Some of the folks at These Bastards had the following to say about conservatives fuming over Powell’s endorsement of Obama:
Immediately Rush Limbaugh, Pat Buchanan, George Will, and Dan Billings fired off e-mails and gave interviews alerting the American populace to this chain of events. More intelligent people would have tried to attack Powell’s credibility based on his tenure in the Bush Administration. But to Rush and the like we are in yet another grand year of the glorious freedom experiment in Iraq, so that’s out. So they did the next best thing, kicked open the front door, strode out onto the porch and yelled “The Negroes is congregatin’ and endorsifyin’!” Because I guess Colin Powell and other black figures aren’t allowed to deviate from the standard line of pasty white guys they’ve endorsed since time immemorial.
So, word to the wise black folks. Endorsing a person of the same race is kinda racist, unless you are white. I think it has something to do with the equinox or the Magna Carta. If I understand it correctly, the only way to move race relations forward is for the black community to rally around the old, white guy. For the 44th time in a row. To prove to us you aren’t voting based on race. We promise to return the favor the next time a black guy runs. Honest.
And Morris O’Kelly at the NYT’s Fifth Down had the following reaction:
It wasn’t enough for Colin Powell to have been a professional soldier and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was “irrelevant” that he was once Secretary of State. When it came down to Powell offering his informed, influential and most important, single-minded opinion, the FIRST criticism leveled at him trumpeted race.
Limbaugh didn’t acknowledge his credentials and couldn’t attack his record.
The FIRST criticism leveled at Powell trumpeted race, and Powell’s previous service to America was summarily dismissed. This, despite the fact that Powell had never made any overture to appease or please African-Americans.
Nobody publicly accused Republicans Susan Eisenhower or Christopher Buckley of being “race traitors” when they endorsed Obama, or alleged Joe Lieberman was a race loyalist after switching parties and kowtowing to McCain. So when a respected and reputable black uber-American is first characterized as a race loyalist…it’s at best questionable.
By every Republican measure, Powell (like McCain) had put “country first.”
Others, such as Pat Buchanan, took an even lower road, alleging that other, “more qualified” generals were passed over in favor of Powell as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You know, “affirmative action” at the highest level.
Even after all these years, the credit Powell deserved still escaped him.
No such questions were posed of Dr. Henry Kissinger as to whether his support of Senator John McCain was also based in race. Buchanan didn’t accuse Senator McCain of gender affirmative action with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate.
Much of last night’s presidential debate centered on “Joe the Plumber,” Joe Wurzelbacher, a plumber who Barack Obama met while campaigning in Ohio. According to the New York Times, Mr. Wurzelbacher says that he is planning to buy a plumbing business that has profits of between $250,000 and $280,000 a year.
While this income would put Mr. Wurzelbacher above the threshold where he could expect to pay higher taxes under Senator Obama’s tax plan, the increase in his tax bill would be relatively modest. Under Senator Obama’s plan, the tax on income above $250,000 would increase by 3 percentage points from 33 percent to 36 percent. This means that Mr. Wurzelbacher could expect to see his tax bill rise by between $0-$900, assuming that this plumbing business would be his entire taxable income. If he has additional taxable income, then he would see a larger increase in his taxes.
Whoa that sounds really burdensome for someone making $250k or more a year. Interestingly enough, Wurzelbacher is not even in that top 5 percent of the income earners to even be worried about such a hike.
Some are speculating whether or not Wurzelbacher was actually planted by the McCain campaign to portray Obama as a tax and spend liberal.
Here is the exchange between Joe the Plumber and Obama in case any of you missed it.
Its hard to know how much faith to place in national polls but the 14 point spread reported in the newest CBS/NYT poll should give many observers pause, especially since its largely consistent with how other polls have been trending.
Here is how CBS interpreted the results.
The Obama-Biden ticket now leads the McCain-Palin ticket 53 percent to 39 percent among likely voters, a 14-point margin. One week ago, prior to the Town Hall debate that uncommitted voters saw as a win for Obama, that margin was just three points.
Among independents who are likely voters – a group that has swung back and forth between McCain and Obama over the course of the campaign – the Democratic ticket now leads by 18 points. McCain led among independents last week.
McCain’s campaign strategy may be hurting hurt him: Twenty-one percent of voters say their opinion of the Republican has changed for the worse in the last few weeks. The top two reasons cited for the change of heart are McCain’s attacks on Obama and his choice of Sarah Palin as running mate.
I bet McCain is kicking himself for not picking Romney now.
The New Yorker more than made up for its sad attempt at satire this summer with its recent full-throated endorsement of Obama. To date, this has got to be the most forceful and persuasive case for Obama I have seen yet. The editorial draws contrasts between the Obama-Biden and the McCain-Palin ticket on numerous issues, but the differences on energy and on the courts were the most dramatic and powerful points in the piece.
On energy and global warming, Obama offers a set of forceful proposals. He supports a cap-and-trade program to reduce America’s carbon emissions by eighty per cent by 2050—an enormously ambitious goal, but one that many climate scientists say must be met if atmospheric carbon dioxide is to be kept below disastrous levels. Large emitters, like utilities, would acquire carbon allowances, and those which emit less carbon dioxide than their allotment could sell the resulting credits to those which emit more; over time, the available allowances would decline. Significantly, Obama wants to auction off the allowances; this would provide fifteen billion dollars a year for developing alternative-energy sources and creating job-training programs in green technologies. He also wants to raise federal fuel-economy standards and to require that ten per cent of America’s electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2012. Taken together, his proposals represent the most coherent and far-sighted strategy ever offered by a Presidential candidate for reducing the nation’s reliance on fossil fuels.
There was once reason to hope that McCain and Obama would have a sensible debate about energy and climate policy. McCain was one of the first Republicans in the Senate to support federal limits on carbon dioxide, and he has touted his own support for a less ambitious cap-and-trade program as evidence of his independence from the White House. But, as polls showed Americans growing jittery about gasoline prices, McCain apparently found it expedient in this area, too, to shift course. He took a dubious idea—lifting the federal moratorium on offshore oil drilling—and placed it at the very center of his campaign. Opening up America’s coastal waters to drilling would have no impact on gasoline prices in the short term, and, even over the long term, the effect, according to a recent analysis by the Department of Energy, would be “insignificant.” Such inconvenient facts, however, are waved away by a campaign that finally found its voice with the slogan “Drill, baby, drill!”
On the courts:
The contrast between the candidates is even sharper with respect to the third branch of government. A tense equipoise currently prevails among the Justices of the Supreme Court, where four hard-core conservatives face off against four moderate liberals. Anthony M. Kennedy is the swing vote, determining the outcome of case after case.
McCain cites Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives, as models for his own prospective appointments. If he means what he says, and if he replaces even one moderate on the current Supreme Court, then Roe v. Wade will be reversed, and states will again be allowed to impose absolute bans on abortion. McCain’s views have hardened on this issue. In 1999, he said he opposed overturning Roe; by 2006, he was saying that its demise “wouldn’t bother me any”; by 2008, he no longer supported adding rape and incest as exceptions to his party’s platform opposing abortion.
But scrapping Roe—which, after all, would leave states as free to permit abortion as to criminalize it—would be just the beginning. Given the ideological agenda that the existing conservative bloc has pursued, it’s safe to predict that affirmative action of all kinds would likely be outlawed by a McCain Court. Efforts to expand executive power, which, in recent years, certain Justices have nobly tried to resist, would likely increase. Barriers between church and state would fall; executions would soar; legal checks on corporate power would wither—all with just one new conservative nominee on the Court. And the next President is likely to make three appointments.
Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago, voted against confirming not only Roberts and Alito but also several unqualified lower-court nominees. As an Illinois state senator, he won the support of prosecutors and police organizations for new protections against convicting the innocent in capital cases. While McCain voted to continue to deny habeas-corpus rights to detainees, perpetuating the Bush Administration’s regime of state-sponsored extra-legal detention, Obama took the opposite side, pushing to restore the right of all U.S.-held prisoners to a hearing. The judicial future would be safe in his care.
In a piece where he could barely bring himself to endorse Barack Obama for President, Christoper Hitchens took Gov. Sarah Palin to task with searing wit and unsparing honesty.
The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.
Ta-Nehisi Coates sums up John McCain’s posture on Iraq in very stark terms.
There is no sense here that one may have other reasons, short of cowardice, for wanting out of Iraq. But this is like being back on the block. Your man tells you that he got jumped by some cats from across the tracks, so you and him go to war. The beef lasts for months, and then you find out he never got jumped to begin with. But when you pull out, he calls you a chump.
This reminds me of a scene in The Wire when Slim Charles shares some of his wisdom on the Art of War with Avon Barksdale. Charles wanted to retaliate against a rival gangster Marlo Stansfield for the latter’s presumed involvement in murdering a close associate of the Barksdale set. Even when Barksdale the righleader informs him Marlo had nothing to do with the murder Charles still presses the point. “It don’t matter who did what to who at this point. And now there ain’t no going back. Once you in it you in it. If its a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight,” implores Charles.
In what seems like ages ago, the McCain campaign and GOP at large were concerned about a potential backlash against attacking Obama unfairly. In a February article in the Jack Kemp, albeit not your typical Republican, told the Politico, “You can’t run against Barack Obama the way you could run against Bill Clinton, Al Gore or John Kerry” because it would highlight how much a “all white country club party” the Republican party truly is.
“You can’t allow the party to be Macaca-ed,” one operative noted, “The P.C. [politically correct] police will be out and the standards will be very narrow,” said another strategist. Senator McCain even defended Senator Obama after hearing Bill Cunningham, one of the more vile radio talk show hosts on the extreme right, disparage the Illinois Senator in a rant in which the McCain supporter invoked the now Democratic Presidential nominee’s middle name three times.
According to the New York Times, McCain took the stage at the fundraiser and told the crowd there:
It’s my understanding that before I came in here a person who was on the program before I spoke made some disparaging remarks about my two colleagues in the Senate, Senator Obama and Senator Clinton. I have repeatedly stated my respect for Senator Obama and Senator Clinton, that I will treat them with respect. I will call them Senator. We will have a respectful debate, as I have said on hundreds of occasions. I regret any comments that may have been made about these two individuals who are honorable Americans.
My how times have changed. I wonder where that guy is today? And surprise surprise the so-called PC police aren’t as strong or intimidating as Republicans said they were.
Maybe I am just waking up to the fact that its mud season. And its been that way for some time.
On Wednesday, Peggy Noon railed against the presumed ineffectiveness of promoting narratives as a campaign device for Republican candidates running for high office in her opinion piece in the WSJ by saying:
I don’t like the idea of The Narrative. I think it is … a barnyard epithet. And, oddly enough, it is something that Republicans are not very good at, because it’s not where they live, it’s not what they’re about, it’s too fancy. To the extent the McCain campaign was thinking in these terms, I don’t like that either. I do like Mrs. Palin, because I like the things she espouses. And because, frankly, I met her once and liked her. I suspect, as I say further in here, that her candidacy will be either dramatically successful or a dramatically not; it won’t be something in between.
Not something they are good at? Not where they live? To fancy? That’s a little hard to believe. In 2000, the Bush campaign pushed a narrative of the then-Governor Bush as a one time lost soul who felt so out of place among the country club elites and overshadowed by his father’s achievements he tried to drink his sense of inadequacies away only to be redeemed by the power and grace of evangelical Christianity. All of which resonated very well with the Republican base and many other religious folk who felt that W. knew family values and understood them best.
Even David Frum recently gave a nod to the success of such narrative spinning on his blog at the NRO:
George W. Bush had very slight executive experience before becoming president. His views were not well known. He won the nomination exactly in the same way that Palin has won the hearts of so many conservatives: by sending cultural cues to convince them that he was one of them, understood them, sympathized with them. So that made everything else irrelevant in 2000 – as it seems again to be doing in 2008. [snip] But he lacked other important aspects of leadership which is how we got into the mess from which he needed to rescue the country and himself.
Amen to that.
To me, this is not only proof that not all Republicans think alike, but also some are a lot more honest with themselves than others, at least on certain topics. That said, on most days I’d rather read Peggy Noonan’s sweeping insights packaged in her crisp prose than sift through David Frum’s endless banter and pontification.
Earlier today Senator Barack Obama met with reporters to respond to some of the Republican attacks last night at the GOP convention. The Democratic Presidential nominee minced no words. He told journalists “This is what they do” when “they don’t have an agenda to run on.” He then coyly asked those same reporters if they were surprised to hear such negative criticisms from Republicans during their convention.
And when asked why has he not gone on the offensive against Senator John McCain’s running mate Governor Sarah Palin after fierce and snide jabs at him last night, Obama told the press corp “Because John McCain’s running for President and I am running against John McCain and as far as I can tell Governor Palin does not have any ideas that are different from John McCain’s and that speech she delivered was on behalf of John McCain.”
Watch it.
But of course, Obama could not let the community organizing jab slide either. For those of you who did not get a chance to see the speech last night Governor Palin said:
Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involved. I guess — I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.
A reporter in the clip below ask Obama to respond by saying “They are talking about work I did right out of college” and asked “Why would that work be ridiculous?” and “Who are they fighting for?” and maybe they are out of touch and don’t get it because they (McCain and Palin) have not been working on behalf of those folks.
With Governor Sarah Palin’s vetting stories soaking up so much of the media oxygen few have bothered to notice Senator Barack Obama’s post convention bump this past weekend. According to the most recent Gallup daily tracking poll, Obama has a 50 to 42 percent advantage over Senator John McCain. Though this is not the largest lead Illinois Senator has held over McCain (a July Gallup found 49 compared to 40 percent of all registered voters favored Obama over the Arizona Senator), its an important milestone nonetheless since it the first time that half of all voters now favor the hope machine than they do McSame.
Obviously, McCain and company will eat into the lead here, but with the truncated and thus far lackluster GOP convention, and Gov. Palin’s Prego-gate and Trooper-gate dominated news coverage at the expense of a McCain’s overall message coming out of the Twin Cities this week, I doubt it will even this up any time soon.
In fact, I predict that by next week the Obama-Biden ticket will still have a solid 5 point lead over McCain-Palin campaign. Or at the very least it will be beyond the margin of error.
Andrea Batista Schlesinger at DMI blog has grown weary and skeptical of the attention paid on the foreign policy portion of Senator Joe Biden’s resume in assessing whether or not the Delaware lawmaker is a well matched running mate for Senator Barack Obama.
Enough with the talk about filling in the foreign affairs gap. This just accepts that we are going to live out yet ANOTHER campaign the way the right wants us to — on their turf. The most pressing issues to America’s middle class are economic, economic, and ECONOMIC, so let’s learn a little bit more about where Senator Joseph Biden stood when it came to voting for legislation that matter to the pocketbooks of middle-class Americans.
Aside from the fact, that as Samantha Power has noted, the Democrats should use this election year as in part an opportunity to define themselves the better party on national security, its also clear that ceding ground to the Republicans on security issues by not discussing them they also hamstring their efforts to get their message out on the economy and other issues.
Each time the Obama does not answer forcefully or not all to some absurd charge about some fabricated ties to Hamas or imagined sympathies for the Iranians or is naive about the gravity of certain authoritarian rouge regimes because he says he is open to negotiation under certain circumstances, those stories linger in the press for days or even weeks. One asset Senator Biden does bring to the campaign is his ability to aggressively push back on those issues to make sure those charges don’t go unchallenged and get them off the front pages as Obama pitches his plan to modernize our economy and make it greener, generate job growth, and create a more sensible and equitable tax system.
Stressing Joe Biden’s foreign policy resume is like letting the opposition know you have a good deterrent that you plan to use regularly once campaigning turns into much more of a contact sport.
So after you are done whining about the economy, you can support John McCain’s presidential campaign by simply heading to the beach. And don’t forget that sun tan lotion.
In fact, McCain seem to tap into his inner feminist when he told an audience of full of the conservative faithful that “Women in America not only take care of the children, manage the household budgets and balance the pressures of work and family, they also run the enterprises that keep our country running.” He also assured the women dominated audience that he was for “equal pay for equal work” and that he wanted to make sure “there is equal opportunity in every aspect of our society.”
And according to Fox News Embeds, Mr. Straight Talk Express told women that Obama’s policies “would make it harder for women to start news businesses, harder for women to create or find new jobs, harder for women to manage the family budget, and harder for women and their families to meet their tax burden.”
If McCain decided that he wants to genuinely adopt a more progressive stance on women’s issues, that’s fine with me. We need more politicians to do so. But first he needs to account for why he did not support fair pay legislation when it came to a vote earlier this year.
The legislation in question is called the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The legislation was named after an Alabama women who was a victim of pay discrimination for more than 19 years at the Gadsen, Alabama Goodyear plant, and sued her employer as soon as she found out she was being discriminated against.
Initially, she won her claim at the federal trial court level where was awarded back pay and other damages. But Goodyear appealed the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where under a cramped interpretation of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a narrow majority ruled that Ms. Ledbetter filed her claim too late.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act says a plaintiff must file a complaint within the 180 days “after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred.” The law prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, sex, creed, disability, age, and national origin. For decades, the Supreme Court and lower courts understood this provision to mean that employees could sue within 180 of receiving a discriminatory paycheck since each check represented a related yet distinct instance of discrimination in a series of discriminatory acts.
Justice Alito, however, had a different interpretation. Writing for the majority, Justice Alito found Ms. Ledbetter should have filed her suit with the EEOC within 180 days of the original decision to pay her differently. “Current effects alone cannot breathe life into prior, uncharged discrimination,” declared the Justice.
I suppose it did not matter much to the five Justices that Ms. Ledbetter only found out that she was a victim of pay discrimination through an anonymous note from a fellow co-worker and thus impossible for her file the charge within the time Alito recommended given the secrecy surrounding salary pay in the workplace.
But in April of this year, Democrats tried to rectify this by passing a fair pay bill that will among other things rectify this seemingly small ambiguity in the law. Now most reasonable people would consider this a nonpartisian issue worth solving. But not everyone saw it that way.
Apparently, some lawmakers are worried that allowing workers to take their employers to court would be bad for big business and designed to enrich trial lawyers. Republican Senator Mitch McConnell at the time said, “We think that this bill is primarily designed to create a massive amount of new litigation in our country, and I think that is the reason for the resistance to its passage on our side”
And the presumptive Republican nominee Senator John McCain also concurred:
I am all in favor of pay equity for women, but this kind of legislation, as is typical of what’s being proposed by my friends on the other side of the aisle, opens us up to lawsuits for all kinds of problems…This is government playing a much, much greater role in the business of a private enterprise system
So in April he was against voting for a bill that would help combat pay discrimination, but now in July he is all for “equal pay for equal work.” That’s definitely not straight talk, thats flip flop and pander for more votes talk.
For the record, both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took time from campaigning to vote for the bill and enthusiastically supported it.
Note: According to a 2006 U.S. Census Bureau report, median annual income earnings for men were greater than women in every single state. And in 2005, men’s median annual earnings amounted to $41,965 compared to $32,168 for women. In other words, women earned, 76.7 percent of what men made. The same study also found that the wage gap persisted across gender and racial lines.
Asian American women made 80.7 percent of what white men earned.
African American men made 73.5 percent of what white men earned.
African American women made 63.2 percent of what white men earned.
Hispanic men earned 58.4 percent of what white men earned.
Hispanic women made 52.2 percent of what white men earned.
Native American men made 71.6 percent of what white men earned.
Native American women made 59.7 percent of what white men earned.
White women made 73 percent of what white men earned.
The only outlier here are Asian men who tend to be over represented among high wage earners as a group in the U.S. and earned $1.04 for every dollar made by white men. This is in no small part is due to how our immigration laws favor high skilled and highly educated workers. For example, another 2006 study, found that 69 percent of all Asians are foreign born, and 44 percent of all Asians, compared to just 24 percent of the general U.S. population, had a Bachelor’s degree or better.
Note II: Even when you account for education, profession, and hours work, etc., the pay gap among men and women still persists. For example, a report by the American Association of University Women found that even among recent grads:
In education, a female-dominated major, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. In biological sciences, a mixed-gender major, women earn only 75 percent as much as men earn. Likewise in mathematics—a male dominated major—women earn only 76 percent as much as men earn.
The Hispanic voter—and I want to say this very carefully—has not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.
-Hillary Clinton campaign pollster Sergio Bendixen, New Yorker, Jan 21, 2008
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