The Obama Thread (Merged x6)

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Yet the majority of Americans still respect Colin Powell immensely, which is why his endorsement will be huge.

same here.....he had the cojones to stand up and say he ****ed up....that goes a long way in my book....
 
Which is why when he left office, he had an approval rating in the high sixties :huh:

Which is why, even after he has left office, he hasn't received nearly as much scrutiny as those who drafted the war, such as Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush?

I mean, Powell told the UN what he was told. He wasn't the head of the operation or anything close-- he was Secretary of State. His job was to relay the information that was given to him, and nothing more. He didn't help orchestrate the policy, and in the years following his departure from the Bush administration, Powell has publicly questioned the Iraq war. If Rumsfeld endorsed Obama, he would have a serious problem. But Powell isn't Rumsfeld and he is regarded highly by many, many people, which means that his endorsement would be well received.

Orchestrating it or not, he still lied to the entire country. I guess some are more forgiving than I am.
 
same here.....he had the cojones to stand up and say he ****ed up....that goes a long way in my book....

That is right , now if Bush and his minions would have done the same, i would actually have some respect for them.
 
Orchestrating it or not, he still lied to the entire country. I guess some are more forgiving than I am.

It cannot be a lie if you are relaying the information that is told to you.

If I was given a briefing, and told that "scientific evidence suggests Soilent Green is made of kelp," and I tell everyone in the country that scientists declare that Soilent Green is a kelp-based product, does that make me a liar if it is revealed years later that Soilent Green is actually made of people?

The answer should be "no," because I told everyone what was told to me. Powell was told by others within the Bush administration to make a case for the Iraq war. He didn't know every single dynamic. He wasn't responsible for drafting our policy towards Iraq. Instead, he served as a mouth piece, and because he was the one who spoke in front of the UN, he is receiving some unwarranted criticism for other peoples' mistakes.
 
It cannot be a lie if you are relaying the information that is told to you.

If I was given a briefing, and told that "scientific evidence suggests Soilent Green is made of kelp," and I tell everyone in the country that scientists declare that Soilent Green is a kelp-based product, does that make me a liar if it is revealed years later that Soilent Green is actually made of people?

The answer should be "no," because I told everyone what was told to me. Powell was told by others within the Bush administration to make a case for the Iraq war. He didn't know every single dynamic. He wasn't responsible for drafting our policy towards Iraq. Instead, he served as a mouth piece, and because he was the one who spoke in front of the UN, he is receiving some unwarranted criticism for other peoples' mistakes.
Yeah, what was that thing they used to say, back in the day?

Oh, don't kill the Messanger?
 
Yeah, what was that thing they used to say, back in the day?

Oh, don't kill the Messanger?

I do give Powell the benefit of the doubt because he left the Bush Administration after it became apparent that there is no WMD in Iraq after US invaded Iraq. I still think he's a honorable man who just got misled by the Administration.
 
He didn't create the product though, he bought it and then capitalized on it by taking other products and getting a patent. He didn't make anything, just an opportunist that capitalized at the right time with the right product. Since then microsoft has gone out of its way to insure they had a monopoly on the market and paid enough lobbiests to keep it that way. It's worked pretty well, but I'd hardly say he's this bastion of the American Dream you paint him out to be.

We can debate how many he put out of buisness by controlling the market, and how many buisness were never formed because of his practices. Maybe the net result was a massive loss of jobs? I don't know, but you don't either.

Again, he didn't make any of the innovations, he only profitted by them and now smart people like you are defending him because he's had enough money to PR this the right way. Rich beats Smart any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Earned? More like bought in and manipulated. But for some reason that seems to be the same thing.

I'd say the money I donate to charaties is proportunately more than gate's donations. I'm also in the BB program and do work for a nonprofit educational firm (that's my own time I'm giving up there, something Gates couldn't fathom). But unlike gates I don't run around screaming how great I am for doing it. I do it cause my sister has diabetes; I hate wifebeaters; I think kids get screwed over way too much; and I believe in knowledge as key. But since we're asking personal questions, what do you do to help out, and how much money do you give to charities?


Sidenote, you're kinda down on the single mother thing ain't ya? What if her kids grow up to be more important that Gates ever could have been? What if they didn't have that chance? To deny someone's impact on the world is short sighted, the person who's been the most influential to society both good and bad was a poor jewish carpenter. All I'm saying is money and jobs aren't everything: decency, compassion, doing the hard thing because it's right.....we lose sight of the value in that far too often.

Well Said Moral well said!!!:applaud:applaud:applaud

Why are people so down on single parents and folks that are poor so much? I guess they are worthless drains on society, hunh?

The fact remains the wheels of the economy are run because of those people that are in the lower 40% in income of the U.S. population.

Q: Who would be most adversely affected from a consumption tax? A: poor people.

If you are wealthy a consumption based tax system does not affect you as adversely as someone who is not as wealthy.
 


Why are people so down on single parents and folks that are poor so much? I guess they are worthless drains on society, hunh?


No, that's not it at all. It's because a fair number of them are not willing to take the time and the effort to get themselves out the situations they're in, and instead they expect the rest of society to pay for their mistakes.
 
It's pretty obvious on why they're running such bad campaigns. According to the latest issue of Secret Invasion, both John McCain and Barack Obama (along with Osama bin Laden, Tom Cruise, Oprah, Pope Benedict XVI, Stephen Colbert, Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin, Tiger Woods, Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton and others) are Skrulls.
 
Well Said Moral well said!!!:applaud:applaud:applaud

Why are people so down on single parents and folks that are poor so much? I guess they are worthless drains on society, hunh?

The fact remains the wheels of the economy are run because of those people that are in the lower 40% in income of the U.S. population.

Q: Who would be most adversely affected from a consumption tax? A: poor people.

If you are wealthy a consumption based tax system does not affect you as adversely as someone who is not as wealthy.
That would be true unless the Tax accounted for that with a Rebate of the Average Taxes paid by your Household, keeping you out of the Poverty Level, giving you back nearly $10,000 a year per individual to ensure you never tax anyone in or below Poverty. Wouldn't that be a swell idea.
 
It's pretty obvious on why they're running such bad campaigns. According to the latest issue of Secret Invasion, both John McCain and Barack Obama (along with Osama bin Laden, Tom Cruise, Oprah, Pope Benedict XVI, Stephen Colbert, Kim Jong Il, Vladimir Putin, Tiger Woods, Ann Coulter, Paris Hilton and others) are Skrulls.

I think you left out George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.
 
I am not talking about personal scandals and idiotic surrogates. I am talking about actual credentials. How long was he in the Senate when he announced his bid to run for the White House? What platform was he running on?
154 Days
 
Book on Obama hopes to repeat anti-Kerry feat
Author who launched Swift Boat attacks in '04 takes aim at '08 nominee

By Jim Rutenberg and Julie Bosman
updated 12:57 a.m. ET, Wed., Aug. 13, 2008


WASHINGTON - In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book attacking Senator John Kerry’s record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry’s war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

Hype machine in overdrive
The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit. And it is a significant, early success for Ms. Matalin’s three-year-old imprint, which is also planning to publish the memoirs of Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru. Threshold says it has undertaken an extensive printing effort for anticipated demand, with 475,000 copies of “The Obama Nation” produced so far.

“The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

He said he was planning to aid several conservative groups that intend to run advertisements against Mr. Obama this fall, though he would not name them.

Mr. Corsi, who has over the years also written critically about Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama’s probable Republican opponent, said he supported the Constitution Party presidential nominee, Chuck Baldwin, and had not been in touch with McCain aides. He called his reporting on Mr. Obama, which he stands by, “investigative,” not prosecutorial.

Effective means of attack
Ms. Matalin said in an interview that the book “was not designed to be, and does not set out to be, a political book,” calling it, rather, “a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.” She said she was unaware of efforts to link it to any anti-Obama advertising.

In its timing, authorship and style of reporting, the book is strikingly reminiscent of the one Mr. Corsi wrote with John O’Neill about Mr. Kerry, “Unfit for Command,” which included various accusations that were ultimately undermined by news reports pointing out the contradictions. (Some critics of Mr. Kerry quoted in the book had earlier praised his bravery in incidents they were now asserting he had fabricated; one had earned a medal for bravery in a gun battle he accused Mr. Kerry of concocting.)

But books like “Unfit for Command,” which remained for some 12 weeks on the Times best-seller list, and, now, “The Obama Nation,” have become an effective and favored delivery system for political attacks. There have been anti-Clinton (both Bill and Hillary) and anti-Bush books too numerous to name. The sensational findings in these books, true or dubious, can quickly come to dominate the larger political discussion in the news media, especially on cable television and the less readily detectible confines of talk radio and partisan Web sites.

Fact-checking the books can require extensive labor and time from independent journalists, whose work often trails behind the media echo chamber.

Misleading accusations
Web sites on the left have begun poring over Mr. Corsi’s latest book. Media Matters, which is run by David Brock, a former right-wing journalist who wrote a classic of the attack genre, “The Real Anita Hill,” has been particularly aggressive in fact-checking the book, and its press releases on inaccuracies in the book have gotten some attention on cable television.

Several of the book’s accusations, in fact, are unsubstantiated, misleading or inaccurate.

For instance, Mr. Corsi writes that Mr. Obama had “yet to answer” whether he “stopped using marijuana and cocaine completely in college, or whether his drug usage extended to his law school days or beyond.” “How about in the U.S. Senate?” Mr. Corsi asks.

But Mr. Obama, who admitted to occasional marijuana and cocaine use in his high school and early college years, wrote in his memoir that he had “stopped getting high” when he moved to New York in the early 1980s. And in 2003 The State Journal-Register of Springfield, Ill., quoted him responding to a question of his drug use by saying, “I haven’t done anything since I was 20 years old.”

In an interview, Mr. Corsi said Mr. Obama’s word was not to be trusted because “self-reporting, by people who have used drugs, as to when they stopped is inherently unreliable.”

Reprising Rev. Wright
In exploring Mr. Obama’s denials that he had been present for the more incendiary sermons of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Mr. Corsi cites a report on the conservative Web site NewsMax.com that Mr. Obama had attended a sermon on July 22, 2007, in which Mr. Wright blamed “the ‘white arrogance’ of America’s Caucasian majority for the world’s suffering, especially the oppression of blacks.”

Mr. Obama, however, was giving a speech in Florida that afternoon, and his campaign reported he had not attended Mr. Wright’s church that day.

William Kristol, a columnist for The New York Times, had cited the same report in a column, and issued a correction. “There is a dispute about the date, and Kristol chose to side with Obama,” Mr. Corsi said. “We can nitpick the date to death,” he added, saying his “fundamental point” was Mr. Obama’s close association with someone ascribing to “black liberation theology.”

Mr. Corsi described most of the critiques of his book as “nitpicking,” like a contradiction of his claim that Mr. Obama had failed to dedicate his book “Dreams of My Father” to his family; Mr. Obama dedicated the book to several family members, in the introduction.

Mr. Corsi called the Media Matters critique inconsequential because it was advancing a liberal, political agenda.

Activists take on ‘echo chamber’
Media Matters was created in part to answer a conservative “echo chamber” — one that liberal activists say they have still yet to match — that gives books like Mr. Corsi’s extra bounce.

“There’s just no doubt that in terms of longer-term infrastructure, there’s more out there on the right than there is on the left,” said Cliff Schecter, author of a liberal attack book on Mr. McCain, “The Real McCain,” which, with 35,000 copies in print, did not make the Times bestseller list.

Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to weigh in heavily on Mr. Corsi’s accusations. It appears to face the classic decision between the risk of publicizing the claims by addressing them and the risk of letting them sink into the public debate with no response.

“This book is nothing but a series of lies that were long ago discredited, written by an individual who was discredited after he wrote a similar book to help George Bush and Dick Cheney get re-elected four years ago,” said Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “The reality is that there are many lie-filled books like this in the works cobbled together from the Internet to make money off of a presidential campaign.”

Several Democrats associated with Mr. Kerry’s campaign in 2004 said in interviews Tuesday that they were comfortable so far with Mr. Obama’s more muted response to the book, which has not showed up yet in television advertisements.

Even Mr. Corsi said this book did not have what “Unfit for Command” had: a built-in interest group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to run advertisements against its target.

While he said he thought it was a certainty that he would be “assisting in the creation of ads in the fall,” he did not say what he believed their content would be.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26168590/


:whatever:
 
That would be true unless the Tax accounted for that with a Rebate of the Average Taxes paid by your Household, keeping you out of the Poverty Level, giving you back nearly $10,000 a year per individual to ensure you never tax anyone in or below Poverty. Wouldn't that be a swell idea.

That would be swell but you know it would not work that way. The poorest Americans will still end up being disenfranchised.

And there is also the inaccurate perception that most people that are below the poverty line are dogging the system or are lazy.

This mindset lends itself to being unfair to people within that social strata.

Consider the statements by other posters asserting that people on welfare are lazy leches taking their money. This is the thought paradigm that people use to malign any re-adjustment of the tax burden to benefit middle class people.

I know a large number of people that have been on welfare and used it as a hand up and not a hand out they no longer use the assistance but it was there for them when they needed it. They now work everyday pay taxes and make positive contributions to society and their communities.

Yes there are people that truly abuse the system would it not be better to more effectively stop the abusers than ending it all together?
 
That would be swell but you know it would not work that way. The poorest Americans will still end up being disenfranchised.

And there is also the inaccurate perception that most people that are below the poverty line are dogging the system or are lazy.

This mindset lends itself to being unfair to people within that social strata.

Consider the statements by other posters asserting that people on welfare are lazy leches taking their money. This is the thought paradigm that people use to malign any re-adjustment of the tax burden to benefit middle class people.

I know a large number of people that have been on welfare and used it as a hand up and not a hand out they no longer use the assistance but it was there for them when they needed it. They now work everyday pay taxes and make positive contributions to society and their communities.

Yes there are people that truly abuse the system would it not be better to more effectively stop the abusers than ending it all together?
What I'm saying is if there was a Tax System that people could pay only when they wanted to, by purchasing things. And they get a rebate of their taxes up to the Poverty Level. So, no one in the the Poverty Level pays any taxes, and the Elderly would have assistance, and College Kids would have assistance. And with this Tax, everything would cost the same as it does today, AND you get 100% of your paycheck. That would be grand.
 
What I'm saying is if there was a Tax System that people could pay only when they wanted to, by purchasing things. And they get a rebate of their taxes up to the Poverty Level. So, no one in the the Poverty Level pays any taxes, and the Elderly would have assistance, and College Kids would have assistance. And with this Tax, everything would cost the same as it does today, AND you get 100% of your paycheck. That would be grand.

Do that and you will get a run on large scale hijacking and theviery....like the mob used to do in the old days with cigarettes and fur coats....you'll see grocery store delivery trucks being robbed and an increase in larceny and theft like never before...
 
I actually think it could work, and I'm damn sure willing to give it a try.....because what we are doing sure as hell isn't working....
 
Do that and you will get a run on large scale hijacking and theviery....like the mob used to do in the old days with cigarettes and fur coats....you'll see grocery store delivery trucks being robbed and an increase in larceny and theft like never before...

That's definitely a possibility. Never underestimate the ability of criminals to capitalize on a situation.

jag
 
He didn't create the product though, he bought it and then capitalized on it by taking other products and getting a patent. He didn't make anything, just an opportunist that capitalized at the right time with the right product. Since then microsoft has gone out of its way to insure they had a monopoly on the market and paid enough lobbiests to keep it that way. It's worked pretty well, but I'd hardly say he's this bastion of the American Dream you paint him out to be.

He's a both a brilliant computer scientist and a brilliant businessman. That's part of the game, he found ideas from different sources (which WE ALL do.....we all products of inspiration) put the resources together, put the code together, made the telephone calls, knocked on the right doors repeatedly, after failure after failure, put forward the presentation, provided a service for IBM and Apple, and got a legal patent on it, and made a convincing case to several other computer hardware companies. The American dream as far as I'm concerned. He worked his ass off.



We can debate how many he put out of buisness by controlling the market, and how many buisness were never formed because of his practices. Maybe the net result was a massive loss of jobs? I don't know, but you don't either.

Whatever, so this is a mute point. Business is all about taking opportunity and running with it given the limited constraints, not worrying about the what-ifs.

Again, he didn't make any of the innovations, he only profitted by them and now smart people like you are defending him because he's had enough money to PR this the right way. Rich beats Smart any day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Think clearly about you're arguing. Yes, Bill Gates borrowed pieces of programming concepts from other sources....guess who also does that? You think writers produce their art without inspiration from others? Artists? Actors? Philosophers. Plato borrowed from Aristotle. Thomas Jefferson borrows from Paine. Creator of of Darkman borrows from Creator of Batman. Creator of Batman borrows from the creator of Zorro. LBJ borrows policies from FDR. Clinton borrows strategies from Reagan. They borrow some ideas here...some concepts over there and put it in a new package. Half-life borrows from Quake which borrows from Doom which borrows from Wolfestein 3D. Everyone. When one person thinks up an idea, they're processing concepts used from other entities. They decide to use the ideas based on whether they have value. Bill Gates is no different, he learns different programming languages (he knew how to program, don't deny that) from different mentors. and produced it in a format that was user friendly and marketable to companies and consumers.

All these businessmen, movers and shakers do the same thing. No one thinks up an idea in a complete vacuum....they are always following in a line of other great thinkers, entreprenuers, and innovators.....they're developing on what others have done in the past. You're only hating on Bill Gates because he's a rich target. Being successful is not about sitting around and thinking. Its about doing. And Bill Gates DID! That why he's friggin rich.

Earned? More like bought in and manipulated. But for some reason that seems to be the same thing.

He worked and put the right pieces together. IF you want to give negative connotations to that, be my guest.



I'd say the money I donate to charaties is proportunately more than gate's donations.

Who cares about proportions? The billions he's pumping into charity and our government are far more valuable than, no offense, how much dollars you put in. So what if its "proportional".......which would your prefer...a million dollars from a multibillionaire....or one dollar by someone who owns 2 dollars. Your "proportionality" argument reaks of the same flawed "fairness" doctrine that Barack Obama uses to exploit class warfare and envy.


I'm also in the BB program and do work for a nonprofit educational firm (that's my own time I'm giving up there, something Gates couldn't fathom).

Yeah, giving up reins to a multibillion dollar company to create one of the greatest charitable funds this world has seen....putting minorities through college....pfffffftt Bill Gates. Let's hate on him. :whatever:

But unlike gates I don't run around screaming how great I am for doing it. I do it cause my sister has diabetes; I hate wifebeaters; I think kids get screwed over way too much; and I believe in knowledge as key. But since we're asking personal questions, what do you do to help out, and how much money do you give to charities?

I've never actually heard Bill Gates scream about how great he is....maybe how great Windows 95 and Vista is...but not how great HE is........he seems pretty personally humble given his wealth....in comparison to most wealthy people and celebrities.

Sidenote, you're kinda down on the single mother thing ain't ya? What if her kids grow up to be more important that gates ever could have been? What if they didn't have that chance? To deny someone's impact on the world is short sighted, the person who's been the most influential to society both good and bad was a poor jewish carpenter. All I'm saying is money and jobs aren't everything: decency, compassion, doing the hard thing because it's right.....we lose sight of the value in that far too often.

That's true....money isn't everything. Those values you mentioned are valuable and important in our society. That doesn't mean the most efficient thing to do is unconditionally raise taxes on rich and just hand it out to the poor...and let the government do the distributing.
 
He's a both a brilliant computer scientist and a brilliant businessman. That's part of the game, he found ideas from different sources (which WE ALL do.....we all products of inspiration) put the resources together, put the code together, made the telephone calls, knocked on the right doors repeatedly, after failure after failure, put forward the presentation, provided a service for IBM and Apple, and got a legal patent on it, and made a convincing case to several other computer hardware companies. The American dream as far as I'm concerned. He worked his ass off.





Whatever, so this is a mute point. Business is all about taking opportunity and running with it given the limited constraints, not worrying about the what-ifs.



Think clearly about you're arguing. Yes, Bill Gates borrowed pieces of programming concepts from other sources....guess who also does that? You think writers produce their art without inspiration from others? Artists? Actors? Philosophers. Plato borrowed from Aristotle. Thomas Jefferson borrows from Paine. Creator of of Darkman borrows from Creator of Batman. Creator of Batman borrows from the creator of Zorro. LBJ borrows policies from FDR. Clinton borrows strategies from Reagan. They borrow some ideas here...some concepts over there and put it in a new package. Half-life borrows from Quake which borrows from Doom which borrows from Wolfestein 3D. Everyone. When one person thinks up an idea, they're processing concepts used from other entities. They decide to use the ideas based on whether they have value. Bill Gates is no different, he learns different programming languages (he knew how to program, don't deny that) from different mentors. and produced it in a format that was user friendly and marketable to companies and consumers.

All these businessmen, movers and shakers do the same thing. No one thinks up an idea in a complete vacuum....they are always following in a line of other great thinkers, entreprenuers, and innovators.....they're developing on what others have done in the past. You're only hating on Bill Gates because he's a rich target. Being successful is not about sitting around and thinking. Its about doing. And Bill Gates DID! That why he's friggin rich.



He worked and put the right pieces together. IF you want to give negative connotations to that, be my guest.





Who cares about proportions? The billions he's pumping into charity and our government are far more valuable than, no offense, how much dollars you put in. So what if its "proportional".......which would your prefer...a million dollars from a multibillionaire....or one dollar by someone who owns 2 dollars. Your "proportionality" argument reaks of the same flawed "fairness" doctrine that Barack Obama uses to exploit class warfare and envy.




Yeah, giving up reins to a multibillion dollar company to create one of the greatest charitable funds this world has seen....putting minorities through college....pfffffftt Bill Gates. Let's hate on him. :whatever:



I've never actually heard Bill Gates scream about how great he is....maybe how great Windows 95 and Vista is...but not how great HE is........he seems pretty personally humble given his wealth....in comparison to most wealthy people and celebrities.



That's true....money isn't everything. Those values you mentioned are valuable and important in our society. That doesn't mean the most efficient thing to do is unconditionally raise taxes on rich and just hand it out to the poor...and let the government do the distributing.

I whole heartly agree with you. :up:
 
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