Originally posted by Q5echo
Sloppy Joe Biden has accepted $5,133,072 in contributions from lawyers and lobbyists since 2003.
his own son is a registered Federal lobbyist.
you should choose your words more carefully.
And yet he's the 99th wealthiest Senator in the US Senate... care to guess where McCain falls?
LatinLover
I mean if the far left cant get the fact that Barack Hussein Obama chose Biden to be his mentor, you guys should be invoked of your voting rights for lack of common sense.
hardcore trancer
quote:
Originally posted by LatinLover
I mean if the far left cant get the fact that Barack Hussein Obama chose Biden to be his mentor, you guys should be invoked of your voting rights for lack of common sense.
You out of all the people want to talk about common sense?:haha:
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
/waits patiently for Richard Lugar's office to release a statement.
Tbilisi, Georgia - U.S. Sen. Dick Lugar made the following statement today en route to Tbilisi. (See schedule at www.lugar.senate.gov/energy.)
“I congratulate Senator Barack Obama on his selection of my friend, Senator Joe Biden, to be his vice-presidential running mate. I have enjoyed for many years the opportunity to work with Joe Biden to bring strong bipartisan support to United States foreign policy.
“I share the disappointment of many Hoosiers that my partner in the Senate, Evan Bayh, was not selected on this occasion, but I believe he will continue to have widespread support for higher office during many years ahead.”
Lebezniatnikov
Andrew Sullivan joins the list of conservatives excited about the Biden pick:
-Andrew Sullivan
-Sen. Chuck Hagel
-Sen. Jack Reed
-Sen. Dick Lugar
-LatinLover
quote:
Leaving aside all the necessary gaming of how this affects the election, what does the selection of Biden tell us about Obama's potential decision-making as president? This is the second big decision of the national campaign (the first Bumperemmanueldunandgetty was opting out of public financing). I'd say it suggests a serious, adult attitude toward the enormous burden that the next presidency will be, especially in foreign policy.
We've learned how disastrous a vice-president can be, in the current administration. No vice-president in American history has done as much damage to national security, constitutional integrity and the moral standing of the United States as Dick Cheney. Biden has aspects of the Cheney pick - he's older, more seasoned and more adept at foreign policy than Obama. But no one imagines that Obama would delegate - and all but abdicate - critical decisions to Biden the way Bush has to Cheney.
Nonetheless, it seems obvious that Biden speaks his mind frankly, and would have real heft and independence in the office. He knows enough that foreign leaders call him in international crises. That reassures me, as we face some grim days in the coming years in the war on terror.
This strikes me, in other words, as a pick for a candidate who is already very serious about governing - and making calls that forgo a campaign buzz for the sake of the country if he wins. Putting country first, you might say.
All of a suddent the far left wants to make it seem that Im excited because Biden is the VP :rolleyes:
All im happy about is that Obama now is not going to talk about stupid . I hope he pays attention to Biden so the kid can learn something. Just like what he said about the Russian immoral invasion, that the US should resolve it with NATO... eventhough Russia is part of NATO and a major power that can veto any resolution :rolleyes:
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Lebezniatnikov
And yet he's the 99th wealthiest Senator in the US Senate... care to guess where McCain falls?
you should know (my guess is you do, but play the ignorance card) wealth envy is a political game best played by Democrats and their constituents. wealth envy suits only when its advantageous to be such because you probably aren't too distracted by past candidates and leaders in the Dem party and their wealth like Kerry or Edwards or Pelosi or Kennedy. its a game and you should know it.
and to say he's the 99th wealthiest is the same as saying someone is the least poor of a hirise apt building on the upper East side of Manhattan. not only that, it speaks ill of man's financial prowess for someone who has been in Congress for as long as Sloppy Joe has. which is about 35 frikken years! so much for "substantive change", right ?:rolleyes:
...and another thing more to the point. how in the f**k do you reconcile his recent lobbyist past, present and future with Obama's main premise on wanting to invoke said "substantive change"?
don't answer that. i already know. you give him the PASS and proceed to DEFLECT like mad. it's a tactic as old as Washington politics itself. don't forget that when you go vomitting "solid ticket" for "hope and change":rolleyes:
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by LatinLover
eventhough Russia is part of NATO and a major power that can veto any resolution :rolleyes:
erm... say what?
Groundhog Boy
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
you should know (my guess is you do, but play the ignorance card) wealth envy is a political game best played by Democrats and their constituents. wealth envy suits only when its advantageous to be such because you probably aren't too distracted by past candidates and leaders in the Dem party and their wealth like Kerry or Edwards or Pelosi or Kennedy. its a game and you should know it.
quote:
Originally posted by LatinLover
You are another one that is politically confused. What a cute argument... Obama vs Mccain net worth :rolleyes: and yet you guys bitch when you lose elections
I'm sure you supported making that exact type of argument when the GOP were making it against John Kerry's Heinz fortune or John Edwards' $400 haircuts.
Lebezniatnikov
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
you should know (my guess is you do, but play the ignorance card) wealth envy is a political game best played by Democrats and their constituents. wealth envy suits only when its advantageous to be such because you probably aren't too distracted by past candidates and leaders in the Dem party and their wealth like Kerry or Edwards or Pelosi or Kennedy. its a game and you should know it.
and to say he's the 99th wealthiest is the same as saying someone is the least poor of a hirise apt building on the upper East side of Manhattan. not only that, it speaks ill of man's financial prowess for someone who has been in Congress for as long as Sloppy Joe has. which is about 35 frikken years! so much for "substantive change", right ?:rolleyes:
The majority of the time you rant, I have no idea what you're going on about. You change the subject and move the goalposts more frequently than Karl Rove.
I'm not the one that made this election cycle about who can best relate to the middle class. McCain did that by trying to paint Obama as out of touch (the Britney/Paris ticket... seriously?). The point here is that Biden is, in fact, practically middle class. The man makes $151,000 a year in Senate salaries, and only has one home - the one in Delaware he takes the train home to every night. He's been a public servant all of his life and never had any additional income (that he didn't donate to charity) beyond a paltry adjunct professor teaching salary at a Delaware university. He has a working class background and he took out loans to get his kids through college. The economy is a huge issue, so the fact that he can relate to the normal problems of financial management that the average American deals with is a positive on this ticket. Before Obama's lucrative book deals, he too could relate.
The point here is that McCain is out of touch on the economy. John Kerry was out of touch.
So I don't know if that's what you mean by the "wealth envy game played by Democrats" - whatever the hell that means - but that is, in a nutshell, why I think Biden's personal life lends a lot of credence to the economic arguments coming from the Obama campaign - that McCain is out of touch with the economic problems of this generation (by his own admission even) and with the ramifications of those problems on American families.
And the fact that Biden has worked in Washington for 35 years does go against the "change" message... on the surface. But not when you take a look at the actual man. But don't take my word for it.
quote:
In his home state, Biden is a regular Joe
Friends describe him as a family man who went home every night from Washington to care for his sons after his wife and infant daughter died in a crash.
By Noam N. Levey
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 24, 2008
WASHINGTON — The personification of the white-haired Washington insider, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph R. Biden Jr. has spent more than half his life in the Senate, seemingly so in love with his own voice that his colleagues must fight to be heard at his hearings.
A hundred miles away from Capitol Hill, however, is another Joe Biden -- more a character in Mister Rogers' neighborhood than a globe-trotting statesman or a pontificating fixture on the Sunday talk shows.
He is a putterer who plants bushes in his backyard and designed his own house, including space for his elderly parents. He's a man quick to find a doctor for someone's sick grandmother or hold a fundraiser for a local firefighter battling cancer.
This Joe Biden is the son of a car salesman who lost nearly all his money and moved his family from Scranton, Pa., to a hardscrabble neighborhood in Delaware. As a boy, Biden struggled to overcome a bad stutter and the nickname Joe Impedimenta.
As a 29-year-old freshman senator-elect, he lost his wife and infant daughter in a car crash that also severely injured his two young sons. The tragedy almost caused Biden to abandon his political career. And for years afterward, he took the train home almost every night from Washington to Delaware to be with the boys as they grew up.
"I tell people that you get to know Joe Biden the closer you get to Wilmington, Del. And when you see him with his family, then you know the man," said John Marttila, a longtime friend and advisor who worked on Biden's first Senate campaign in 1972.
Biden's family was at the core of his first run for office. His sister, Valerie, ran that campaign, as she has each one since. His brother headed the fundraising operation. His mother and father sat in on most of the strategy meetings.
Biden was challenging a popular incumbent Republican who maintained a huge lead in the polls in a year that would sweep Richard Nixon to his second term in the White House.
The campaign had so little money to advertise, Marttila recalled, that Biden's army of volunteers had to get mailers to voters by walking neighborhoods around the state. But Biden eked out a victory.
A month later, as he was in Washington interviewing candidates for his office staff, the fatal accident occurred. His wife and three children had been out shopping for a Christmas tree.
Biden didn't want to take his Senate seat, said Ted Kaufman, another longtime friend who worked on that campaign and would serve as Biden's chief of staff for 22 years.
Waiting for his sons to recover in the hospital, Biden wrote in his 2007 memoir, "Promises to Keep," he would take long walks around the seedy neighborhoods nearby. "I liked to go at night when I thought there was a better chance of finding a fight," Biden wrote. "I was always looking for a fight. I had not known I was capable of such rage."
The loss also shook his deep Catholic faith. "I felt God had played a horrible trick on me," he wrote.
Montana Sen. Mike Mansfield, the Democratic leader at the time, convinced Biden to stay in the Senate. (He was sworn in at one son's bedside in the hospital.) But Biden resolved not to be separated from his family. He gave up a house that he and his wife had planned to buy in the capital and instead went back to Delaware every night.
"The rule in the office was if the boys called, he was to be interrupted no matter what he was doing or who he was talking to," Kaufman said. "He was never out of communication with them."
Biden's father, a proud man who had made his children talk about foreign affairs around the dinner table, would frequently come down to the Capitol to see the young senator, sitting in on his son's hearings and other meetings. "His dad loved it," Kaufman recalled.
Under the tutelage of Mansfield and other senior senators such as Minnesota's Hubert H. Humphrey, Biden quickly landed plum committee assignments.
The ambitious young senator showed an early affection for the limelight. After traveling with five other senators to Moscow in 1979, Biden emerged from a meeting with Premier Alexei Kosygin to tell reporters of the arms control demands he had put to the Soviet leader.
By the late 1980s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee, a post from which he presided over the controversial Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, both of whom Biden opposed.
Biden was accused of mismanaging the 1991 Thomas hearings, which erupted into a dramatic examination of Thomas' alleged sexual harassment of Anita Hill.
But Biden had burnished his image as a Capitol Hill eminence. He would push through major legislation to combat domestic violence and the drug-fueled crime wave.
From his position on the Foreign Relations Committee, he cooperated extensively with several Republicans, including the late conservative Sen. Jesse Helms, with whom Biden worked on a major chemical weapons treaty.
The high-profile committee hearings and television appearances that Biden sought so assiduously never seemed to help his political fortunes nationally. He was crushed in both his presidential bids, in 1988 and this year.
And Biden never really became a Washington insider. He is not a major fundraiser in the Beltway and gets relatively little money from political action committees. Among his biggest supporters have been employees of MBNA, a Delaware-based credit card giant recently bought by Bank of America.
Biden doesn't move in the Washington cocktail circuit. And when he remarried and started a family with his second wife, Jill, he still returned home to Delaware nearly every night.
"He knew every conductor on the train," said Mark Gitenstein, who worked for Biden for 13 years and remains close to him.
To this day, Gitenstein and others who know him say, Biden keeps up with the people back home.
One is J.D. Howell, a former chief at the Mill Creek volunteer fire company outside Wilmington.
In 1988, Biden suffered a brain aneurysm. Howell was a member of the ambulance crew that rushed him from Delaware to a Washington hospital, where doctors performed lifesaving surgery.
Fifteen years later, long after Biden had bounced back, Howell was diagnosed with advanced stage lymphoma. Biden called immediately.
"The man was practically at my doorstep," Howell recalled Saturday before reading a letter the senator sent him at the time. "You wouldn't let me quit on that fateful night . . . ," Biden wrote. "Now it is my turn."
When his fellow firefighters held a benefit for Howell, Biden and his wife came to preside.
"It was kind of an emotional thing," Howell said, "because Joe knows what it's like to be down and out."
So whatever. Launch your character attacks and paint Biden as a product of the system (while laughably defending John "I vote with Bush 95% of the time" McCain as anything but).
quote:
...and another thing more to the point. how in the f**k do you reconcile his recent lobbyist past, present and future with Obama's main premise on wanting to invoke said "substantive change"?
You're going to have to substantially clarify that question - what "lobbyist past" are you referring to? The bankruptcy bill? That's a product of his constituency... to vote against that bill would have been to sell out the people that elected him. I don't agree with the bill, and I agree that it is the single largest piece of legislation that Biden was responsible for that is a negative blight on his record. But I don't believe he voted for it because he was bought by lobbyists.
quote:
don't answer that. i already know. you give him the PASS and proceed to DEFLECT like mad. it's a tactic as old as Washington politics itself. don't forget that when you go vomitting "solid ticket" for "hope and change":rolleyes:
Sorry, I couldn't understand you through all the snark.
