Day: September 11, 2008

What Can Obama Do?

For decades the Dems have been making the same mistake, not responding to the attacks.  Thius is why they have not been in the White House since 2000.  And only once since 1972.  If they continue to laugh oiff the attacks they will assure themselves of second place in November.

Obama and his campaign need to do two things.  First, ignore Palin–they are running against McCain and not Palin.  Talk about her only when absolutely necessary,

Second, the McCain camp has called Obama unpatriotic, a sexist and a coward, to be brief.  Obama needs to call a news conference or something similar with all media outlets in attendance.  Then asxk John McCain if he really thinks that he (Obama) is truly unpatriotic or a coward or a sexist.  And make it clear that the question is for McCain not the assassins in his camp.  Then lastly, give his a deadline for his response.  Either way it will be a good tactic, whether he responds or not, it will help.

This would accomplish two things.  It will put to rest the scandalous crap coming from the McCain camp and it will show those mid american voters in central Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia,  that he (Obama) is not a wimp.

Dems for too long have not fought back against the personal attacks, because they thought the voter were smarter than to believe the hype.  They may be, but a 30 second attack is far more persuasive than all the analysis that the media offers.

If Obama wants to be president then it is time to fight like he does.

Mississippi’s Dirty Little Election Trick

This is a repost from Gulf South Free Press.

Mississippi’s governor, Haley Barbour, and its secretary of state have come up with a particularly cynical dirty trick for the November election. Let’s call it: “Where’s the Senate race?”

Defying state law, they have decided to hide a hard-fought race for the United States Senate at the bottom of the ballot, where they clearly are hoping some voters will overlook it. Their proposed design is not only illegal. It shows a deep contempt for Mississippi’s voters.

Mississippi election law clearly states that federal elections must go at the top of ballots. And the secretary of state, Delbert Hosemann, plans to list the state’s other Senate race — incumbent Thad Cochran is running far ahead of his Democratic challenger, Erik Fleming — where it belongs, right below the presidential contest.

Some voters, including the elderly, the least educated and first-time voters, have more trouble than others navigating complicated ballots. Many of these voters are more likely to vote for Democrats than Republicans. And, yes, Governor Barbour and Mr. Hosemann are both Republicans.

A local election official is suing to put the Wicker-Musgrove race back where it belongs. The state court judge who is hearing the case on Thursday should order that the Senate race be placed at the top of the ballot. Even if she does the right thing, we fear, that will not end the matter.

If the state courts do not provide relief, supporters of fair elections should take the case to federal court. They will need to move quickly since time to prepare ballots is fast running out. Mississippi’s voters have a right to a ballot that conforms with the law — and that is not designed to win a Senate seat by trickery.

All is fair in love and politics.  The Repub establishment is running scared in this elkection and is resorting to every tactic possible to beat the Dem candidate for US Senator.

How About A Real Issue?

Lipstick?  Please people stop listening to this crap.  There is more to worry about than some damn silly lipstick comment.

In a stark indication that the crises gripping the US housing market and the financial sector are spreading throughout the economy, unemployment figures for August rose far more sharply than expected, hitting a five-year high.

The official unemployment rate rose to 6.1 percent last month, according to a report released Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In addition to the net loss of 84,000 jobs last month, the agency revised its figures for June and July, reporting the destruction of an additional 58,000 jobs, pointing to an entire summer dominated by layoffs and economic slump.

Meanwhile the so-called misery index, which adds the unemployment and inflation rates, hit 11.7 percent, the worst figure recorded since mid-1991, as high gas, food and utility prices continue to gouge workers’ paychecks even as layoffs mount.

At the same time, existing home sales fell to a 10-year low in the second quarter, while the median price of a single-family house plummeted by another 7.6 percent, the National Association of Realtors reported.

The increase in unemployment and the rising number of foreclosures are clearly trends that are feeding into one another in a vicious downward spiral. Workers having lost their jobs are finding it impossible to meet monthly mortgage payments, and the collapse of home values has wiped out credit for many, leading to falling consumption and new layoffs.

This is turning into a vicious cycle that needs to be addressed by the candidates and let the late night TV shows handle the lipstick thing.

Today In Labor History

11 September
More than 3,000 people died when suicide highjackers crashed planes into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.  Among the dead were 634 union members, the majority of them New York City firefighters and police on the scene when the towers fell – 2001

What Is “The Working Class”?

The struggle for the votes from the working class has never been more openly discussed. In the mainstream media, we’ve heard the phrase “working class” far more than the classless phrase “middle class” in recent weeks. This is new feature for national elections.
“White working class voters” were crudely characterized as the “lunch bucket” crowd, and they, we were told, supported Hillary Clinton. After her primary wins in West Virginia, Ohio and Pennsylvania, the pundits focused on that voting cluster as explaining the results. “White working class males” were similarly lumped into Hillary Clinton’s column.

“Women” were for Clinton. The term was used sometimes to describe working-class woman, but neither their class relationships nor their ethnic backgrounds were ever mentioned. They were portrayed strictly as a gender vote. A significant percent of these voters either belong to labor unions or would if it were possible.

When the phrase “Black voters” is used, the phrase working class is never applied. These voters live a non-class bubble, the media experts told us. Yet, far and away, the largest percent of Black voters fit the traditional working-class definition. Pundits also never talked about the fact that millions of African American voters are women. The media assigned African American voters to Barack Obama without hesitation. Ironically, however, Obama was typically characterized as having difficulty appealing to working-class people and women.

Similarly, the media declassed college-educated voters and never referred to them as working class, even though millions of professionals, professors, and other white collar workers are working class, are members of unions, or want to belong. By the way, many intellectual workers bring their lunch to work, too. The media put this group of workers into Obama’s camp, but, in so doing, some people derisively referred to them as elitist voters.

Then through mass media exit polling and others means the pundits laid out the voting patterns of various religious, racial and age groupings. Some reported a trade union vote but it was always unclear what that designation meant.

The media appears to be trying to explain voting patterns without a knowledge of the voter.

OOPS! On The Veep Choice

This whole conversation woiuld be nowhere if Obama had chosen Clinton as his running mate. Along the same line of thinking—then Palin would not be on the Republican ticket.

Now the PUMA women have someone to vote for and support, regardless of her positions on abortion and such. THis, in my opinion, was an excellent choice for McCain or whoever came up with this scheme. Since the Repubs are short on substance on “real” issues; this situation keeps the media focused on her and not on the issues trhat the American voter deserves.

None of this he said, she said, doing anything to educate the voter on issues and positions of the candidate. Confusion, misdirection and obfuscation are just what the Repubs need to make their way to the finish line.

If white middle America votes with their gut, then McCain will most likely win the election. That is why they are continuing to keep the media focused on Palin and not the issues.

Do Fannie And Freddie Have A History?

No Irene, this is not something from the soap, “As The Stomach Turns”. The financial giants!

Fannie Mae was set up by the federal government in 1938 as part of the New Deal to inject capital into a mortgage market mired in the Great Depression. It was a public agency with the explicit mission of providing government credit so that average families could buy homes.

In 1968, it was turned into a private but government-sponsored corporation with the aim of getting mortgage debt off of the government’s books under conditions in which the Vietnam War was creating growing fiscal pressures. Freddie Mac was created in 1970 as a similar “government sponsored enterprise.” By the 1990s, the two agencies became central to the speculative housing bubble that underlay the profit boom on Wall Street that preceded the current crisis of the world financial system.

Both of the mortgage giants had been involved in previous accounting scandals. Freddie Mac underwent a shakeup in 2003 after it was revealed that earnings figures had been falsified to the tune of $5 billion, while at Fannie Mae, the company was accused of “accounting errors” totaling $6.3 billion. Both Freddie and Fannie were forced to pay fines and replace their chief executives, but no criminal investigations were initiated and no substantive change was initiated in the companies’ operations.

As the New York Times described these operations, the two firms used the implicit government commitment to bail them out “to borrow money at below-market rates and lend money at above-market returns,” turning them into “what amounted to gigantic hedge funds operating with only a sliver of capital to protect them from unexpected surprises.”

Dems Wanna Drill?

House Democrats, some chanting “drill, drill,” embraced a plan to open the door for more oil and natural-gas exploration along the entire U.S. coastline, in a shift showing the power of the energy issue in this election.

The Democrats’ turnabout marks a victory for the oil industry and Republicans, who have seized on the drilling issue in recent months. With gasoline prices still high at the pump, polls show Americans in favor of expanded oil production at home, and Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain has made the issue central to his campaign, as have congressional Republicans.

Even Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s presidential standard-bearer, has endorsed expanded drilling as part of a comprehensive bill boosting conservation and renewable energy, such as wind and solar power.

The decision to push the more aggressive plan in part reflects the leverage the White House has to shape the agenda. Bush aides have signaled that the president might not support a spending bill needed to finance basic government operations beyond Sept. 30 unless Democrats allow a longstanding moratorium on offshore drilling to expire. It isn’t clear if the new House bill will ever become law. But given the sensitivity of the issue — and the White House’s leverage — the measure unveiled Wednesday can be seen as an opening bid in negotiations over details of the end-of-year spending bill.

The Democratic bill is designed to boost production and conservation, while putting the oil industry and its Republican allies in an uncomfortable position: choosing between much-coveted drilling rights in unexplored areas along the coast or the guaranteed benefit of tax breaks, which the bill would scale back under a provision that extends new tax preferences in support of renewable energy.

Remember The Day

The seventh anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks is supposed to bring the heated presidential race to a screeching halt. But just for a day.

Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama were appearing together twice Thursday and agreed to suspend all TV ads critical of each other in honor of the day terrorists forced four airplanes to crash into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the Pentagon in Washington, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Neither candidate had any political events scheduled for the day. The 2001 attacks transformed the nation in many ways, and one is that every anniversary since has found those holding or seeking office struggling for ways to appropriately pay homage.

A joint statement from the campaigns announcing their decision to visit ground zero together said they wanted to do so in thanks for all emergency responders who served during and after the attacks as well as the military troops still defending the nation.

Sad that Repubs will not honor the memory of those people by stop using the attack as a campaign slogan.  McCain is becoming a typical Repub using fear and confusion as tools to win elections.