While I think the story of Obama’s contribution system being less than secure is a very valid one, I don’t think a bunch of Republican’s giving Obama money under false names is particularly good for a number of reasons. One, you’re giving him money during the homestretch, kudos. Two, aren’t you committing some form of fraud yourself by falsifying the information on these contributions?
Bill Taggert puts it well when speaking about Obama “Truth Squad Regulators For TRUTH!” in Missouri:
A famous man once said:
A nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.
That man was John F. Kennedy.
As much as people across the political spectrum want to speak about rights being squashed over the last eight years, how on earth can anyone excuse First Amendment violations such as creating a policing squad to halt “untruthiness” with legal threats from state officials? This is frightening…
John McCain’s lack of use of a computer has become an issue to Barack Obama but it seems it’s not because he doesn’t get it as Obama may want you to believe:
McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan – Ted Williams is his hero – but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.
Emphasis added. Just to make sure folks catch it.
Maybe Obama’s camp wasn’t aware of this bit of information. But it certainly puts things in a new light.
(Via The Corner)
UPDATE: Forbes in 2000:
In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.
Wow, he just doesn’t get it, does he?
The Obama Campaign has decided to make an issue of McCain’s lack of computer knowledge as if it shows something about his ability to govern:
Obama spokesman Dan Pfeiffer said the campaign was not making an issue of the 72-year-old McCain’s age, but the time he’s spent in Washington.
“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”
Sigh.
Our nation wouldn’t survive without strong foreign policy and a military that exists to help implement it, or to assist in disasters throughout the world, or support our allies, and on and on and on.
How much military experience does Barack Obama have?
Oh, wait, he THOUGHT about joining the military. That’s gotta count for something.
Think my argument is asinine? Imagine how asinine it would be if I were talking about his using an iPod. Just like Obama’s doing to McCain.
I’ve covered this before here and here. I’ll cover it again if I have to.
So in case you missed it, there’s been a big to do lately about Barack Obama’s use of the phrase “you can put lipstick on a pig and it’s still a pig” when referring to the policies of John McCain and Sarah Palin.
Now, did Obama mean for this to be about Palin, using code words to speak negatively of her without coming right out and saying it (see “uppity“)? The Obama campaign and many Democrats have been using the term “lipstick” when speaking of Palin over the weekend and days leading up to Obama’s utterance.
Or is Barack Obama a victim of spin? Certainly possible. It’s easy to take something someone says, something fairly innocent, and turn it into an insult and feign disgust with much success (George Allen and Macaca come to mind, though certainly under different circumstances).
Or are we seeing a problem in regional dialects meaning different things to different people (again, see “uppity“)??
Ask around. Talk to folks from all over. Particularly in the northwest or northeast, areas that aren’t too familiar with the rural and it’s slang. See if they’ve heard the phrase before. If you get results like mine you’ll find they’d never heard the phrase before. You’ll find they immedeately associate the phrase with the woman involved in the context, even if she wasn’t named. Even if the origin of the phrase had nothing to do with women.
The dangers and joy of the English language.
UPDATE: Straight from the horse’s mouth (and, no, I am not literally trying to call Obama a “horse”):
“This is sort of silly season in politics, not that there’s a non-silly season, but it gets sillier,” Obama said. “And it’s a common expression in at least Illinois. I don’t know about New York City. I don’t know what you put lipstick on here.”
When Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac open up their wallets, they don’t just give change to CHANGE (har, har, I kill me):
Top Recipients of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Campaign Contributions, 1989-2008
1. Dodd, Christopher (D-CT) $133,900
2. Kerry, John (D-MA) $111,000
3. Obama, Barack (D-IL) $105,849
4. Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) $75.550
The Barack Obama campaign has announced that it will announce his Vice President nominee via text and e-mail sometime between now and the Democratic Convention. While some might be willing to dismiss this as a ploy, it’s actually quite shrewd. Potential millions wanting to be in the know are going to voluntarily give the campaign their cell phone numbers and email addresses and, perhaps most importantly, zip codes. That’s a big pool to turn to for future announcements, not just for Obama but the Democratic Party as a whole.
This is a very smart move to get some long term traction and resources, win or lose.
By way of Right Wing Liberal we find that Big Oil sure does like them some “hope” and “change”:
The Center for Responsive Politics took a look at the candidates campaign contributions from employees of Exxon-Mobil (companies themselves are barred from donating). Here’s what they found (ABC via Jim Geragthy):
Through June, Exxon employees have given Obama $42,100 to McCain’s $35,166.
Given that the Obama campaign has been trying to paint McCain as in the pocket of the oil companies, this doesn’t bode well for the Audacity of Hype.
Dragging Paris Hilton into political debates strikes me as kinda weird. Sure, John McCain did it and shame on him. But it seems he wasn’t the first of our presumptive presidential nominees to do it:
If it’s so awful to pull Paris Hilton into politics, as John McCain recently did in a commercial, then Barack Obama shouldn’t have dragged her into a Senate debate two years ago, when he attacked the repeal of the death tax:
Mr. OBAMA: Madam President, I rise to speak in opposition to the complete repeal of the estate tax.
First of all, [let's] call this trillion-dollar giveaway what it is—the Paris Hilton tax break.
Ohs nos!
UPDATE: McCain wasn’t even the first to compare Obama to Hilton. It was, in fact, Sen. Obama himself:
A February 24, 2005, Washington Post article begins:
There’s nothing exotic or complicated about how phenoms are made in Washington, and, more to the point, how they are broken.
“Andy Warhol said we all get our 15 minutes of fame,” says Barack Obama. “I’ve already had an hour and a half. I mean, I’m so overexposed, I’m making Paris Hilton look like a recluse.”
Today the NYT covered McCain’s lack of computer literacy and what that means on a broader scale:
While 73 percent of American adults use the Internet (only 35 percent 65 or older), according to a survey by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, it’s likely that many of them would rather have a president who can get Osama bin Laden than get online. And there is a common belief that says being president should be more a “vision” job than a “management” job, and that the clutter of a digital life can only distract from the Big Picture and Deep Thoughts a leader should be concerned with. In other words, would we really want a president “friending” from the Oval Office, scouring Wikipedia for information on Iran’s nuclear program or fielding e-mail from someone claiming to be “Nigerian general” seeking an American bank account for embezzled millions?
…
“We’re not asking for a president to answer his own e-mail,” said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley futurist who teaches at Stanford. “We’re asking for a president who understands the context of what e-mail means.”
The “user experience,” Mr. Saffo said, brings with it an implicit understanding of how the country lives, and where it might be heading. As Mr. McCain would lack this, he would also be deficient in this broader appreciation for how technology affects lives.
Mr. Saffo, if I may, if “user experience” is key to knowledge and application of something as President, I suggest you take a peek a priorites and look at Barack Obama’s military experience or lack thereof. Or perhaps his work on foreign affairs in general, which is severely lacking compared to the experience of John McCain. I think America’s standing among its friends and enemies in the world is much more important than whether or not we know what the President is doing’s based on his recent Twitterings.
The Gospel According To Gerard Barker:
And it came to pass, in the eighth year of the reign of the evil Bush the Younger (The Ignorant), when the whole land from the Arabian desert to the shores of the Great Lakes had been laid barren, that a Child appeared in the wilderness.
The Child was blessed in looks and intellect. Scion of a simple family, offspring of a miraculous union, grandson of a typical white person and an African peasant. And yea, as he grew, the Child walked in the path of righteousness, with only the occasional detour into the odd weed and a little blow.
When he was twelve years old, they found him in the temple in the City of Chicago, arguing the finer points of community organisation with the Prophet Jeremiah and the Elders. And the Elders were astonished at what they heard and said among themselves: “Verily, who is this Child that he opens our hearts and minds to the audacity of hope?”
In the great Battles of Caucus and Primary he smote the conniving Hillary, wife of the deposed King Bill the Priapic and their barbarian hordes of Working Class Whites.
And so it was, in the fullness of time, before the harvest month of the appointed year, the Child ventured forth – for the first time – to bring the light unto all the world.
As Politico puts it, “Surge meets Purge” at Barack Obama’s website:
The Daily News report by James Gordon Meek says: “Barack Obama’s campaign scrubbed his presidential Web site over the weekend to remove criticism of the U.S. troop ‘surge’ in Iraq, the Daily News has learned.”
Has the situation changed? Certainly. But Obama came out against the surge before it even had a chance to work, an uninformed and way too quick reaction that leads to lots of “regret”. I thought Democrats were tired of knee jerk reactions to issues facing America. I guess I was wrong…
UPDATE: How this came to light may be the long term story, though. McCain’s campaign used a service called Versionista to track changes to Obama’s website:
The service, which launched two months ago, allows users to track and cache changes to specific web pages up to an hourly basis, depending on the level of filtering requested, says Peter Bray, its creator in Portland, Oregon.
“I’m an avid reader of blogs, so I thought this would be a good tool for campaigns and activists,” he says. “This could be a good tool in their arsenal. ”
Bray says that he got the idea from Wikipedia, which shows people the changes made to its entries. Versionista is a subscription service and allows people to track minute, detailed changes on web sites.
Luke Boggs notes how regretful Obama is about so many things, but allow me to spoil the ending:
… a lot of Americans understand that you don’t get a bunch of easy do-overs in the Oval Office. You have to make tough calls, even when they may be politically costly.
I can’t help wondering what Obama might regret in four years as president. What might he regret doing —- or not doing —- on the world stage? What might he regret saying —- or not saying —- to Putin or Kim Jong-il or Ahmadinejad?
Obama’s plane had to make an emergency landing in St. Louis yesterday after the plane developed difficulty with its pitch. Thankfully they landed fine and everyone is OK. But interesting to note is where the plane came from:
This was not Obama’s regular campaign plane, which is being overhauled. It was a loaner, having previously been used by Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY.
Hmmmm…..
Warner Todd Huston blogs over at The Next Right that Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania is full of dirty hippies not only because they offer credit for a “gap year” (when one takes a year off between high school and college) but because some of that credit can be gained by volunteering with the Obama campaign:
So, not only are we failing our children in high school, NOW we are teaching them that they deserve a break from the nothing that is their high school “education”! On top of that we are telling them that working for Obama is good for college credit but not bothering with the Republican side of the aisle. Not too partisan there, eh?
His post is erred on all points.
I’ll start on the gap year as it’s one thing that hits closest to home. Not everyone goes to college off the bat. Your’s truly took plenty of time off in order to work in the real world a bit. I finally finished that degree and while having gotten it years ago might have been nice, I don’t regret the experiences I’ve had through the years or the resume I’ve been able to build and am now able to use to back up my degree.
I am not alone in this. Nor is Franklin & Marshall alone in recognizing that people sometimes need to take time off or can use such time to build character and do things that they can apply to life. Many a university offers “life credits” that take into consideration your resume when awarding a degree.
Maybe Mr. Huston thinks many of our fine men and women in the armed forces are wasting their time or being lazy when they decide not to go to college right away. But I digress.
Secondly, just because the Obama campaign has approached universities about offering internships with the campaign for credit does not reveal a bias in that school. If they deny the same to McCain, then, yes, there’s a clear bias. But the majority of internships are not proposed by the university but by organizations who approach the school in search of free labor. That Obama has done this and not McCain says more about Obama than it does about the university in question.
Both of these points, the very basis of the blog post, are easily refuted by basic research consisting of opening one’s window and shouting a couple simple questions to a passer by or two.
Now, maybe there’s a legitimate argument of liberal bias at universities and colleges in America rooted in Mr. Huston’s reasoning. I could get behind a well reasoned argument that displays that, hey, could make one of my own while I’m at it. But when you go so far off the reservation in an effort to make a point you really lose a lot of people and turn some would be allies into skeptics. You’re seeing conspiracies where they don’t exist, man, and you’re just going to go crazy. Stick to the facts, fight the good fight, that’s how you’ll win.
