popular support for this as a legitimate sanction for abortion, so allowance for that exception would no doubt be written into the legislation of at least some states.) What will church authorities consider proper criminal penalties for abortion? On whom will they fall? The abortion provider? The woman? The newly elected senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, M.D., has from time to time advocated the death penalty for abortionists. Now that would be a public policy! Would the church support this?

Thinking the matter through to the issue of criminality and its penalties should affect how one regards the moral gravity of abortion per se and the circumstances surrounding any particular abortion decision. If the harshest language of anti-abortion advocates were to be accepted, drastic penalties would seem to be appropriate. If abortion is a form of genocide, would not armed resistance to abortionists be legitimate? If abortion is simply murder of innocent life, as our parish priest affirmed one recent Sunday, there would seem to be no difference between abortion and infanticide. Would anyone having an illegal abortion be subject, therefore, to an extended prison term or even execution in states where that is the practice? If these drastic penalties seem misplaced, one can certainly continue to regard abortion as a moral fault (I do) but one of lesser gravity than genocide or infanticide. Lessening the gravity also would imply that there could be extenuating circumstances that could lessen the fault, if not wholly remove it.

A Posture, Not a Policy

I do not pretend that there are easy answers to any of these questions; but unless they are addressed, church opposition to abortion remains a posture but not a policy. Catholic bishops who threaten to excommunicate Catholic politicians who support Roe should be obliged to think through the issue of public policy, because public policy is the issue for politicians. In turn, the proper reply of Catholic politicians who support Roe should not be a statement of personal moral opposition to abortion. That is as much an avoidance of the policy issue as is the bishops’ moral posturing. The right reply from a politician is to insist on the policy question. They should ask the bishop: do you favor recriminalization of abortion? If so, who is to be penalized; what penalties are appropriate; are there extenuating circumstances?

There are further questions: Would the abortion issue be better treated in a patchwork of state laws—the most obvious outcome of repealing Roe? I do not believe there is an obvious answer to that question. While I believe that issues like abortion, gay marriage and the like are much better dealt with in the back and forth of the legislative process than by broad judicial decree, there is a significant price to pay for too great a discrepancy among multiple and varying state laws. Certainly the patchwork solution will not prohibit abortions; it will simply make them more inconvenient and expensive. Abortion will be readily available to those who can afford to travel; it may be de facto denied to the poor. Denial of access to abortion legally or financially in this or that jurisdiction will, one can be certain, cause the re-emergence of “back-alley” abortions. The trauma and danger of back-alley procedures will, of course, be confined to the poor.

I have suggested that the church’s policy position on abortion goes no further than “repeal of Roe.” That generalization is to a certain extent incorrect. If one were to derive a policy from the actual work of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, the policy would be more like “setting conditions on abortion.” Sometimes these efforts have been directed at the conditions of the pregnancy, as in the ban on “partial birth” abortion. Others have been directed at how the woman should be required to proceed in order to obtain an abortion: establishing a waiting period or requiring parental consent for minors. I am strongly in favor of these efforts, but there is significant lack of connection between these prudent efforts and the rhetoric about abortion most often heard from official church sources. As suggested above, if abortion is rightly characterized as “genocide” or “murder,” efforts to “set conditions” would be deeply wrong. One would not advocate a waiting period and parental consent for a young woman contemplating infanticide. As Aristotle pointed out long ago, there are some actions that cannot be performed better or worse. No doubt it is “better” on the whole that an execution be as painless as possible, but execution may not be the sort of thing one should do painlessly or painfully. Painless infanticide is no better for being painless.

The question of how to go about setting conditions on abortion poses a significant dilemma for the church. Either the official “murder” rhetoric is too drastic, or the ongoing attempt to limit abortions is too compromising. My view is that the rhetoric is at fault. Almost all decisions to abort are morally flawed. Some are deeply immoral and inexcusable—for example, the decision to abort because the fetus is the wrong sex. But if almost all decisions to abort are morally problematic, not all situations are equally immoral and deserving of condemnation as murder plain and simple.

Moving away from “murder” as a description inevitably leads into extremely complex moral assessments. Unwillingness to deal with complexity makes simplistic rhetoric a temptation. Assessing individual abortion situations on some scale of moral faults would include consideration of the highly varied circumstances of the woman. Why the pregnancy? Was it due to rape? What is her current economic, domestic or mental condition? Was she coerced by parents or by her sexual partner to abort? And so on.

The Moral Claim of the Fetus

Ultimately one cannot, I fear, avoid assessing the moral claim of the fetus at different stages in its development. This is certainly a “slippery slope,” but failure to recognize different moral positions for varying stages of life—for example, equating abortion and infanticide—avoids reality. Parents may grieve for a miscarriage, but not as they would over a crib death. The fetus has a strong presumptive claim to live to term, but unlike the claim on life of the newborn, the fetus’s claim may be overridden under certain serious conditions—for instance, indirect abortions, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy or the removal of a womb with a cancerous tumor. That statement is at the heart of the conflict over the moral legitimacy of abortion. One may, of course, deny that the fetus’s claim is any different from that of the newborn, but if so the whole array of assumptions and sanctions about murder must apply. Calling abortion murder may look good on a protest sign, but it is highly problematic as a criminal statute.

It would be helpful if there were some clear criteria for determining the exact claim of the fetus at various stages and how that claim would intersect with the woman’s situation. I doubt that any such a decision table could be devised, but that does not mean that one must retreat to overly simple, black and white criteria as a substitute—for example, the assertion that the fetus has from the moment of conception full personal rights similar to those of the newborn. The extraordinary complexity of the woman’s circumstances and the status of the fetus may be one minor argument for not trying to formulate elaborate legal structures around abortion and leaving it to her choice. Choice should, however, be placed within the complex moral framework that the highly particular situations of the woman may demand. There should be a waiting period, consultation and realistic support and adoption procedures to support carrying the fetus to term.

I would be less concerned with leaving the issue with “choice,” if it were not for the emptiness and amorality of the pro-choice rhetoric. I have accused church officials of posturing, but posturing is not confined to the opponents of abortion. It is equally the fault line in the “pro-choice” camp, but as the inverse of the “pro-life” advocates. If Catholics pronounce on morality to the neglect of policy, pro-choice advocates fix on policy to the exclusion of serious moral discourse. Concentrating on the public policy of choice ignores the question whether all choices are morally worthy. I certainly hope that pro-choice advocates would agree with me that abortion for sex determination is an immoral and inexcusable choice. Perhaps if the pro-choice advocates would stop posturing on “choice” and the bishops on “morality,” it would be possible to devise a public conversation as well as flexible public policies that would make abortion in the United States “safe, legal and rare.”

I noted at the beginning of this essay that moral positions do not automatically create public policy. I suggested that United States public policy on drugs was ineffective, counterproductive and immoral. One could make the same arguments about a simplistic attachment to the repeal of Roe. Certainly repeal would be ineffective in prohibiting legalized abortion within the United States. Concentrating on the impossible goal of prohibiting abortion is counter-productive insofar as it bars discussion with those, even in the pro-choice camp, who would support measures that thicken the moral context within which abortion decisions would be undertaken and agitate to ameliorate economic and social policies along with cultural expectations that force young women to seek an abortion. Finally, prohibition of abortion will lead to the immoral consequences attendant on “back-alley” procedures. These consequences are real. Abortion may be so heinous that the consequences must be tolerated, but they cannot be ignored.

Voter-Fraud Fraud

The idea that Democrats try to win elections by arranging for hordes of nonexistent people with improbable names to vote for them has long been a favorite theme of Rove-era Republicans. Now it’s become a desperate obsession.

Consider today’s fund-raising e-mail from Robert M. (Mike) Duncan, chairman of the Republican National Committee. Some snippets:

Every election, it’s the same old song and dance from the Democrats and their liberal allies when it comes to donor and vote fraud.They will soon be trying to pad their totals at ballot boxes across the country with votes from voters that do not exist. From Ohio and Florida to Wisconsin and Nevada, there are reports of fraudulent voter registration forms being submitted by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a liberal group that is dedicating its resources to electing the Obama-Biden Democrats.

The e-mail climaxes with this pledge, which one hopes is delivered with a Sarah Palin wink: “We will not stand for the stealing of the election—the tainting of our democracy—by those who wish to subvert the rule of law.”

ACORN has become the 24/7 story on Fox News, too, on account of reports that it has submitted several thousand phony registration forms to local boards of elections. These reports appear to be true. Nevertheless, the “scandal,” as Fox calls it, is itself on its face as phony as Mickey Mouse’s social security number.

During this election cycle, the Times reported today, ACORN has deployed thirteen thousand mostly paid workers, who have registered 1.3 million new voters. One or two per cent of these workers turned in sheaves of forms that they filled out themselves with fake names and bogus addresses, and, even though at least a hundred of these workers have already been fired, the forged forms have been submitted to election boards.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that groups like ACORN are required by law to submit them, even if they’re obvious fakes. This is to prevent funny business, such as trashing forms that look like they might be Republican (or Democratic, as the case may be).

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that ACORN normally sorts through forms, flags those that look fishy, and submits the fishy ones in a separate pile for the convenience of election officials.

Sounds suspicious—until you reflect that the motivation of the misbehaving registration workers is almost always to look like they’ve been doing more work than they really have, and that the victim of the “fraud” is actually the organization they’re working for.

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that even if one of these fake forms results in a nonexistent person actually being registered, now under the Help America Vote Act of 2002, “any voter who has not previously voted in a federal election” must provide identification in order to actually cast a ballot. This will make it tough for Mickey Mouse, even if registered, to vote, no matter how big, round, or black his ears. Likewise, members of the Duck family (Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewey, and Louie) who turn up at the polling place will have a hard time getting into the voting booth. (Uncle Scrooge might be able to bribe his way in, but he’s voting Republican anyway.)

Sounds suspicious—unless you know that despite all the hysteria, from 2002 to 2005, only twenty people in the entire United States of America were found guilty of voting while ineligible and only five of voting more than once. By contrast, consider the lede on this story, published a week ago today:

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times.

And take it from Sarah Palin: the Times is “hardly ever wrong.”

from the New Yorker October 15, 2008

Joe the Plumber

Welcome to your 15 minutes of fame.  It’s not everyone who gets his name mentioned 286 times in a presidential debate.  If you haven’t already, you simply must change your business’s name to Joe the Plumber.  That’s just good marketing.  Oh, and don’t forget to add the tag line, “As seen on TV!”

OK, Joe, so you had a conversation with Barack Obama and, while media reports are very sketchy about exactly what your circumstances are (not surprising), it appears you want to buy a business that “brings in” more than $250,000.  I have yet to find out if “brings in” means $250,000 in revenue or profit (a very important distinction, Joe), but let’s assume for a moment that it’s profit we’re talking about.  Under Barack Obama’s plan (as sketchy as it is on his website), a good guess would be that you would go into a higher tax bracket, paying about 3.6% more in taxes on every dollar you earn over $250,000, for a total marginal tax rate of 39.6% — exactly the same as it was in the 1990s.

UPDATE

It turns out that Joe is not a good businessman for a simple reason:  He doesn’t own a business, appears to have no immediate prospects to do so, has no plumber’s license, works for a small firm doing residential work (which means his employer is unlikely to be clearing $250k per year), and has occasionally talked to the owner about buying the business — someday.

Poor Joe.  He’s about to get ripped to shreds by the media, and he seems like a pretty decent guy.  I feel for him.

On the other hand, Joe is a great example of those who are so terrified that they’ll get rich some day and owe an extra 3.5 cents on every dollar over $250,000 that they spend a lot of time worrying about it.  Joe doesn’t know that he is unlikely ever to make that kind of money.

UPDATE #2

It just gets better and better.  Bloomberg is reporting that Joe owes around $1200 in back taxes, and there is an Ohio lien filed against him.

But let’s take a closer look at your situation, shall we Joe?

You say you’re planning to buy this business, and it must be a very large small business, indeed, if it covers salaries, expenses, trucks, inventory and the like and still yields a $250,000 + profit.  I’m going to guess that you don’t have the cash to buy this business outright, Joe, and if you do, I think you’re holding back on us.  I think you’ve inherited some money.  But let’s assume that you’re borrowing a fair amount of money to buy the business, using its book value (what the business is worth if you sold all the assets and paid off all your debts) as security and using the revenue stream to pay off the loan.  Let’s also assume a business this size is incorporated.

Here’s what you do, Joe.  First off, you have your corporation pay you a salary of, say, $249,000 per year.  Now you’re not in the higher marginal tax bracket, right?  Payments on the loan you took out to buy the business are fully tax deductible, so profits will be reduced by that amount.  If you still have more than $250,000 in profit, we’re talking about a rather large business here, and probably a very large down payment (which suggests that you can manipulate your down payment to reduce your taxes, doesn’t it?)

But here’s the thing, Joe.  When you own a business, you can do all kinds of things to reduce taxable income (profit).  For instance, you can buy more equipment, which can then be depreciated over the years, providing a tax deduction and increasing the company’s book value and, thus, your wealth.  Even fully depreciated equipment can generally be sold, in the future, for something.  You can spend more money on advertising and hire on a new plumber or two.  The advertising costs and the employment costs are generally fully tax deductible.  Well, let me take that back.  If you provide your employees with health insurance, your costs for health insurance won’t be tax deductible under John McCain’s plan, but who’s counting, right?

By advertising and hiring on, you can drastically increase your revenues (the amount of money coming in) while keeping profits below the $250,000 mark.  The increased revenues will make the resale value of your business much higher than it already is, increasing your wealth without getting taxed on that increase.  If you want to take more wealth out right now without paying taxes, there is a cornucopia of tax-free or tax-deferred retirement options, benefits, and the like that can move money right around the IRS’s outstretched palm.

Eventually, Joe, your company will be so large, and you will be so wealthy, than an extra 3.5 pennies in tax on each dollar on income you earn over $250,000 will be chickenfeed to you (if it isn’t already).  But, hey, it’s up to you.  Increase the underlying wealth in your company without paying taxes, or take cash now and pay a few additional taxes on it.

But, please, don’t complain to me about paying more taxes.  All it says to me is that you’re not smart enough to run your business’s financial side.

Where Are We Going with this Bailout?

I’m not an economist, but I have been paying attention. Here are the sequence of events as I saw them happen:

At some point, by some means, Secretary of the Treasury Paulson and Chairman of the Federal Reserve

http://edkrebs.com/herb/Fascist-Palin-.jpg

Board Bernanke, became aware that AIG – the largest insurance company in the world – was floundering financially. In fact, I understand that AIG approached treasury because they said they could not raise enough capital privately.

Now it should be noted here that, at least to my understanding, one division of AIG had a “liquidity” problem, and that other divisions were, in fact, profitable, and could have “bailed out” the division in trouble without bothering the US taxpayers and their money at all.

Enormous assets are held around the world by this conglomerate of many different companies, and if the cash wasn’t readily available, assets could have no doubt been liquidated to cover the “temporary shortfall.”Additionally, there are the protections offered for companies in bankruptcy of which I understand AIG is well aware, having been there before. So why was this time different? I don’t know and can’t find out anywhere any particular situation being different that would have necessitated the federal government to step in this time. In fact, from what I can see, it is probably true that AIG could loan the federal government money rather than the other way around. This country is technically financially “bankrupt” in the sense that the only “product” the government produces, our currency, is valued as less every day by traders around the world. It is, after all, the primary task of the Fed and Treasury to ensure that American dollar value remains high.

But here comes AIG asking for a handout, and since they received that handout, they continue to send their employees on expensive junkets, at taxpayer expense, instead of taking seriously the fact that, partly due to them, the public deficit has now doubled in the last few weeks!

Nevertheless, as I understand it, Paulson and Bernanke and perhaps Cox, Chairman of SEC, decided to make available $85 billion in loans at a rate of over 11%. I can understand why the President would tell them to go ahead with what needed to be done – that’s why a President has advisors and department heads, to be experts in their field.

According to Paulson and Bernanke, they watched as the credit markets froze after making this deal with AIG and as they allowed Lehman Brothers, the oldest investment bank in Wall Street, to be liquidated. Why didn’t Lehman Brothers go into bankruptcy protection instead of immediately falling like a corpse picked apart by vultures?  I can’t find an answer for that either.

So now we have the situation where a few investment banks have gone belly up because they were gambling with other peoples money and got caught short. To me and I suspect the general public, it looks like the federal government has chosen to front some money to each of these “for profit” corporations so they could belly back up to the table and keep gambling so they can try to recoup their losses. This is the behavior of someone who is addicted to gambling, just before they blow their brains out in their unpaid for motel room.

Has the so-called “credit crisis” eased since the actions of Treasury and the Fed?  Not that I have heard. The stock market continues to tumble, which was not what the government was attempting to address, as I understand it. Are the billions that were added to the public debt being used to buy up the “toxic debt” which originally was said to be causing this problem?  No, it has been funneled to very wealthy banks and they have been told to start lending to corporations and the public. I have not heard that that is happening yet, at least.

Like many, I am trying to determine in my own mind whether we just have an awful example of rank incompetence on the part of those who have engineered this fiasco so far, or if there is something systemically failing in our system of government and economic practice. If, as some say, the market got the way it is through “capitalistic free-market” principles, why isn’t the solution free market and capitalistic as well?  When the government starts acting as instigated by corporations, or acting “in partnership” with corporations, are we not far afield from capitalistic principles?  I have heard some say that it is “socialism.”

Actually, from what I can see, it is by definition “fascist” according to the definitions I have included below.

Fascism

“A philosophy or system of government that is marked by stringent social and economic control, a strong, centralized government usually headed by a dictator, and often a policy of belligerent nationalism.” (From The American Heritage Dictionary)

Socialism

An “economic, social and political doctrine which expresses the struggle for the equal distribution of wealth by eliminating private property and the exploitative ruling class. In practice, such a distribution of wealth is achieved by social ownership of the means of production, exchange and diffusion.” (Rius, Marx for Beginners (New York: Pantheon Books, 1976), 152.)

Capitalism

Capitalism is an economic theory which stresses that control of the means of producing economic goods in a society should reside in the hands of those who invest the capital for production. It is a system based on the production of goods and services for exchange rather than use. Private ownership and free enterprise supposedly leads to more efficiency, lower prices, better products. Adam Smith popularized this theory in his 1776 book The Wealth of Nations.

As far as rank incompetence on the part of Paulson and Bernanke, I believe they are both rather new in their positions. Bernanke, I understand, is a professor with zero experience in business, and Paulson was CEO of Goldman-Sachs, one of the investment banks involved in this who have now changed to a “regular” bank, now insured by the FDIC (which is us). I am under the impression that he is not an economist but a trader and business man whose focus has always been on making money, not understanding the economy from a theoretical standpoint.

So if a Democrat administration had been in charge, what would have been different?  Would Bernanke still be in charge of the Fed?  We know Paulson will leave with the outgoing administration, so we can assume he would not be appointed by a Democratic President. Perhaps former Secretary of the Treasury Robert E. Rubin or Larry Sumner would be in Treasury. Perhaps former Fed Chair Volker would be in the Fed. (I’m ignoring Greenspan because he was in for so long before Bernanke that it is likely that Greenspan’s policies have much to do with the present situation.)

So what do Rubin and Volker say about the present situation? I can’t really find anything indicating a policy statement by Rubin, but an article from Financial Post is instructional:

Rubin Sees End to Crisis

Eoin Callan, Financial Post Published: Tuesday, September 30, 2008

It takes a brave soul to call the bottom in the depths of a global financial crisis, but yesterday Citigroup Inc.’ s Robert Rubin ventured a cautious prediction the end was in sight after his institution agreed to buy Wachovia Corp.’ s banking operations in a government-backed rescue.

As shock waves from the financial implosion on Wall Street continued to topple institutions around the world, the former U. S. Treasury secretary said governments had the power to “stem the immediate crisis of confidence” in world markets.

Speaking as the future of a US$700-billion bailout package was cast into doubt, the Citigroup director said it was within the gift of policymakers to restore stability, predicting the U. S. banking system would “weather” the turmoil.

“If we don’t, we are all in a new world,” said the Citigroup director.

The view from the boardroom underlines the pivotal role bank executives expect world leaders to play in halting the worsening credit crisis, and came after George W. Bush, the U. S. President, approved an emergency rescue of Wachovia, the sixth-largest U. S. lender.

The rescue follows a dramatic wave of consolidation in the global banking industry brought on by an unprecedented seizure in credit markets and concentrates control of more than a third of the U. S. retail branch system in the hands of three banks: Bank of America Corp., JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Citigroup.

The deal protects depositors but decimates Wachovia shareholders, setting a fresh precedent that spooked investors in financial stocks who see the terms as a model for how authorities will handle failing banks in the absence of a comprehensive bailout scheme.

As high-political drama yesterday on Capitol Hill gave way to in-fighting, shares in Citigroup fell 12% as the wider U. S. financial sector dropped 11% and Canadian financials slid 5.6%. While heavyweights Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank and Bank of Nova Scotia were the biggest contributors to the decline in Canadian financials, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and Bank of Montreal shares were the worst performing big banks, dumping 8.5% and 9.4% respectively.

The rescue of Wachovia will land a direct hit on Toronto-based financial institutions such as Manulife Financial Corp., which has $600-million in exposures to the bank.

The terms of the takeover allow the branches and deposits of Wachovia to be picked up at a fire-sale price of US$1 a share, or about US$2.2-billion, but mean Citigroup will absorb up to US$42-billion in losses on a US$312-billion pool of tainted loans, with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. assuming losses beyond that point.

“I think it was the right decision,” Mr. Rubin, the Citigroup director, told the Financial Post after a 6.30 a.m. board meeting yesterday to approve the deal.

Outlining the tense 48 hours leading up to the agreement, Mr. Rubin said the Citigroup board had met twice on Saturday to assess the situation and again on Sunday to strategize before a marathon negotiating session that continued until just before dawn yesterday morning.

With minimal time to assess the risks lurking in Wachovia’s books, the Citigroup board appears to have been guided in part by confidence that credit markets would start to stabilize in six to 12 months.

Mr. Rubin said that as former U. S. Treasury secretary he had witnessed first-hand crises when markets enter “a state of deep psychological duress and at some point begin to heal themselves.”

“I think public policy should be able to stem the immediate crisis of confidence,” he said after flying to Toronto to address an industry conference hosted by the Financial Times.

An article in MarketWatch gives us a sense of Volker’s opinion of government bailouts. Former Treasury Secretary Sumner seems to share Volker’s philosophical bent in the same article.

Volcker: Fed’s role should be above politics of whether to support markets

By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch 5:13 p.m. EDT April 9, 2008

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker on Wednesday challenged recent moves by the central bank, including its $29 billion bailout of Bear Stearns Cos. and interest rate cuts, saying both could create more problems than solutions.

Last month’s rescue of Bear Stearns and the subprime mortgage mess that led up to it illustrate sharp differences between investment and commercial banks, with the latter better capitalized and regulated, and therefore better able “to protect against these crises,” said Volcker, speaking at the Harvard Club of New York City.

The Fed intervention also calls into question what role the central bank might be expected to play if and when other such scenarios arise, said Volcker, who chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987.

“Taking this kind of action in an emergency does create a precedent in people’s minds… the more you support the market, the more political concerns arise. The Federal Reserve is supposed to be above all that,” said Volcker.

“Financial crises don’t come along unless there are underlying problems,” said Volker, who pointed to years of the U.S. consuming more than it produces, with U.S. debt financed by money from abroad and Americans buying cheap goods from overseas.

“The only trouble is you can’t go on forever spending more than you’re producing,” he said.

Volcker, whose Fed is credited for halting the stagflation crisis of the 1970s, also maintained the central bank’s interest rate cuts won’t be an easy fix to current financial problems. “The history of markets is littered with the idea you can solve problems by raising inflation,” he said.

Addressing the same audience, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said the U.S. economy is “currently in recession,” but the next administration would likely inherit an economy on the cusp of recovery.

“In a technical sense the recession will have ended when the next president takes office,” although the climate may not feel much improved, said Summers, a Harvard University professor who led the U.S. Treasury during the Clinton Administration.

David Walker, up until recent weeks the country’s comptroller general, lashed out at the “imprudent and immoral practices of the Federal government,” saying the current policy of low taxes and high government spending means “tomorrow’s taxpayers will pay the bill, (including) those too young to vote and some of them not born yet.”

For a financial system to work, it needs to have incentives “for people to behave the right way,” adequate transparency, and individual and institutional accountability when things go wrong, said Walker, who for a decade headed the Government Accountability Office.

So what do Rubin, Sumner and Volker say about the present situation?  Note that this instruction came clear back in April, but certainly applies to what has occurred in August and September and continues on into October.

It seems clear that a Democratic administration would not have intervened in the troubles of Wall Street, which has now spread to the global markets. Barack Obama, who voted for the bailout, has said that if and when elected, he will be reviewing every line of this bailout, and may change the rules once able to do so.

from MIKE ALLEN, Politico 9/28/08 7:59 AM EDT
Hours after a tentative congressional agreement on a mortgage bailout program, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said Sunday morning that he is likely to support it but might seek changes in the program if he is elected.

“If elected President, I will order a thorough review of this plan to make sure that it fully lives up to the principles I’ve laid out,” Obama said. “And I will also move quickly to upgrade our financial regulations for the 21st century, establishing new rules of the road and tougher oversight to ensure that the American taxpayers are never again forced to put their money and their futures at risk because of bad decisions in Washington and on Wall Street.”

Suggesting he will support the plan, Obama said: “While I look forward to reviewing the language of the legislation, it appears that the tentative deal embraces [four] principles [he had advocated].”

Obama’s statement began: “The breakthrough between Congress and the Administration is the culmination of a sorry period in our history, in which reckless speculation and greed on Wall Street and lax oversight from Washington led to a meltdown of our financial markets. But regardless of how we got here, a failure to deal with the current crisis would have devastating consequences for our economy, costing millions of Americans their jobs and retirement security.

“To understand how this tentative deal was reached, it’s important to remember how this all began. The Bush Administration initially asked for a blank check to respond to this problem, which I strongly opposed. It would have been unconscionable to expect the American people to hand this Administration or any Administration a $700 billion check with no conditions and no oversight when a lack of oversight in Washington and on Wall Street is exactly what got us into this mess. If the American people are being asked to pay for the solution to this crisis, their tax dollars must be protected.

“That is why over the past ten days, in conversations with the President, Secretary of Treasury and leaders of Congress, I laid out the four core principles I believed had to guide any solution: oversight by an independent board; protections for taxpayers to ensure that they are treated like investors and that they receive any profits – and recoup any losses – from this plan; measures to help homeowners stay in their homes; and rules to make sure CEOs are not being rewarded at taxpayers’ expense. While I look forward to reviewing the language of the legislation, it appears that the tentative deal embraces these principles.

“When taxpayers are asked to take such an extraordinary step because of the irresponsibility of a relative few, it is not a cause for celebration. But this step is necessary. Now Washington has to show the same sense of urgency in dealing with the crisis facing Main Street and the middle class by passing an emergency economic stimulus plan that would create jobs by rebuilding our crumbing roads; shore up flagging state budgets to prevent drastic cuts in education and health care; and extend expiring unemployment insurance benefits for those who’ve lost their jobs in this downturn and cannot find new ones.”

GOP’s latest ugly fable

If the economic situation weren’t so grim, it’d be darkly amusing watching conservatives hunting for a scapegoat other than Bush administration True Believers. Hey, they’re all Brownies now. Heckuva job. For a generation, devotees of the very bad novelist Ayn Rand have assured us that greed is a virtue and government oversight of financial institutions an impediment to genius. In the “ownership society,” financial regulations were for pantywaists. In GOP-think, governments exist purely to drop bombs and monitor other people’s sex lives. Financial deregulation has been the Republican miracle elixir since Ronald Reagan. Back in March, Sen. John McCain reassured The Wall Street Journal that despite being “aware of the view that there is a need for government oversight” in debacles like the sub-prime lending crisis, “I am fundamentally a deregulator.” In between winks and shout-outs to “Joe Sixpack” during the vice-presidential debate, Sarah Palin also wanted it both ways. She praised McCain for “pushing for even harder and tougher regulations.” Then she said patriotism means saying, “Government, you know, you’re not always the solution. In fact, too often you’re the problem, so government… get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper.” Meanwhile, naïve, otherworldly progressives argued that mortgage lenders needed regulators in the back room for the same reason they needed locks on the front door. You’d think that any adult who’d ever bought real estate, avoided losing his life savings to Nigerian e-mail scams or even spent rainy afternoons playing Monopoly as a child would understand this fundamental fact of human nature: If you make it easy for people to steal, they’ll steal everything, including the silverware and Grandma’s dentures.

Alas, too many heeded pie-in-the-sky GOP theology. The miracle-working market absolved us all from sin; hence, from the Reagan-created savings-and-loan crisis onward, corporate financial scandals have grown steadily larger and more dangerous. But abandon dogma ? Never.

Now come GOP apologists to identify the real perps of the Wall Street meltdown: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, feckless black folks, Mexican Americans and U. S. Rep. Barney Frank, who’s evidently been covertly running Wall Street all this time.

See, while you fretted over Bush screwups in Iraq, Afghanistan and New Orleans, a sinister, dusky cabal built a speculative bubble in ghetto real estate. Overpriced luxury condos were constructed with borrowed money in fashionable Harlem, Watts and the south side of Chicago; also, downtown Atlanta, Newark, St. Louis, Detroit, Memphis and Philadelphia. In Monopoly terms, the entire U. S. economy drained into a black hole of defaulted loans on Baltic and Mediterranean.

So how come you haven’t heard this before ? Maybe because you don’t spend enough time watching FOX News or listening to GOP talk radio. In those precincts, the real cause of the national (and world ) financial debacle turns out to be an obscure 1977 law known as the Community Reinvestment Act, or CRA.

Intended to end the practice of “redlining,” i. e., refusing to make creditworthy loans in “bad” neighborhoods, the CRA was enacted under President Carter. To conservative pundits such as Charles Krauthammer, Jeff Jacoby and Laura Ingraham, that’s where all the trouble started.

Supposedly, left-wing activists intimidated bankers into making risky loans to improvident minorities, which caused the whole debacle. Supposedly, too, President Clinton made things worse by revising the rules back in 1995.

Leave it to Ann Coulter to spell things out most clearly. Thanks to Democratic interference with free markets, see, sound methods of appraising mortgage applicants’ ability to repay loans were replaced by “nontraditional measures of creditworthiness, such as having a good jump shot or having a missing child named ‘Caylee.’” As a result, she recently wrote, “Middleclass taxpayers are going to be forced to bail out the Democrats’ two most important constituent groups: rich Wall Street bankers and welfare recipients.” The brutality of this argument is matched only by its stupidity. An alert child would wonder why a 31-year-old law suddenly started causing trouble in 2008. Wouldn’t a lot of those loans already be paid off ? Wouldn’t the same apply to actions that Clinton supposedly took 13 years ago ? Besides, with Republicans controlling the government for the past eight years, how come they didn’t fix it ?

Mainly because it’s utter nonsense. CRA regulations apply only to FDICinsured banks, not the mortgage companies and investment banks, which made 83. 4 percent of sub-prime loans responsible for the crisis. The 1977 law also has nothing whatsoever to do with fraudulent packages of “securitized” mortgage debt taking down investors worldwide. Those are a Bush-era innovation.

Rick Pearlstein, author of the brilliant history “Nixonland,” calls this ugly fable “a modern-day equivalent of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ a Big Lie narrative that blames a despised, outcast social group for problems they had nothing to do with.” A naïve person might imagine that these people would have some shame.

—–––––•–––––—Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

The Man Behind the Whispers About Obama

By JIM RUTENBERG

NY Times

The most persistent falsehood about Senator Barack Obama’s background first hit in 2004 just two weeks after the Democratic convention speech that helped set him on the path to his presidential candidacy: “Obama is a Muslim who has concealed his religion.”

That statement, contained in a press release, spun a complex tale about the ancestry of Mr. Obama, who is Christian.

The press release was picked up by a conservative Web site, FreeRepublic.com, and spread steadily as others elaborated on its claims over the years in e-mail messages, Web sites and books. It continues to drive other false rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.

Just last Friday, a woman told Senator John McCain at a town-hall-style meeting, “I have read about him,” and “he’s an Arab.” Mr. McCain corrected her.

Until this month, the man who is widely credited with starting the cyberwhisper campaign that still dogs Mr. Obama was a secondary character in news reports, with deep explorations of his background largely confined to liberal blogs.

But an appearance in a documentary-style program on the Fox News Channel watched by three million people last week thrust the man, Andy Martin, and his past into the foreground. The program allowed Mr. Martin to assert falsely and without challenge that Mr. Obama had once trained to overthrow the government.

An examination of legal documents and election filings, along with interviews with his acquaintances, revealed Mr. Martin, 62, to be a man with a history of scintillating if not always factual claims. He has left a trail of animosity — some of it provoked by anti-Jewish comments — among political leaders, lawyers and judges in three states over more than 30 years.

He is a law school graduate, but his admission to the Illinois bar was blocked in the 1970s after a psychiatric finding of “moderately severe character defect manifested by well-documented ideation with a paranoid flavor and a grandiose character.”

Though he is not a lawyer, Mr. Martin went on to become a prodigious filer of lawsuits, and he made unsuccessful attempts to win public office for both parties in three states, as well as for president at least twice, in 1988 and 2000. Based in Chicago, he now identifies himself as a writer who focuses on his anti-Obama Web site and press releases.

Mr. Martin, in a series of interviews, did not dispute his influence in Obama rumors.

“Everybody uses my research as a takeoff point,” Mr. Martin said, adding, however, that some take his writings “and exaggerate them to suit their own fantasies.”

As for his background, he said: “I’m a colorful person. There’s always somebody who has a legitimate cause in their mind to be angry with me.”

When questions were raised last week about Mr. Martin’s appearance and claims on “Hannity’s America” on Fox News, the program’s producer said Mr. Martin was clearly expressing his opinion and not necessarily fact.

It was not Mr. Martin’s first turn on national television. The CBS News program “48 Hours” in 1993 devoted an hourlong program, “See You in Court; Civil War, Anthony Martin Clogs Legal System with Frivolous Lawsuits,” to what it called his prolific filings. (Mr. Martin has also been known as Anthony Martin-Trigona.) He has filed so many lawsuits that a judge barred him from doing so in any federal court without preliminary approval.

He prepared to run as a Democrat for Congress in Connecticut, where paperwork for one of his campaign committees listed as one purpose “to exterminate Jew power.” He ran as a Republican for the Florida State Senate and the United States Senate in Illinois. When running for president in 1999, he aired a television advertisement in New Hampshire that accused George W. Bush of using cocaine.

In the 1990s, Mr. Martin was jailed in a case in Florida involving a physical altercation.

His newfound prominence, and the persistence of his line of political attack — updated regularly on his Web site and through press releases — amazes those from his past.

“Well, that’s just a bookend for me,” said Tom Slade, a former chairman of the Florida Republican Party, whom Mr. Martin sued for refusing to support him. Mr. Slade said Mr. Martin was driven like “a run-over dog, but he’s fearless.”

Given Mr. Obama’s unusual background, which was the focus of his first book, it was perhaps bound to become fodder for some opposed to his candidacy.

Mr. Obama was raised mostly by his white mother, an atheist, and his grandparents, who were Protestant, in Hawaii. He hardly knew his father, a Kenyan from a Muslim family who variously considered himself atheist or agnostic, Mr. Obama wrote. For a few childhood years, Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia with a stepfather he described as loosely following a liberal Islam.

Theories about Mr. Obama’s background have taken on a life of their own. But independent analysts seeking the origins of the cyberspace attacks wind up at Mr. Martin’s first press release, posted on the Free Republic Web site in August 2004.

Its general outlines have turned up in a host of works that have expounded falsely on Mr. Obama’s heritage or supposed attempts to conceal it, including “Obama Nation,” the widely discredited best seller about Mr. Obama by Jerome R. Corsi. Mr. Corsi opens the book with a quote from Mr. Martin.

“What he’s generating gets picked up in other places,” said Danielle Allen, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., who has investigated the e-mail campaign’s circulation and origins, “and it’s an example of how the Internet has given power to sources we would have never taken seriously at another point in time.”

Ms. Allen said Mr. Martin’s original work found amplification in 2006, when a man named Ted Sampley wrote an article painting Mr. Obama as a secret practitioner of Islam. Quoting liberally from Mr. Martin, the article circulated on the Internet, and its contents eventually found their way into various e-mail messages, particularly an added claim that Mr. Obama had attended “Jakarta’s Muslim Wahhabi schools. Wahhabism is the radical teaching that created the Muslim terrorists who are now waging jihad on the rest of the world.”

Mr. Obama for two years attended a Catholic school in Indonesia, where he was taught about the Bible, he wrote in “Dreams From My Father,” and for two years went to an Indonesian public school open to all religions, where he was taught about the Koran.

Mr. Sampley, coincidentally, is a Vietnam veteran and longtime opponent of Mr. McCain and Senator John Kerry, both of whom he accused of ignoring his claims that American prisoners were left behind in Vietnam. He previously portrayed Mr. McCain as a “Manchurian candidate.” Speaking of Mr. Martin’s influence on his Obama writings, Mr. Sampley said, “I keyed off of his work.”

Mr. Martin’s depictions of Mr. Obama as a secret Muslim have found resonance among some Jewish voters who have received e-mail messages containing various versions of his initial theory, often by new authors and with new twists.

In his original press release, Mr. Martin wrote that he was personally “a strong supporter of the Muslim community.” But, he wrote of Mr. Obama, “it may well be that his concealment is meant to endanger Israel.” He added, “His Muslim religion would obviously raise serious questions in many Jewish circles.”

Yet in various court papers, Mr. Martin had impugned Jews.

A motion he filed in a 1983 bankruptcy case called the judge “a crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.”

In another motion, filed in 1983, Mr. Martin wrote, “I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did.”

In an interview, Mr. Martin denied some statements against Jews attributed to him in court papers, blaming malicious judges for inserting them.

But in his “48 Hours” interview in 1993, he affirmed a different anti-Semitic part of the affidavit that included the line about the Holocaust, saying, “The record speaks for itself.”

When asked Friday about an assertion in his court papers that “Jews, historically and in daily living, act through clans and in wolf pack syndrome,” he said, “That one sort of rings a bell.”

He said he was not anti-Semitic. “I was trying to show that everybody in the bankruptcy court was Jewish and I was not Jewish,” he said, “and I was being victimized by religious bias.”

In discussing the denial of his admission to the Illinois bar, Mr. Martin said the psychiatric exam listing him as having a “moderately severe personality defect” was spitefully written by an evaluator he had clashed with.

Mr. Martin, who says he is from a well-off banking and farming family, is clearly pleased with his newfound attention. But, he said, others have added to his work in “scary” ways.

“They Google ‘Islam’ and ‘Obama’ and my stuff comes up and they take that and kind of use that — like a Christmas tree, and they decorate it,” he said. For instance, he said, he did not necessarily ascribe to a widely circulated e-mail message from the Israeli right-wing activist Ruth Matar, which includes the false assertion, “If Obama were elected, he would be the first Arab-American president.”

He said he had at least come to “accept” Mr. Obama’s word that he had found Jesus Christ. His intent, he said, was only to educate.

Palin’s Breathtaking Naivete

On Saturday, Representative John Lewis, one of the heroes of the civil rights movement, made the comparison himself. Lewis, now a congressman from Atlanta, took the McCain-Palin campaign severely to task for “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” He said: “George Wallace never threw a bomb. He never fired a gun, but he created the climate and the conditions that encouraged vicious attacks against innocent Americans who were simply trying to exercise their constitutional rights. Because of this atmosphere of hate, four little girls were killed on a Sunday morning (in 1963) when a church was bombed in Birmingham, Alabama.”

The climate of hatred claimed many other victims as well. Most famous among them was Martin Luther King, Jr., who was killed in April, 1968. Two months later the victim was Robert F. Kennedy, younger brother of the assassinated president, who was himself running for president. A Kennedy biographer, Thurston Clarke, wrote this week that Robert Kennedy was “demonized before he was assassinated.” Clarke reminds us that a leading newspaper editor had called Kennedy “the most vicious and dangerous leader in the United States today.”

Worse, a newspaper columnist and self-proclaimed bigot, Westbrook Pegler, had expressed the wish that “some white patriot … will spatter (Kennedy’s) spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow flies” — an outright incitement to murder. In the end, of course, it was a disaffected Palestinian who killed Kennedy.

Sarah Palin has suggested no such thing as murder. She would no doubt be horrified at the thought. Yet it is a measure of her blithe ignorance — and of the tin ear of her speech writers — that her acceptance address at the Republican National Convention quoted Westbrook Pegler’s famous line: “We grow good people in our small towns, with honesty and sincerity and dignity.” The sentence sounds harmless until you consider that, in the context of a nearly all-white Republican convention, the words will be understood, even if subliminally, as an attack on America’s cities, many of them dominated by black political leaders.

The fact that Palin could throw out even an anodyne quote from someone as discredited as Pegler (she called him simply “a writer,” as if no one would check) is another sign of her naivete at a time when America has finally broken with its painful history and nominated a black man for president. How inflammatory can her careless rhetoric be? Thurston Clarke raised the question: “Has Sarah Palin Put a Target on Obama?”

God forbid. And cut it out with the cheap shots, Sarah. An atmosphere of character assassination and cultural clash helps no one. In Governor Wallace’s case, the bitter whirlwind turned, finally, against him, too. In May, 1972, while running for president, Wallace was gunned down in an assassination attempt that left him in a wheelchair until his death in 1998. (from DerSpeigel)

The “Terrorist” Barack Hussein Obama

By FRANK RICH

NY Times

If you think way back to the start of this marathon campaign, back when it seemed preposterous that any black man could be a serious presidential contender, then you remember the biggest fear about Barack Obama: a crazy person might take a shot at him.

Some voters told reporters that they didn’t want Obama to run, let alone win, should his very presence unleash the demons who have stalked America from Lincoln to King. After consultation with Congress, Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, gave Obama a Secret Service detail earlier than any presidential candidate in our history — in May 2007, some eight months before the first Democratic primaries.

“I’ve got the best protection in the world, so stop worrying,” Obama reassured his supporters. Eventually the country got conditioned to his appearing in large arenas without incident (though I confess that the first loud burst of fireworks at the end of his convention stadium speech gave me a start). In America, nothing does succeed like success. The fear receded.

Until now. At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

It wasn’t always thus with McCain. In February he loudly disassociated himself from a speaker who brayed “Barack Hussein Obama” when introducing him at a rally in Ohio. Now McCain either backpedals with tardy, pro forma expressions of respect for his opponent or lets second-tier campaign underlings release boilerplate disavowals after ugly incidents like the chilling Jim Crow-era flashback last week when a Florida sheriff ranted about “Barack Hussein Obama” at a Palin rally while in full uniform.

From the start, there have always been two separate but equal questions about race in this election. Is there still enough racism in America to prevent a black man from being elected president no matter what? And, will Republicans play the race card? The jury is out on the first question until Nov. 4. But we now have the unambiguous answer to the second: Yes.

McCain, who is no racist, turned to this desperate strategy only as Obama started to pull ahead. The tone was set at the Republican convention, with Rudy Giuliani’s mocking dismissal of Obama as an “only in America” affirmative-action baby. We also learned then that the McCain campaign had recruited as a Palin handler none other than Tucker Eskew, the South Carolina consultant who had worked for George W. Bush in the notorious 2000 G.O.P. primary battle where the McCains and their adopted Bangladeshi daughter were slimed by vicious racist rumors.

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

The operatives who would have Palin quote Pegler have been at it ever since. A key indicator came two weeks after the convention, when the McCain campaign ran its first ad tying Obama to the mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Rather than make its case by using a legitimate link between Fannie and Obama (or other Democratic leaders), the McCain forces chose a former Fannie executive who had no real tie to Obama or his campaign but did have a black face that could dominate the ad’s visuals.

There are no black faces high in the McCain hierarchy to object to these tactics. There hasn’t been a single black Republican governor, senator or House member in six years. This is a campaign where Palin can repeatedly declare that Alaska is “a microcosm of America” without anyone even wondering how that might be so for a state whose tiny black and Hispanic populations are each roughly one-third the national average. There are indeed so few people of color at McCain events that a black senior writer from The Tallahassee Democrat was mistakenly ejected by the Secret Service from a campaign rally in Panama City in August, even though he was standing with other reporters and showed his credentials. His only apparent infraction was to look glaringly out of place.

Could the old racial politics still be determinative? I’ve long been skeptical of the incessant press prognostications (and liberal panic) that this election will be decided by racist white men in the Rust Belt. Now even the dimmest bloviators have figured out that Americans are riveted by the color green, not black — as in money, not energy. Voters are looking for a leader who might help rescue them, not a reckless gambler whose lurching responses to the economic meltdown (a campaign “suspension,” a mortgage-buyout stunt that changes daily) are as unhinged as his wanderings around the debate stage.

To see how fast the tide is moving, just look at North Carolina. On July 4 this year — the day that the godfather of modern G.O.P. racial politics, Jesse Helms, died — The Charlotte Observer reported that strategists of both parties agreed Obama’s chances to win the state fell “between slim and none.” Today, as Charlotte reels from the implosion of Wachovia, the McCain-Obama race is a dead heat in North Carolina and Helms’s Republican successor in the Senate, Elizabeth Dole, is looking like a goner.

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

What if…?

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
class?

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.

PS: What if Barack Obama had an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter….
*******
You are The Boss… which team would you hire?

With America facing historic debt, 2 wars, stumbling health care, a
weakened dollar, all-time high prison population, mortgage crises,
bank foreclosures, etc.

Educational Background:

Obama:
Columbia University – B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in
International Relations.
Harvard – Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Biden:
University of Delaware – B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law – Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

McCain:
United States Naval Academy – Class rank: 894 of 899

Palin:
Hawaii Pacific University – 1 semester
North Idaho College – 2 semesters – general study
University of Idaho – 2 semesters – journalism
Matanuska-Susitna College – 1 semester
University of Idaho – 3 semesters – B.A. in Journalism

——————————————————-

Kinda makes you take a step back and think about things doesn’t it? If you’re leaning McCain, think for a second about why you’re even considering McCain and make sure it’s not because Obama is black.

Sen. McCain, Ronald Reagan Called. He Wants His Legacy Back.

by wmtriallawyer

Geez, Senator McCain, when the wheels come off the Straight Talk Express, they really come off, don’t they?

Word comes today, after your campaign essentially said that you wouldn’t “go there” with respect to Obama-Ayers, that you decide to go there with a 90 second web ad. Not unexpected, given the lying and hypocrisy of your campaign.

But what really jumps the shark is this segment of the ad:

Ayers and Obama ran a radical “education” foundation, together.
They wrote the foundation’s by-laws, together.
Obama was the foundation’s first chairman.

Radical? Really? President Reagan on line one for you, Senator.

• wmtriallawyer’s diary :: ::

I have a feeling President Reagan would probably take you task pretty harshly.  The picture below, as they say, is worth 1,000 words, and explains why:

That photo is from 1981, and it shows President Reagan with Walter and Leonore Annenberg. Walter Annenberg was a billionaire, philanthropist, and a pretty well known Republican, friend of both Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

Why is this significant? Because the so-called “radical education foundation” that Obama and Ayers served on was actually the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an initative started by the Annenberg Foundation to promote public school reform that was the brainchild of Annenberg himself.

Here’s another delicious nugget, Sen. McCain, if you consider the program “radical.” The program was actually a pretty unique hybrid that in many ways espoused the conservative viewpoint of using private money, rather than public funds, to reform education.  Indeed, this was one of those “private-public” collaborations that Republicans were fond of promoting (or least used to be fond of promoting until you came along, Sen. McCain).  The Annenberg Foundation matched 2-to-1 every public dollar spent on the project.

Annenberg, that pesky radical, started the program with this goal in mind:

“Everybody around the world wants to send their kids to our universities. South America, Asia, Europe, all of them. But nobody wants to send their kids here to public school. Who would, especially in a big city? Nobody. So we’ve got to do something. If we don’t, our civilization will collapse.”

So Annenberg ponied up the dough, and the Annenberg Foundation solicited grant applications from around the country.  Guess who’s grant application won? That’s right, William Ayers

I mean, my God, Senator McCain…Walter Annenberg, friend of the Reagans, gave nearly $50 million dollars to a well known terrorist? To improve public schools?  Did the Reagans know about this? What could the implications possibly be???

And this is where you, Senator McCain, have become the radical in this debate.  You try to spin “public-private” partnership, established by one of the pillars of the Republican Party, as “radical.”  You attempt so much guilt by association that you ignore that by your logic, Annenberg and by extension Reagan, associated with terrorists.  You have become a disgrace to your party, and your country, with this incidiary rhetoric and lies.

You, Senator. Not Barack Obama.

So I have no doubt that given the personal friendship President Reagan had with the Annenbergs, he would tell you to stop using his name as a primary example of whose legacy you really want to follow.

And while were on the subject, Teddy Roosevelt is on line two.  He wants a cease-and-desist order as well…

because your radical rhetoric is the furthest thing from speaking softly Teddy has seen in years.

UPDATE: Oh, Sen. McCain? Leonore Annenberg on line three.  As has been pointed out by several commenters, she is a donor to your campaign.  Given that you’ve now called the Annenberg Foundation “radical,” does that mean you are associating yourself with radicals, too? Just checking…

The Secret Service is following up on media reports today…

…that someone in the crowd at a McCain/Palin event suggested killing Barack Obama, according to Secret Service spokesman Malcolm Wiley. The shout of “kill him” followed a Sarah Palin rant on Obama’s relationship with radical Chicagoan Bill Ayers.
Wiley says the Secret Service did not begin looking into the matter until press reports, namely Dana Milbank’s article in the Washington Post, surfaced today, because no agents at the event heard anything. “The Secret Service did not hear any threatening statements directed at targets under its protection and no threatening statements were reported to us by law enforcement or citizens at the event,” Wiley told Radar. Also unclear: whether the remark was directed at Obama or Ayers if the words were actually “kill” and “him.”

In the latest instance of inflammatory outbursts at McCain-Palin rallies, a crowd member screamed “treason!” during an event on Tuesday after Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of criticizing U.S. troops.

“[Obama] said, too, that our troops in Afghanistan are ‘air raiding villages and killing civilians,’” Palin said, mischaracterizing a 2007 remark by Obama. “I hope Americans know that is not what our brave men and women in uniform are doing in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is fighting terrorism and protecting us and protecting our freedom.”  READ THE DISTURBING REPORT