I rather doubt that Bush Two thinks. And the people who used to think for him seem to have left the scene. How else could something like this come out of his mouth?

"This Memorial Day, I ask all Americans to honor the sacrifices of those who have served you and our country. One way to do so is by joining in a moment of remembrance that will be marked across our country at 3:00 p.m. local time. At that moment, Major League Baseball games will pause, the National Memorial Day parade will halt, Amtrak trains will blow their whistles, and buglers in military cemeteries will play Taps. You can participate by placing a flag at a veteran's grave, taking your family to the battlefields where freedom was defended, or saying a silent prayer for all the Americans who were delivered out of the agony of war to meet their Creator. Their bravery has preserved the country we love so dearly."

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080528_close_but_no_healthcare/

WASHINGTON—More than halfway through a political season in which public concern about America’s porous, confusing and costly health insurance system has consistently emerged as one of the chief worries of a squeezed electorate, this is what we can expect when the new president takes office next year: not so much. 

Neither has proposed a health-insurance plan that would make health care more fair and equitable by putting everyone in a pool in which risks are shared among those who are healthy (but might one day get sick) and those who are not. This is how insurance—whether it be government insurance, such as Social Security, or private insurance, such as the policies we buy for automobiles—works. With everyone in the same system, everyone shares the burden of paying as well as the benefit of coverage when it is needed.

Because of the crucial failure of both candidates to acknowledge this elemental truth, the nation is likely to stay on the crooked path down which it has staggered since the employer-based system of care began to unravel at least two decades ago.

But don’t both McCain and Obama say they want to fix the system, covering more people and lowering costs for everyone? Sure. But talk is cheap—much cheaper, apparently, than the political costs of more comprehensive action that would either anger ideological supporters on the right (if you’re McCain) or raise that old chestnut about “socialized medicine” (if you’re Obama).

McCain would provide tax credits for individuals to purchase insurance, but he relies on the unproved theory that if full costs and responsibility for insurance were shifted back to individuals and families, prices would drop. “This is a ‘back to the future’ plan, returning us all to the period before the creation of employer-based group insurance in the 1930s, when individuals and families were ‘on their own’ to find ways of paying for their health care,” concludes an issue brief by Rekindling Reform, a New York-based group of social welfare agencies, unions and religious, academic and public health organizations. 

Obama’s plan is a lost opportunity.

Yes, it would curtail some of the more egregious insurance industry practices and seeks some cost containment. But it still fails to recognize that without some kind of mandate to bring everyone into the system—either an individual mandate, like his Democratic rivals Hillary Clinton and John Edwards proposed, or a nationwide requirement, such as a Medicare-for-all type of system—insurance companies still would be able to cherry-pick among those they want to insure and those they don’t.

The good news, I suppose, is that if McCain wins the White House, Democrats probably will continue to control Capitol Hill. They would be unlikely to enact anything so radical as the McCain proposal. The bad news is that if Obama wins, his party will have squandered the best opportunity in more than a decade—since the Bill Clinton era—to take a bold leap toward the universal coverage Democrats have promised since the presidency of Harry Truman.

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23488377-details/One%20for%20the%20end%20of%20the%20road%20Merry%20Clinton%20knocks%20back%20whisky%20on%20campaign%20plane/article.do

London, <script type="text/javascript" src="/js/dateWriter.js"></script> Thursday 29.05.08

One for the end of the road? Merry Clinton knocks back whisky on campaign plane

Last updated at 16:37pm on 29.05.08

 

Hillary Clinton took time out from her punishing campaign schedule to enjoy a glass of whiskey with a group of journalists.

The Democratic presidential hopeful was flying back from Rapid City in South Dakota, one of the few states yet to hold its primary when she decided to let her hair down a little.

Her relaxed mood may give rise to speculation she is preparing to concede to her Democratic rival Barak Obama.

A wee dram: Mrs Clinton jokes with reporters on her campaign plane prior to takeoff from the airport in Rapid City

he is just told what to do. and read from that big book that he reads from.

http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/politics/story/372975.html

Posted on Thu, May. 29, 2008

GOP senator's wife donates to Obama

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON --

Sens. John McCain and Chuck Hagel have long been friends. Fellow Republicans and Vietnam War veterans, their Senate offices are just across the hall from each other.

But at least during the presidential primary, Hagel's wife, Lilibet, is helping McCain's likely Democratic rival, Barack Obama.

According to Federal Election Commission records, Mrs. Hagel donated twice to Obama's campaign in February for a total contribution of $500. The contributions were first reported by the Washington Post

The contribution came a month before Sen. Hagel, a sharp GOP critic of the war in Iraq, appeared on ABC's "This Week" and declared that he and McCain have "pretty fundamental disagreements on the future of foreign policy."

...

http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/dashboard/main/demfarmer

rdorgan - You also have some high quality college lacrosse players from high schools around Mass. My son asked if we would pls move him to the east coast for lacrosse. LOL.

Is this guy crazy or what?
Hot on the heels of his explanation for why he no longer wears a flag pin,
presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama was forced to explain why he doesn't follow protocol when the National Anthem is played.

According to the United States Code, Title 36, Chapter 10, Sec. 171,
During rendition of the national anthem when the flag is displayed, all present except those in uniform are expected to stand at attention facing the flag with the right hand over the heart.

Obama Quote: 'As I've said about the flag pin, I don't want to be perceived as taking sides' but 'There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message. You know, the bombs bursting in air and all. It should be swapped for something less parochial and less bellicose.' 'I like the song 'I'd Like to Teach the World to Sing.' If that were our anthem, then I might salute it.'

WHAAAAAAAT!!!!!!! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this could possibly be our next president. I, for one, am speechless!
LTG. TG Bill Ginn, USAF Retired.....

It's an email hoax Sorry no toolbar to highlight but here is the link http://urbanlegends.about.com/od/barackobama/a/obama_anthem.htm

Another calm day here - have time to sniff out BS :)

Since 1978, commercial establishments (bars, restaurants, etc) that serve already intoxicated persons cannot be held responsible should that person leave the bar and cause harm to himself or others, even while driving drunk.  The driver can be sued, but not the commercial establishment.  It's been challenged over the years but the state law holds firm.

Interesting

taunting Obama to go to Iraq (uggghhhh, I loathe their tactics). I'm now seeing on AP News that Barack is contemplating a trip there. If he goes I'm interested to see how he uses facts from the trip to pin McCain to the mat. I believe him (Barack) to be one of the smartest campaigners--smart at besting his opponents.

Not always easy to determine the best of your choices:
-ignore your opponent's taunts.
-respond to them by defending yourself/your position.
-turn the issue back on your opponent.

Barack always seems to strike that perfect balance. I like that about him.
I think he'll be the toughest opponent the Repubs have had in many years...despite what pollsters and pundits say.

What has happened to the Republican Party?

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. [...] Is there no other way the world may live?

-Dwight David Eisenhower, "The Chance for Peace," speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

151 Congressmen Derive Financial Profit From War

Ralph Forbes
OpEdNews
May 28, 2008

Who profits from the Iraq war? More than a quarter of senators and congressmen have invested at least $196 million of their own money in companies doing business with the Department of Defense (DoD) that profit from the death and destruction in Iraq.

According to the latest reports, 151 members of Congress invested close to a quarter-billion in companies that received defense contracts of at least $5 million in 2006. These companies got more than $275.6 billion from the government in 2006, or $755 million per day, according to FedSpending.org, a website of the watchdog group OMBWatch.

"...McCain--a man whose known positions on the war and on the economy are deeply unpopular, whose other positions are endlessly shifting, whose party and ideology are rejected--is recast entirely in terms of his biography, his honor, his character, his American-ness.

This year the Republican argument is reduced to its barest essence: Americans versus "pluribus," unprotected by the politeness of issues or safer symbolism. Hence McCain's slogan, the politics of the flag pin, the e-mails charging that Obama doesn't salute the flag, and the attempt to associate him with the anti-American politics of 1968, when he was 7 years old. This, then, may be the ultimate high-stakes gamble for the party of confident risk-takers: Accept that everything else--ideas, competence, governance--is gone, and instead of trying to reconstruct it, as the books recommend, bet everything on the bare essentials of Republican identity politics, "The American President Americans Are Waiting For."

The GOP has seen a collapse on all levels. Polls show them less trusted on every single issue. They are raising less money. They are enduring a rash of retirements. They are lashed to a president who's less popular than a child's tears. What they have left, the only thing they have left, are the politics of cultural resentment. We've turned the clock back all the way back before Bush, before Reagan, before the GOP felt it had a popular and dynamic policy agenda at the hearts of its appeal. We're back to Nixon, and his personal insecurities about the popularity of his own politics, and his resulting attempts to channel cultural fracture and societal unrest into a voting majority. The problem is that this isn't 1968. Society has its cracks, but they are not fissures. We have our disagreements, but they are not civil wars. And so when you hear John McCain proclaim himself "The American President Americans Are Waiting For," you scratch your head. It's puzzling. And it's puzzling because this stuff used to be done skillfully. This sort of campaigning is dangerous, and generally requires a light touch. But a light touch only works if the electorate is sensitive to the message, attuned to its own resentment. Right now, it isn't. Frankly, the atmospherics make Obama look like the American president America is waiting for."

--Ezra Klein

Camp memories: Obama and Reagan

Joseph Cannon
May 28, 2008

On Memorial Day, Obama announced that his uncle helped to liberate Auschwitz — and that the experience was so traumatic that the uncle had to spend six months in an attic.

In fact, Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. I don’t believe the "attic" story either. In 2002, Obama said the following:

My grandfather signed up for a war the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed, fought in Patton’s army. He saw the dead and dying across the fields of Europe; he heard the stories of fellow troops who first entered Auschwitz and Treblinka.

Here he refers to the grandfather, not the uncle, and we have no talk of entering the camps personally. Anyone who spends six months in an attic based on hearsay from other soldiers must be very sensitive. By the way: Treblinka was also liberated by the Soviets. Patton’s army liberated Buchenwald and Mauthausen.

Do I consider this gaffe important? Not really, although I’m ticked off by the double-standard. Despite Obi’s chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome, the CDS-sufferers still pretend that the Bosnia affair was the single worst lie in the history of mankind. What I find extremely cute is the parallel to Ronald Reagan — who also claimed to have participated in the liberation of the concentration camps.

It is no coincidence that our first MTV-era president, Ronald Reagan, was fond of telling audiences stories of how he had helped liberate concentration camps at the end of World War II, when his only experience with a Dachau or Treblinka was sitting in a darkened room watching movies of those events. "You believed in it because you wanted to believe it," Reagan once told a reporter who thought he had seen Reagan on the set of a movie which didn’t feature him at all. "There’s nothing wrong with that. I do it all the time."

what kind of police state makes a law about posture during an anthem?

<dd>

</dd><dd>               by Patrick J. Buchanan

</dd><dd>    Barack says we need to have a conversation about race in America.

</dd><dd>Fair enough. But this time, it has to be a two-way conversation. White America needs to be heard from, not just lectured to.

</dd><dd>This time, the Silent Majority needs to have its convictions, grievances and demands heard. And among them are these:

</dd><dd>First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

</dd><dd>Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

</dd><dd>Second, no government anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the '60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

</dd><dd>Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks -- with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas -- to advance black applicants over white applicants.

</dd><dd>Churches, foundations, civic groups, schools and individuals all over  America have donated time and money to support soup kitchens, adult education, day care, retirement and nursing homes for blacks.

</dd><dd>We hear the grievances. Where is the gratitude?

</dd><dd>Barack talks about new 'ladders of opportunity' for blacks.

</dd><dd>Let him go to Altoona and Johnstown, and ask the white kids in Catholic schools how many were visited lately by Ivy League recruiters handing out scholarships for 'deserving' white kids.


</dd><dd>Is white America really responsible for the fact that the crime and incarceration rates for African-Americans are seven times those of white America? Is it really white America's fault that illegitimacy in the African-American community has hit 70 percent and the black dropout rate from high schools in some cities has reached 50 percent?

</dd><dd>Is that the fault of white America  or, first and foremost, a failure of the black community itself?

</dd><dd>As for racism, its ugliest manifestation is in interracial crime, and especially interracial crimes of violence. Is Barack Obama aware that while white criminals choose black victims 3 percent of the time, black criminals choose white victims 45 percent of the time?

</dd><dd>Is Barack aware that black-on-white rapes are 100 times more common than the reverse, that black-on-white robberies were 139 times as common in the first three years of this decade as the reverse?

</dd><dd>We have all heard ad nauseam from the Rev. Al about Tawana Brawley, the Duke rape case and Jena. And all turned out to be hoaxes. But about the epidemic of black assaults on whites that are real, we hear nothing.

</dd><dd>Sorry, Barack, some of us have heard it all before, about 40 years and 40 trillion tax dollars ago.
</dd>

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/29/12757/9330/971/524828

Link for Rich's post

Obama wasn't even born yet at the end of the WWII. Republicans are getting way desperate in their attempts to smear him.

bbl

New Thread.

New Thread.