Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
words cannot express how stunned i am.
i'm not really happy either, but mccain is still an improvement over bush.
i'm convinced if obama was white with a name like john smith this wouldn't even be a race. i've heard anecdotal confirmation from people in texas and other rural parts of the country that there is no chance in hell obama can win the votes of many rural whites. it's unfortunate.
LatinLover
I think that Mccain has been soft on Obama. He needs to go out and attack his lack of judgement. It really bothered when Obamas was questioned about abortion and responded that one way to prevent less abortions was to assist young teenagers by afforing them free health care, day care etc.. when that child was born.
I really hope that Mccain can use his response to attack him. I mean if you are old enoough to get pregnant and bring a child to this world, you should be old enough to work and provide that child with healthcare, day care, shelter, clothing and food. The notion that if you bring a child to this world and that the federal government is going to provide all the needs for a child from irresponsible people under tax payer expense in just redicolous. That is like saying "ok make babies and dont worry because the federal govt is going to take care of it". If you really want to prevent pregnancies among teenagers, they should be aware that they are going to be responsible in providing them all the needs of the child and that they are not going to get no assistant what so ever from the govt. Let their ass lose their social life so they can work day and night to provide for that child.
I mean, its disturbing that most people decide to bring a child to this world without being accountable for the needs of that child. Again, if you dont want americans to have personal accountability you have Obama that is going to take care of you.
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by LatinLover
I think that Mccain has been soft on Obama. He needs to go out and attack his lack of judgement. It really bothered when Obamas was questioned about abortion and responded that one way to prevent less abortions was to assist young teenagers by afforing them free health care, day care etc.. when that child was born.
I really hope that Mccain can use his response to attack him. I mean if you are old enoough to get pregnant and bring a child to this world, you should be old enough to work and provide that child with healthcare, day care, shelter, clothing and food. The notion that if you bring a child to this world and that the federal government is going to provide all the needs for a child from irresponsible people under tax payer expense in just redicolous. That is like saying "ok make babies and dont worry because the federal govt is going to take care of it". If you really want to prevent pregnancies among teenagers, they should be aware that they are going to be responsible in providing them all the needs of the child and that they are not going to get no assistant what so ever from the govt. Let their ass lose their social life so they can work day and night to provide for that child.
I mean, its disturbing that most people decide to bring a child to this world without being accountable for the needs of that child. Again, if you dont want americans to have personal accountability you have Obama that is going to take care of you.
i like the argument. although i don't know why obama is shying away from his position on abortion. i find it hard to believe that is going to be a dealbreaker this term. if people really vote on those issues this term then the country is far more ed up than i initially thought.
Krypton
quote:
Originally posted by jerZ07002
i like the argument. although i don't know why obama is shying away from his position on abortion. i find it hard to believe that is going to be a dealbreaker this term. if people really vote on those issues this term then the country is far more ed up than i initially thought.
There are millions who vote only for the pro-life, anti-gay candidates.
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by Krypton
There are millions who vote only for the pro-life, anti-gay candidates.
i know there are many like that, however, i thought many would soften their stance because of the extraordinary circumstances which are far more important. i guess, unfortunately, those same people are likely the people with the least disfavor for the war and the least contempt for the current administration and its illegal policies. It's a shame that a nonissue like abortion is so important to many people. i also find it ironic, probably like most on this board, that the people who are so against abortion are usually the same championing capital punishment and the unfettered right to protect themselves (and their property - funny enough) with guns and violence. It's an illogical twist in my view.
pkcRAISTLIN
quote:
Originally posted by jerZ07002
It's a shame that a nonissue like abortion is so important to many people.
i would never vote for a pro-life candidate, so i cant really blame the morons on the other side...
...or can i! :toothless
jerZ07002
quote:
Originally posted by pkcRAISTLIN
i would never vote for a pro-life candidate, so i cant really blame the morons on the other side...
...or can i! :toothless
being pro-life is an indication of other values, so i fully understand your logic. however, when the vote hinges on such a stupid issue i truly get frustrated. especially considering that in the US abortion is actually controlled at the state level. So, even if the supreme court were to overrule roe v. wade anyone could get an abortion by going to mass, cali, new york, etc... that said, i have never sided with a pro-lifer.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by jerZ07002
i'm not really happy either, but mccain is still an improvement over bush.
I disagree. His top foreign policy advisor (Scheunemann) is an even bigger neo-con than Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and Co, and he's really shown no separation from Bush on domestic issues in the past two years.
It's also worth mentioning that nationwide polling is fairly insignificant given the numbers in states up for grabs in the electoral vote. Just because McCain captures 84% of the vote in Alabama and Texas doesn't mean he's in good shape to win Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, or Michigan (Karl Rove's very own "four key states for McCain")
MisterOpus1
Agreed, Lebez. The polls are interesting to follow, but making immediate conclusions about a snapshot in one particular poll or another is erroneous at best. Some other things to note about polls as depicted by Frank Rich's column today:
quote:
It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.
And he posits an explanation to the wonderful conservative line as to why Obama isn't blowing away McCain in the polls:
quote:
Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.
The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.
So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.
And here comes yet another interesting poll worth examining:
quote:
The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.
To which Frank believes (as do I) that we absolutely MUST know more about McCain. So I completely agree with you, Latin, let's have the real McCain stand up:
quote:
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.
McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.
McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.
Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.
While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”
Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.
To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.
Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”
McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”
Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”
As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.
It appears that the media is slowly starting to wake up to the "Straight Talk" bull of McCain. I don't know if their love fest will end and reality kicks in prior to the election, but as stated previously, I'm completely all for letting McCain show his true colors........
LatinLover
MisterOpus,
Pollster has it Mccain: 169, Obama: 264, Toss up: 105.
If you are going to post any information about polls, which you love too, go directly to the source and dont quote a ing loser.
:rolleyes:
Look people, these election are not going to be decided over pro-life or pro-choice. I mean among the christian base I do think that Mccain has there vote locked up, but its not something that Mccain is going to base his campaigh on. I mean Mccain is not as unconfortable as Bush was talking about these issues. Both Obama and Mccain as we know dont really want to touch this subject. As we know it was touched in the forum they participated on because the atmosphere for the topic was there.
You know people need to start using more common sense so they dont complicate themselves so much. Yes is nice to look at polls at the moment, but in my opinion the most relevent polls are going to be the ones after labor day, were this race gets really heated up. Also, in my opinion a convention can make or break a candidate. So its going to be really interesting about how both candidates are able to connect with the american people at the convention.
LazFX
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
It appears that the media is slowly starting to wake up to the "Straight Talk" bull of McCain. I don't know if their love fest will end and reality kicks in prior to the election, but as stated previously, I'm completely all for letting McCain show his true colors........
same here, +1
Zild
I always wonder about the polls because it seems to me they are calling people up on landlines during primetime to poll them about their choice for president. Seems only a bunch of older conservative types would be inclined to even have a landline (I haven't had a landline in years) and to actually answer a number they don't recognize and then take the polling seriously enough to answer the question. So it seems to me the polls should be skewed highly in favor of McCain. But then again who even votes in this country? Old conservatives for the most part.
