FINAL COUNTDOWN FOR USA ELECTION 2008

I think the backlash against all the hateful slime thrown at Sarah Palin plus Joe Biden emulating a walking gaffe machine the last few days is bringing a lot desperation to the surface just about everywhere....

Biden thinks FDR was president when the market crashed in 1929? And FDR got on tv..... haha haa ha,

Exactly why do Obama supporters think he is so great? And surely there must be something about him that they dislike since they accuse us of being unable to see the sins and weaknesses of John McCain no matter how often or on how many threads we post them.

there was a thread exactly to this effect a few months back - let me see if I can find it.

What happens when Obama gets in the white house? Will he only pay attention to selected advisors or will he bend to the political pressure of say a bunch of Mom's led by Cindy Sheehan and MoveON.org? Who will he try to please next?

WTF? MoveOn and Sheehan have had zero effect upon Obama's voting record...Do you just make it up?

there was a thread exactly to this effect a few months back - let me see if I can find it.

What happens when Obama gets in the white house? Will he only pay attention to selected advisors or will he bend to the political pressure of say a bunch of Mom's led by Cindy Sheehan and MoveON.org? Who will he try to please next?

WTF? MoveOn and Sheehan have had zero effect upon Obama's voting record...Do you just make it up?

OK, but I would be satisfied with just your individual answer to the question. Really, one of the reason's I participate in A2K is to learn others' views to educate myself. The more I participate the more I learn. Yes ,yes I know I don't always change my mind but sometimes I do and I always learn something I didn't know. It's not meant to be a trick question. Sometimes when I look at the other guys side I find evidence that demands that I change my perspective, given I am to make a reasonable informed choice or decision.

Davis Firm on Freddie Payroll
By Tory Newmyer
Roll Call Staff
September 23, 2008, 6:25 p.m.

The lobbying firm of Rick Davis, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign manager, remains on the payroll of mortgage giant Freddie Mac, according to two sources with knowledge of the arrangement.

The firm, Davis Manafort, has collected $15,000 a month from the organization since late 2005, when Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae dissolved a five-year-old advocacy group that Davis earned nearly $2 million leading, the sources said.

The relationship is coming to an end, however, as Fannie and Freddie’s new federal caretaker zeroes out its contracts with political consultants.

“All lobbying activity has stopped, and all political consulting contracts at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are in the process of being terminated,” said Stefanie Mullin, a spokeswoman for the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which assumed control of the troubled mortgage giants earlier this month.

The news comes in the wake of a Monday report in the New York Times detailing Davis’ work for the mortgage companies that sparked an aggressive response from the McCain campaign. That report suggested that Davis Manafort ended its work for the companies once they decided to shutter the advocacy group, called the Homeownership Alliance.

Fannie Mae terminated its relationship with the firm after the Homeownership Alliance disbanded, company spokeswoman Amy Bonitatibus said.

Davis Manafort has remained on Freddie Mac’s payroll, however, although it is not clear what work Davis Manafort has performed in order to earn its paycheck.

Sharon McHale, a Freddie spokeswoman, declined to comment, citing the company’s policy of not discussing its relationships with vendors. Officials with the firm and the McCain campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

“I never saw that Rick was asked to ever do anything. And certainly after the Homeownership Alliance faded away, there was no indication of any real action on his part,” one source familiar with the deal said.

Davis still owns a partial stake in the lobbying shop, but the McCain campaign has repeatedly said he no longer receives income from it. Asked in a Sunday interview with the Times and CNBC about Davis’ work for the mortgage companies, McCain said it had ended. “And my campaign manager has stopped that, has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it,” he said.

Both mortgage companies were forced to dissolve their muscular lobbying teams earlier this month under the terms of their federal takeover. Davis Manafort appears to have hung on a little longer because the firm never directly lobbied for the company, instead providing public affairs help.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac emerged as issues in the presidential race last week because of turmoil in the financial markets. In a radio address from Green Bay, Wis., on Saturday, McCain blamed the companies and their political clout for creating the housing mess now roiling Wall Street. “At the center of the problem were the lobbyists, politicians and bureaucrats who succeeded in persuading Congress and the administration to ignore the festering problems at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,’’ he said. “Using money and influence, they prevented reforms that would have curbed their power and limited their ability to damage our economy. And now, as ever, the American taxpayers are left to pay the price for Washington’s failure.’’

The McCain camp has attacked Democratic presidential nominee Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) for his ties to Fannie Mae, noting that the Democrat tapped former Fannie executive Jim Johnson to lead the search for his vice presidential nominee " until controversy over Johnson’s home loans forced him to quit. And the campaign has criticized Obama for receiving advice on housing issues from former Fannie chief Franklin Raines, a charge the Democrat’s campaign denies.

McCain’s inner circle has its own ties to the companies. Among the newest revelations: William Timmons, a lobbyist reportedly expected to lead McCain’s presidential transition team, has earned $260,000 this year lobbying for Freddie, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.

The Times story on Monday detailed Davis’ turn as president of the alliance, a group that also included nonprofit organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and the Urban League but was reportedly bankrolled largely by the mortgage giants. At its helm, Davis helped advance the companies’ arguments promoting homeownership and discouraging stricter regulations. A former Fannie official said Davis did little for the paycheck and was hired because of his ties to McCain.

The report prompted an angry response from McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt, who accused the paper of being a “pro-Obama advocacy organization.”

Okay, I'll bite.

Pros -

- Obama is obviously intelligent.
- Young and in great health
- Has a commanding presence
- Is not a long-time Washington insider
- Is a wonderful public speaker
- Articulates the Dem platform excellently
- Has an inspirational life story
- Has morals and values that I agree with
- Is highly respected and liked internationally

Cons -

- Makes political gaffes from time to time that hurt his cause. Needs to be more careful in his speech. Sometimes comes off as arrogant.
- Is too willing to call for compromise in some situations where contrast is needed.
- Has ran some lame ads, and some misleading ones this cycle, that he shouldn't have.

- Hasn't strongly articulated a clear message. 'Change' is good, but he needed to find a more creative way to explain exactly what that means.
- Probably should have picked Hillary as VP; barring scandals, she would have locked his win in.

...

Obama and Ayers
Pushed Radicalism
On Schools
By STANLEY KURTZArticle

Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.
The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.
The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.
The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.
The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.
One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.
The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.
In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.
CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).
Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.
CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.
The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.
The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.
Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.
Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.
The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.
Mr. Kurtz is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Hard for me to figure out why anyone would support Obama.

Anyone remember Greg Craig, who is now advising Obama in regard to upcoming debates. Yes, the same Greg Craig that defended Clinton in all of his corruption and impeachment problems, represented Elian Gonzales father or essentially Fidel Castro, defended John Hinkley that tried to assassinate Reagan, defended Pedro Miguel González Pinzón, a Panamanian legislator wanted in the US for the murder in 1992 of a US soldier, and the attempted murder of another, defended United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan during the Volker Commission's investigations in 2004 into the scandals involving the oil-for-food program, worked for Senator Edward Kennedy - as during the 1991 rape trial of William Kennedy Smith.

How does Obama find such great people?