Fear and smear are bread and butter of politics however much it's said it's not. Fact and fiction are distorted.
In a polarizing presidential campaign season where many "firsts" are being made, first viable woman, first viable bi-racial, and first oldest candidate at first inauguration, fact, fiction, emotion and pride bleed and blind intensely and blame and shame run rampant. No candidate or campaign wins with this cover issue.
Register to vote, and send Voltage to play at the Democratic National Convention. We have songs that are perfect for the event already written, and I am already the number one democrat at the DNC.
NYT - June 20, 2008 by David Brooks
God, Republicans are saps. They think that they're running against some academic liberal who wouldn't wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn't proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they're running against some naive university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson. [an insult to Adlai, if you ask me].
But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there's Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who'd throw you under the truck for votes. This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator.
Good luck new coalition.
BRD
The commissioners sought public comment to determine whether they should allow corporations to dictate the terms of web traffic or to keep it an open system in which, for instance, a company can't buy the right to have its website load faster than yours or its email expedited.
The problem? Comcast acknowledged it had paid people to fill seats for 90 minutes before the meeting, making many concerned citizens from attending.
Sorry, no link:
Source: Playboy Magazine, July 2008
So said Obama on the Jimmy Kimmel Show. Got some laughs. What I find funny is how Obama supporters are quick to come to his defense about making the lame joke.
My guess is that if Hillary or a Republican or, for that matter, a person of any race other than Obama's...had made the joke, these people would be demonized severely.
An example of a blog that touched on the topic:
http://cincymoms.cincinnati.com/f/ShowThread.aspx?tid=54684&cid=15&fid=129
Some Cuban Americans are planning to protest Democrat Barack Obama's visit to Miami on Saturday.
Posted on Fri, Jun. 20, 2008
By BETH REINHARDMARISOL RUIZ ZOTO/AP
Elian Gonzalez, right, smiles as he attends an event marking the 80th anniversary of the birth of Ernesto "Che" Guevara in Havana, Cuba, June 14, 2008.Summoning a time of political upheaval in Miami, a great-uncle of Elián González plans Friday to publicly denounce two Barack Obama campaign advisors who helped send the boy back to his father in Cuba eight years ago.
One day before the expected Democratic nominee addresses a conference of mayors in Miami, Delfín González will hold a 1 p.m. news conference outside the Little Havana home where Elián lived with relatives for several months in 2000.
Earlier this week, CNN reported that Elián, now 14 years old, has joined Cuba's Young Communist Union. Obama was an Illinois lawmaker during the 2000 dispute and did not take a public position.
At issue are foreign-policy advisor Greg Craig, who represented Elián's father in the custody battle with the Miami relatives, and legal advisor Eric Holder, a member of Obama's vice-presidential search committee who was deputy attorney general when the 6-year-old boy was seized by federal agents and returned to Cuba.
In a stunning announcement Friday, the Pentagon skipped over Boeing and awarded a massive $40 billion contract for a new fleet of refueling tankers to a Northrop Grumman and European Aeronautics Defense and Space (EADS). While Air Force officials claimed the choice of the KC-45 tankers jointly developed by Grumman and Airbus' parent company was based on its superior design, politicians in both parties are howling about the devastating economic impact on U.S.-based Boeing. And they might just have John McCain to thank for it.
Back in 2004, McCain launched a one-man to crusade to undo the scandal ridden lease for Boeing aerial refueling tankers based on the 767 design. Subsequent congressional investigations showed a systematic failure of the Air Force's procurement process in opting for a lease of the Boeing aircraft that would be more expensive that purchasing the tankers outright. While Air Force officials blamed one Pentagon official about to start a her new career at Boeing as responsible for swinging the deal to hr new employer, Senator McCain was having none of it. As the Washington Post reported in November 2004:
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has conducted an equally vigorous campaign against the lease, said in releasing the internal Pentagon communications in a speech on the Senate floor that the missives reflect a "systemic Air Force failure in procurement oversight, willful blindness or rank corruption."McCain said top Air Force officials have recently been trying to "delude the American people" into believing that a single person is responsible for misconduct in the $30 billion leasing plan -- namely, Darleen A. Druyun, the Air Force contracting official who pleaded guilty two months ago to overpricing the tankers as a "parting gift" to Boeing before she became one of the firm's executives.
"I simply cannot believe that one person, acting alone, can rip off taxpayers out of billions of dollars," said McCain, who said he will keep pursuing internal Defense Department and Bush administration communications until "all the stewards of taxpayers' funds who committed wrongdoing are held accountable."
In the fallout from the reversal of the Boeing lease, Air Force Secretary James G. Roche and Marvin R. Sambur, the Air Force's top acquisitions manager, resigned several days before McCain's speech. (As the Post noted, emails revealed that "Roche asked a lobbyist for Boeing Co. to use the company's Washington contacts to 'quash' a deputy undersecretary of defense and make him "pay an appropriate price.")
For his part, John McCain has made his role in unearthing the Boeing scandal and billions of dollars the lease would have wasted a centerpiece of his campaign for the White House. In October 2007, the McCain web site proclaimed that "in one successful effort, John McCain eliminated up to $2 billion in wasteful and corrupt spending in the Boeing tanker deal" and boasted of his being named a "Taxpayer Hero" by Citizens Against Government Waste. During the November 28, 2007 CNN/YouTube GOP presidential debate, McCain championed his efforts to scuttle the Boeing deal:
"I have the record of fighting against wasteful spending. I have a clear record of winning. I saved the taxpayers $2-billion on a bogus Air Force Boeing tanker deal where people went to jail."None of which is to suggest that McCain's actions were improper. Far from it, the original Boeing lease deal was shockingly corrupt. It is with good reason that Keith Ashdown of Taxpayers for Common Sense concluded, "It was probably the best example of oversight in the 108th Congress."
Incidently, Lou Dobbs thought this export idea was ludicrous.
Obama wrote: "In February 2007, I proposed a novel way to preserve the strength of the public financing system in the 2008 election. My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce...
Second time Obama lied: June 19, 2008
Obama says "We've made the decision not to participate in the public financing blaming it on the need to combat Republicans, saying "we face opponents who've become masters at gaming this broken system. John McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee are fueled by contributions from Washington lobbyists and special interest PACs. And we've already seen that he's not going to stop the smears and attacks from his allies running so-called 527 groups, who will spend millions and millions of dollars in unlimited donations."
Things would be different naturally if Obama was running a campaign on a shoe-string. But he thinks he can play old style politics before he can promise to change the way Wasington works once elected.
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