Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ist-criss.html


http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

On Oct 2, 3:14 pm, wrote:
Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ommunist-criss...

http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

Kids sing for Usama bin Hussein Obama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM

Do the words "Communists" and "Nazi's" come to mind? HItler, China, N.
Korea,
Russia.?

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.
The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The
Chicanos. The MARXIST Professors and structural feminists and punk-
rock performance poets." pg 100...Usama bin Hussein Obama

Vote for Usama bin Hussein Obama and help turn the United States into
a black Marxist state.

On Oct 2, 4:19 pm, cmdr buzz corey
wrote:
On Oct 2, 3:14 pm, wrote:

Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ommunist-criss...

http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

Kids sing for Usama bin Hussein Obama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM

Do the words "Communists" and "Nazi's" come to mind? HItler, China, N.
Korea,
Russia.?

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.
The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The
Chicanos. The MARXIST Professors and structural feminists and punk-
rock performance poets." pg 100...Usama bin Hussein Obama

Vote for Usama bin Hussein Obama and help turn the United States into
a black Marxist state.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/commen...o_talk_editors
The Choice
October 13, 2008

Keywords
2008 Election;
Obama, Barack (Sen.);
McCain, John (Sen.);
Elections;
Endorsements (Political);
Bush, George W. (Pres.) (43rd);
Iraq War

Never in living memory has an election been more critical than the one
fast approaching—that's the quadrennial cliché, as expected as the
balloons and the bombast. And yet when has it ever felt so urgently
true? When have so many Americans had so clear a sense that a
Presidency has—at the levels of competence, vision, and integrity—
undermined the country and its ideals?

The incumbent Administration has distinguished itself for the ages.
The Presidency of George W. Bush is the worst since Reconstruction, so
there is no mystery about why the Republican Party—which has held
dominion over the executive branch of the federal government for the
past eight years and the legislative branch for most of that time—has
little desire to defend its record, domestic or foreign. The only
speaker at the Convention in St. Paul who uttered more than a sentence
or two in support of the President was his wife, Laura. Meanwhile, the
nominee, John McCain, played the part of a vaudeville illusionist,
asking to be regarded as an apostle of change after years of embracing
the essentials of the Bush agenda with ever-increasing ardor.

The Republican disaster begins at home. Even before taking into
account whatever fantastically expensive plan eventually emerges to
help rescue the financial system from Wall Street's long-running
pyramid schemes, the economic and fiscal picture is bleak. During the
Bush Administration, the national debt, now approaching ten trillion
dollars, has nearly doubled. Next year's federal budget is projected
to run a half-trillion-dollar deficit, a precipitous fall from the
seven-hundred-billion-dollar surplus that was projected when Bill
Clinton left office. Private-sector job creation has been a sixth of
what it was under President Clinton. Five million people have fallen
into poverty. The number of Americans without health insurance has
grown by seven million, while average premiums have nearly doubled.
Meanwhile, the principal domestic achievement of the Bush
Administration has been to shift the relative burden of taxation from
the rich to the rest. For the top one per cent of us, the Bush tax
cuts are worth, on average, about a thousand dollars a week; for the
bottom fifth, about a dollar and a half. The unfairness will only
increase if the painful, yet necessary, effort to rescue the credit
markets ends up preventing the rescue of our health-care system, our
environment, and our physical, educational, and industrial
infrastructure.

At the same time, a hundred and fifty thousand American troops are in
Iraq and thirty-three thousand are in Afghanistan. There is still
disagreement about the wisdom of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and his
horrific regime, but there is no longer the slightest doubt that the
Bush Administration manipulated, bullied, and lied the American public
into this war and then mismanaged its prosecution in nearly every
aspect. The direct costs, besides an expenditure of more than six
hundred billion dollars, have included the loss of more than four
thousand Americans, the wounding of thirty thousand, the deaths of
tens of thousands of Iraqis, and the displacement of four and a half
million men, women, and children. Only now, after American forces have
been fighting for a year longer than they did in the Second World War,
is there a glimmer of hope that the conflict in Iraq has entered a
stage of fragile stability.

The indirect costs, both of the war in particular and of the
Administration's unilateralist approach to foreign policy in general,
have also been immense. The torture of prisoners, authorized at the
highest level, has been an ethical and a public-diplomacy catastrophe.
At a moment when the global environment, the global economy, and
global stability all demand a transition to new sources of energy, the
United States has been a global retrograde, wasteful in its
consumption and heedless in its policy. Strategically and morally, the
Bush Administration has squandered the American capacity to counter
the example and the swagger of its rivals. China, Russia, Iran, Saudi
Arabia, and other illiberal states have concluded, each in its own
way, that democratic principles and human rights need not be
components of a stable, prosperous future. At recent meetings of the
United Nations, emboldened despots like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran
came to town sneering at our predicament and hailing the "end of the
American era."

The election of 2008 is the first in more than half a century in which
no incumbent President or Vice-President is on the ballot. There is,
however, an incumbent party, and that party has been lucky enough to
find itself, apparently against the wishes of its "base," with a
nominee who evidently disliked George W. Bush before it became
fashionable to do so. In South Carolina in 2000, Bush crushed John
McCain with a sub-rosa primary campaign of such viciousness that
McCain lashed out memorably against Bush's Christian-right allies. So
profound was McCain's anger that in 2004 he flirted with the
possibility of joining the Democratic ticket under John Kerry. Bush,
who took office as a "compassionate conservative," governed
immediately as a rightist ideologue. During that first term, McCain
bolstered his reputation, sometimes deserved, as a "maverick" willing
to work with Democrats on such issues as normalizing relations with
Vietnam, campaign-finance reform, and immigration reform. He co-
sponsored, with John Edwards and Edward Kennedy, a patients' bill of
rights. In 2001 and 2003, he voted against the Bush tax cuts. With
John Kerry, he co-sponsored a bill raising auto-fuel efficiency
standards and, with Joseph Lieberman, a cap-and-trade regime on carbon
emissions. He was one of a minority of Republicans opposed to
unlimited drilling for oil and gas off America's shores.

Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly
rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid
obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned
immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill. Most
shocking, McCain, who had repeatedly denounced torture under all
circumstances, voted in February against a ban on the very techniques
of "enhanced interrogation" that he himself once endured in Vietnam—as
long as the torturers were civilians employed by the C.I.A.

On almost every issue, McCain and the Democratic Party's nominee,
Barack Obama, speak the generalized language of "reform," but only
Obama has provided a convincing, rational, and fully developed vision.
McCain has abandoned his opposition to the Bush-era tax cuts and has
taken up the demagogic call—in the midst of recession and Wall Street
calamity, with looming crises in Social Security, Medicare, and
Medicaid—for more tax cuts. Bush's expire in 2011. If McCain, as he
has proposed, cuts taxes for corporations and estates, the benefits
once more would go disproportionately to the wealthy.

In Washington, the craze for pure market triumphalism is over.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson arrived in town (via Goldman Sachs) a
Republican, but it seems that he will leave a Democrat. In other
words, he has come to see that the abuses that led to the current
financial crisis––not least, excessive speculation on borrowed
capital––can be fixed only with government regulation and oversight.
McCain, who has never evinced much interest in, or knowledge of,
economic questions, has had little of substance to say about the
crisis. His most notable gesture of concern—a melodramatic call last
month to suspend his campaign and postpone the first Presidential
debate until the government bailout plan was ready—soon revealed
itself as an empty diversionary tactic.

By contrast, Obama has made a serious study of the mechanics and the
history of this economic disaster and of the possibilities of
stimulating a recovery. Last March, in New York, in a speech notable
for its depth, balance, and foresight, he said, "A complete disdain
for pay-as-you-go budgeting, coupled with a generally scornful
attitude towards oversight and enforcement, allowed far too many to
put short-term gain ahead of long-term consequences." Obama is
committed to reforms that value not only the restoration of stability
but also the protection of the vast majority of the population, which
did not partake of the fruits of the binge years. He has called for
greater and more programmatic regulation of the financial system; the
creation of a National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank, which would
help reverse the decay of our roads, bridges, and mass-transit
systems, and create millions of jobs; and a major investment in the
green-energy sector.

On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful
proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America's
carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious
goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if
atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels.
Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and
those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell
the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the
available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to
auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars
a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-
training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise
federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of
America's electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012.
Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-
sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing
the nation's reliance on fossil fuels.

There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a
sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the
first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon
dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-
and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White
House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline
prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to
shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on
offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his
campaign. Opening up America's coastal waters to drilling would have
no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the
long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the
Department of Energy, would be "insignificant." Such inconvenient
facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its
voice with the slogan "Drill, baby, drill!"

The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to
the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails
among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core
conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M.
Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.

McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two
reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective
appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one
moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be
reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on
abortion. McCain's views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said
he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise
"wouldn't bother me any"; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape
and incest as exceptions to his party's platform opposing abortion.

But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to
permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning.
Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has
pursued, it's safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds
would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand
executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly
tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and
state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate
power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the
Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.

Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago,
voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several
unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won
the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new
protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While
McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees,
perpetuating the Bush Administration's regime of state-sponsored extra-
legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the
right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future
would be safe in his care.

In the shorthand of political commentary, the Iraq war seems to leave
McCain and Obama roughly even. Opposing it before the invasion, Obama
had the prescience to warn of a costly and indefinite occupation and
rising anti-American radicalism around the world; supporting it,
McCain foresaw none of this. More recently, in early 2007 McCain
risked his Presidential prospects on the proposition that five
additional combat brigades could salvage a war that by then appeared
hopeless. Obama, along with most of the country, had decided that it
was time to cut American losses. Neither candidate's calculations on
Iraq have been as cheaply political as McCain's repeated assertion
that Obama values his career over his country; both men based their
positions, right or wrong, on judgment and principle.

President Bush's successor will inherit two wars and the realities of
limited resources, flagging popular will, and the dwindling
possibilities of what can be achieved by American power. McCain's
views on these subjects range from the simplistic to the unknown. In
Iraq, he seeks "victory"—a word that General David Petraeus refuses to
use, and one that fundamentally misrepresents the messy, open-ended
nature of the conflict. As for Afghanistan, on the rare occasions when
McCain mentions it he implies that the surge can be transferred
directly from Iraq, which suggests that his grasp of counterinsurgency
is not as firm as he insisted it was during the first Presidential
debate. McCain always displays more faith in force than interest in
its strategic consequences. Unlike Obama, McCain has no political
strategy for either war, only the dubious hope that greater security
will allow things to work out. Obama has long warned of deterioration
along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and has a considered grasp of
its vital importance. His strategy for both Afghanistan and Iraq shows
an understanding of the role that internal politics, economics,
corruption, and regional diplomacy play in wars where there is no
battlefield victory.

Unimaginably painful personal experience taught McCain that war is
above all a test of honor: maintain the will to fight on, be prepared
to risk everything, and you will prevail. Asked during the first
debate to outline "the lessons of Iraq," McCain said, "I think the
lessons of Iraq are very clear: that you cannot have a failed strategy
that will then cause you to nearly lose a conflict." A soldier's
answer––but a statesman must have a broader view of war and peace. The
years ahead will demand not only determination but also diplomacy,
flexibility, patience, judiciousness, and intellectual engagement.
These are no more McCain's strong suit than the current President's.
Obama, for his part, seems to know that more will be required than
willpower and force to extract some advantage from the wreckage of the
Bush years.

Obama is also better suited for the task of renewing the bedrock
foundations of American influence. An American restoration in foreign
affairs will require a commitment not only to international
coöperation but also to international institutions that can address
global warming, the dislocations of what will likely be a deepening
global economic crisis, disease epidemics, nuclear proliferation,
terrorism, and other, more traditional security challenges. Many of
the Cold War-era vehicles for engagement and negotiation—the United
Nations, the World Bank, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime,
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—are moribund, tattered, or
outdated. Obama has the generational outlook that will be required to
revive or reinvent these compacts. He would be the first postwar
American President unencumbered by the legacies of either Munich or
Vietnam.

The next President must also restore American moral credibility.
Closing Guantánamo, banning all torture, and ending the Iraq war as
responsibly as possible will provide a start, but only that. The
modern Presidency is as much a vehicle for communication as for
decision-making, and the relevant audiences are global. Obama has
inspired many Americans in part because he holds up a mirror to their
own idealism. His election would do no less—and likely more—overseas.

What most distinguishes the candidates, however, is character—and
here, contrary to conventional wisdom, Obama is clearly the stronger
of the two. Not long ago, Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, said,
"This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite
view of what people take away from these candidates." The view that
this election is about personalities leaves out policy, complexity,
and accountability. Even so, there's some truth in what Davis said––
but it hardly points to the conclusion that he intended.

Echoing Obama, McCain has made "change" one of his campaign mantras.
But the change he has actually provided has been in himself, and it is
not just a matter of altering his positions. A willingness to pander
and even lie has come to define his Presidential campaign and its
televised advertisements. A contemptuous duplicity, a meanness, has
entered his talk on the stump—so much so that it seems obvious that,
in the drive for victory, he is willing to replicate some of the same
underhanded methods that defeated him eight years ago in South
Carolina.

Perhaps nothing revealed McCain's cynicism more than his choice of
Sarah Palin, the former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, who had been
governor of that state for twenty-one months, as the Republican
nominee for Vice-President. In the interviews she has given since her
nomination, she has had difficulty uttering coherent unscripted
responses about the most basic issues of the day. We are watching a
candidate for Vice-President cram for her ongoing exam in elementary
domestic and foreign policy. This is funny as a Tina Fey routine on
"Saturday Night Live," but as a vision of the political future it's
deeply unsettling. Palin has no business being the backup to a
President of any age, much less to one who is seventy-two and in
imperfect health. In choosing her, McCain committed an act of
breathtaking heedlessness and irresponsibility. Obama's choice, Joe
Biden, is not without imperfections. His tongue sometimes runs in
advance of his mind, providing his own fodder for late-night
comedians, but there is no comparison with Palin. His deep experience
in foreign affairs, the judiciary, and social policy makes him an
assuring and complementary partner for Obama.

The longer the campaign goes on, the more the issues of personality
and character have reflected badly on McCain. Unless appearances are
very deceiving, he is impulsive, impatient, self-dramatizing, erratic,
and a compulsive risk-taker. These qualities may have contributed to
his usefulness as a "maverick" senator. But in a President they would
be a menace.

By contrast, Obama's transformative message is accompanied by a sense
of pragmatic calm. A tropism for unity is an essential part of his
character and of his campaign. It is part of what allowed him to
overcome a Democratic opponent who entered the race with tremendous
advantages. It is what helped him forge a political career relying
both on the liberals of Hyde Park and on the political regulars of
downtown Chicago. His policy preferences are distinctly liberal, but
he is determined to speak to a broad range of Americans who do not
necessarily share his every value or opinion. For some who oppose him,
his equanimity even under the ugliest attack seems like hauteur; for
some who support him, his reluctance to counterattack in the same vein
seems like self-defeating detachment. Yet it is Obama's temperament—
and not McCain's—that seems appropriate for the office both men seek
and for the volatile and dangerous era in which we live. Those who
dismiss his centeredness as self-centeredness or his composure as
indifference are as wrong as those who mistook Eisenhower's stolidity
for denseness or Lincoln's humor for lack of seriousness.

Nowadays, almost every politician who thinks about running for
President arranges to become an author. Obama's books are different:
he wrote them. "The Audacity of Hope" (2006) is a set of policy
disquisitions loosely structured around an account of his freshman
year in the United States Senate. Though a campaign manifesto of
sorts, it is superior to that genre's usual blowsy pastiche of
ghostwritten speeches. But it is Obama's first book, "Dreams from My
Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance" (1995), that offers an
unprecedented glimpse into the mind and heart of a potential
President. Obama began writing it in his early thirties, before he was
a candidate for anything. Not since Theodore Roosevelt has an American
politician this close to the pinnacle of power produced such a
sustained, highly personal work of literary merit before being
definitively swept up by the tides of political ambition.

A Presidential election is not the awarding of a Pulitzer Prize: we
elect a politician and, we hope, a statesman, not an author. But
Obama's first book is valuable in the way that it reveals his
fundamental attitudes of mind and spirit. "Dreams from My Father" is
an illuminating memoir not only in the substance of Obama's own
peculiarly American story but also in the qualities he brings to the
telling: a formidable intelligence, emotional empathy, self-
reflection, balance, and a remarkable ability to see life and the
world through the eyes of people very different from himself. In
common with nearly all other senators and governors of his generation,
Obama does not count military service as part of his biography. But
his life has been full of tests—personal, spiritual, racial, political—
that bear on his preparation for great responsibility.

It is perfectly legitimate to call attention, as McCain has done, to
Obama's lack of conventional national and international policymaking
experience. We, too, wish he had more of it. But office-holding is not
the only kind of experience relevant to the task of leading a wildly
variegated nation. Obama's immersion in diverse human environments
(Hawaii's racial rainbow, Chicago's racial cauldron, countercultural
New York, middle-class Kansas, predominantly Muslim Indonesia), his
years of organizing among the poor, his taste of corporate law and his
grounding in public-interest and constitutional law—these, too, are
experiences. And his books show that he has wrung from them every drop
of insight and breadth of perspective they contained.

The exhaustingly, sometimes infuriatingly long campaign of 2008 (and
2007) has had at least one virtue: it has demonstrated that Obama's
intelligence and steady temperament are not just figments of the
writer's craft. He has made mistakes, to be sure. (His failure to
accept McCain's imaginative proposal for a series of unmediated joint
appearances was among them.) But, on the whole, his campaign has been
marked by patience, planning, discipline, organization, technological
proficiency, and strategic astuteness. Obama has often looked two or
three moves ahead, relatively impervious to the permanent hysteria of
the hourly news cycle and the cable-news shouters. And when crisis has
struck, as it did when the divisive antics of his ex-pastor threatened
to bring down his campaign, he has proved equal to the moment,
rescuing himself with a speech that not only drew the poison but also
demonstrated a profound respect for the electorate. Although his
opponents have tried to attack him as a man of "mere" words, Obama has
returned eloquence to its essential place in American politics. The
choice between experience and eloquence is a false one––something that
Lincoln, out of office after a single term in Congress, proved in his
own campaign of political and national renewal. Obama's "mere"
speeches on everything from the economy and foreign affairs to race
have been at the center of his campaign and its success; if he wins,
his eloquence will be central to his ability to govern.

We cannot expect one man to heal every wound, to solve every major
crisis of policy. So much of the Presidency, as they say, is a matter
of waking up in the morning and trying to drink from a fire hydrant.
In the quiet of the Oval Office, the noise of immediate demands can be
deafening. And yet Obama has precisely the temperament to shut out the
noise when necessary and concentrate on the essential. The election of
Obama—a man of mixed ethnicity, at once comfortable in the world and
utterly representative of twenty-first-century America—would, at a
stroke, reverse our country's image abroad and refresh its spirit at
home. His ascendance to the Presidency would be a symbolic culmination
of the civil- and voting-rights acts of the nineteen-sixties and the
century-long struggles for equality that preceded them. It could not
help but say something encouraging, even exhilarating, about the
country, about its dedication to tolerance and inclusiveness, about
its fidelity, after all, to the values it proclaims in its textbooks.
At a moment of economic calamity, international perplexity, political
failure, and battered morale, America needs both uplift and realism,
both change and steadiness. It needs a leader temperamentally,
intellectually, and emotionally attuned to the complexities of our
troubled globe. That leader's name is Barack Obama.

—The Editors

boo-radley wrote:

On Oct 2, 4:19 pm, cmdr buzz corey
wrote:
On Oct 2, 3:14 pm, wrote:

Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ommunist-criss...

http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

Kids sing for Usama bin Hussein Obama

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdPSqL9_mfM

Do the words "Communists" and "Nazi's" come to mind? HItler, China, N.
Korea,
Russia.?

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully.
The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The
Chicanos. The MARXIST Professors and structural feminists and punk-
rock performance poets." pg 100...Usama bin Hussein Obama

Vote for Usama bin Hussein Obama and help turn the United States into
a black Marxist state.

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/commen...o_talk_editors

{BS snipped}


—The Editors

The New Yorker is merely a mouthpiece for the Liberal/Democrat/Marxists.

NoBama!

On Oct 2, 9:10*pm, boo-radley wrote:

http://www.newyorker.com/


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAkc03uHmeU

Most people have too much of a sense of decency and too much common
sense to have gone along with those horrors unless someone found a way
to turn off their thinking and turn on their emotions.

That is how Jim Jones led hundreds of people to their deaths at
Jonestown. On a much larger scale, that is how Lenin created a regime
of mass murder in Russia, how Hitler did the same thing in Germany and
Mao in China.

Yet we seem to be no more aware of a need to be on guard against
demagoguery today, in the 21st century, than those people who looked
up with open-mouthed adulation at Adolf Hitler in the 1930s and at
numerous other demagogues, large and small, around the world
throughout the turbulent 20th century.

Many people find it thrilling that the mantra of "change" is ringing
out across the land during this election year. But let's do what the
politicians hope that we will never do -- stop and think.

It is doubtful whether there is a single human being in this entire
country who is 100 percent satisfied with everything that is going on.
In other words, everybody is for change.

The real difference between liberals and conservatives is in which
specific things they want to change, and in what way.

Milton Friedman was the leading conservative thinker of his time but
he wanted to radically change the Federal Reserve, the school system,
and the tax system, among other things.

Everybody is for change. They differ on the specifics. Uniting people
behind the thoughtless mantra of "change" means asking for a blank
check in exchange for rhetoric. That deal has been made many times in
many places -- and millions of people have lived to regret it. [Tens
of millions more have died because of it.]

It is not too much to ask politicians to talk specifics, instead of
trying to sweep us along, turning off our minds and turning on our
emotions, with soaring rhetoric.

Optimists might even hope for some logical consistency and hard
facts.

Barack Obama says that he wants to "heal America and repair the
world." One wonders what he will do for an encore and whether he will
rest on the seventh day.

That we have so many people who are ready to be swept along by such
rhetoric is a huge danger, for it means that the fate of this great
nation is at risk from any skilled demagogue who comes along.

Barack Obama says that he wants to "heal" the country while at the
same time promoting the idea that all sorts of people are victims for
whom he will fight.

Being divisive while proclaiming unity is something you can do only in
the world of rhetoric.

Senator Obama has no monopoly on demagoguery, however. Former Senator
John Edwards has been playing this game longer, even if not as
effectively in the political arena.

John Edwards built his own fortune in the courtroom, depicting babies
with birth defects as victims of the doctors who delivered them. The
cost of such demagoguery has gone far beyond the tens of millions of
dollars that Edwards pocketed for himself from gullible juries.

Such lawsuits based on junk science have driven up the cost of medical
care, not only directly but even more so indirectly, by leading to an
increase in Caesarean births and other costly "defensive medicine" to
protect doctors rather than patients.

The world of John Edwards, like the world of Barack Obama, is a world
of victims, whose savior he claims to be.

What is scary is how little interest the public and the media have in
the actual track record of political saviors and the cry of generic
"change."

America is not czarist Russia or Iran under the shah, so that people
might think that any change was bound to be for the better. Yet even
in those despotic countries the changes -- to communism and to the
ayatollahs -- made them far worse.

The time is long overdue for voters to demand specifics instead of
rhetoric that turns their emotions on and their minds off.

Everybody expects politicians to lie, especially during an election
year. You can bet the rent money on it.

Among the many lies we can expect to hear this election year, none
will be bigger or more often repeated, in the media as well as by
politicians, than the lie that there is a widening income gap between
the rich and the poor.

Why is that a lie, when there are so many statistics that seem to
substantiate it?

Let's start at square one and take it a step at a time.

First of all, there is a fundamental difference between statistical
categories and flesh-and-blood human beings.

When there is a growing disparity between one statistical category and
another statistical category over time, that does not mean that there
is a corresponding growing disparity between flesh-and-blood human
beings over time, since human beings move from one statistical
category to another.

The statistical categories in this case are income brackets. There is
no question that incomes in the top income brackets have risen both
absolutely and relative to the bottom income brackets.

The joker is that millions of people move from one income bracket to
another.

The even bigger joker is that taxpayers whose incomes were in the
bottom 20 percent in 1996 had a 91 percent increase in incomes by
2005.

Meanwhile, taxpayers in the top one-hundredth of one percent -- "the
rich" or "superrich" if you believe politicians and the media -- had
their incomes drop by 26 percent over those very same years.

Obviously, when millions of people's incomes nearly double in a
decade, many of them move up out of the bottom income bracket.
Similarly, when other people who were at the top see their income drop
by about one-fourth, many of them drop out of that bracket.

When we talk about "the rich" and "the poor" we mean rich and poor
human beings, not rich and poor statistical brackets. Yet politicians
and the media treat people and statistical categories as if they were
the same thing.

Part of the reason is that data on statistical brackets are more
numerous and easier to find, whether from Census Bureau statistics or
from a variety of other sources.

Data based on following actual flesh-and-blood individuals over time
are, however, also available. The statistics quoted above are from the
Treasury Department, which has people's income tax returns, so it is
no problem for them to follow the same people over the years.

You can check out the numbers for yourself in a November 13, 2007
report from the Treasury Department titled "Income Mobility in the
United States from 1996 to 2005." You can find a summary of the same
data in a Wall Street Journal editorial that same day.

These are not the only data that tell a diametrically opposite story
from the usual political and media story that the rich are getting
richer and the poor are getting poorer.

A previous Treasury Department study showed similar patterns in
individual income changes between 1979 and 1988.

Moreover, a study conducted at the University of Michigan, following
the same individuals over an even longer span of time, likewise found
most people moving from income bracket to income bracket over time --
especially among those who began in the bottom 20 percent.

The University of Michigan Panel Survey on Income Dynamics showed
that, among people who were in the bottom 20 percent income bracket in
1975, only 5 percent were still in that category in 1991. Nearly six
times as many of them were now in the top 20 percent in 1991.

There was a summary of the University of Michigan data in the 1995
annual report of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, which also issued
an excerpt titled "By Our Own Bootstraps."

Among the intelligentsia, it is fashionable to sneer at income
mobility as a "Horatio Alger myth" -- and, as someone once said, you
cannot refute a sneer. But, among people who have not yet abandoned
facts for rhetoric, it is worth stopping to consider whether they are
being played for fools by politicians and much of the media.

www.tsowell.com

wrote:
Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ist-criss.html


http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

And there are no skinheads for Palin?

cmdr buzz corey wrote:

rock performance poets." pg 100...Usama bin Hussein Obama

Vote for Usama bin Hussein Obama and help turn the United States into
a black Marxist state.

It can only be an improvement.

Judge Orders Obama To Produce Birth Certificate.
www.newswithviews.com/Ryter/jon252.htm

I still don't believe Barack HUSSEIN Obama is a natural born citizen of
U.S.A.
cuhulin

On Oct 3, 6:49*am, Dave wrote:
wrote:
Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ommunist-criss...

http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

And there are no skinheads for Palin?

Plenty of John Birchers, though. ;-)

Dave wrote:
wrote:
Communist Party USA Executive Vice-Chair Stumping for ObaMao!

They now have the audacity to come out from the dark

http://newzeal.blogspot.com/2008/08/...ist-criss.html



http://TheRealBarackObama.wordpress.com

And there are no skinheads for Palin?

Only her son.