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The Case Against John McCain

 
 
cicerone imposter
 
  1  
Reply Sat 30 Aug, 2008 02:51 pm
@JTT,
Well, McCain said he's going after bin Ladin as soon as he becomes president. What's wrong with this picture? I don't think the neo-cons understand why this is stupid.
Ramafuchs
 
  -1  
Reply Sat 30 Aug, 2008 03:25 pm
@cicerone imposter,
CI
after this 8 years of noble rulers without corruption
anybody who votes the duplicate will face
an uncongeinial admosphere which i wish not to endure.
Ramafuchs
 
  0  
Reply Sun 31 Aug, 2008 12:39 pm
@Ramafuchs,
just to substantiate my critical views
There has been some trepidation (including my own) about the fact that, if elected, he would be the oldest president to ascend to the office. But today I thought that it would be interesting to see where his age would rank among other world leaders.

Measuring against the leaders of the 34 countries listed as “developed” by the CIA World Factbook, he’s at the upper fringe of the age range. If elected, he would tie Japan’s Yasuo Fukuda as the oldest leader of a developed country.


Here are some other interesting tidbits:

1. The average age of the leaders of the developed countries listed above is 56.5.
2. Of these 29 leaders, nearly three quarters are younger than 60.
3. A quarter are 50 or younger.
4. Half are in their 50’s.

The Republicans have made a talking point of the fact that Barack Obama is too young and inexperienced to be commander-in-chief. When you consider the ages of these other leaders, the age part of that argument loses its power to convince.

Around the world, running a developed country seems like a job for 50-somethings. Obama is 47. McCain is … (do I really have to say it again?)
http://blow.blogs.nytimes.com/
Cycloptichorn
 
  2  
Reply Sun 31 Aug, 2008 09:36 pm
http://img295.imageshack.us/img295/2051/wmog9.jpg

Perfect

Cycloptichorn
cicerone imposter
 
  2  
Reply Mon 1 Sep, 2008 04:53 pm
@Ramafuchs,
Rama, Age is not a guarantor of a good president or leader of a country.
Ramafuchs
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Sep, 2008 09:37 am
@cicerone imposter,
Your statement is correct.
But I will add old( before the word age).

Rep convention had opened a bank account to collect money and help the victim of the natural disaster.
Good Idea if it only philanthrioic and not shapping a candidate's political image.
This is also a case against John McCain.

The campaign website of Senator John McCain declares that the arrival of Hurricane Gustav is a moment for "Serving a Cause Greater". (Whatever that means.) The GOP--which for eight years demonstrated what columnist Paul Krugman described as "an ideological hostility to the very idea of using government to serve the public good" --has now reshuffled its convention, talked of fundraisers, phonathons, and volunteers--and told America it's above partisan politics and is putting the country first.



On Monday, the McCain campaign website ran a quote from the candidate himself smack-dab on the homepage: "I pledge that tomorrow night and if necessary throughout our convention, we will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."



Darn right--you better not act like Republicans if you want to help America.



As Christopher Hayes wrote in his excellent post today, "Volunteers and fundraising isn't the solution for the Gulf, competent government is, and John McCain has hardly lifted a finger to make that happen." Hayes points out that McCain warned against over-spending in support of Katrina's victims; voted against establishing a Congressional commission to examine the response to Katrina in mid-September 2005; voted against allowing up to fifty-two weeks of unemployment benefits to people affected by the hurricane; and in 2006 voted against appropriating $109 billion in supplemental emergency funding, including $28 billion for hurricane relief.



McCain's newfound "concern" for the plight of disaster victims is as cynical as some of his recent campaign moves (think, Palin).
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut/352686
teenyboone
 
  1  
Reply Tue 2 Sep, 2008 02:49 pm
@rosborne979,
LOL, that was hilarious and they're right! BS is the #1 issue! Priceless!
0 Replies
 
blueflame1
 
  1  
Reply Thu 4 Sep, 2008 08:47 am
In a More Diverse America, A Mostly White Convention http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/03/AR2008090303962.html?hpid%3Dartslot&sub=AR
0 Replies
 
blueflame1
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 02:25 pm
John McCain's List of Real Smart People "Try former Texas Senator, Phil Gramm.

McCAIN: one of the smartest people in the world on economics

As we watch the financial sector move into the next stage of melt down, here's a reminder of what Gramm did to earn himself a spot as not only a Real Smart Person, but McCain's top economic advisor.

[Gramm]was co-sponsor of the 1999 law that allowed commercial banks to get into investment banking. And the fact that Gramm was a prime architect of a 2000 bill that kept regulators' hands off of "credit default swaps," an exotic financial tool which helped enable the bundling and selling of crappy subprime mortgages to investors.

In other words, Gramm was at the top of the list of people rushing to give the banking industry "more flexibility" and relieve them of all those nasty regulations that kept them from showing the kind of constraint that Wall Street always shows when nobody is looking.

The value of the entire U.S. Treasuries market: $4.5 trillion.

The value of the entire mortgage market: $7 trillion.

The size of the U.S. stock market: $22 trillion.

The size of the credit default swap market last year: $45 trillion.

[Risk expert] CHRISTOPHER WHALEN: They are the most hideous kind of speculation. To have a federally insured bank like JPMorgan as the largest dealer in this market, to me says we don't know what we're doing anymore, and we don't understand the difference between real work -- real economic activity -- and something that's essentially wasting.

Phil Gramm saw to it that banks could not only become involved in risky investments, they could buy and sell those investments to each other, creating a speculative shadow economy many times larger than the real economy, and Gramm made sure that all this activity was completely unregulated.

Back to Dave Davies' of the Philadelphia Daily News and his July interview with McCain.

[McCain] said that Gramm and others thought that they were doing the right thing in the 2000 legislation.

But that's just the point.

Nobody thought that they were setting up a cataclysmic collapse in the nation's financial sector, but when you're restricting public oversight of private markets, you'd better give some serious thought to the downside.

Serious thought to the downside? That's surrender talk. Hell, boy, what kind of maverick are you?

That kind of thinking is never going to make McCain's list. Which is a very important reason why McCain shouldn't be on anyone's list of potential presidents" http://www.dailykos.com/
0 Replies
 
H2O MAN
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 02:28 pm
@Cycloptichorn,


Perfect for you and the dumbmasses.

0 Replies
 
squinney
 
  0  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 02:39 pm
@Ramafuchs,
Ramafuchs wrote:
...

On Monday, the McCain campaign website ran a quote from the candidate himself smack-dab on the homepage: "I pledge that tomorrow night and if necessary throughout our convention, we will act as Americans and not as Republicans because America needs us now."

Darn right--you better not act like Republicans if you want to help America.

...


Laughing Laughing Laughing Laughing

I'm lovin' that, Rama!
0 Replies
 
blueflame1
 
  3  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 03:05 pm
McCain Blasts Wall Street Failure, Neglects To Mention His Adviser Helped Cause ItAs the news broke of the Lehman Brothers meltdown and the rest of the latest financial crisis, John McCain, speaking at a campaign rally in Florida on Monday, angrily declared,

We will never put America in this position again. We will clean up Wall Street. This is a failure.
And in a statement released by his campaign, McCain called for greater "transparency and accountability" on Wall Street.

If McCain wants to hold someone accountable for the failure in transparency and accountability that led to the current calamity, he should turn to his good friend and adviser, Phil Gramm.

As Mother Jones reported in June, eight years ago, Gramm, then a Republican senator chairing the Senate banking committee, slipped a 262-page bill into a gargantuan, must-pass spending measure. Gramm's legislation, written with the help of financial industry lobbyists, essentially removed newfangled financial products called swaps from any regulation. Credit default swaps are basically insurance policies that cover the losses on investments, and they have been at the heart of the subprime meltdown because they have enabled large financial institutions to turn risky loans into risky securities that could be packaged and sold to other institutions.

Lehman's collapse threatens the financial markets because of swaps. From Bloomberg:

Bond-default risk soared worldwide as the collapse of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. sparked concern than the $62 trillion credit-derivatives market will unravel....
Lehman, the fourth-largest securities firm until last week, has been one of the 10 largest counterparties in the market for credit-default swaps, according to a 2007 report by Fitch Ratings. The market, which is unregulated and has no central exchange where prices are disclosed, has been the fastest-growing type of so-called over-the-counter derivative, according to the Bank for International Settlements.
"The immediate problem is the derivative default swaps market, in which a plethora of institutional accounts and dealer accounts are at risk,'' Bill Gross, manager of the world's largest bond fund at Pacific Investment Management Co. in Newport Beach, California, said in an interview with Bloomberg Radio yesterday. "It induces a tremendous amount of volatility and uncertainty.''
Barclays Capital analysts have estimated that if a financial institution with $2 trillion in credit-default swap trades were to fail, it might trigger between $36 billion and $47 billion in losses for institutions that traded with the firm. So the Lehman fiasco--caused in part by the use of unregulated swaps--could lead to ruin elsewhere in the economy.

Gramm is responsible for the rise of the wild and woolly $62 trillion swaps market. And he was chairman of the McCain campaign and a top economic adviser for McCain--until he dismissed Americans worried about the economy as "whiners." After that comment, McCain dumped Gramm. But was Gramm truly excommunicated from McCain land? Last month, he attended a meeting of McCain's top supporters in Aspen, Colorado. And at a dinner that day, McCain singled out Gramm for praise. Last week, failed Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul revealed that Gramm, now an exec for Swiss banking giant UBS (which also lost billions of dollars due to subprime loans and swaps), had recently called him as part of a McCain effort to win Paul's endorsement. Paul turned Gramm down. (Both Gramm and Paul are Texas Republicans.) Gramm's Paul-courting effort seems to indicate that the fellow who has done much to cause the current financial troubles (and who was once considered a possible Treasury secretary should McCain win the White House) is back in the good graces of the McCain campaign.

Shortly after McCain promised he would "clean up" Wall Street, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, his running mate, appeared at a Colorado rally on Monday morning and proclaimed that "John McCain and I will put an end to the abuses in Washington and Wall Street that have resulted in this financial crisis." She promised a McCain administration would "reform the way Wall Street does business." (She was short on details and spent more time discussing Colorado sports stars from Alaska.) What neither she nor McCain has explained is how they plan to be able to reform Wall Street when they are being assisted by 177 lobbyists and the guy who greased the way to the current crisis with a backroom legislative maneuver. If McCain and Palin are serious about never putting America "in this position again," they ought to consider seriously writing down any economic advice they get from Phil Gramm.
******

By the way, both McCain and Palin decried golden parachutes for CEOs. What might Carly Fiorina, a top McCain adviser and surrogate, think of that? She received a $21 million severance package when she was forced out as CEO of Hewlett-Packard, after her not-so-successful stint there--and the value of her golden parachute eventually reached $42 million.
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/09/9718_mccain_lehman_crisis_gramm.html
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 03:31 pm
@blueflame1,
Well done Carly.
spendius
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 04:24 pm
@spendius,
I'm insanely jealous. Smirking in the mirror like that.
0 Replies
 
H2O MAN
 
  2  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 04:38 pm
@blueflame1,
blueflame1 wrote:


By the way, both McCain and Palin decried golden parachutes for CEOs.


Not really. Go back and look for Palin's entire quote on this subject, she was specific.
spendius
 
  2  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 04:41 pm
@H2O MAN,
WHAT!!?? Specific!!?? Surely not?
blueflame1
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 07:09 pm
@spendius,
Palin the earmark queen specific? She's all lip service railing against what she practices herself. Bushie with lipstick.
0 Replies
 
blueflame1
 
  2  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 07:28 pm
Palin Tax Mystery Enters Second Week: Itemizing The Questions http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/15/palin-tax-mystery-enters_n_126553.html Let's hope she gets specific on this.
firefly
 
  1  
Reply Mon 15 Sep, 2008 10:09 pm
@blueflame1,
Alan Greenspan on the economy and McCain's tax cuts...

Quote:

WASHINGTON (AFP) " The United States is mired in a "once-in-a century" financial crisis which is now more than likely to spark a recession, former Federal Reserve chief Alan Greenspan said Sunday.

The talismanic ex-central banker said that the crisis was the worst he had seen in his career, still had a long way to go and would continue to effect home prices in the United States.

"First of all, let's recognize that this is a once-in-a-half-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event," Greenspan said on ABC's "This Week."

Asked whether the crisis, which has seen the US government step in to bail out mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, was the worst of his career, Greenspan replied "Oh, by far."

"There's no question that this is in the process of outstripping anything I've seen, and it still is not resolved and it still has a way to go," Greenspan said.

"And indeed, it will continue to be a corrosive force until the price of homes in the United States stabilizes.

"That will induce a series of events around the globe which will stabilize the system."

Greenspan was also asked whether the United States had a greater-than 50 percent chance of escaping a recession.

"No, I think it's less than 50 percent.

-------------------------------------------------
In an interview with Bloomberg Television Friday, Greenspan said the nation could not afford 3.3 trillion dollars of tax cuts proposed by McCain without matching cuts in spending.

Greenspan, a long-time friend of McCain and a Republican, said about the Arizona senator's plans to extend massive tax cuts imposed by President George W. Bush: "I'm not in favor of financing tax cuts with borrowed money."

McCain has said he would pay for his cuts by ending pet funding projects for US lawmakers' districts known as "earmarks."

-----------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------
Greenspan, who has been around a very long time, says the U.S. economy is in a "once-in-a-century financial crisis", but, only this morning, John McCain tells us the "fundamentals of the economy are strong". Well, McCain better wake up and smell the coffee because that's what Herbert Hoover said as the Great Depression loomed. McCain is out of touch.

Okay, Greenspan, a Republican, also says the nation can't afford McCain's 3.3 trillion of proposed tax cuts without matching cuts in spending.

McCain claims he can match his tax cuts by eliminating "earmarks"

So, how much can realistically be saved by eliminating "earmarks"?

Quote:
The Office for Management and the Budget came up with a figure for $16.9 billion in the 2008 appropriation bills. Taxpayers for Commonsense, an independent watchdog group that focuses on wasteful spending, identified $18.3 billion worth of earmarks in the 2008 bills, a 23 per cent cut from a record $23.6 billion set in 2005.

How much of this $18.3 billion could be eliminated is a "difficult question that we have not yet figured out," said Taxpayers for Commonsense vice-president Steve Ellis. The figure includes such items as $4 billion for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which could not be eliminated without halting hundreds of construction projects around the country. Another big chunk goes to military construction, including housing for servicemen and their families, which McCain has also promised not to touch.

Bruce Riedl, a budget analyst with the Heritage Foundation, says it might be possible to eliminate roughly half the expenditure on earmarks every year, i.e. around $9 billion, using the Taxpayers for Commonsense figures. He identified $5 billion in Community Development Block Grant funds, most of which goes to local governments, as a prime target for cuts. Even if earmarks were eliminated altogether, many other expenditures would have to be shifted to other parts of the budget.

Like other analysts, Riedl was mystified by McCain's argument that previous year's earmarks automatically become a "permanent part of the budget." "I don't understand how they come up with that," he told me.

Excluding those programs McCain has promised to preserve, the draconian slashing of earmark expenditures might save around $10 billion a year.



10 billion saved in "earmarks" does not match the 3.3 trillion in revenue the government would lose through John McCain's tax cuts. McCain either can't do math or he can't deal with the reality of the situation.

That's why John McCain's economic proposal does not make sense, and why it would further damage our already badly faltering economy.
0 Replies
 
Diest TKO
 
  1  
Reply Fri 19 Sep, 2008 04:33 am
The Case for John McCain
as told by Deist TKO in the way no republican is comfortable saying

McCain is the perfect candidate for the person who
- is pro-drilling despite the fact that it's NOT a solution and that drilling is already being done.
- is pro-war.
- thinks that a god has a "side" save that we are on it.
- is pro-life(ish) and thinks that the republican's actually give a damn about changing anything. Editor's note: They had two branches of out government, if they ever planned on doing it, the time has passed. It serves them better for it to be legal and then use it to pander votes out of social conservatives.
- is against gay rights.
- believes in something called a "gay agenda."
- thinks they need more guns than they can hold to defend themselves.
- doesn't know anything about economics, or doesn't care.
- doesn't know about education, or doesn't care.
- doesn't know about the earth's ecosystem, or doesn't care.
- doesn't know about history, or doesn't care.
- thinks that our retirement should be played on the stock market. Clarification: The same stock market that is doing so poorly.
- dislikes Obama's plan, likes a third party candidate, but lacks the courage to support them.
- thinks that "liberal" is a dirty word.
- thinks that all republican ideas are good.
- thinks that all democrat ideas are bad.
- thinks Fox News is "fair and balanced"
- believes that the media is "liberal"
- liked how the last 7.75 years went and wish Bush could run again.
- likes Palin and is hoping that McCain will pass away.
- is not a fan of facts.
- is easily scared into voting a particular way.
- believes in unicorns.

I have no doubt that McCain will get the vote of the people above.

T
K
O
0 Replies
 
 

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