The Next President of the USA will be?

[wanna be drummer]

He talks ok when he's reading it, not so much when off the cuff

[TypeO]

I've got great news for you, Derigable.

Even if you don't vote for him,.. when Obama is elected

as our next POTUS, you'll be getting a $1,000 tax cut!!

Unless, that is, you make $250,000/year or more.

If you wanna give that extra $1000 to Uncle Sam every year,

then you go right on ahead and vote for McCain, my friend.

Wow.

strong about-face on tax-cuts.

When Bush was handing out money, you were deriding it as a useless ploy.

Now that B.O. wants to hand out money, it's a great idea?

[~tangerine~]

Yeah, if I was married and my wife got pregnant by me, I should have the option of keeping it. If she cheated on me, she better get it aborted before the time period I propose comes up.

I think it was the godfather where the wife aborted the child of the Michael. I’m not sure.

But then you get into how would you police that and you really can't but you can use it a reason for divorce.

Depends on the situation i guess. You would have to wonder why a woman wouldn't want to keep a baby she conceived with her husband. I imagine most do want to keep them. Your scenario sounds very uncommon. Most married couple plan children together.

If she cheated how would you know if it was yours or not, before the birth?

Either way, i don't think being married gives you "ownership" over your spouse. It's supposed to be a "partnership".

[Uncle Bill]

The primary issue has always been with regard to who is benefitting the most from the Bush tax cuts. Bush has been giving huge tax cuts to corporations and the wealthiest Americans while he has offered scant little relief to middle and lower class Americans. That was wrong policy, it was bound to fail, and it has.

Trickle down economics does not work; it's merely a ploy by rich repubs to further enrich the rich at the expense of the middle class and at the expense of the overall economy. We've seen this republican movie before and it always ends the same way: with record deficits, a hurting middle class, and the rich getting richer.

These statements aren't supported by the numbers:

Their Fair Share

Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

boring graphs and figures located here

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

This is precisely what supply-siders predicted would happen with lower tax rates on capital gains, dividends and income. The economy and earnings would grow faster, which they did; investors would declare more capital gains and companies would pay out more dividends, which they did; the rich would invest less in tax shelters at lower tax rates, so their tax payments would rise, which did happen.

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left's imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts. These tax payments from the rich explain the very rapid reduction in the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP in 2006 from 3.5% in 2003.

[Pb Derigable]

Remember Uncle Bill,

B. Hussein Obama was a liberal state senator from a liberal state, from a liberal district in which that city’s city council also voted against the Iraq war.

And that’s his toughest choice he had to make? We all know he threw his wife and his pastor under the train when polling numbers showed he needed to. Why should this stance be no different?

I asked you, should they all be the president over John McCain?

Joe Biden, who actually voted, thought Obama was naive and this guy voted against the first war.

[wanna be drummer]

well i have a fever and i need to work early tomorrow, so I'll talk to you gents later

And college is a bitch sometimes man. I tried walking home buzzed and I probably got sick that way. Shit, wish i hadn't picked a college with such a big campus

[Electrophile]

Open question to all Republicans: Who would you like to see McCain pick as his running mate? Bare in mind, this person should balance out his strengths and weaknesses AND pull in Independents/Dems who would have voted for Hillary had she been nominated. This is just basic curiosity asking, nothing more.

[Lake of Shadows]

That may be the most classless, tasteless and callous thing I've seen posted at this board. Ever.

You've reached a new low, Pb.

[i anticipate Lakey giving out a much-deserved asshat award on this one.]

Oh lawsy, ain't that the truth... here ya go, Pb.

~~~~~~~~

The problem with the abortion 'debate' is that it's two entirely different issues... it's an apples and oranges argument involving the same fruit basket (so to speak).

I've known several people who have had abortions. For all but one of them, it was an agonizing decision. The 'pro-choice' people I know, like me, believe abortion should be legal, safe, and rare... kind of the last option, but still an option.

I understand the sanctity of life, 'pro-life' viewpoint that many have. I'm not going to debate it here either. Pb, you don't even have that viewpoint as your argument.

Eh, I'll stop there... too much heartburn otherwise... but I'm very, very glad you aren't king Pb.

[I have got a horsey]

The problem with the abortion 'debate' is that it's two entirely different issues... it's an apples and oranges argument involving the same fruit basket (so to speak).

I've known several people who have had abortions. For all but one of them, it was an agonizing decision. The 'pro-choice' people I know, like me, believe abortion should be legal, safe, and rare... kind of the last option, but still an option.

The Pro-Life people are usually the first ones to support the death penalty, along with any sort of military conflict.

They're not 'Pro-Life' per-se, more 'Pro-Spawn', like a tribe who want to guarantee that there is going to be offspring to carry on the tribe and to carry on the fighting.

[Electrophile]

Actually, I am curious, or else I wouldn't have asked. Do you have a problem with me asking a question? If you do, kindly be quiet and keep it to yourself.

[Electrophile]

It's pathological. He absolutely must reference his former POW status all the time, either because we'll forget......or he'll forget. My dad works with a lot of veterans, and as I mentioned, my uncle was in 'Nam and what I've heard from them and what they've heard from talking with people, is that it's cheapening to the experience and insulting to others who suffered the same fate and didn't return home. He's using it as a political tool, and that's so disgusting. It's as bad as Guiliani referencing 9/11 every damn day.

I used to have respect for him; I don't any more.

[Del Zeppnile]

I can speak for British Columbia and yes Del, you are correct when it comes to wealthy Canadians heading south for major surgery. Not that the quality of doctor here isn't up to par but because the waiting lists are so damn long. Many have not made it into surgery and have died because of it. I honestly can't give a general sweeping opinion as to which system is better. I know people in the USA are also being turned away because they can't afford the care . Seems to me that nobody has it all right.

I can't speak about all hospitals or for all healthcare procedures, but what I can speak about is renal dialysis and kidney transplants. For the year that my wife was on dialysis waiting for her transplant (she had a kidney doner lined up with her brother BTW), I saw many people receiving dialysis who were on Medicare or Medi-Cal (our state runned social healthcare program). I never saw anyone turned away from what they needed, even people with no insurance who were receiving transplants at UCLA.

In my wife's case, we did have insurance through her job (HMO in fact at the time of her transplant). I would estimate in the last 18 years that she has probably had a million dollars in surgeries and procedures, and her care has been excellent.

My point is that this system is not broken, even if it needs some fixes. I believe that if we switch to universal healthcare, the ability of a hospital like UCLA Medical Center to continue to be both profitable and worthy of drawing the level of fine Doctors and medical workers as it does, would probably no longer be the case. I hope that my wife's Doctors are not only making a lot of money, but also that they are filthy rich... they deserve it, and so does the hospital and it's investors. Once you make healthcare a government run system, it becomes a system that only aims to satisfy the lowest common denominator.

[Del Zeppnile]

I'm sorry for your friend, but if she was dumb enough to stick a coat hanger up her vagina because she was afraid to tell her parents or being out of wedlock, she shouldn't opened up her legs.

It wasn't my friend. It was my MOTHER'S friend. And it was back in 1969, when desperate women had to resort to such barbaric tactics because abortion was illegal. And it wasn't a coat hanger, it was a bicycle spoke. Did you even read the post?

And that was the most insincere sympathy I've ever read. You should have kept it to yourself.

I have to agree with the other poster on this one. I actually reject the whole arguement that women were so DESPERATE that she needed to stick a bicycle spoke in her uterus to kill her fetus. Anyone that stupid is seriously already jeapordizing the gene pool anyway. It's not like her fetus was that spacemonster from the movie Alien, and she needed to kill it so that it would not rip through her abdomen and kill everyone on the ship with it's big pointy teeth.

About as stupid a tactic as you can think of. And a really lame arguement for abortions too. It's not like they were stoning girls getting pregnant out of wedlock in 1969... give me a break Lizzy.

Life is full of consequences, and getting pregnant is not the end of the world. But with today's wanton disregard for the innocent life of the unborn, and the appalling number of abortions in this country -- no wonder many young women are so self absorbed that they will even toss their precious babies into trash cans and leave them to die. That's what we get for sending the message that a woman's personal convienence and social standing are more important than A HUMAN LIFE.

You pro-choice people are going to have to own your belief and the consequences of that belief. And if Barrack Obama loses this Presidential election (as I believe he is going to). It will probably be over the issue of abortion on demand that he will lose it. Based on the polling trends in the battleground states where this issue really makes a differnce to good people.

The democrats can register millions more people in States like California, Illinois and New York, but if they can't win the hearts and minds of the American people in the great heartland of this country; the democratic message will continue to be the wrong message.

[cryingbluerain]

These statements aren't supported by the numbers:

Their Fair Share

Washington is teeing up "the rich" for a big tax hike next year, as a way to make them "pay their fair share." Well, the latest IRS data have arrived on who paid what share of income taxes in 2006, and it's going to be hard for the rich to pay any more than they already do. The data show that the 2003 Bush tax cuts caused what may be the biggest increase in tax payments by the rich in American history.

boring graphs and figures located here

The most amazing part of this story is the leap in the number of Americans who declared adjusted gross income of more than $1 million from 2003 to 2006. The ranks of U.S. millionaires nearly doubled to 354,000 from 181,000 in a mere three years after the tax cuts.

This is precisely what supply-siders predicted would happen with lower tax rates on capital gains, dividends and income. The economy and earnings would grow faster, which they did; investors would declare more capital gains and companies would pay out more dividends, which they did; the rich would invest less in tax shelters at lower tax rates, so their tax payments would rise, which did happen.

The idea that this has been a giveaway to the rich is a figment of the left's imagination. Taxes paid by millionaire households more than doubled to $274 billion in 2006 from $136 billion in 2003. No President has ever plied more money from the rich than George W. Bush did with his 2003 tax cuts. These tax payments from the rich explain the very rapid reduction in the budget deficit to 1.9% of GDP in 2006 from 3.5% in 2003.

Thank you.

[Uncle Bill]

McCain played the POW card.. he leaned on the POW campaign

crutch.. again.. this time he did it on The Tonight Show..tonight.

It's politics as usual in my opinion. No different from kerry's "reporting for duty" spew, as a vet myself I don't like any of them pushing their service to hard. Especially when it was so long ago. Yes, it's a factor but not big one. Like I stated earlier, his being in command of troops is a lot more relevant than his former POW status.

Personally I'm a lot more annoyed by nobama's CHANGE (but no change) message, like he invented it as a slogan . Bush 3 is in danger of jumping the shark as well. But like I said, business as usual, nothing to see here, move along.

[Uncle Bill]

Open question to all Republicans: Who would you like to see McCain pick as his running mate?

I'm not, nor ever have been, a republican (or democrat) but I'll answer anyhow if you don't mind.

I'd like to see him do what nobama failed to do and pick someone "outside the box", a real change, for a change.

Lieberman would be such a choice, but he looks too much like McCain and the base would balk at his pro-choice stance. Hillary would be the boldest choice he could make( not that I want her, just saying),but that won't happen either. So, I guess I'll just say I hope it's someone unexpected, a woman or minority would be a good choice.

[ally]

I can't speak about all hospitals or for all healthcare procedures, but what I can speak about is renal dialysis and kidney transplants. For the year that my wife was on dialysis waiting for her transplant (she had a kidney doner lined up with her brother BTW), I saw many people receiving dialysis who were on Medicare or Medi-Cal (our state runned social healthcare program). I never saw anyone turned away from what they needed, even people with no insurance who were receiving transplants at UCLA.

In my wife's case, we did have insurance through her job (HMO in fact at the time of her transplant). I would estimate in the last 18 years that she has probably had a million dollars in surgeries and procedures, and her care has been excellent.

My point is that this system is not broken, even if it needs some fixes. I believe that if we switch to universal healthcare, the ability of a hospital like UCLA Medical Center to continue to be both profitable and worthy of drawing the level of fine Doctors and medical workers as it does, would probably no longer be the case. I hope that my wife's Doctors are not only making a lot of money, but also that they are filthy rich... they deserve it, and so does the hospital and it's investors. Once you make healthcare a government run system, it becomes a system that only aims to satisfy the lowest common denominator.

Firstly, I'm glad that your wife got the care she needed and as a husband and a father, I can fully appreciate your gratitude to the facility and the doctors who performed the surgery. When anyone truly needs hospitalization we should not have to wait beyond the breaking point. The problem in this country has been debated to death. Just about every reason you can think of has been thrown on the table as to why health care in Canada has gone down hill. If you ask me, this all started when the individual provinces started taking the federal subsidies that were ear marked for health care and started putting that money into general revenue to try and balance they're own provincial budgets. The feds, rightly so, started to reduce and in some cases withhold those payments forcing the provinces to come up with the shortfall. Again, this is my opinion. What has become clear to me in the meantime is yes, I do think healthcare is a right in a publically funded system. The problem is that the real costs of that system are not being addressed properly and because people like me feel that it is a right and not a privlidge, the system get's abused. IMHO a revamp of how healthcare is delivered needs to be considered. Everything from outpatient care, smaller specialized surgery's, allowing nurses to actually nurse, etc need to be dealt with before we seriously consider any privatization of our system. Having said all that, I consider our position to be perilous at the moment and I can assure you that if a member of my family was to be suffering on a waiting list then I would be quick to jump off my high horse and use the private system. I just think that in Canada, we need to address the reality before we pass off the responsibility to the private sector

[StringBender]

Yes, they are.

You got that right, Kat......

[Electrophile]

McCain on the Tonight Show, responding to a joke by Leno with literally "Noun, verb, POW". In a situation that completely did not merit a mention of it, he brought it up. Why? Who the hell knows. I don't know if thought it was an appropriate response or if he's just conditioned now to answer every question that way.

[ally]

McCain on the Tonight Show, responding to a joke by Leno with literally "Noun, verb, POW". In a situation that completely did not merit a mention of it, he brought it up. Why? Who the hell knows. I don't know if thought it was an appropriate response or if he's just conditioned now to answer every question that way.

He has overplayed it. He deserves respect but yes, he has overplayed it

[Electrophile]

My own words were I'm the most attractive, intelligent, wittiest guy you'll ever meet.

No you're not. You must be on some powerful, mind-altering drugs if you really think that about yourself.

[Medhb]

Kudos to Michelle Obama who did great at the Dem convention last night!

Michelle successfully made the case that the Obamas are a wonderful representation of the

American dream realized.. and they are as true-(red, white and)blue American as it gets!!

And kudos to the anti-Obama crowd here whose overwhelming silence about Michelle's

speech suggests to me that they recognize Michelle does not warrant their derision.

Cheers

[i hope I don't end up having to retract those latter kudos. ]

She has soooo much class, just loved her speech last night. What a beautiful, wonderful family they are....very heartwarming and inspiring....

Edited to get my response outside of the quote

[XerSizNRite]

Michelle successfully made the case that the Obamas are a wonderful representation of the

American dream realized.. and they are as true-(red, white and)blue American as it gets!!

Michelle's speech suggests to me that they recognize Michelle does not warrant their derision.

No comment from me, because she is not a politician or running for any political office such as President.

I prefer to address only what each of the actual candidates has to say, not there spouse or other family members.

The main thing I got out of this is, by all the nice things she said about him, they are not going to divorce court anytime soon.

[Uncle Bill]

And kudos to the anti-Obama crowd here whose overwhelming silence about Michelle's

speech suggests to me that they recognize Michelle does not warrant their derision.

Yeah, I noticed she is changing her tune, finally. She had to, she was going to derail the already rickety O-train. With her, the song doesn't remain the same.

Michelle Obama’s Two Americas

At the convention, a new and radically different message from the candidate’s wife.

By Byron York

Denver — Near the end of Michelle Obama’s speech to the Democratic National Convention Monday night, I got an e-mail from a friend who had been with me at another speech by Mrs. Obama, in Charlotte, North Carolina, last May, on the eve of that state’s primary. “This isn’t the Michelle we know,” my friend said. And indeed, Mrs. Obama’s speech to the delegates here in Denver was worlds away from her address in Charlotte.

In Denver, Michelle Obama described America as a place of hope, a place where people find success during the course of “improbable journeys.” In Charlotte, her America was a dark and ugly place, where people who work hard are knocked down by sinister forces — a place where even young children burst into tears when they realize the deck is stacked against them.

In Denver, Mrs. Obama said, “My piece of the American Dream is a blessing hard won by those who came before me.” Those forebears, she explained, were “driven by the same conviction that drove my dad to get up an hour early each day to painstakingly dress himself for work — the same conviction that drives the men and women I’ve met all across this country…That’s why I love this country.”

In Charlotte, Mrs. Obama said, “We’re still living in a time and in a nation where the bar is set, right?…You start working hard and sacrificing and you think you’re getting close to that bar, you’re working and you’re struggling, and then what happens? They raise the bar…keep it just out of reach.”

Had something changed in the last few months? In the early primaries, Mrs. Obama often gave complaining speeches. It was in late February that she said the now-famous words, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country, because it feels like hope is finally making a comeback.” In other speeches, she grumbled — sometimes at length — about having to pay back her college loans. And she, as much as her husband, was associated with the anti-American rants of Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The images began to accumulate. By the later months of the Democratic primary race, when her husband was stumbling to victory after a powerful stretch of wins in February, Mrs. Obama’s approval ratings began to slip. She was still not widely known at the time, but it seemed the more voters got to know her, the more they began to have reservations about her.

In May, the Pew Research Center found that 22 percent of people polled had an unfavorable opinion of Mrs. Obama. In July, an Associated Press poll showed that she had a 35 percent unfavorable rating — versus a 30 percent favorable figure. A couple of weeks ago, a the Rasmussen polling organization found that 43 percent of voters had an unfavorable impression of Mrs. Obama. (Of them, Rasmussen said, 24 percent said they had a very unfavorable view of her.)

The numbers were simply terrible for a candidate’s wife — not all that different from Hillary Clinton’s numbers, even though the former First Lady has been in the spotlight for much longer and was a candidate in her own right.

More recent polls have had slightly better news for Mrs. Obama. A few days ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed her with a 30-percent unfavorable rating and a favorable rating that had inched up to 51 percent. Still, Mrs. Obama’s unfavorable numbers remain significant — and well above those of the Republican would-be First Lady, Cindy McCain.

So here in Denver Mrs. Obama had a job to do. It wasn’t just to introduce Americans to the Obama family or show another side of her husband’s personality. It was to rehabilitate herself, to take the edge of anger and resentment from her public pronouncements and embrace a wholesome, country-loving, American-Dream-living image. And that’s what her speech at the convention was about.

source

[Uncle Bill]

I don't know how much to read into the polls this time around. I think all the polling data is suspect, because they can't accurately take into account the Bradley effect. Nobama seems to have experienced both Bradley effect and reverse Bradley effect during the primary process according to this article

Bradley effect

The term Bradley effect or (less commonly) the Wilder effect refers to an explanation advanced as the possible cause of a phenomenon which has led to frequent inaccurate voter opinion polls in many American political campaigns between a white candidate and a non-white candidate. Specifically, there were instances in which such elections saw the non-white candidate significantly underperform with respect to the results predicted by pre-election polls.

Researchers who studied the issue theorized that some white voters gave inaccurate polling responses because of a fear that by stating their true preference, they might appear to others to be racially prejudiced. This theory suggested that statistically significant numbers of white voters tell pollsters in advance of an election that they are either undecided, or likely to vote for the non-white candidate, but that those voters exhibit a different behavior when actually casting their ballots. White voters who said that they were undecided break in statistically large numbers toward the white candidate, and many of the white voters who said that they were likely to vote for the non-white candidate ultimately cast their ballot for the white candidate.