Day: March 10, 2008

Swiftboating Obama: A Look Inside Bogus Rightwing Claims He Has Terror Ties

Jon Ponder

In early January, when Barack Obama was just one among many Democratic candidates, we published Swiftboating Obama’s Religion: He Is Not a Muslim. Now that he is the putative Democratic nominee, here is a look at another potentially Swiftboat-able part of his record — his tenuous connections to William Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn, who were members of the Weather Underground in the Vietnam War era — and his one-time professional relationship with Dr. Rashid Khalidi, a one-time PLO media director.
Ayers was a prominent constituent in Obama’s state senate district.
Ayers and Dorhn were involved in the planning and execution of violent protests 40 years ago:

They disappeared in 1970, after a bomb — designed to kill army officers in New Jersey — accidentally destroyed a Greenwich Village townhouse, and turned themselves into authorities in 1980. They were never prosecuted for their involvement with the 25 bombings the Weather Underground claimed; charges were dropped because of improper FBI surveillance.

Both have written and spoken at length about their pasts, and today he is an advocate for progressive education and a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago; she’s an associate professor of law at Northwestern University.

This never-heard-of-him rightwinger offers a taste of the spin to come from his fellow Noise Machiners:

[…]

N.Y. Dem Gov. Spitzer Linked to D.C. Prostitution Ring

Jon Ponder

New York’s Democratic Gov. Elitot Spitzer has told his top aides that he was involved in a Washington, D.C., prostitution ring that is under investigation by federal prosecutors:

Gov. Eliot Spitzer has informed his most senior administration officials that he had been involved in a prostitution ring, an administration official said this morning.

Mr. Spitzer, who was huddled with his top aides inside his Fifth Avenue apartment early this afternoon, had hours earlier abruptly canceled his scheduled public events for the day. He scheduled an announcement for 2:15 after inquiries from the Times.

Mr. Spitzer, a first term Democrat who pledged to bring ethics reform an end the often seamy ways of Albany, is married with three children.

The governor’s travel records appear to confirm that he was in the capitol when one of the federal prosecutor’s male suspects met with a prostitute from the ring.

Should Spitzer step down, he would be replaced by Lt. Gov. David A. Patterson, a Democrat from Manhattan. Patterson is the first African American to be elected lieutenant governor of New York, and would be the state’s first black governor. He is also legally blind.

Economists Alarmed: McCain Would Stay the Course on Bush Tax Policies

Trish

Like peas in a pod. Wait, weren’t the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers?

If you’ve been deluding yourself that having John McCain as our president couldn’t be all that bad since almost anything beats what we’ve got now…I have some bad news. McCain would be even worse.

How can any responsible or intelligent person — anyone able to operate a toothbrush, say — look at the economic mess we’re in and decide that the answer is less revenue?

…budget experts say his numbers do not add up.

McCain’s promises to reduce wasteful spending if elected president in November would not begin to cover the costs of his proposed tax cuts, analysts say.

He also has not yet explained how he would rein in the health-care and retirement costs expected to swamp the federal budget as some 77 million people retire from the U.S. work force in the coming decades.

On top of that, a President McCain would inherit a $400 billion budget deficit, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that cost nearly $200 billion per year and a similar bill for interest payments on the $10 trillion national debt.

Many experts said McCain’s proposals would make the fiscal picture worse.

It’s funny how different McCain the senator was from McCain the presidential candidate. Suddenly, being Bush all over again makes sense to the “maverick.”

He angered conservatives when he opposed President George. W. Bush’s income-tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 on the grounds that they favored the wealthy and were fiscally irresponsible. He now supports making them permanent, echoing Bush in saying that allowing them to expire would amount to a tax increase.

How can any responsible or intelligent person — anyone able to operate a toothbrush, say — look at the economic mess we’re in and decide that the answer is less revenue? This is madness.

But it’s good for Exxon/Mobil.

McCain also wants to slash corporate tax rates from 35 percent to 25 percent and allow businesses to immediately write off capital expenses. He has called for reforming the Alternative Minimum Tax, initially targeted at the wealthy but now snaring many middle-class taxpayers.

These tax cuts would shrink annual federal revenues from $4.55 trillion today to $3.4 trillion in 2018, according to Len Burman of the Brookings Institution’s Tax Policy Center.

Federal revenues would account for 15.3 percent of U.S. gross domestic product, the lowest level since 1950.

Ah yes, 1950. Let’s turn back the clock and all return to a time when John McCain was a strapping 14-year-old, fresh from his home in Panama but poised to attend prep school in Alexandria, Va. Things were simpler then, or so they tell me since I wasn’t born yet. So enough memory lane. The next president cannot propose any more tax cuts unless he or she wants to officially bankrupt America.