Politics
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- janne760
i'll just wait for the exit polls.
k thx bai!
- hallelujah0
"The Norwegian newspaper VG has reported a truly amazing story about a newly-wed trying to get to Norway to be with her husband, and the stranger who helped pay an unexpected luggage surcharge. The blog "Leisha's Random Thoughts" has translated the story.
It was 1988, and Mary Andersen was at the Miami airport checking in for a long flight to Norway to be with her husband when the airline representative informed her that she wouldn't be able to check her luggage without paying a 100 surcharge:
When it was finally Mary’s turn, 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.As tears streamed down her face, she heard a "gentle and friendly voice" behind her saying, "That's okay, 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.Who was the man?
Barack Obama.
Twenty years later, she is thrilled that the friendly stranger at the airport may be the next President and has voted for him already and donated 100 dollars to his campaign:
-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.Mary even convinced her parents to vote for him:
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.
And Obama replied:
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.Mary says that when her friends and associates talk about the election, especially when race relations is the heated subject, she relates the story of the kind man who helped out a stranger-in-need over twenty years ago, years before he had even thought about running for high office.
- Nice story but sounds like urban myth material to me.BusterBoy
- see if i imagine mccain. there is alot of huffing and impatience followed by eventual bargingautoflavour
- Sounds like something my mother would email to me. Except that in this case the protagonist is a Democrat.blaw
- blaw :)Nairn
- ukit0
- BusterBoy0
Will the UN be positioning independent election scrutineers for the 2008 election? They do for all the other basket case countries don't they? At the moment you'd have to say the USA fits into the same 'basket'.
- ismith0
Well I don't know if it's already been brought up, buuuut.....
http://www.wwtdd.com/post.phtml?…
Eugh...... hahaa
- Those guys must be pretty hard-up for new storylines.MrOneHundred
- "There's also a threeway with Hillary and Condoleezza look-alikes." lolsofakingbanned
- ukit0
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday will launch a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.
Pushing back against what it calls “guilt-by-association” tactics by McCain, the Obama campaign is e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, that will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The overnight e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.
The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the last ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.
Obama’s offensive comes after McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, spent two days telling voters, donors and reporters that Obama showed poor judgment in his relationship with the former radical William Ayers.
McCain’s campaign has vowed to make a major issue of Obama’s Chicago relationships in coming days, with a senior McCain official telling Politico that they are “the vehicle that allows us to question Obama’s truthfulness about his past and his plans for the future.”
In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee cleared McCain of corruption charges but cited him for “poor judgment” in meeting with federal regulators on behalf of Charles H. Keating Jr., a political patron who went to prison for fraud in connection with the collapse of the California-based Lincoln Savings and Loan Association, which at the time was one of the biggest financial failures in the nation’s history.
Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”
A trailer for the campaign-produced documentary features William K. Black, a former bank regulator who McCain met with in the Keating case, saying: “The Keating Five involved all the things that have brought the modern crisis. Senator McCain has not learned the lesson, and has continued to follow policies that are going to produce a disaster.”
- ********0
SHE DID LOOK AT ONE TIME...
- Can the one on the left be VP, please?locustsloth
- if thats a real picture of her on the left. shes a whore. weekend pussy.sofakingbanned
- a drunken whore.. like i cant wait to get home, lets just do it in the guys bathroom kind of whoreautoflavour
- if it was the one on the right, i think mccain would probably have a heart attackautoflavour
- ********0
FYI: The last 4 recessions all have something in common, all of the U.S. Presidents were are Republicans.
1982: President, Ronald Reagan
1991: President, George H.W. Bush
2002: President, George W. Bush
2008: President, George W. BushAnd before there was a housing marketing meltdown and scandal their was the "S & L" Savings & Loan scandal of from the 1980's and 1990's which involved Neil Bush, son of then Vice President of the United States George H. W. Bush. Neil Bush paid a $50,000 fine and was banned from banking activities for his role in taking down Silverado, which cost taxpayers $1.3 billion. A Resolution Trust Corporation Suit against Bush and other officers of Silverado was settled in 1991 for $26.5 million.
- ********0
- BusterBoy0
How can Palin spew the bullshit she does when she is on video being blessed by some African minister to rid her of witchcraft or some aft shit?
- There you go again with your gotcha politics and your factual informations, doncha know.
*winksTheBlueOne
- There you go again with your gotcha politics and your factual informations, doncha know.
- TheBlueOne0
The Asian markets took a beating on Monday, Europe don't look to good..I'm guessing Paulson's $700 billion will be gone by Friday...and that's being only partially snarky
- TheBlueOne0
"Investors questioned how long it would take for the [US Bailout] package to unfreeze credit markets, restore bank lending and generally shore up the U.S. economy.
"The market had already figured in the package's passage," said Yukio Takahashi at Shinko Securities Co. in Tokyo. "There are strong doubts about its implementation."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081…
Ah. Man, am I ever glad we rushed through that legislation giving all new powers and authority to the Executive branch then. You know without stopping to think or anything because those experts in the Bush administration were on the teevee saying "Fear! Danger! Now!"...That happened, what? Friday. And here it is 7:07am EST my time on Monday and the markets have already factored it in and are sinking. Awesome.
- ********0
Talking at the debate about how she would “positively affect the impacts” of the climate change for which she’s loath to acknowledge human culpability, she did a dizzying verbal loop-de-loop: “With the impacts of climate change, what we can do about that, as governor, I was the first governor to form a climate change subcabinet to start dealing with the impacts.” That was, miraculously, richer with content than an answer she gave Katie Couric: “You know, there are man’s activities that can be contributed to the issues that we’re dealing with now, with these impacts.”
At another point, she channeled Alicia Silverstone debating in “Clueless,” asserting, “Nuclear weaponry, of course, would be the be-all, end-all of just too many people in too many parts of our planet.” (Mostly the end-all.)
A political jukebox, she drowned out Biden’s specifics, offering lifestyle as substance. “In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been, you know, all our lives,” she said, making the middle class sound like it has its own ZIP code, superior to 90210 because “real” rules.
Sometimes, her sentences have a Yoda-like — “When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not” — splendor. When she was asked by Couric if she’d ever negotiated with the Russians, the governor replied that when Putin “rears his head” he is headed for Alaska. Then she uttered yet another sentence that defies diagramming: “It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right there.”
Reared heads reared themselves again at the debate, when she said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “were starting to really kind of rear the head of abuse.”
- Nairn0
There's a story over at The Register that's making big waves (well, it's Slashdotted and racking up the comments, which in the internet world means it's big), telling how certain vested parties abused Wikipedia and their journalistic positions to calm fears over 'naked' short selling in Wall Street in the run up to the recent collapse.
It's a bit of a read, but quite enlightening.
- hallelujah0
"Yes, they went there: the LA Times is featuring on its homepage a major story examining a portion of John McCain's military record:
Mishaps mark John McCain's record as naval aviator
Here's the subhead:
Three crashes early in his career led Navy officials to question or fault his judgment. A Times review of his record suggests he was cocky, occasionally cavalier and prone to testing limits.
The once-sacred-cow, the Time Period Of Which We Dare Not Speak, is now fair game for the corporate media.
This cannot be good news for McCain.
The story opens with - surprise! - a whopper told by McCain that was soundly refuted by his superiors:
McCain recounted the accident [in which he crashed an AD-6 Skyraider near Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1960] decades later in his autobiography. "The engine quit while I was practicing landings," he wrote. But an investigation board at the Naval Aviation Safety Center found no evidence of engine failure.
The 23-year-old junior lieutenant wasn't paying attention and erred in using "a power setting too low to maintain level flight in a turn," investigators concluded.
The crash was one of three early in McCain's aviation career in which his flying skills and judgment were faulted or questioned by Navy officials.
The story also tells of McCain's crash of a T-2 jet trainer near Cape Charles, Va., in 1965:
In a report dated Jan. 18, 1966, the Naval Aviation Safety Center said it could not determine the cause of the accident or corroborate McCain's account of an explosion in the engine. A close examination of the engine found "no discrepancies which would have caused or contributed to engine failure or malfunction."
Interestingly, for some unknown reason, the report was revised:
About two weeks after issuing its report, the safety center revised its findings and said the accident resulted from the failure or malfunction of an "undetermined component of the engine.
Huh. An "undetermined component" of the engine failed? Just how does one come to that conclusion? "Um, we examined the engine and couldn't find anything that had failed, but since we've decided, in spite of our earlier examination of the engine, to take the pilot's word for it and agree that something in the engine must've failed, that was the best language we could come up with."
Anyone who would dare suggest that Admiral McCain might have had something to do with the revision of that report most assuredly hates America and pals around with terrorists.
McCain's entire military record is believed by some to run to at least 636 pages. Only 19 of those pages have been released. What the balance of those records - like his as-yet-unreleased medical records - might show is anybody's guess - but until now, to even hint at questioning those records was taboo among the corporate media.
The Times story is a major breach in the hitherto impenetrable wall that had been built around McCain's war record. Shouting, "But he's a war hero!" evidently will no longer be enough to satisfy those looking for the truth."
- ukit0
- ukit0
http://www.redstate.com/diaries/…
At this point, the campaign for the Presidency is Barack Obama's to lose. If the election were held today, he would win. Not only would he win, but Republican loses in Congress would be massive.
From here until the election on November 4th, the McCain chances of winning diminish on a daily basis, except for external factors beyond either candidates' control.
This is, in fact, the last week for John McCain to, on his own accord, shift the polling trends back in his favor. To do so, he must aggressively begin punching Barack Obama on issues that work to McCain's advantage.
I think we've seen the beginnings of this with Sarah Palin going after Obama's terrorist ties, which are extremely extensive and barely covered by the media.
Beyond Obama's terrorist ties, McCain should also begin pounding Obama on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Like with the surge, McCain was right on the issue and Obama was wrong. Also like the surge, Obama has steadfastly refused to admit he was wrong.
Remember President Bush's pre-election news conference in the White House in 2004? Standing in the East Room, reporters repeated demanded to know what mistakes he would admit to. They have never done the same to Barack Obama on these issues.
It is time for McCain-Palin '08 to change the narrative by aggressively going after Barack Obama on Fannie and Freddie. Force the issue before the public and an unwilling media. Force the tough questions. Certainly, Obama will push back, but McCain should easily be able to handle those questions — much easier than Obama can handle his questions.
We are in the last week in which McCain can do anything himself to win this race. After this week, the polling is locked in except for external factors. And at this point, the purpose is mitigation of damage against the GOP, not making up significant lost ground.
If McCain wants a chance of winning and if he wants to mitigate damage to the Republican brand across the ballot, he must aggressively attack now and attack using Fannie and Freddie.
- "terrorist ties, which are extremely extensive" Are you on crack?********
- Also like the surge, Obama has steadfastly refused to admit he was wrong. What has the surge accomplished exactly?********
- Not my opinion, this is from Redstate, the most popular right wing blogukit
- I just thought it was interesting that they are just about ready to throw in the towel;)ukit
- "terrorist ties, which are extremely extensive" Are you on crack?
