To those afraid of Barack Obama The Socialist, I’d like to offer a little perspective. I was born and raised in a country with higher taxes, stringent pro-labor laws, and universal healthcare. Not many will call this country – Germany – socialist. Yet if you plopped Senator Obama into the German parliament, you would see him sitting at a lonely outpost on the far right.
Obama is no more a socialist than Clinton, Bush Senior, or Reagan. All he proposes is to restore the tax code to what it was during the Clinton years. Were we socialist then? If so, then I for one am longing for those socialist days of old, when our economy was still sound. The fact is, even John McCain called the Bush tax cuts irresponsible at the time.
So please, educate yourself about the candidates and their proposals and vote accordingly. But don’t vote based on some silly label one politician sticks on another.
View this letter as published by the Kansas City Star on 10-30-08: http://blogs.kansascity.com/unfettered_letters/2008/10/views-on-the-pr.html
My 6-year old daughter was looking at pictures in the NY Times. A suitcase full of money, along with an article about AIG and how it has used billions in Fed money but failed to disclose for what, caught her eye (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/30/business/30aig.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&em&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1225426931-X0UkKF4IS5YDV9iIokTjUQ). After sounding out the title, “Where did the cash go?” she thought for a minute, then said: “I guess somebody was robbed of all their money.”
Mr. Paulson, she speaks the truth: You let yourself be robbed of the money we entrusted you with! How much more incompetent can this administration get?
I recently had this published on Op-Ed News:
http://www.opednews.com/articles/The-Republican-low-tax-fai-by-Sine-Thieme-081002-186.html
In a rare moment of truth for Republicans, the presidential election has come down to a simple choice: the “real” America versus the “other” America. Clashing world views about patriotism after 9/11, economic fairness, and social values finally have been distilled to an essence anybody can comprehend.
Maybe we needed a self-proclaimed Washington outsider, such as Sarah Palin, to tell us in simple terms. And if that weren’t enough, Michele Bachman (R-Minn) felt the need to call for an investigation of all members of Congress to determine who is pro-American and who is not, with the chilling implication that something needs to be done with the latter. A burning at the stake, perhaps?
All this is eerily reminiscent of the “pure-bloods” and “mud-bloods” in a bestselling series of books. Pure fiction, to be sure, but a powerful read. The denizens of what’s left of the Republican Party might want to read up on what happens to those who sew such legendary seeds of division. Then again, maybe this is why some “real” Americans have sought to have these particular books banned.
So now John McCain is calling Barack Obama a socialist. Perhaps this charge would stick better if he had employed it from the beginning of his campaign, not with two weeks to go and the panic amongst his advisors visible to everyone.
In a long line of such flavor-of-the-week attacks, it does not resonate with voters now. We were already told that Senator Obama was too elitist, too inexperienced, too famous, too risky, too fit, too eloquent, too unknown, too skinny, and too presumptuous. Too socialist? Add that to the list.
McCain may have finally succeeded in showing the American people just how meaningless such labels are. More and more Republicans and conservatives are flocking to Obama’s side. If they associate with a “socialist” or even a “liberal,” so can we. And perhaps McCain’s fake outrage over “spreading the wealth” would be more convincing if he himself had not announced a $300 billion taxpayer-financed bailout for homeowners just last week.
Dear Senator McCain:
Just like you, I am not one to mince words, so let me get straight to the point.
I am pleased to hear that the prospect of the Democrats gaining total control of the federal government concerns you. And I agree that my help is needed right now.
That’s why I have dedicated myself to volunteering for the Obama campaign to ensure that for once our country can change course from the disastrous last eight years. I once thought that you might be different than the other Republicans, that you would actually think before following the party line, but in the last few weeks I have come to see that you are exactly the same.
Both Barack Obama and John McCain propose tax plans that will lower taxes, much to the surprise of many voters who still believe that only Republicans are capable of that.
However, a comparison of both plans conducted by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center shows a vast difference: While the bulk of McCain’s tax cuts are designed to benefit the wealthiest 1% of tax payers, based on a continued belief in trickle-down economics, Obama proposes to lower taxes for 95% of Americans in an effort to shore up the middle class.
For eight years we were told that helping the rich would help everybody by growing the overall economy. Since that clearly hasn’t worked, why not try the other approach?
Senator McCain, in light of your continued insistence that America should not be obsessed with the economy but rather with the idea that one presidential candidate is really a terrorist, one can only assume two motives:
Either you do NOT put country first, as you are so fond of saying, and will do anything it takes to become president. Or you truly DO believe it is in the best interest of our country to use any means necessary to keep Barack Obama from becoming president.
Well, Sen. McCain, let me tell you something: The end never, ever justifies the means. It did not when witches were burned at the stake, it did not during the crusades, it did not when torturing prisoners in Vietnam, and it did not when torturing prisoners in Guantanamo.
No one blames you for wanting to be president, but stop using despicable means to achieve your end. It is neither honorable nor patriotic.
The new McCain/Palin campaign slogan of “Who is the real Barack Obama?” is absolutely despicable. Poll numbers for Obama are rising steadily, no doubt a reflection of American’s growing confidence he will deal best with the economic crisis. John McCain’s campaign planners are trying one last trump to reverse this trend. They are playing the fear card. It has worked well for Republicans in the past.
After nearly two years of campaigning and public vetting, they are pretending there is much about Senator Obama we don’t know. And what do they think that is? The worst dirt they could trump up was that Obama once served on the same board as William Ayers, who was a Weather Underground bomber four decades ago. If they could find more dirt, I’m sure we’d hear about it. But because there isn’t anything, McCain and Palin think stoking the fires at their rallies and getting angry mobs shouting “terrorist” will scare enough voters away from Obama.
We may not know everything about John McCain either, but there is one thing about his character that is becoming increasingly clear: He will stoop to unbelievably low levels just to become president.
It has now been seven years since 9/11 and to my knowledge we have not yet found Osama bin Laden. Since it is unfathomable that John McCain would be so unpatriotic as to withhold such crucial information from our current leaders, I can only assume that he has no clue.
So when he makes the same bold promises about fixing our economy, I will take that with a substantial grain of salt.
The McCain campaign claims they are now “turning a page on this financial crisis” by focusing on Senator Obama as “too risky for Americans.”
Too risky? Never mind that most Americans don’t have the luxury to turn the page on their own economic woes, and that passage of the bailout package hasn’t solved their immediate problems—if we are going to discuss risky choices, let’s take a closer look at Senator McCain’s past.
In the 1980s, after he was lobbied heavily by Charles Keating, the chairman of Lincoln Savings and Loan who later went to jail, McCain was instrumental in calling off federal regulators pushing for an investigation of Lincoln. This was the first time he sided with deregulation. The ensuing Savings and Loan collapse cost U.S. taxpayers $124 billion. At the time, McCain got away with a warning from the Senate Ethics Committee, but others involved in the scandal were not so lucky.
Not only does McCain’s involvement with Charles Keating show a serious lack of judgment and integrity, he also seems to have learned nothing from it. He has continued to vote for more deregulation over the years, leading us once again to a collapse in the financial sector. The only difference: in 2008 it is costing taxpayers $700 billion.
Why should we wait around to find out if McCain has learned the lesson this time? What will it cost us if he hasn’t? A risky choice indeed!
Looking at the state of our economy, most people now realize that the philosophy of deregulation, so favored by the Republicans, did not deliver the promised results. On the contrary, we are facing the biggest financial crisis in 70 years and will all pay the price for the current administration’s limited foresight and failed policies for years to come.
However, many of us are still eager to believe another promise peddled by the Republicans: “We will lower your taxes, while the tax-and-spend liberal Democrats will take all your money away.” When John McCain and Sarah Palin announce Barack Obama voted 94 times to raise our taxes, we readily accept such a claim. We think, “That’s what liberal Democrats do.” It comes as a surprise, then, if we apply the same bogus counting method to McCain’s record and discover he voted to raise our taxes 477 times.
In truth, both candidates promise lower taxes. Here is the main difference: McCain offers the biggest break to the top 1% of wealthiest Americans, in hopes that will trickle down to the rest of us in a strong economy created by such tax cuts. On the other hand, Obama will cut taxes for 95% of Americans in order to strengthen the middle class. You judge whether you want to believe Republican promises of a strong resurgent economy, or whether you’d rather see those Obama tax cuts in your own paycheck.
Colorado:
http://www.nunnglow.com/reference/tips-for-writing-a-letter-to-the-editor.html
Florida:
http://dpffl.org/newscontact.htm
Indiana:
http://advocates.ppin.org/lte.aspx
Kansas:
http://www.ksdp.org/node/952
Michigan:
http://www.michigancivilrights.org/writealetter.html
http://onemom.wordpress.com/2008/01/10/huckabee-supporters-write-letters-to-newspapers/
Minnesota:
http://northstar.sierraclub.org/involved/letters/editorAddresses.html
North Carolina:
http://www.ncdp.org/lettertotheeditor
Ohio:
http://www.ohiodems.org/site/c.mhLRKZPCLmF/b.3632423/k.E48D/Write_a_Letter_to_the_Editor.htm
Oregon:
http://www.oregonhousedemocrats.com/cgi-bin/lte.cgi?id=1000 (similar to SpeakOut but also has direct contact links)
http://www.onethousandfriendsoforegon.org/issues/M37/LTE-guide.html
http://www.injuredworker.org/newspapers.htm
Virginia:
http://www.familyfoundation.org/editor.html
Actions speak louder than words. John McCain, who has fashioned experience versus just words into a major theme of his campaign, should know this. So, when he promised at the end of the first presidential debate that he would “take care of our veterans,” he must have known that some voters might go looking for his record.
They didn’t even have to dig deep. Just this spring, Senator McCain opposed the biggest expansion of the GI bill in a quarter century, a bill that enjoyed widespread bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. McCain found it too generous to veterans returning from Iraq, a place he seems determined to keep them indefinitely, and was afraid it would entice them to leave the military early. He opposed the bill and did not even attend the vote. Fortunately, others did, including Senator Obama, and the GI Bill of 2008 has been signed into law.
Sen. McCain’s actions do not support taking care of veterans. It’s time for voters to peel back his “support our troops” label and look underneath. There is not much there.
The closer we get to November 4th, the more evident it is that John McCain’s much-touted experience has become a burden for him. His ideology and poor judgment have brought about too many disastrous developments for voters to have much confidence in his leadership.
Although he tried for much of the first presidential debate to portray Barack Obama as naïve and inexperienced, with his arrogant repetition “my opponent does not seem to understand,” the most memorable and compelling words were Senator Obama’s “You were wrong, John!” Obama’s performance showed the American people that he understands the issues very well, and McCain cannot escape the fact that he was wrong too many times. He was wrong to authorize the Iraq war. He was wrong to brush away the risks of the ensuing Iraq invasion. He was wrong to vote against renewable energy more than 20 times. He was wrong to side with the S&L industry against federal regulators in the 1980s, and he was wrong to champion deregulation since then.
We are now engaged in two wars, we are more dependent on foreign oil than ever, and we are facing the most catastrophic economic collapse in recent history. John McCain’s experience and his adherence to a philosophy of laissez-faire, of neglecting the middle class, and of picking fights with our enemies helped get us here. His is not the kind of experience we need in our foremost leader.
This letter was also published in the Chapel Hill News in North Carolina: http://www.chapelhillnews.com/opinion/story/19871.html
This letter is a 350 word version of the longer article with the same title further down on my blog. It might be better suited for submission as letter to the editor.
“I am a conservative. I could never vote for the most liberal Democrat in Congress.” I’ve heard this said over and again. Let me show you why it is precisely the liberal Democrat you need to vote for if you truly espouse conservative principles.
Let’s take the idea of small government and free markets, a truly conservative value. Free markets consistently outperform centrally planned economies, and everybody ends up better off. The problem is that the “conservatives” running Washington for the last 8 years mistook “little intervention” for “no intervention” and successfully pushed for deregulation and less government oversight of our financial markets. Where has that gotten us? To a world in which the federal government now essentially owns four of our largest financial institutions.
Should the federal government be in the business of running Wall Street? Is that a conservative value? The answer is no. Overnight, we dramatically jumped from no regulation to government control. We now have the very government intervention that would have Milton Friedman turn in his grave.
The thing is, with prudent foresight and well-managed regulation, the current crisis could have been avoided. But what has the “conservative” candidate, who is now pledging to “clean up Wall Street,” done in the last 26 years? He has consistently sided with his party in pushing for deregulation.
If years ago we had listened to “liberal” calls for caution, we would now live in a world where the markets were regulated AND working. If you are in favor of free markets and little government intervention, you need to wake up to the fact that “liberal” and “conservative” are misleading labels created as smokescreens by the political parties. Nowadays “conservatives” are not pro-market. They are pro-business and have allowed special interests to lobby them for measures that imperil the very foundation of our free markets.
Why put a person in the White House just because he calls himself a “conservative”? If you’re voting for free markets, you need to vote for the man who has plans for their survival, no matter what label anyone tries to stick on him.
I recently tried to combine my artistic wanderings with my work for the Obama campaign and designed a line of t-shirts, mugs, and stickers. My main design, the Face of Hope, is an artistic drawing of Barack Obama, rendered in different shades. Please visit my online store at http://www.cafepress.com/faceofhope.
When I'm out registering new voters, I always get asked where to get Obama merchandise, and there is always disappointment that our local headquarters is constantly sold out. So, if you need to buy any gear and want it fast, consider my shop. It's also a good way to help out the campaign, as I donate all proceeds.
I am also offering my services as an artist to draw a custom portrait for you, based on any original photograph you email me. The drawing would be similar in style to this: http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/main/Sine
If you are interested or would like to see additional samples, please leave a comment.
In a recent effort to bolster running mate Sarah Palin's credentials on national security beyond the fact that she can "see Russia from Alaska," John McCain pointed out that she "understands energy." She herself emphasized in her ABC interview that "energy is a foundation of national security."
Really? Has she told this to her own party, the Republicans, the ones who have been running this country for the last decade? This is the party that, for the last 20 years, has vehemently opposed raising fuel efficiency standards, a measure that could have reduced domestic oil consumption by millions of barrels a day. And how can John McCain make this claim for the Republican ticket? He himself voted against renewable energy 25 times in the Senate. He missed all three critical clean energy votes in 2007, while at the same time accepting huge contributions from the oil industry. He voted against a plan to reduce our dependence on foreign oil in 2005. And now he claims to be the champion of a new energy policy?
Yes, energy is a foundation of our national security, as Barack Obama laid out so well in his National Security address of July 15th. We absolutely have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. But for the Republicans to write this on their banners when they did absolutely nothing while they had the chance is merely a cheap ploy for votes. I hope the American public is not buying.
He is right to blame Wall Street companies for taking excessive risks at taxpayers’ expense and for building up a bubble that had no foundation in reality. But who was the champion of deregulating our financial institutions, of reducing already scant government responsibility for oversight, of believing the markets were best at policing themselves? If you have any doubts, please check Senator McCain’s record. He even promoted a moratorium on federal regulations of all kinds in 1995.
Let’s take the idea of small government, with little interference in and self-regulation of markets. We can all agree this is a truly conservative value. Free markets consistently outperform centrally planned economies, and everybody ends up better off. The problem is that the “conservatives” running Washington for the last 8 years mistook “little intervention” for “no intervention.” So they successfully pushed for deregulation and less government oversight of our financial markets, leaving the markets to their own free-wheeling and increasingly non-transparent devices. Where has that gotten us? To a world in which the federal government now essentially owns four of our largest financial institutions.
Should the federal government be in the business of running Wall Street? Is that a conservative value? The answer is no. Overnight, we dramatically jumped from no regulation to government control. We now have the very government intervention that would have Milton Friedman turn in his grave. And what is free about a market in which companies and their executives reap enormous profits when times are good and get bailed out when times are bad? Does that teach prudent investment and good decision making, also conservative values?
The thing is, with prudent foresight and well-managed regulation, the current crisis could have been avoided. With a little well-placed oversight, our markets would have run pretty smoothly, largely unassisted, and with the public’s trust. Easy to say now, but we needed that a year ago.
So let’s take a look at what happened over the last few years. In February 2006, the so-called liberal candidate introduced the STOP FRAUD act in the Senate to address “deteriorating mortgage lending practices and rising foreclosures.” In March 2008, the same “liberal” candidate outlined 6 detailed principles to “correct failures in financial market oversight and move forwards to restore accountability, transparency, and trust,” warning of precisely the kind of problems we now face. Meanwhile, the so-called conservative candidate, who throughout his career consistently embraced his party’s mantra of deregulation, repeatedly failed to recognize the growing housing crisis as a problem and continued to call for less regulation in March, May, and July of 2008. And the economic adviser of this “conservative” candidate authored the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 to “protect financial institution from overregulation,” paving the way for the explosion of complex financial instruments that are at the root of our current credit crisis.
I dare say, if years ago we had listened to those “liberal” proposals instead of enacting the “conservative” ones, we would now live in a world where the markets were regulated AND working. If you are in favor of free markets and little government intervention, you need to wake up to the fact that “liberal” and “conservative” are misleading labels created as smokescreens by the political parties. Nowadays “conservatives” are not pro-market. They are pro-business and have allowed special interests to lobby them for measures that imperil the very foundation of our free markets. Look at what the candidates stand for, and whether it is smart policy or simply blind repetition of party dogma. If the liberal candidate’s plan states, “Free markets are the engine of American progress; but the government’s role as umpire and steward is critical to the function of the free market,” you should give that plan a serious look.
Too bad it had to come this far. No matter who ends up in the White House, he will have to deal with this financial mess for a long time. But why put a person there just because he calls himself a “conservative”? Because that happens to be what you think you are? If you’re voting for free markets, you need to vote for the man who has plans for their survival, no matter what label anyone tries to stick on him.
