2008 U.S. Presidential Campaign Discussion Thread-Part 11

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Hey diamond!

From ex Sec. of State Eagleburger, who has previously endorsed McCain:

Give her some time in the office and I think the answer would be, she will be [pause] adequate. I can't say that she would be a genius in the job. But I think she would be enough to get us through a four year... well I hope not... get us through whatever period of time was necessary. And I devoutly hope that it would never be tested.

What does he mean?
 
Interesting little chart related to all this "socialism" banter.
I wonder to what extent those rankings fluctuate with which party is in control of Congress? Unsurprisingly, it looks like there's considerable overlap with rankings of states by per capita and median income, with certain major exceptions (Alaska, Hawai'i, Maryland...).
 
One Democrat who is honest:

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.



An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( ]Snipurl / Snurl / Snipr - Snippetty snip snip with your looong URLs! ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."
These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Franklin Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing. If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.


If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

This article first appeared in The Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro, North Carolina, and is used here by permission.

R
 
Orson Scott Card pops up on Right Wing blogs quite a bit, he wrote some good SF novels but I think he holds some idiotic beliefs, appeals to any authority; such as quoting a mormon author for justification, really demonstrates an unwillingness to defend ideas, it is relatively lazy (which is not neccessarily a bad thing), but one should at least be able to remember enough of their arguments to plagirise them properly.

Obama's positions appear more considered and consistent than those of McCain, he doesn't present himself as a guy you could have a beer with and he is a perfectly moderate liberal; he is probably the least bad option (and the VP picks tip it towards him).
 
"But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. "

Sounds like an economist. "It can go this way or it can go that way so tentatively we should support these ideas, of course it's a risk so we will change our minds later if the wind blows that way."

I've lost belief in intellectuals. They don't seem intelligent at all. There's always an "except for" to cover their asses.
 
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"He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency."

What????
 
Last night I saw Obama, Mark Warner, Tim Kaine, and Jim Webb all on stage together.


Keep an eye on us. Assuming all goes well polls close here at 7pm ET, and if we go blue it's over.
 
"He has earned it
So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency."

What????

What part of that comment/reasoning don't you understand?
 
Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

R

Oh well, it's a couple of steps up from youtube videos of angry preachers and the relentless flogging of a dead horse's skeletal remains on the birth certificate non-issue
 
Studies Find a Candidate's Looks Matter

Jeanna Bryner
Senior Writer

livescience.com Fri Oct 31, 12:07 am ET

Voters look for someone who appears both competent and attractive when choosing a president, at least when the candidate is female, finds a new study.

If true, the reportedly astronomical fees spent on vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin's appearance could have been right on the money.

"Campaign managers seem to be ahead of the game in understanding that image really matters," said Joan Y. Chiao, a psychologist at Northwestern University in Illinois. "They know that, contrary to popular notions, people are not necessarily using deliberate and rational strategies in deciding whom to vote for, especially when it comes to women."

Male and female voters

Chiao and her colleagues asked a group of more than 70 undergraduate students, about evenly split between females and males, to judge a series of male and female political candidates on how competent, dominant, attractive and approachable they seemed based on their facial appearances.

Then participants looked at images showing pairs of political candidates and indicated which candidate they would vote for in a hypothetical election for U.S. president.

Overall, participants judged male faces as more competent and dominant than females. And the participants perceived female faces as more attractive and approachable than males.

All participants were most likely to vote for candidates who appeared more competent. However, male candidates who appeared more approachable and female candidates who appeared more attractive were most likely to win votes.

Both male and female participants in the study were most likely to vote for women candidates seen as attractive and competent.

"Even female voters seemed to tap into the cultural expectation that women who are attractive as well as competent are more worthy of high status roles," Chiao said.

The results, detailed online in the Oct. 31 issue of the journal PLoS ONE, diverged for male candidates. Male voters were more likely to vote for a guy only if that candidate appeared competent, while female voters preferred a male candidate who was both competent and approachable.

Voting on the brain

Another recent study also shows that facial looks matter for political candidates. The study, published online this week in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, suggests that negative views about a person's facial appearance could cost that candidate the election.

The researchers used functional MRI scans to measure brain blood oxygenation of participants as they made decisions about pairs of political candidates based solely on the candidates' photos. The candidates had run in elections in 2002, 2004 or 2006. In some cases, the participants had to cast a hypothetical vote and in others they made character judgments about each candidate, including which of the two looked more competent to hold a congressional office or looked more physically threatening.

When participants viewed photos of politicians who lost elections, in the lab and in the actual elections, brain areas associated with processing emotions showed activity. The results suggest negative evaluations of a candidate based on appearance affect real election outcomes, said lead researcher Michael Spezio, a psychologist at Scripps College and a visiting associate at Caltech.

The researchers stress that the brain effects seen, while statistically significant, were small. In addition, the results likely only apply to voters who know very little about the political candidates, and in general, appearance is just one piece of the political puzzle.

"We are not claiming that how the candidates look is all there is to the story of how voters make up their minds - or that this is even the biggest part of the story," said Ralph Adolphs, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Caltech. "However, we do think it has some effect - and, moreover, that this effect may be largest when voters know little else about a candidate."
 
Poll shows Obama up by 13 in NH

By The Associated Press | October 30, 2008

THE POLL: Suffolk University/ WHDH-TV poll in the presidential, U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races in New Hampshire of 600 likely voters.

THE NUMBERS: President: Barack Obama, 53 percent, John McCain, 40 percent.

OF INTEREST: Women are supporting Obama by a 60 percent-to-35 percent margin. Obama also is leading in all regions of the state and in all age groups.

DETAILS: Telephone poll of 600 likely voters conducted Oct. 27-29 by the Suffolk University Political Research Center for Suffolk University/WHDH-TV in Boston. Sampling margin of error plus or minus 4 percentage points.

MORE:

Suffolk University - Obama Up by 13 in NH, with Strong Support from Women
 
I just got a robocall from our Gov here in MD, urging us to vote Yes for slot machines. :huh:

If you're gonna robocall me, at least make it on an issue worth my time.
 
I'm surprised this is new enough information to warrant a whole study. Haven't we known this since the televised Nixon/Kennedy debate?

Word. That reminds me of something Samantha said on Sex and the City, "The country runs better when there's a good-looking man in the White House. Look at Nixon. Nobody wanted to fuck him, so he fucked everybody.":lmao:
 
2008 Presidential Discussion

I'm voting for Obama. I have never heard so many ridiculous statements like the ones accusing Obama of being a socialist. :censored::censored::censored::censored::censored::censored::censored::censored::censored:
 
Biden had a rally today at Trent Arena(Kettering - suburb of Dayton - Ohio)...which is part of the campus of the high school I graduated from in 2003(this building wasn't there yet, it was built after I graduated). It's a hop and a skip away from my house. I pass by it all the time. So my mom and I went. It was great time, lots of energy. Our camera wasn't working properly though so we don't know how many of our pictures came out ok. The speech was great :up: but it could have been longer - it was probably about 20-30 minutes long. We spent more time waiting for him to get there(he was running late) then he spent talking once he got there. While waiting, there was a Palin-lookalike dressed in a suit and glasses carrying around Macy's bags and letting people take pictures with her :lol: They have the same handful of songs on a loop over the PA, and we went through it at least twice while waiting for Biden & co. to arrive. John Sweeney, the president of AFL-CIO, and one of the chief guys from the local Obama office spoke, and then there was a good 30-40 minute wait for the main attraction. I knew the motorcade had arrived when a line of 10 or so people walked into the gym one after another with video camera and tripod bags over their shoulders, with their campaign ID around their necks and began setting their equipment up on the media platform(where some others were already set up). Then some lady walked in front of the crowd and said, 'He's here.' Then a few minutes after that Jill was introduced, and then she introduced Joe.

When we were leaving, there was a group of pro-McCain protesters on the street holding up signs that said things like 'Vote McCain, Not Hussein', and 'Vote to fight terrorism'(or something like that, I can't remember, might've been 'vote for the candidate that will fight/protect us from terrorism'...I'm having trouble remembering), and 'School Indoctrination In Progress'(because Trent Arena is part of the high school). That last one is my favorite. See, McCain himself had a rally there in the exact same room as Biden did today four days ago on Monday. I wonder if that person was complaining about school indoctrination then. After we passed them, my mom began shouting 'bigot!' at the guy holding up the 'Vote McCain, not Hussein' sign and 'idiots!' at the lot of them in general(don't take that as an insult towards all McCain supporters necessarily, the signs this particular group were holding up were absurd). That was pretty funny.

It was a really interesting and enjoyable experience.
 
^Speaking of that, one of my best friends has very racist grandparents who own a convenience store in our city. They've actually tried to intimidate my friend and her brother, who are supporting Obama. My mom was in the store today buying some pop and talking to Lindsay's grandma. Mom said it took every bit of self-control to not yell "Go Obama" as she was walking out just to see their reactions.:lol:
 
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