Thank you, Colin Powell. I especially applaud his return to reality about taxes. Sen. Joe Biden never said it was patriotic to pay “higher” taxes, by the way. He said it was patriotic to pay your taxes. One look at Joe the Plumber, who is a tax deadbeat to the tune of $1,200 in arrears, will confirm that thought.
FOX News was right — for once — that former Secretary of State Colin Powell intended to endorse Sen. Barack Obama. But they were wrong — as usual — about the reasons.
“I think he is a transformational figure, he is a new generation coming onto the world stage, onto the American stage, and for that reason I’ll be voting for Sen. Barack Obama,” Powell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Powell said he was concerned about what he characterized as a recent negative turn of Republican candidate Sen. John McCain’s campaign, such as the campaign’s attempts to tie Obama to former 1960s radical Bill Ayers.
“I think that’s inappropriate. I understand what politics is about — I know how you can go after one another, and that’s good. But I think this goes too far, and I think it has made the McCain campaign look a little narrow. It’s not what the American people are looking for,” he said.
Amen. But FOX prophesied a Powell endorsement based solely on the race of the two men, which says more about what FOX sees when it looks at Powell and Obama than it does about Powell’s decision-making process.
Fox News sees ominous signs in the general’s impromptu boogie. It posits that because Powell not only “showed off hip hop moves,” but audibly referred to himself as “African American” while on stage in London, all the signs are present for him to soon endorse Barack Obama for president.
As is his wont, Powell expressed some remorse at his announcement.
“It isn’t easy for me to disappoint Sen. McCain in the way that I have this morning, and I regret that,” Powell said.
Speaking on Fox News Sunday, McCain said he respects and admires Powell, and the announcement “doesn’t come as a surprise.”
ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos reports: Barack Obama’s presidential campaign shattered all records in September by raising more than $150 million, the campaign announced in an e-mail to supporters this morning.
Obama’s haul more than doubles his previous monthly best of $67 million, which came during August of this year, and will further fuel his financial advantage over John McCain.
Since accepting public funds after being nominated for president at the Republican Convention in early September, McCain has been limited to spending $84 million, although the Republican National Committee has raised additional money on his behalf.
Obama has been putting his financial advantage to good use, and in recent weeks has massively outspent McCain on television ads. During the second week of October, Obama spent $32 million blanketing the airwaves in the key battleground states, while McCain and the RNC combined to spend only $16 million.
Obama’s campaign says its September fundraising was fueled by 632,000 donors, giving the campaign a total of 3.1 million since launching early last year.
Obama rallied 100,000 people underneath St. Louis’ Gateway Arch on Saturday, according to St. Louis police — his biggest event in America to date — and laid out the differences between himself and his rival on taxes and other issues.
Speaking underneath the landmark near the banks of the Mississippi River, Obama called taxes a values issue and said McCain’s proposals valued wealth more than the work that creates it. He refuted McCain’s criticism that his plan to provide tax cuts for 95 percent of Americans would amount to “welfare†for the 40 percent the Arizona senator says don’t pay federal income taxes. Obama said he would only provide a tax break to people who are paying payroll taxes.
“John McCain is so out of touch with the struggles you’re facing that he must be the first politician in history to call a tax cut for working people “welfare,†he said. “Well, let me tell you, the only “welfare†in this campaign is John McCain’s plan to give another $200 billion in tax cuts to the wealthiest corporations in America — including $4 billion in tax breaks to big oil companies that ran up record profits under George Bush. That’s who John McCain’s fighting for. I’m fighting for you.â€
The Obama campaign has consistently sought to paint the Illinois senator as a champion for working people and his rival as beholden to big companies, special interests and the rich. Their effort has been helped by massive spending on advertising in key areas.
Other than bogeymen like Bill Ayers, the only line of attack John McCain has left is to claim that Barack Obama would raise taxes on the middle class, which is, of course, a baldfaced lie. Under Obama’s plan, only those who make over $250,000 per year would receive a tax increase.
It seems to have escaped the attention of the punditocracy, but during the debate last week, it was McCain who admitted that he would raise taxes on just about every American who had health insurance coverage:
MCCAIN: Now, 95 percent of the people in America will receive more money under my plan because they will receive not only their present benefits, which may be taxed, which will be taxed, but then you add $5,000 onto it, except for those people who have the gold-plated Cadillac insurance policies that have to do with cosmetic surgery and transplants and all of those kinds of things.
First, it’s revealing that McCain equates plastic surgery with transplants. But the main point is, with the costs of health care soaring, it’s puzzling why tax-hating, borrow-and-spend Republicans would choose to tax health care benefits.
Perhaps they’re proposing this tax as a stealthy, punitive first step in killing employer-based heath benefits, with the eventual goal of forcing everyone to buy insurance as individuals on the open market. If so — unless they can convince insurers to reduce the cost of premiums — it’s likely we’d see a huge spike in the number of uninsured.
According to North Carolina State Board of Elections, voter registration for the 9,061,032 residents in the tenth largest state looks like this:
| Democratic: | 2,809,860 |
| Republican: | 1,982,321 |
| Libertarian: | 2,783 |
| Unaffiliated: | 1,370,717 |
| Total: | 6,165,681 |
Of course, the question is who will the 1.3 million unaffiliateds vote for.
The McCain campaign office in Pompano Beach, Fla., has been sporting this cute little poster on its wall, according to the South Florida Sun-Sentinel. In case you can’t read the yellow highlighted quote at the top, it says:
This is the greatest nation on the face of the earth. Join with me as we change it. — Barack Obama 2008
The poster then goes on to draw a parallel between Obama and Karl Marx, Josef Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Fidel Castro because they allegedly all said the same kind of thing to young people in their nefarious careers as dictators. Except for Marx, of course, who never led anything or anybody, but why let your message of hate get all bogged down in the facts.
Of course, the local Republican Party responded in the usual manner:
Shown a picture of the sign Thursday night, Broward [County] Republican Chairman Chip LaMarca said he was “disgusted” and would immediately go to the office and remove it.
“I’m speechless at the ignorance,” LaMarca said. “It’s not something we can condone.
“I’ll find out who put it up there, and maybe they’ll volunteer somewhere else.”
Attaboy, Chip, you tell ’em! But really, the depth of the outrage is, well, “outrageous”:
Jeffrey Sanders, 23, a Palm Beach Community College student from Boynton Beach, said he saw the sign earlier Thursday when he stopped to pick up tickets for today’s McCain rally at Florida International University.
“To label someone as the next Hitler is beyond outrageous [and] offensive. And it needs to be addressed. And if Barack Obama does the same thing to McCain, I would expect the same reaction,” he said.
Yeah, well, Jeff, if your party was not so blinded by anger, racism and venom, maybe you’d be able to see that Obama would never do something like that to McCain. See, he’s not a hater, he’s a creator; he’s not a dictator, he’s a debater.
Hands-down, my favorite part of Letterman’s interview with John McCain was when he asked the lying bastard about pallin’ around with G. Gordon Liddy, convicted Watergate burglar and rightwing whack job. Watch McCain’s reaction, which went from, “Oh shit!” to “I’ll pretend I’m not sure,” to “I can lie my way out of this.”
McCain, as usual, is lying like a sisal bath mat. Vietnam War protester and 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year William Ayers served his debt to society just as much as Liddy did, and he never said he “wished he’d bombed more.” The Stonecipher Report:
[Ayers] issued a memoir in 2001, released just before 9/11, which resulted in interviews with him that came out right after the tragedies.
The resulting articles from those interviews were notable – and, to many, notorious – because Ayers not only talked about regrets, but also expressed the thought that “We didn’t do enough” during the Weather days – meaning (he later explained) that he believed they could have worked harder and in different ways to oppose the war…NOT that he thought they should have done more bombings.
I think twisting the truth with those, “but it makes a better story if we tell it this way” sound bites have become so second nature to McCain that he no longer bothers to remember the facts. It’s satisfying to (occasionally) watch people like David Letterman confront him with them anyway.
Pundits say that Trump’s $5,000 midterm bribe was an overreach,
And they agree that if lies were a crime, he’d be impeached.
Despite all the dividend promises he’s made,
The fact is, not one has ever been paid,
So even before the midterms, he already owes us $8,000* each.
*$5000 stimulus checks via “DOGE dividend”; $2000 stimulus checks via a “tariff dividend”; $1000-plus checks via “savings” from expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies
