28 posts tagged “politics”
"How very agreeable it must be to sit at a table in a casino where nobody seems to lose, and to play with a big stack of chips furnished to you by other people, and to have the further assurance that, if anything should ever chance to go wrong, you yourself are guaranteed by the tax dollars of those whose money you are throwing about in the first place! It’s enough to make a cat laugh."
McCain - obviously too little and too late - tries to rein in his supporters..
When a man told him he was “scared” of an Obama presidency, Mr. McCain replied, “I want to be president of the United States and obviously I do not want Senator Obama to be, but I have to tell you — I have to tell you — he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States.” The crowd booed loudly at Mr. McCain’s response.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/11/us/politics/11campaign.html
Toldya!!!!
In a letter published in today's NYTimes, the lead Federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 70's says this:
I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers’s terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.
Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.
Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.
Apparently Gov. Palin has agreed to drop the "ceremonial first puck" at a Philadelphia Flyers game this weekend.
Hmmm..... I don't think this will be your typical Alaska hockey crowd. Let's see - a heavily blue collar, union crowd.... Philadelphia fans who have booed Santa Claus.
Should be very interesting....
From Tom Friedman's brilliant and scathing piece in today's NYT:
Criticizing Sarah Palin is truly shooting fish in a barrel. But given the huge attention she is getting, you can’t just ignore what she has to say. And there was one thing she said in the debate with Joe Biden that really sticks in my craw. It was when she turned to Biden and declared: “You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic. In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that’s not patriotic.”
What an awful statement.....
I only wish she had been asked: “Governor Palin, if paying taxes is not considered patriotic in your neighborhood, who is going to pay for the body armor that will protect your son in Iraq? Who is going to pay for the bailout you endorsed? If it isn’t from tax revenues, there are only two ways to pay for those big projects — printing more money or borrowing more money. Do you think borrowing money from China is more patriotic than raising it in taxes from Americans?” That is not putting America first. That is selling America first.
Sorry, I grew up in a very middle-class family in a very middle-class suburb of Minneapolis, and my parents taught me that paying taxes, while certainly no fun, was how we paid for the police and the Army, our public universities and local schools, scientific research and Medicare for the elderly. No one said it better than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.”
So the other day there was a big Obama rally at our local High School stadium. Something like 6,000 people showed up. My son and his wife came all the way down to suburban Philly from Hoboken and stood in line for several hours to get in.
I didn't feel like standing in line for hours so I didn't go. Later in the day, though, I was sitting out in the back yard and I heard all this commotion down the street. I poked my head around the corner and saw that the street was blocked off by police tape a few blocks down where there is a little shopping district. So I took a stroll down and there was a small crowd gathered outside the neighborhood flower shop where Barack had stopped to buy flowers for his wife for their 16th wedding anniversary. Lots of cops and Secret Service and big ugly looking SUVs parked outside.
After a few minutes, Barack came out with his dozen white roses, tossed them into the back of one of the vehicles and came across the street work the crowd. Except for one idiot with a McCain sign who kept shouting "When was the last time you saw Bill Ayers?" it was definitely an adoring crowd. I even got to shake hands with the man!
At one point, waiting for Barack to come out of the flower shop I was standing there with my hands in my pockets and a Secret Service guy came up behind be and grabbed my elbow and said 'Please take you hands out of your pockets, sir!" Yikes....
Local news report here.
Frank Rich in today's NYT:
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking
Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered
Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply
because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV
news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is
every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
