Category Archives: Politics

Virginia must have something in the fall air that is affecting people’s thought processes.
In the debate Gilmore said that he disagrees with the bailout, proving that he can still identify an issue and use it to manipulate voters. So he has found an itch to scratch, and voters are forgetting his record and settling back in the autumn glow thinking “hey, that boy has something there. I don’t like the bailout either.”
Well, nobody likes the bailout. It wasn’t our dream of perfection. However, the bailout hopefully will save a lot of people’s retirement, and administrative oversight is built into the plan thanks to both Democrats and Republicans who were making the best of a bad situation created by the Bush administration’s failure to govern. Gilmore did the same thing to Virginia’s economy that Bush did to the U.S. economy, and his lack of ability to govern is well demonstrated.
Anyone who listens to him has a memory disorder.

The New York Times today is saying that both Barack Obama and John McCain, since one of them will inherit management of the bailout, agree that there must be more oversight of the Treasury Department. McCain is of course the deregulation person of old, formerly content to follow the Bush lead on this rather complex question about something he did not understand. Now he is apparently being advised to say we need regulation, although he probably hasn’t a clue what that means in practical terms. He can of course ask Sarah Palin.
Obama/Biden is looking better to anyone with economic awareness or a memory that goes back further than last Sunday?s exhortation to the faithful, and these are probably the folks turning the tide to favor Barack Obama.

To prevent disappointment on election day, check your voter registration. If you have moved, or 911 has come in to change your street number or name, you may not be entered correctly on the voting roster.
Use the link to your right above the Obama badge to check your registration in time to make any needed corrections!

This election year I am what I have always said people should not be ? a single-issue voter. I am voting the economy.
Republicans have called Democrats the party of big government, tax and spend liberals. In fact, the United States is a big country, and it requires a big government. The major function of government is to administer a fair system of taxation and to use the money wisely to maintain physical and financial security, services, and infrastructure for a sustainable system.
All governments are ?tax and spend.? That is how they keep things running. Under Republican leaders, we have failed to sustain our physical and financial security, services, and infrastructure. Republicans have traded these critical supports for tax cuts for wealthy citizens, an ill-conceived and poorly executed war in Iraq, and an unrealistic energy policy that benefits the oil industry and breaks working people?s budgets. The rest of the developed world has moved ahead of us in wind and solar power as well as transportation and communications technology. Among developed nations, we have the highest infant mortality, which is a significant statistical measure of quality of life. These are all Republican economic failures.
The Republican idea that the market does not need oversight or regulation has resulted in the necessity for the takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The debt of these private companies, a sum greater than the national debt of any other nation except the U.S., is now added to the federal deficit. Everyone loses except the institutions that created the crisis by predatory lending practices and current government officials who permitted banks to prey upon clients they were supposed to be serving and keeping financially secure.
The next president will face a deficit around $500 billion, estimated by the Congressional Budget Office. Over the next ten years, over $2.3 trillion will be added to the national debt. These figures assume that the Bush tax cuts will be allowed to expire in 2010. The deficit will be worse if they are made permanent by McCain/Palin.
Under Republican leadership, we have seen crises in housing, healthcare, energy, and financial services. Costs of living are up from food to heating oil. Homeowners have lost value in their homes or literally lost their homes. Retirement is a frightening prospect as companies downsize and go bankrupt. Individuals dumped from employment in their 50?s draw out their retirement savings for personal and family expenses while they search for employment in a bleak job market. Unemployment is at 6% even with a large number of our National Guard members serving on foreign soil. The damage done to the American consumer base, the great United States middle class that has been the source of wealth, will take many years to repair.
This election year we literally cannot afford to be distracted from the dismal failure of Republicans to govern. There is a hard road ahead even with intelligent and resourceful people in leadership. It will be the height of irresponsibility to be distracted by divisive social issues put forward by people who don?t even know where the middle class lives. John McCain thinks that you are in the middle class if you make less than $5 million a year. The median income in the United States is $4,960,000.00 less than $5 million.
I am voting for Barack Obama. He has spent his life helping people live better. That is what a community organizer does. And does our community ever need organizing.

I’m saying, if you lie about one thing you have to lie about the next related thing because when you start telling the truth people know you were lying. So in spite of the fact that the Limbaugh switchers in PA said in exit polls that they voted for Obama, I believe they voted for Clinton.
I hate to say a lot of people are lying, but here is how it works:

• If, as a Limbaugh switcher, I had voted for Clinton, I would be negating the effect of that vote to say I voted for Clinton. That would make people think her win was false, and that would not boost her favor as a candidate.
• On the other hand, if I were a Limbaugh switcher and voted for Clinton (which I am sure they did) and said I voted for Obama, that would make it look like Hillary was actually getting more Democrats to vote for her.

Not to parse it to finely, a Limbaugh switcher would have to lie to the election commission and say they were a Democrat when they were in truth intending to act in support of the Republican ticket. That means that going in they would have one lie to their credit. Coming out and asked to state which candidate they voted for, they have to say “Obama.” If they say “Clinton,” they are saying, “Hey, I am a Limbaugh switcher who lied to the election commission.”
It seems more realistic to me to believe that Obama brought out a lot of people who have not voted before, and he closed the lead on Clinton even against the tide of switchers. I believe that is where the actual evidence tends.

Now think about it — If you were a Republican in PA who was lowlife enough to change your party registration in order to select the Democrat that McCain thought would be easier to beat, would you feel honor bound to tell the pollster the truth about that? Changing your registration falsely to influence the political decision of another party in a national election is not any penny ante “oh-no-those-jeans-don’t-make-you-look-fat” lie.
I’m guessing that the switchers are 90% McCain supporters responding to the Limbaugh imperative.

There is enough bad stuff to go around — I can’t imagine why Hillary finds it acceptable to exaggerate and embellish, when if you look around it is certainly not necessary. She looks more and more like “them” and not “us.” She plays with the lobbyists and tells us half-truths and exaggerations, so I expect she will not be a strong agent for change. Her own medical plan still serves the insurance companies and not the people, setting up a system in which people are forced by law to pay insurance companies.
When the game is money and manipulation, it is always the people who lose. Here is John Edwards telling us why we have such a mess, and I want to say he has been right for a long time.

If I have to choose between John McCain and Hillary Clinton, it won’t be a toss-up. I would have to go with Clinton. But my teeth are clinching thinking about the possibility.

Thudfactor is talking about the people who switched to Clinton from Obama in the latest primaries because of a question about Obama’s position on NAFTA.
The NAFTA question is a slim reason to switch, particularly since it isn’t about NAFTA at all but about Obama’s integrity. Certainly this is a serious question if the worst implications of the story are believed, but I think it is a stretch to believe them. I am still seeing Obama as the better campaign manager and the best candidate to face McCain.
In addition to attacking Obama’s integrity, Hillary has used three other non-issue personal attacks against Obama adroitly and sometimes subtly — the “all talk, no substance” attack, the gender bias, and the race card. , MSNBC reports, burried in the last paragraphs of a long story:

How much did race and gender factor in Ohio? The AP: “One-fifth of white Ohio voters said race was an important issue to their vote, and those who did voted three in four for Clinton. That compares with the one in five Democrats in Ohio who said gender was important to their vote, and they voted six in 10 for Clinton.”

The “all talk, no substance” attack is false, as any who know Obama’s record and have compared it to Hillary’s (not Bill’s) already knows. The charge of plagiarism (another attack on integrity) is purely stupid, because all campaigns use speech writers and supporters’ input and suggestions that are given to the candidate. The race and gender issues are not worthy of any Democrat, and I regret that a candidate would stoop to using them. I understand that there are voters who respond to them, but their use by a candidate to manipulate voters is divisive and troublesome.

So it looks like there is a three to the one-two punch of the sub-prime lending — There is a common scam operation behind the reverse mortgage lending as well.
The New York Times in a story “Tapping Into Homes Can Be Pitfall for the Elderly” by Charles Duhigg today looked into this “golden opportunity,” available only to people in their 60’s who own their homes:

But hundreds of people who have sought reverse mortgages ? in lawsuits, surveys and conversations with elder-care advocates ? have complained about high-pressure or unethical sales tactics they say steered them toward loans with very high fees. Some say they were tricked into putting proceeds of their loans into unprofitable investments, while sales agents pocketed rich commissions.
?Every scam artist is getting into this business,? said Prescott Cole, an elder-care advocate who has worked with numerous reverse mortgage borrowers. ?Because reverse mortgages are so complicated and give you money up front, years can pass before a senior realizes they?ve lost everything.?

I guess I have that old person habit of following along with my cusor while I read — sort of like combating the failing vision by keeping my finger on the line — and as I read the “lost everything” I inadvertently double-clicked. That utility that defines words for you popped up and defined “everything” for me. Somehow the definition was not really expressive of working all your life to buy a home and then finding in your retirement years that you will be left with literally nothing.
The article states that “reverse mortgages have grown into a $20-billion-a-year industry, with elderly homeowners taking out more than 132,000 such loans in 2007, an increase of more than 270 percent from two years earlier.”
Apparently in the incident in the story, which is reported not to be one unique circumstance, the bank talked the home owner into a loan and investment package, lending the value of the home and talking the borrower (once the papers were signed, no longer the “owner”) into putting most of the money into investments. The borrower got a small bit of cash and an annuity based on the income from the investments. Of course there was a hefty fee for processing the loan, and another one for setting up the investments and the annuity. Then the investments went downhill, and the borrower was left without income and sucked into debt — something like that. Sort of a sub-sub-prime based on the principle of finding someone who has something and getting them to pay you to take it away from them.