43 Days Until Election Day
September 22, 2008
MORNING UPDATE:
TEAM SARAH…MIGOP Co-Chair Jane Abraham has helped start a national organization of diverse women dedicated to advancing and defending Sarah Palin’s Vice Presidential candidacy and motivating grassroots women to actively support the ticket this fall called Team Sarah. For more info check out their webpage! http://www.teamsarah.org/
143 DAYS OF EXPERIENCE…so what does it take to be a District Manager at McDonalds or superintendent of schools…or President of the United States…see the Rest of the Story below…interesting info being sent around the internet.
OBAMA TELEPROMPTER…wow, the “one”, the great “communicator II” now is using a teleprompter at all his speeches…see this story.
http://migop.blogs.com/blog/2008/09/obamas-teleprom.html
$2.5 BILLION IN BONUSES FOR TAXPAYER BAILOUT…you want to see another Boston Tea Party…pass a bailout bill that pays those who put the taxpayers at risk $2.5 Billion in bonuses. If the government and taxpayers pick up the bad debt, we should not “subsidize” the executives who put the taxpayers at risk.
NO organization should be “too big” to allow to fail, Freddie and Fannie should be broken up. This kind of government intervention does more to distort the market than stabilize it. Congress should take advantage of this crisis for real reform.
FORBES PROPOSES BREAK UP OF FANNIE MAE AND FREDDIE MAC…in what is the boldest, yet the most common sense approach to the government bailout of the mortgage market, Steve Forbes proposes that these "two corrupt, mismanaged monsters" be broken up into 12 new companies…to help avoid backing the U.S. government into another bailout.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/09/08/fannie-freddie-next-oped-cz_sf_0908opedfannie.html
VOLUNTEERS NEEDED…we are opening up new Victory Centers daily and need more and more volunteers to make phone calls, knock on doors and put up lawn signs. The response has been overwhelming, but Michigan will be the key battleground state and we need EVERY person willing to help in anyway they can. Thanks again for all you do! For more info click here.
http://www.migop.org/inner.asp?z=113
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Check…out…our…onlineArticles of Interest………News…you…can…use………
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THE REST OF THESTORY:
143 DAYS OF ‘EXPERIENCE’ A PRESIDENT DOESN’T MAKE…
You couldn’t get a job at McDonalds and become district manager after 143 days of experience.
You couldn’t become chief of surgery after 143 days of experience of being a surgeon.
You couldn’t get a job as a teacher and be the superintendent after 143 days of experience.
You couldn’t join the military and become a colonel after a 143 days of experience.
You couldn’t get a job as a reporter and become the nightly news anchor after 143 days of experience.
BUT..
‘From the time Barack Obama was sworn in as a United State Senator, to the time he announced he was forming a Presidential exploratory committee, he logged 143 days of experience in the Senate. That’s how many days the Senate was actually in session and working. After 143 days of work experience, Obama believed he was ready to be Commander In Chief, Leader of the Free World…after 143 days.
We all have to start somewhere. The senate is a good start, but after 143 days, that’s all it is – a start.
AND, strangely, a large sector of the American public is okay with this and campaigning for him. wouldn’t accept this in our own line of work, yet some are okay with this for the President of the United States of America ? Come on folks, we are not voting for the next American Idol!
TODAY’S TOP STORIES
The following stories and more are available at myArticles of Interest online.
Even Barack Obama, who opposed the Iraq troop surge, has finally acknowledged its success. But some of his fellow Democrats in Congress apparently remain unconvinced. Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin teamed up to block a vote on a bipartisan resolution "recognizing the strategic success of the troop surge in Iraq" and thanking our men and women in uniform for their efforts.
By late 2006, Iraq was gripped by sectarian chaos. Insurgents and death squads were killing nearly 3,000 civilians per month, and coalition forces were sustaining more than 1,200 attacks per week. On January 10, 2007, President Bush announced the new counterinsurgency strategy that included deploying five additional Army brigades and two Marine battalions to Iraq.
Under General David Petraeus, who relinquished command of U.S. forces in Iraq on Tuesday, sectarian bloodshed has almost entirely abated, daily attacks have fallen to 25 from a high of 180 in June 2007, and overall violence has declined by more than 70%. In July, U.S. combat deaths were lower than in any month since the beginning of the war. All of the troops sent to Iraq as part of the surge have now returned home and are not being replaced.
The Incredible Shrinking Obama
By Rex Murphy
How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?
Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.
Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.
Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.
Obama’s Social Security Whopper
By Brooks Jackson | factcheck.org
Summary:
In Daytona Beach, Obama said that "if my opponent had his way, the millions of Floridians who rely on it would’ve had their Social Security tied up in the stock market this week." He referred to "elderly women" at risk of poverty, and said families would be scrambling to support "grandmothers and grandfathers."
That’s not true. The plan proposed by President Bush and supported by McCain in 2005 would not have allowed anyone born before 1950 to invest any part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts. All current retirees would be covered by the same benefits they are now.
Obama would have been correct to say that many workers under age 58 would have had some portion of their Social Security benefits affected by the current market turmoil – if they had chosen to participate. And market drops would be a worry for those who retire in future decades.
Palin draws crowd of 60,000 in The Villages
BY BILL COTTERELL • NEWS-PRESS.COM CAPITAL BUREAU
THE VILLAGES — Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told wildly cheering, flag-waving, chanting supporters that John McCain is "the only great man in this race" and promised Sunday he will fix the nation’s economy if voters give the GOP four more years in the White House.
"He won’t say this, so I’ll say it for him," the Alaska governor said in an almost confidential tone at the close of her first Florida stump speech. "There is only one man in this election who has ever really fought for you. John McCain wore the uniform of his country for 22 years — talk about tough."
The Villages, a vast, upscale planned community north of Orlando, has about 70,000 mostly adult residents — many of them military retirees — who vote reliably Republican in statewide races. Tens of thousands inched along roads into the picturesque town square of the complex, where they stood in sweltering heat for about four hours as local GOP officials and a country band revved up the crowd.
Palin to Meet With Kissinger, Colombian President
By Elisabeth Bumiller
Gov. Sarah Palin will meet with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia during the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, an aide to Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign said.
Ms. Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, is to meet on the same day with President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan.
The sessions are part of an effort to demonstrate that Ms. Palin is prepared to function in the world of foreign policy and national security at a time when she is under criticism for a lack of experience. Ms. Palin, who has been governor of Alaska for 20 months, got her first passport last year.
The McCain campaign provided no details about the time, place or issues to be discussed at the meetings.
By Robert Tracinski
It is clear that the press wants their man Barack Obama to win–and as a result, they have obscured rather than illuminated our attempt to make an objective assessment of who Sarah Palin is, how she thinks, and what she stands for. And as I have pointed out, the worst consequence of this transparent bias may turn out to be that the press has destroyed the credibility it would need to make valid criticisms of Palin.
But there is enough information available to begin making our own independent assessment of Palin, using the bits and pieces we can discern through this veil of press partisanship. To do this, let’s move past irrelevant details of her biography and past the debatable elements in her record. Let’s look at what we can find out about Sarah Palin’s ideas and principles.
The upshot of most of the smears targeting Palin is that she is a religious zealot. But we now know that she didn’t try to ban books at Wasilla’s public library, she didn’t try to mandate the teaching of creationism in public schools, and she does not, so far as anyone knows, actually think that dinosaurs are "lizards of Satan." The one clear indication we have as to the degree of her religious commitment is the fact that she is opposed to abortion in all cases, making an exception only to protect the life of the mother. And we know she means it because she chose to give birth to her youngest child even though she knew from genetic testing that it would have Down Syndrome, a severe form of mental retardation.
By Lawrence Kudlow
We can fix this. If nothing else, that’s the message I hope readers take away from this column. Of course, the "this" is the run on the world banking system. Stock markets have plunged globally, gold prices have shot up, and U.S. Treasury-bill rates have plummeted to 10 basis points, the lowest since the 1950s.
We’re witnessing a desperate flight to safety by investors. Folks are running away from financial assets and financial institutions simply because confidence has disappeared.
Last week, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson said "no" to a government bailout of Lehman. Mr. Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke then took over AIG with an $85 billion bailout, with the Treasury issuing roughly $100 billion in new T-bills so the Fed has the cash to resuscitate AIG.
By MIKE ALLEN
n a change from the original proposal sent to Capitol Hill, foreign-based banks with big U.S. operations could qualify for the Treasury Department’s mortgage bailout, according to the fine print of an administration statement Saturday night.
The theory, according to a participant in the negotiations, is that if the goal is to solve a liquidity crisis, it makes no sense to exclude banks that do a lot of lending in the United States.
Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson confirmed the change on ABC’s "This Week," telling George Stephanopoulos that coverage of foreign-based banks is "a distinction without a difference to the American people."
"If a financial institution has business operations in the United States, hires people in the United States, if they are clogged with illiquid assets, they have the same impact on the American people as any other institution," Paulson said
By MARTIN CRUTSINGER and CHARLES BABINGTON
WASHINGTON — The Bush administration insisted Sunday that Congress must move quickly to approve what one lawmaker called the "mother of all bailouts" — a $700 billion proposal to buy a mountain of bad mortgage debt in an effort to unfreeze the nation’s credit markets.
Congressional leaders endorsed the plan’s main thrust, saying passage might occur in a matter of days. But they said it must be expanded to include help for people on Main Street as well as the big Wall Street financial firms who have lost billions of dollars through their bad investment decisions.
The proposal "does not include the necessary safeguards," said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. She called for "independent oversight, protections for homeowners and constraints on excessive executive compensation."
Report on GOP foreclosure lists retracted
Kathy Barks Hoffman
The Michigan Messenger’s editorial director says the Web site misstated an Ohio GOP official’s comments in an article that said Republicans were planning to challenge homeowners on foreclosure lists to keep them from voting.
Republicans have denied that accusation and demanded that comments from two GOP officials in the story be corrected or retracted.
Franklin County GOP Chairman Doug Preisse said on Wednesday that a reporter for The Michigan Messenger took comments he made to The Columbus Dispatch and twisted them out of context.
In a statement posted Friday evening on the Michigan Messenger Web site entitled, "Messenger clarifies Ohio official’s remark," Jefferson Morley of the Messenger’s Washington-based parent organization, The Center for Independent Media, said Preisse’s comments to the Dispatch "did not specifically address the issue of foreclosed homeowners."
