Obama might be sinking hard...and soon.

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What on earth are you talking about? Obama was only 8 back in the 70's .

Now back in the mid 2000's when he was holding fundraisers in the guy's home or working on the Annenburg Challenge directing the guys money as he saw fit - that was another Bill Ayers he knew, not the one from when he was 8.

Regardless of whether obama was 8 or 38, my main point still stands... republicans are pointing out some random association that makes obama look bad to distract the public from the real issue of the economy (which went from prosperous to crap under the current administration)...

It doesn't stand because Republican's are trying to point out the source of the problem - as in *who's* deregulation these were. If Republicans are being blamed for a financial crisis that their policies didn't cause - yeah, I'd say that's a problem worth pointing out.

Have you seen the front page @ CNN.com? The s**t's really hitting the fan for the Republicans,and the WHOLE american right...all at once!

REEELLY?! !


Oh.

I never get any credit ...

Don't you think it's curious that the Annenberg family that appointed Ayers to their own Annenberg Charity Foundation endorsed McCain? McCain proudly lists Lenore Annenberg as a former ambassador that endorses McCain (she wasn't an ambassador, but she was married to one), and she is also president of the charitable foundation that bears her family's name.

McCain is proud to be supported by a person that gives grant money to terrorists!

^^ Velkom to America, Komradski!

Looking at it....sorry, I don't see it. A guy who's threatening to harm the governor's family, some guy (Alwan) who CNN is talking about - who doesn't explain Algerian intelligence, doesn't explain Jordanian intelligence, doesn't explain the fact that the whole U.N. believed that he had WMD's but disagreed on what to do about it.

One article has to do with how GWB, Blaire, Ron Howard, and many others may have acted on false intelligence which everyone agreed on (and for whom this supposed deepthoat was probably only a portion of the intelligence they were getting). The real stuff, the things that are in defense of all the western world's administrations beliefs - both capitalist and socialist - likely still classified because you can't let certain people know what cards you still hold; if its out to the press and the people its out to everyone else that you don't want to see it as well (well aside from the cellphone evesdropping - one of our lovely senators gave Bin Laden the heads up on that in a press conference; mad props to him for helping Bin Laden evade authorities). Saddam was playing a shell game with Iran, he was terrified of them after what he'd tried to do, and he made a game of deceiving everyone into believing he had these things because he didn't want Iran to know that he didn't. He did have the roving chemical labs, they found those and they were exactly what they'd been claimed to be.

Also, does anyone ever talk about the 550 metric tons of yellow cake that actually were found in Iraq, Saddam shooting at the planes over the no-fly zones, or him giving out monetary awards of $30,000 U.S. equivalent to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers? Do people ever talk about the oil-for-food controversy where Saddam was trying to buy the U.N. weapons inspectors off of his back so that he could go back to rearming himself? No, none of these things really get talked about because, if you want to believe that GWB and Cheney were bloodthirsty warmongers - those things just aren't salient.


I know you'd never believe me but, I'd be a democrat and a liberal if the democrats and liberals actually gave explanations that made any realistic degree of sense. To this day, I can't find that - even listening to the supposed 'best of the best'. Maybe the real 'best of the best' are so badly buried, or imprisoned, by our totalitarian military-industrial complex that they can't get their words out, rotting away in American gulags? You'd think that there'd be a least enough semi-articulate voices on the other side to tell their story - I'm just not hearing it, not on CNN, not on MSNBC, not anywhere. And seriously, you could find out that your canditate hypothetically was a card carrying member of the communist party - no worries, indiscretions of youth; a republican candidate - people question everything they ever did to the extent to where they're even questioning whether McCain's engine really failed in the fighter jet that he did some damage to back at the age of 22, Oliver stone getting publicity for claiming that he was out of touch because he was a fighter pilot rather than infantry and therefore because he's out of touch it explains the fact that its not fighting to control threats or has nothing to do with the some 30 terrorist attacks on the U.S. that have been averted in the last 7 years - McCain is (in Oliver Stone's words) bloodthirsty warmongers (baseless ad hominem that the left sucks down like Koolaid). In comparison it seems like Republicans these days have *brutal* transparency, anything the left does - its all good. It really all goes back to the entrenchment that the left obtained in our schools, in the media, in pop culture. It almost seems like anyone under the age of 40, if they aren't careful, are living in some sort of dream where reality isn't reality just for the fact that what's getting passed down the pipe is so callow that they can't even tell what's salient and what's not - its all about feeling.

We don't know reality because the media and our culture has us so confused anymore that rather than going with facts, we have this magical idea of government, politics, almost solopsistic as if they're godlike, all knowing, all seeing, and that the man is out to get us.

Not to insert too much of my own opinion on this; a) I'm a junglist b) I enjoyed my days of getting f'd and experimenting with psychedellics c) in a lot of ways I am a social liberal - not a fan of the dogma swilling side of the Christian right (call me an elitist, like Kathleen Parker or George Will). Still, regardless of all that, even if what I'm supporting is the side of the evangelical right - I can still take a hit on that just because, I'd rather see this country prosper and do what *works* in terms of reality than legislating on what superficially feels good (what the left seems to want of us). Capitalism works on its own, socialist constructs crash it and that's exactly what's being covered up by the media - the idea that ACORN's moves, in the name of political correctness (supposedly - I really think its sheer 19th century white man's communism using race and the ACLU as a shield).

Look: Obama is NOT anything close to a (true)socialist! Thats just a bunch of right-wing slander. The center-left and the democratic party certainly DO believe in capitalism, what they dont believe in laissez-faire capitalism. These are NOT good times for radical free-marketeers considering what is happening to the economy right now. We've have 8 years of it and with the stock market in free-fall, the voters primary concern is what is going on here in our homeland and NOT paranoia about terrorism(since there have been ZERO attacks on US soil since 9/11/01). Obama is already ahead in the polls, and the republicans are getting desperate. There still is a chance that McCain will be elected but the prospects for the right do not look good at all.....

Capitalism seems to be working on its own very forcefully to destroy the economy. If socialism is so rotten, of course, the government should let capitalism go its merry way and not pump socialist taxpayer money into the system to attempt to salvage the wreckage of rampant capitalism.

To avoid blowing this up and getting too wordy with explanations - the guy's voting records and books about himself have articulated things rather clearly.



I'll take on the terrorism paranoia first - 30 attacks have been prevented in the last 7 years. In a way its good that they don't talk about it that much in the news because having the economy work is partly about keeping people calm, though yes, the downside is that the lack of dialog on it makes it look to some people like both a) nothing has happened at all and b) everything was unfounded in terms of the war on terror and that it was the 'military-industrial complex' war profiteering under a veneer to pillage countries for oil and bring about a police state in the U.S.. I still have not heard even the first conspiracy theorist say that we're pulling out millions and millions of drums a day from Iraq and keeping it all in some secret warehouse to drive prices up just so big oil and Cheney can profit from it; that violates much of the other reasoning aside from the thought that we really did assess an authentic threat.

Getting back to economics - stock market free-fall after 8 years...that's what my original post directly addresses. We're in free-fall because of the housing/sub-prime crisis. The regulations to keep capitalism working as it should were in fact in place; certain people pried those regulations off to make sure people who felt they were entitled to have homes and who didn't have the money or the credit to buy their own had the ability to do so. Its not just these specific loans, the ones that were in reaction to red-lining and supposed race discrimination, it was the fact that these banks then had to take it up with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to be able to sell these mortgages off to other banks; that meant breaking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's regulations - in congress - so that these could go through. Because those regulations were broken by new law, yes, capitalism stopped working as it should because the regulations that had been rightly placed there were stripped away - that washed right back down the pipe to all the U.S. banks and then yes, they had the ability to throw loans to anyone, any color, no particular reason aside from the fact that standards had been thrown out the window by congress. The trouble is that, realistically, most of these companies will do whatever they have to in order to stay competitive - which does drive them to the edge of ethics. Being that what I just described is an inherent problem within capitalism, can you understand just how much of a problem it is regarding what ACORN did in this event? Also can you understand what a problem Obama's associations cause him? The only reason that this could get buried is because people will likely not look at the facts, just think "pfff, Fox News neocon propaganda", and let their emotions continue to direct the steering wheel.

not really. the centralized banks and government intervention in all the wrong ways is forcefully working to destroy the economy and further shake buyers' confidence in the market.


it's not capitalism that brought down the market, it was corporatism. there's a big difference.

Both sides effectively chickened out on the recent legislation, partly because the worlds supposed best and brightest couldn't even say for sure whether this bailout would work or whether they needed to let it all burn and let other companies buy up the rubble.

The problem with politicians in this situation is that they're too scared to do anything decisive because if one party or another voted for a measure and it not only didn't work but it destroyed the economy - they'd be blamed directly by the people, due to just the callow and dumbed-down nature of media coverage and politics (democrats, republicans, wouldn't have mattered in something that big). Then again, if you don't keep the screws to the politicians and try just telling them as political researchers and career students of world events to make all the right decisions since we don't have the time, that can't done either.

The end result is a catch 22. We still don't know if this bailout would work, almost no one who signed on for the bailout was necessarily excited about what it meant to the banks and investment institutions all around the globe (that yes, get drunk and wrap your new Audi around a tree, mom and dad will buy you a new one). On the other hand, with the liquidity crisis was such that the begrudging proponents of the bailout spoke of the 1930's - how the world wide crash of the great depression actually had a lot of aid in terms of bringing large parts of the world to socialism and communism just over the sheer amount of faith lost in capitalism.

I don't know who's right on the bailout, the proponents or dissenters, but a world full of career Phd economists who've been doing what they have for 30 or 40 years - they're as split as everyone else, and its scary.

I think people are going to be so focused on the economy to think about that.

That's what this *whole* thread is about.

yeah, it's an entirely illogical jump of conclusion that somehow obama caused the economic crisis. it's absurd.