Obama '08?

A coin has two sides.
American political system has two parties.
Forget it

H2O_MAN: I am wondering about this guy Barr from your state of GA who is running as a 3rd party candidate. Does he have any support? Obviously he won't win, but could he nab a few % points? How many, would you predict? And would those come from Mr McCain?
Thank you. -RJB-

New book out today...as I was scanning around, searching for information about Obama and Ayers...

Here

Excerpt from article:

New book: Obama a lefty, not a reformer
By BEN SMITH | 8/4/08 9:20 AM EST Text Size:



The first serious negative biography of Senator Barack Obama casts the Democratic nominee as a fake reformer and a real liberal.

"The Case Against Barack Obama," by National Review's David Freddoso, blasts Obama for failing to take on the Chicago machine, for listening to "radical advisors," and for backing "doctrinaire liberal" causes from teachers unions to abortion rights.

It does not, however, compare him to Paris Hilton, or dwell at length on his religion or race - making the substance of "The Case Against Barack Obama" sound a bit unfamiliar amid a campaign cacophony of hyperbolic web ads, alleged race cards, and viral smears.

Freddoso says John McCain's campaign and Republicans at large are making the wrong case against the Illinois senator.

"I don't think you beat Obama by saying that he's Paris Hilton," said Freddoso, a reporter for the conservative magazine National Review, referring to McCain's latest advertising campaign. "The more important thing is really to look at is he who he says he is? Is he really this great reformer?"

No Regrets for a Love Of Explosives; In a Memoir of Sorts, a War Protester Talks of Life With the Weathermen [/size]

By DINITIA SMITH
Published: September 11, 2001

''I don't regret setting bombs,'' Bill Ayers said. ''I feel we didn't do enough.'' Mr. Ayers, who spent the 1970's as a fugitive in the Weather Underground, was sitting in the kitchen of his big turn-of-the-19th-century stone house in the Hyde Park district of Chicago. The long curly locks in his Wanted poster are shorn, though he wears earrings. He still has tattooed on his neck the rainbow-and-lightning Weathermen logo that appeared on letters taking responsibility for bombings. And he still has the ebullient, ingratiating manner, the apparently intense interest in other people, that made him a charismatic figure in the radical student movement.......

This has nothing to do with Obama and you know it.

RL - I'm not sure what you're trying to do. What is your objective? Who is your desired audience?

If you're trying to passive aggressive scare moderate republicans back to their side of the line (because polls show his support is pretty watery).

Do you think that you know more about Obama than Obama supporters?

T
K
O

"Back at ya" my ass. Diest is not starting a new bash McCain thread every few days. Diest is not trolling for any thread that mentions McCain to spew another innuendo or outright smear.

You are one hypocritical transparent puke.

Diest TKO wrote:

RL - I'm not sure what you're trying to do. What is your objective? Who is your desired audience?

If you're trying to passive aggressive scare moderate republicans back to their side of the line (because polls show his support is pretty watery).

Do you think that you know more about Obama than Obama supporters?

T
K
O

Back at ya big guy.

What are you trying to do, Deist?

Why are you here expressing your views?

Who is your desired audience?

Do you think you know more about McCain than his supporters?

But he also went out of his way to say a little something about NASA, an agency he'd said previously should see its budget cut so an Obama administration can better fund education. Not anymore. Though he said nothing specific about supporting sending men to the moon -- a key part of NASA's plan to, among other things, keep most of the workforce at Kennedy Space Center still employed -- he was more supportive of the agency than he'd ever been publicly.

Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) -- Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama called on the government to release light crude oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to drive down gasoline prices, which have created a drag on the economy.

In what an adviser called a ``refinement'' of his stance on using the reserve, the Illinois senator proposed releasing light crude, which is easier to refine, and replacing it later with heavy crude oil in a swap intended to retain reserve levels.

``We should sell 70 million barrels of oil from our Strategic Petroleum Reserve for less expensive crude, which in the past has lowered gas prices within two weeks,'' Obama said in a speech on energy policy today in Lansing, Michigan.

Obama previously has said he opposes tapping the 727 million-barrel-capacity reserve -- established to buffer a sudden disruption in supply -- purely as a brake on prices.

One goal is to put at least 1 million so-called plug-in hybrid vehicles that would get as much as 150 miles to a gallon of gasoline on the road by 2015. That effort would be spurred by a $7,000 tax credit for consumers who buy them. Automakers would get $4 billion in loans and tax credits to help them retool factories to build such cars and trucks, Obama said in Michigan, a battleground state that has been especially hard-hit by the slowdown in the U.S. auto industry.

Enquiring entrepreneurs want to know. Unfortunately, Mr. Obama's "emergency" plan, announced on Friday, doesn't offer any clarity. To pay for "stimulus" checks of $1,000 for families and $500 for individuals, the Senator says government would take "a reasonable share" of oil company profits.


Mr. Obama didn't bother to define "reasonable," and neither did Dick Durbin, the second-ranking Senate Democrat, when he recently declared that "The oil companies need to know that there is a limit on how much profit they can take in this economy." Really? This extraordinary redefinition of free-market success could use some parsing.

Take Exxon Mobil, which on Thursday reported the highest quarterly profit ever and is the main target of any "windfall" tax surcharge. Yet if its profits are at record highs, its tax bills are already at record highs too. Between 2003 and 2007, Exxon paid $64.7 billion in U.S. taxes, exceeding its after-tax U.S. earnings by more than $19 billion. That sounds like a government windfall to us, but perhaps we're missing some Obama-Durbin business subtlety.

Maybe they have in mind profit margins as a percentage of sales. Yet by that standard Exxon's profits don't seem so large. Exxon's profit margin stood at 10% for 2007, which is hardly out of line with the oil and gas industry average of 8.3%, or the 8.9% for U.S. manufacturing (excluding the sputtering auto makers).

If that's what constitutes windfall profits, most of corporate America would qualify. Take aerospace or machinery -- both 8.2% in 2007. Chemicals had an average margin of 12.7%. Computers: 13.7%. Electronics and appliances: 14.5%. Pharmaceuticals (18.4%) and beverages and tobacco (19.1%) round out the Census Bureau's industry rankings. The latter two double the returns of Big Oil, though of course government has already became a tacit shareholder in Big Tobacco through the various legal settlements that guarantee a revenue stream for years to come.

In a tax bill on oil earlier this summer, no fewer than 51 Senators voted to impose a 25% windfall tax on a U.S.-based oil company whose profits grew by more than 10% in a single year and wasn't investing enough in "renewable" energy. This suggests that a windfall is defined by profits growing too fast. No one knows where that 10% came from, besides political convenience. But if 10% is the new standard, the tech industry is going to have to rethink its growth arc. So will LG, the electronics company, which saw its profits grow by 505% in 2007. Abbott Laboratories hit 110%.

If Senator Obama is as exercised about "outrageous" profits as he says he is, he might also have to turn on a few liberal darlings. Oh, say, Berkshire Hathaway. Warren Buffett's outfit pulled in $11 billion last year, up 29% from 2006. Its profit margin -- if that's the relevant figure -- was 11.47%, which beats out the American oil majors.