Politics
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- inhaler970
- Yeah, but i saw an interview where she said that was "taken out of context"locustsloth
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'Tanned Obama' questions anger Berlusconi
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/eu…
- where you are GeorgesII? funny how Berlusconi enters the fray?********
- This comment doesn't actually bother me. It was just a corney joke.Glitterati_Duane
- where you are GeorgesII? funny how Berlusconi enters the fray?
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please please yes
http://www.canada.com/vancouvers…
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JazX is still bitter that his old white presidential candidate and his inbred sidekick have failed miserably...
- GeorgesII0
wasn't berlusconi a fan of your president,
you should be proud of him JazX, he followed you into war and always had a kind word for the bush and mccain.too bad you lost,
I couldn't care less what berlusconi says because you lost,
obama won,
thats all i care about,
now grow up and get over it,this is serious thread
- zaq0
- zaq0
- ukit0
Bill Ayers speaks out:
http://www.inthesetimes.com/arti…
During the primary, the blogosphere was full of chatter about my relationship with President-elect Barack Obama. We had served together on the board of the Woods Foundation and knew one another as neighbors in Chicago’s Hyde Park. In 1996, at a coffee gathering that my wife, Bernardine Dohrn, and I held for him, I made a donation to his campaign for the Illinois State Senate.
Obama’s political rivals and enemies thought they saw an opportunity to deepen a dishonest perception that he is somehow un-American, alien, linked to radical ideas, a closet terrorist who sympathizes with extremism—and they pounced.
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s (D-N.Y.) campaign provided the script, which included guilt by association, demonization of people Obama knew (or might have known), creepy questions about his background and dark hints about hidden secrets yet to be uncovered.
On March 13, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), apparently in an attempt to reassure the “base,” sat down for an interview with Sean Hannity of Fox News. McCain was not yet aware of the narrative Hannity had been spinning for months, and so Hannity filled him in: Ayers is an unrepentant “terrorist,” he explained, “On 9/11, of all days, he had an article where he bragged about bombing our Pentagon, bombing the Capitol and bombing New York City police headquarters. ... He said, ‘I regret not doing more.’ “
McCain couldn’t believe it.
Neither could I.
On the campaign trail, McCain immediately got on message. I became a prop, a cartoon character created to be pummeled.
When Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got hold of it, the attack went viral. At a now-famous Oct. 4 rally, she said Obama was “pallin’ around with terrorists.” (I pictured us sharing a milkshake with two straws.)
The crowd began chanting, “Kill him!” “Kill him!” It was downhill from there.
My voicemail filled up with hate messages. They were mostly from men, all venting and sweating and breathing heavily. A few threats: “Watch out!” and “You deserve to be shot.” And some e-mails, like this one I got from satan@hell.com: “I’m coming to get you and when I do, I’ll water-board you.”
The police lieutenant who came to copy down those threats deadpanned that he hoped the guy who was going to shoot me got there before the guy who was going to water-board me, since it would be most foul to be tortured and then shot.
McCain and Palin demanded to “know the full extent” of the Obama-Ayers “relationship” so that they can know if Obama, as Palin put it, “is telling the truth to the American people or not.”
This is just plain stupid.
Obama has continually been asked to defend something that ought to be at democracy’s heart: the importance of talking to as many people as possible in this complicated and wildly diverse society, of listening with the possibility of learning something new, and of speaking with the possibility of persuading or influencing others.
The McCain-Palin attacks not only involved guilt by association, they also assumed that one must apply a political litmus test to begin a conversation.
On Oct. 4, Palin described her supporters as those who “see America as the greatest force for good in this world” and as a “beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy.” But Obama, she said, “Is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America.” In other words, there are “real” Americans — and then there are the rest of us.
In a robust and sophisticated democracy, political leaders—and all of us—ought to seek ways to talk with many people who hold dissenting, or even radical, ideas. Lacking that simple and yet essential capacity to question authority, we might still be burning witches and enslaving our fellow human beings today.
Maybe we could welcome our current situation—torn by another illegal war, as it was in the ’60s—as an opportunity to search for the new.
Perhaps we might think of ourselves not as passive consumers of politics but as fully mobilized political actors. Perhaps we might think of our various efforts now, as we did then, as more than a single campaign, but rather as our movement-in-the-making.
- ukit0
http://firstread.msnbc.msn.com/a…
The Democrats' road to 60 Senate seats isn't dead yet.
Yes, it's a long road, with a lot of twists and turns and "ifs," but it's still possible.
With the win in Oregon yesterday, they now have picked up six, and control 57 total seats.
In Minnesota, Sen. Norm Coleman leads Al Franken by a scant 237 votes, and NBC’s John Yang reports that Democrats are hopeful Franken can make up that difference in a recount. If the Democrats can pull out a squeaker in Minnesota, they'd be sitting at 58.
In Alaska, the race isn't over yet either -- Democrat Mark Begich trails embattled Ted Stevens by 3,400 votes, but there are 55,000 absentee and provisional ballots that won't be counted until next week. So if the Dems pull that one out too, then they're at 59.
If both of those things happen, then it gets really interesting. That would leave the potential 60th seat as the Georgia runoff next month. Official word should come early next week, but that runoff would be scheduled for Dec. 2nd.
The conventional wisdom is that incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss would win any runoff, because African Americans likely won't turn out in the same numbers for a runoff. And national Republicans would be motivated to win this one after the stinging losses this week.
But if Georgia is the magical 60th seat for Democrats -- would that prompt Obama to invest time, attention and campaign resources to the Democratic effort?
That would change the equation. Should be fascinating.
- locustsloth0
i actually hope the above doesn't happen. i'm glad the Dems got the majority in the House and Senate. i'm ecstatic that Obama won the presidency. But having a filibuster proof Dem Senate is just as scary to me as having a filibuster proof Republican Senate. Either way, it's essentially writing a blank check for one side or the other and saying "everything's fair game".
There's no balance in that. There's 57 million people (the popular vote for McCain. Yes, this is an assumption) who would essentially be ignored if that happened. We'd be outraged and utterly downtrodden if the tables were turned.
- ukit0
- TheBlueOne0
"Sales of rifles, pistols and ammo are surging in parts of the United States, as many gun owners fear President-elect Barack Obama's administration may seek to tighten ownership of certain weapons.
"The day after the election, I had many more calls than usual from people looking for semi-automatic rifles," said David Greenberg, the owner of the Second Amendment Family Gun Shop, in Bisbee, Arizona, who sold out of AR-15 rifles in recent days.
"There seems to be a fear they will be banned, and it's fairly likely," he added. "Obama and Biden are driven to eliminate firearms from the face of the country."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20081…
Get a fucking life, morans.
- joeth0
The Climate for Change
by Al GoreThe inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.
The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.
Here is the good news: the bold steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are exactly the same steps that ought to be taken in order to solve the economic crisis and the energy security crisis...
- TheBlueOne0
Wow. The President-Elect has it's own seal?
Interesting before being elected he was all about the San Serif, now he's going with the serif. What does this all mean?
- He switched it up a few months ago. Just about the same time Biden was announced.calcium
- Sure, all this iconography rivals that of Nazi Germany********
- ukit0
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp…
The financial world was fixated on Capitol Hill as Congress battled over the Bush administration's request for a $700 billion bailout of the banking industry. In the midst of this late-September drama, the Treasury Department issued a five-sentence notice that attracted almost no public attention.
But corporate tax lawyers quickly realized the enormous implications of the document: Administration officials had just given American banks a windfall of as much as $140 billion.
The sweeping change to two decades of tax policy escaped the notice of lawmakers for several days, as they remained consumed with the controversial bailout bill. When they found out, some legislators were furious. Some congressional staff members have privately concluded that the notice was illegal. But they have worried that saying so publicly could unravel several recent bank mergers made possible by the change and send the economy into an even deeper tailspin.
"Did the Treasury Department have the authority to do this? I think almost every tax expert would agree that the answer is no," said George K. Yin, the former chief of staff of the Joint Committee on Taxation, the nonpartisan congressional authority on taxes. "They basically repealed a 22-year-old law that Congress passed as a backdoor way of providing aid to banks."
The story of the obscure provision underscores what critics in Congress, academia and the legal profession warn are the dangers of the broad authority being exercised by Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in addressing the financial crisis. Lawmakers are now looking at whether the new notice was introduced to benefit specific banks, as well as whether it inappropriately accelerated bank takeovers.
The change to Section 382 of the tax code -- a provision that limited a kind of tax shelter arising in corporate mergers -- came after a two-decade effort by conservative economists and Republican administration officials to eliminate or overhaul the law, which is so little-known that even influential tax experts sometimes draw a blank at its mention. Until the financial meltdown, its opponents thought it would be nearly impossible to revamp the section because this would look like a corporate giveaway, according to lobbyists.
Andrew C. DeSouza, a Treasury spokesman, said the administration had the legal authority to issue the notice as part of its power to interpret the tax code and provide legal guidance to companies. He described the Sept. 30 notice, which allows some banks to keep more money by lowering their taxes, as a way to help financial institutions during a time of economic crisis. "This is part of our overall effort to provide relief," he said.
The Treasury itself did not estimate how much the tax change would cost, DeSouza said.
- ukit0
Obama plans to close Guantanamo
- +1colin_s
- Jazx would disagree because we need to torture more peoplezaq
- Hello, and a hearty welcome back to the Constitution. Brother, we have missed you and how..TheBlueOne
- ...and forget about the hundreds of other secret prisonsKwesiJ
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Warning of new bin Laden attack
http://www.theage.com.au/world/w…- bahaha...what is this 2002?KwesiJ
- I suppose it is again.
*sounds the alarm********
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Barack Obama's Treasury Secretary candidates slammed by liberals
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/…
