The Democrat Thread

[kapkomet]

Like the way McCain wants to have taxpayers bail out the banks?

You keep saying that. What would you do? What would you have your glory boy do?

 

 

[BigSqwert]

You keep saying that. What would you do? What would you have your glory boy do?

But I thought you were against socialism and big government?

[lostfan]

This line of questioning is based on the premise that Kap is pro-McCain, which he is not.

[bmags]

And she'd know something about witch hunts

 

I laughed.

[Balta1701]

Truth be told, I agree with that. I was just stirring the 'ol pot yesterday.

 

It really pisses me off that the Republicans have been handed a chance on a gold platter to explain why they can help better then their (socialist) pals. But for whatever reason, they've just played dead, and all they want to do is fear monger. Guess what? It isn't going to work this election. Talk about why RSO will take away money from the economy as a whole and they win, but for some reason they can't do that, and it's sad.

I don't necessarily agree with 2/3 of the things you've said...but if hypothetically I did, there's still one big problem you're missing...you can't exactly do a good job of explaining how you're going to be more fiscally responsible and do a better job with the economy than the Democrats and at the same time tell me how good of a job George W. Bush has done, simply because of the record. Either you have to attack the President's earmark record on something other than the stupid earmarks (anyone who can do the slightest bit of math simply scoffs at that) or you cede the economic ground to Obama.

[bmags]

I don't necessarily agree with 2/3 of the things you've said...but if hypothetically I did, there's still one big problem you're missing...you can't exactly do a good job of explaining how you're going to be more fiscally responsible and do a better job with the economy than the Democrats and at the same time tell me how good of a job George W. Bush has done, simply because of the record. Either you have to attack the President's earmark record on something other than the stupid earmarks (anyone who can do the slightest bit of math simply scoffs at that) or you cede the economic ground to Obama.

 

They don't have a charismatic fiscal conservative in their bunch right now, the only bright ones they have are social conservatives. All they could've brought out was Fred Thompson and Fred Thompson had absolutely no idea what he was getting into clearly.

[BigSqwert]

Snippets of Christopher Buckey Jr's endorsement of Obama...Yes, William F Buckley's son:

 

This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

 

...

 

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR.

 

...

 

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

 

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

 

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

 

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Have you guys seen Conan O'Brien that last two nights with his "wander McCain" bits? HYSTERICAL.

[Balta1701]

Governor Palin refuses to cooperate with the Trooper firing investigation, then her spokespeople complain that the investigation report coming out later today is faulty because they didn't interview Governor Palin.

I hate this world.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Why did the first bailout package fail to pass? Depends how politically expedient it is for McCain:

 

Then:

"This bill failed because Barack Obama and the Democrats put politics ahead of country," adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said

 

Now:

Davis expressed outrage that, "in the middle of the greatest disaster in our financial system that we’d had in our lifetime, that the Democrats in the United States Senate would actually link payments to ACORN in the bailout package that they promoted -- prior to Sen. McCain coming to town and actually blowing that package up....

[Heads22]

OFM didn't wear a flag pin for the second debate.

 

He soooooooooo hates America, right?

[HuskyCaucasian]

Tucker Bounds was just on MSNBC. When asked why his campaign hasn't run positive ads about McCain's economic policy and his vision, Bounds went into a rant about Ayers and Bill Daley. Never answered the question about why they haven't run a positive ad. In fact, it was as if he was implying that their negative attack ads about Obama were positive ads about McCain? WEIRD!

[StrangeSox]

Obama supporters should be happy. It's looking more and more like a landslide at this point, and Ayers/ ACORN won't make a bit of difference. They are suspicious, but they aren't game-changers. If this race were tight, maybe it would push McCain's way, but they aren't going to stem his current free-fall in the polls.

[Balta1701]

I'm going to excerpt virtually this whole TPM post because it's so, um, correct.

The Republican party is grasping on to the ACORN story as a way to delegitimize what now looks like the probable outcome of the November election. It is also a way to stoke the paranoia of their base, lays the groundwork for legal challenges of close outcomes in various states and new legal restrictions on voting by lower income voters and minorities. The big picture is that these claims of 'voter fraud' are themselves a fraud, a tool to aid in suppressing Democratic voter turnout. But I want give readers a bit more detail to understand what is going because the right-wing freak out about ACORN happens pretty much on schedule every two years. The whole scam is premised on having enough people who don't remember when they tried it before who they can confuse and lie to. And this is clearly important because I'm hearing from a lot of people whose heart is in the right place thinking some real voter fraud conspiracy has been uncovered and that Obama has to distance himself from it post-haste.

 

ACORN registers lots of lower income and/or minority voters. They operate all across the country and do a lot of things beside voter registration. What's key to understand is their method. By and large they do not rely on volunteers. They hire people -- often people with low incomes or even the unemployed. This has the dual effect of not only registering people but also providing some work and income for people who are out of work. But because a lot of these people are doing it for the money, inevitably, a few of them cut corners or even cheat. So, inevitably someone will end up filling out cards for nonexistent names and some of those slip through ACORN's own efforts to catch errors. It's important to note that in many of the recent ACORN cases that have gotten the most attention it's ACORN itself that has turned the people in who did the fake registrations. These reports start buzzing through the right-wing media every two years and every time the anecdotal reports of 'thousands' of fraudulent registrations turns out, on closer inspection, to be either totally bogus themselves or wildly exaggerated. So thousands of phoney registrations ends up being, like, twelve.

 

I've always had questions about whether this is a good way to do voter registration. And Democratic campaigns usually keep their distance. But here's the key. This is fraud against ACORN. They end up paying people for more registering people then they eventually signed up. If you register me three times to vote, the registrar will see two new registrations of an already registered person and the ones won't count. If I successfully register Mickey Mouse to vote, on election day, Mickey Mouse will still be a cartoon character who cannot go to the local voting station and vote. Logically speaking there's very little way a few phony names on the voting rolls could be used to commit vote fraud. And much more importantly, numerous studies and investigations have shown no evidence of anything more than a handful of isolated casing of actual instances of vote fraud.

 

...

Again, there have been numerous investigations of this. Often by people with at least a mild political interest in finding wrongdoing. But they never find it. It always ends up being right-wing hype and lies. Remember, most of those now-famous fired US Attorneys from 2007 were Republican appointees who were canned after they got tasked with investigating allegations of widespread vote fraud, did everything they could to find it, but came up with nothing. That was the wrong answer so Karl Rove and his crew at the Justice Department fired them.

 

Vote registration fraud is a limited and relatively minor problem in the US today. But it is principally an administrative and efficiency issue. It is has little or nothing to do with people casting illegitimate votes to affect an actual election. That's the key. What you're hearing right now from Fox News, the New York Post, John Fund and the rest of the right-wing bamboozlement chorus is a just another effort to exploit, confuse and lie in an effort to put more severe restrictions on legitimate voting and lay the groundwork to steal elections.

 

It's that simple.

[BigSqwert]

John Weaver, John McCain's former top strategist:

 

"People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Senator Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Senator McCain," Weaver said. "And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive."

[bmags]

I'm going to excerpt virtually this whole TPM post because it's so, um, correct.

 

thank you, I already knew this and read this, but the straw grasping was getting old.

 

and fwiw, the Wall St. Journal also talked about how this was more employee fraud than election fraud.

Edited October 10, 2008 by bmags

[Balta1701]

thank you, I already knew this and read this, but the straw grasping was getting old.

 

and fwiw, the Wall St. Journal also talked about how this was more employee fraud than election fraud.

But that won't stop Fox News and a few unnamed folks from obsessing about it like it's the end of the world, regardless of the total lack of logic behind any sort of actual vote fraud scheme.

[BigSqwert]

McCain camp's response to the increasingly angry mobs attending their rallies yelling things out like "traitor", "terrorist", and "kill him".

 

Barack Obama’s attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn’t understand regular people and the issues they care about. He dismisses hardworking middle class Americans as clinging to guns and religion, while at the same time attacking average Americans at McCain rallies who are angry at Washington, Wall Street and the status quo.

 

Even worse, he attacks anyone who dares to question his readiness to serve as their commander in chief in chief. Raising legitimate questions about record, character and judgment are a vital part of the Democratic process, and Barack Obama’s effort to silence and shame those who seek answers should make everyone wonder exactly what he is hiding.

[lostfan]

That's absolutely f***ing pathetic. Seriously. What's the question exactly?

[Balta1701]

That's absolutely f***ing pathetic. Seriously. What's the question exactly?

Clearly, it's why he's not in jail facing the death penalty.

[Cknolls]

But that won't stop Fox News and a few unnamed folks from obsessing about it like it's the end of the world, regardless of the total lack of logic behind any sort of actual vote fraud scheme.

 

 

So why don't they change the way they do their voter registrations?

[HuskyCaucasian]

McCain camp's response to the increasingly angry mobs attending their rallies yelling things out like "traitor", "terrorist", and "kill him".

So, not only do they DEFEND the comments, they then FALSELY attack Obama.

 

Here is is quote: "It's easy to rile up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that's not what we need right now in the United States."

No where in there did he attack the McCain supporters. He attack the campaign for stoking the fire.

[HuskyCaucasian]

Oddly, not much coverage of this:

Federal, state, and local officials are gathering information about allegations of voter registration fraud that were first raised Channel 8 Eyewitness News.

 

An employee of a private voter registration firm alleges that his bosses trashed registration forms filled out by Democratic voters because they only wanted to sign up Republican voters.

 

The allegations have set off a political firestorm stretching from Las Vegas to Washington D.C., and beyond.

 

As with everything else in this election year, it's now become a political football being tossed between the two parties, with charges and countercharges, but at its core, there still remains the matter of registration forms that were ripped up and tossed in the trash.

[NorthSideSox72]

Oddly, not much coverage of this:

I think it would be smart for people who want to vote, to just go to the appropriate government office, and register. I wouldn't trust some door-to-door vote registrar any more than I'd trust a door-to-door salesman.

 

[BigSqwert]

Richard Trumka, secretary-treasurer of the AFL-CIO and former president of the United Mine Workers, hits racism head on: