The Republican Thread

[southsider2k5]

Anyone can say that about any political candidate if they wanted to. Seriously.

 

Not this type of campaign. Heck look back to 04. John Kerry sure as hell didn't run like this, and neither did Al Gore. If anyone of them did, we wouldn't be talking about George Bush today.

[lostfan]

Where do you think he learned his trade from? He learned from some of the slimiest dirtiest politicians in the country. The smart part about what he is doing is farming out out of the mudslinging to his surrogates and general public. He looks clean because he just has everyone else doing in for him.

Using words like "slimy" or "dirty" when talking about positions is relative though. Politics is a dirty business by nature. If there's one thing I've learned from following all these primaries, it's that.

[lostfan]

Not this type of campaign. Heck look back to 04. John Kerry sure as hell didn't run like this, and neither did Al Gore. If anyone of them did, we wouldn't be talking about George Bush today.

Kerry's downfall was in letting the attacks continue before he went on the offensive. Well that, and he spent too much time convincing people he was the opposite of Bush.

[southsider2k5]

Using words like "slimy" or "dirty" when talking about positions is relative though. Politics is a dirty business by nature. If there's one thing I've learned from following all these primaries, it's that.

 

When talking about the Chicago political machine, I think the results speak for themselves. Maybe Lousiana could give us a run, but in general, I don't think there are many places that are nearly as corrupt as Chicago.

[southsider2k5]

Kerry's downfall was in letting the attacks continue before he went on the offensive. Well that, and he spent too much time convincing people he was the opposite of Bush.

 

Exactly. Obama has had his people on the attack since day one.

[lostfan]

Exactly. Obama has had his people on the attack since day one.

In and of itself I don't find anything wrong with that, in fact it's necessary. It depends what the attacks are about. When the attacks are ad hominem, or outright lies/falsifications/distortions of the truth/completely irrelevant is when I have a problem with them. So it's ok to say something like "McCain has an inconsistent voting record on issue X" or "Obama voted against the surge." It's not ok to say "McCain has an illegitimate black love child" or "Obama's wife ranted about how she hates white people, I have proof but I don't have it right now but take my word for it."

[southsider2k5]

In and of itself I don't find anything wrong with that, in fact it's necessary. It depends what the attacks are about. When the attacks are ad hominem, or outright lies/falsifications/distortions of the truth/completely irrelevant is when I have a problem with them. So it's ok to say something like "McCain has an inconsistent voting record on issue X" or "Obama voted against the surge." It's not ok to say "McCain has an illegitimate black love child" or "Obama's wife ranted about how she hates white people, I have proof but I don't have it right now but take my word for it."

 

It bothers me when you present yourself as a "new" kind of politician, and then engage in the exact same stuff that you have been demonizing the other party for.

[lostfan]

It bothers me when you present yourself as a "new" kind of politician, and then engage in the exact same stuff that you have been demonizing the other party for.

That is really nothing more than a campaign strategy, and a damn good one if you ask me (results show it). Even still, it seems like the media and other people have projected their definition of "change" or "new politics" onto him anyway, and either praise him for no reason or rip him for failing to meet the expectations they set for him. In the end, people will hear what they want to hear.

[Texsox]

Like in any other game, both sides use the same playbook. One candidate may be more run-centric, another may perfer the forward pass, but they all are playing the same game with the same rules.

 

You have to have a lot of very powerful fans to be President. You cannot be afraid to get dirty. The great example of Presidents in our lifetime certainly spent some time chatting with Iranians while campaigning. It gets dirty.

[kapkomet]

That is really nothing more than a campaign strategy, and a damn good one if you ask me (results show it). Even still, it seems like the media and other people have projected their definition of "change" or "new politics" onto him anyway, and either praise him for no reason or rip him for failing to meet the expectations they set for him. In the end, people will hear what they want to hear.

I disagree. The whole thing is a front, which is what SS is saying. And it almost makes it worse, IMO, because he's pretending to be pretensious (sp) when he's not.

 

[lostfan]

I disagree. The whole thing is a front, which is what SS is saying. And it almost makes it worse, IMO, because he's pretending to be pretensious (sp) when he's not.

I didn't say it wasn't a front. I said it was a strategy, and that it's working.

[southsider2k5]

"A wide stance we can believe in"

 

http://www.idahostatesman.com/newsupdates/story/453127.html

 

Button-maker put Sen. Larry Craig, not Larry LaRocco, on Democratic campaign button

Corrected buttons are now on its Web site.

 

AP

In a recent undated photo, a Barack Obama ticket button made for use in Idaho, is seen with Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig, instead of the Democratic nominee for that seat, Larry LaRocco. The Lewiston Tribune reported that Bill Hall, editor emeritus of the paper's editorial page, was able to get some of the defective buttons from the Ohio-based button manufacturer Tigereye Design's Web site before they were corrected. (AP Photo/Lewiston Tribune, Barry Kough)

BY WILLIAM L. SPENCE - LEWISTON TRIBUNE

Edition Date: 07/27/08

 

Some Obama for President campaign buttons made for use in Idaho were printed with the wrong Larry.

 

A defective campaign button offered a new take on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama's campaign slogan, "Change we can believe in."

 

The 3-inch button was intended to show Obama next to Larry LaRocco, the Idaho Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate.

 

Rather than LaRocco's face, however, the button had a photo of Sen. Larry Craig, the Republican who is vacating the seat LaRocco wants to fill.

 

"That sounds like it's going to be a collector's item," said Dean Ferguson, LaRocco's communications director. "I'm sure Senator Obama appreciates Senator Craig's support."

 

Ferguson said the buttons were not ordered by the LaRocco campaign. They appear to have been produced by a commercial firm that makes memorabilia related to Democratic races across the country.

 

Bill Hall, editor emeritus of the Tribune's editorial page, was able to snag some of the buttons from the company's Web site before they were corrected.

 

"I didn't special order them," Hall said. "I was looking at this commercial site that had buttons from every state. I clicked on Idaho and saw one button for Larry LaRocco. I've known Larry for years, and the photo didn't look quite right. I realized it was a mistake, like finding a coin that's been damaged in the making, so I quickly ordered 10 of them."

 

Hall looked at the site two days later, and the photo had been corrected.

 

The Ohio-based button manufacturer, Tigereye Design, could not be reached for comment Friday.

 

Its Web site, www.democraticstuff.com, indicates the company "is committed to helping Democrats at every level" and that it "provides the highest-quality merchandise faster than anyone else in the country."

 

Craig, whose views on many issues differ from Obama's, is not seeking re-election following his involvement in a gay sex sting operation at a Minnesota airport restroom.

 

No one answered the phone late Friday at his Boise or Lewiston offices.

[HuskyCaucasian]

"A wide stance we can believe in"

 

http://www.idahostatesman.com/newsupdates/story/453127.html

I noticed that earlier. someone's getting fired. lol

 

How hard is it to go to wikipedia?

[southsider2k5]

tpm:

 

Pentagon Confirms That It Told Obama He Couldn't Visit Army Base With Campaign Staff

By Greg Sargent - July 25, 2008, 11:13AM

I've just gotten clarification from the Pentagon on what really happened with regard to Barack Obama's canceled visit to an Army base in Germany, something the McCain campaign has been using to hit Obama since yesterday.

 

A Pentagon spokesperson confirms to me that because of longstanding Department of Defense regulations, Pentagon officials told Obama aides that he couldn't visit the base with campaign staff. This left Obama with little choice but to cancel the trip, since the plan to visit with campaign aides had been in the works for weeks.

 

The Obama campaign yesterday announced that it had decided to cancel the visit to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, saying that it would be "inappropriate" to make such a visit as part of a campaign trip.

 

The McCain camp has nonetheless been using Obama's canceled trip to insinuate that he's anti-troops. "Barack Obama is wrong," McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers said in a statement yesterday. "It is never 'inappropriate' to visit our men and women in the military."

 

But it turns out that the Pentagon did in fact tell Obama that in this case, it was not only "inappropriate," but against DOD rules, for him to conduct the visit with campaign staff.

 

"We have longstanding Department of Defense policy in regards to political campaigns and elections," Pentagon spokesperson Elizabeth Hibner told me. "We informed the Obama staff that he was more than welcome to visit as Senator Obama, with Senate staff. However, he could not conduct the visit with campaign staff."

 

After being told this, the Obama campaign announced yesterday that it had decided it was "inappropriate" to make the visit as part of a campaign trip.

 

It's unclear how Obama could have made the visit at all, given the Pentagon's directives. No Senate staff was on the trip, and the Obama camp says they received the Pentagon's directives on Wednesday, after they were already abroad.

 

TEAM OBAMA is now saying that the Pentagon prevent the trip.

 

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/pos...2Y3MGQzNDRiZTU=

 

Obama Spokesman: We Never Said What Axelrod Said Friday

 

Obama's campaign is often praised as disciplined and focused, but a good chunk of his flip-flops are a result of staffers who, we are later told, are freelancing or mischaracterizing the true views of the candidate. Based on how frequently Obama staffers contradict each other on fairly basic matters, there is a strong case to be made that an Obama White House would be chaos.

 

Obama's chief strategist David Axelrod to the Chicago Sun Times, July 25: The Pentagon "viewed this as a campaign event and therefore they said he should not come."

 

Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs, on Morning Joe, this morning: “We never said that the Pentagon prevented us from going.”

[southsider2k5]

TEAM OBAMA is now saying that the Pentagon prevent the trip.

 

http://campaignspot.nationalreview.com/pos...2Y3MGQzNDRiZTU=

 

And from Barack himself...

 

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/20...a-explains.html

 

So here's what Obama said about it all:

 

"The staff was working this so I don’t know each and every detail but here is what I understand happened," Obama said. "We had scheduled to go, we had no problem at all in leaving, we always leave press and staff off -- that is why we left it off the schedule. We were treating it in the same way we treat a visit to Walter Reed which I was able to do a few weeks ago without any fanfare whatsoever. I was going to be accompanied by one of my advisors, a former military officer."

 

Continued Obama, "And we got notice that he would be treated as a campaign person, and it would therefore be perceived as political because he had endorsed my candidacy but he wasn’t on the Senate staff. That triggered then a concern that maybe our visit was going to be perceived as political. And the last thing that I want to do is have injured soldiers and the staff at these wonderful institutions having to sort through whether this is political or not or get caught in the crossfire between campaigns."

 

"So rather than go forward and potentially get caught up in what might have been considered a political controversy of some sort," Obama said, "what we decided was that we not make a visit and instead I would call some of the troops that were there. So that essentially would be the extent of the story."

[southsider2k5]

[BigSqwert]

Heh. Not bad.

[southsider2k5]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1217200684...emEditorialPage

 

The Greatest Scandal

July 28, 2008

 

The profound failure of inner-city public schools to teach children may be the nation's greatest scandal. The differences between the two Presidential candidates on this could hardly be more stark. John McCain is calling for alternatives to the system; Barack Obama wants the kids to stay within that system. We think the facts support Senator McCain.

 

"Parents ask only for schools that are safe, teachers who are competent and diplomas that open doors of opportunity," said Mr. McCain in remarks recently to the NAACP. "When a public system fails, repeatedly, to meet these minimal objectives, parents ask only for a choice in the education of their children." Some parents may opt for a better public school or a charter school; others for a private school. The point, said the Senator, is that "no entrenched bureaucracy or union should deny parents that choice and children that opportunity."

 

Mr. McCain cited the Washington, D.C., Opportunity Scholarship Program, a federally financed school-choice program for disadvantaged kids signed into law by President Bush in 2004. Qualifying families in the District of Columbia receive up to $7,500 a year to attend private K-12 schools. To qualify, a child must live in a family with a household income below 185% of the poverty level. Some 1,900 children participate; 99% are black or Hispanic. Average annual income is just over $22,000 for a family of four.

 

A recent Department of Education report found nearly 90% of participants in the D.C. program have higher reading scores than peers who didn't receive a scholarship. There are five applicants for every opening.

 

Mr. McCain could have mentioned EdisonLearning, a private company that took over 20 of Philadelphia's 45 lowest performing district schools in 2002 to create a new management model for public schools. The most recent state test-score data show that student performance at Philadelphia public schools managed by Edison and other outside providers has improved by nearly twice the amount as the schools run by the district.

 

The number of students performing at grade level or higher in reading at the schools managed by private providers increased by 6.1% overall compared to 3.3% in district-managed schools. In math, the results for Edison and other outside managers was 4.6% and 6.0%, respectively, compared to 3.1% in the district-run schools.

 

The state of California just announced that one in three students in the Los Angeles public school system drops out before graduating. Among black and Latino students in L.A. district schools, the numbers are 42% and 30%. In the past five years, the number of dropouts has grown by more than 80%. The number of high school graduates has gone up only 9%.

 

The silver linings in these dismal clouds are L.A.'s charter high schools. Writing in the Los Angeles Daily News last week, Caprice Young, who heads the California Charter Schools Association, noted that "every charter high school in Los Angeles Unified last year reported a dropout rate significantly lower than not only the school district's average, but the state's as well."

 

On recent evidence, the Democrat Party's policy on these alternatives is simply massive opposition.

 

Congressional Democrats have refused to reauthorize the D.C. voucher program and are threatening to kill it. Last month, Philadelphia's school reform commission voted to seize six schools from outside managers, including four from Edison. In L.A., local school board members oppose the expansion of charters even though seven in 10 charters in the district outperform their neighborhood peers.

 

It's well known that the force calling the Democratic tune here is the teachers unions. Earlier this month, Senator Obama accepted the endorsement of the National Education Association, the largest teachers union. Speaking recently before the American Federation of Teachers, he described the alternative efforts as "tired rhetoric about vouchers and school choice."

 

Mr. Obama told an interviewer recently that he opposes school choice because, "although it might benefit some kids at the top, what you're going to do is leave a lot of kids at the bottom." The Illinois Senator has it exactly backward. Those at the top don't need voucher programs and they already exercise school choice. They can afford exclusive private schools, or they can afford to live in a neighborhood with decent public schools. The point of providing educational options is to extend this freedom to the "kids at the bottom."

 

A visitor to Mr. Obama's Web site finds plenty of information about his plans to fix public education in this country. Everyone knows this is a long, hard slog, but Mr. Obama and his wife aren't waiting. Their daughters attend the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where annual tuition ranges from $15,528 for kindergarten to $20,445 for high school.

 

When the day arrives that these two candidates face off, we hope Senator McCain comes prepared to press his opponent hard on change, hope and choice in the schools.

[NorthSideSox72]

Not a bad article. Education should indeed be a huge priority, and I am not sure I like either candidate's offerings on the topic.

 

[Cknolls]

Google facebook. Look what comes up for the second entry. Interesting..

[lostfan]

Google facebook. Look what comes up for the second entry. Interesting..

Yeah, he's been all over that for a while now.

[Texsox]

A newspaper without Editors and editing is an on line forum like this where anyone can print just about anything. At newspapers decisions are made every day on what is included and what is not, there is not unlimited space. Is it news when it is the same stump speech that has been given for 12 months?

[Texsox]

Not a bad article. Education should indeed be a huge priority, and I am not sure I like either candidate's offerings on the topic.

 

Where will the money come from? The harsh reality is we need a leveling of the system. As noted in the article, parents can move to a neighborhood with better schools, which generally means higher property values and higher housing prices. When we start looking at school funding on a state wide basis, and fund the schools that way, we begin to offer the kinds of services that Winnetka takes for granted and a poor inner city school can only dream.

 

There are pros and cons on both sides, what worries me the most about vouchers and some of these plans is it will take money out of the public system where most of the poor children will be. Their parents will not be able to make up the difference between the voucher and the private school.

 

Also, the whole he believes this because they donate stuff is crap. If, for example, Southsider, Kap, and AlphaDog where offering an endorsement, wouldn't the candidate be a conservative who supports most of what they believe in? Would it then be fair to say that the candidate only supports a given issue because Southsider, Kap, and AlphaDog gave him an endorsement? It's a two way street. Most endorsements are a shared vision or philosophy. They travel in the same circles, attend the same benefits and fundraisers, visit the same churhces.

[Texsox]

And do we really expect a Presidential candidate or Senator to have their children in a public school with the security concerns? If we discovered Obama did have his kids in a public school, he would be attacked for grandstanding and placing his political interests ahead of his children's safety.

[NorthSideSox72]

Where will the money come from? The harsh reality is we need a leveling of the system. As noted in the article, parents can move to a neighborhood with better schools, which generally means higher property values and higher housing prices. When we start looking at school funding on a state wide basis, and fund the schools that way, we begin to offer the kinds of services that Winnetka takes for granted and a poor inner city school can only dream.

 

There are pros and cons on both sides, what worries me the most about vouchers and some of these plans is it will take money out of the public system where most of the poor children will be. Their parents will not be able to make up the difference between the voucher and the private school.

 

Also, the whole he believes this because they donate stuff is crap. If, for example, Southsider, Kap, and AlphaDog where offering an endorsement, wouldn't the candidate be a conservative who supports most of what they believe in? Would it then be fair to say that the candidate only supports a given issue because Southsider, Kap, and AlphaDog gave him an endorsement? It's a two way street. Most endorsements are a shared vision or philosophy. They travel in the same circles, attend the same benefits and fundraisers, visit the same churhces.

I went to high school in Winnetka - graduated New Trier in '91. I would love to see everyone get that level of education. The positive results from that on the country would be enormous. But as you pointed out, money is required. New Trier spends something like 3 times the amount of money per student that many of Chicago's inner city schools do. This is the "Savage Inequality" that Kozol wrote about. A "leveling" will probably never happen, because the people with the most influence live in the districts that would be going down in quality. But if we instead look to raise up the poorer districts, that will cost a lot of money that the states and localities don't have.

 

School funding is one of the great political conundrums of our time. Who has an answer?