I am organizing a MoveOn rally for a public option that will take place at Sen. McCaskill's office on Delmar, near the Metro Link station.
Date: Thursday, July 9
Time: Noon
We will have people tell their health care stories, thank the Senator for supporting the public option, and present her with a petition from Missourians. We want to emphasize that we need REAL reform THIS YEAR (she made an iffy statement reported on at Talking Points Memo). Please email me at kpthomas55@hotmail.com if you can attend, or sign up at MoveOn.
Thanks,
Kenny T.
Listening to NPR the other day there was a passing comment regarding the relationship of the US economy to consumer confidence – about 2/3 of the US economy is directly connected to consumer spending. Not news in itself but with confidence in Bush at an all time low what could be the potential economic impact of Obama just winning the election. Some of the data is pretty surprising.
According to recent survey by the International Council of Shopping Centers and Goldman Sachs, 8% of respondents said they are likely to increase holiday spending because of the election of Sen. Obama. Although it does not say how much the spending is likely to improve, a little back-of-the-napkin math can help put this into perspective.
In the 2007 there was about $70b in holiday spending and according to Mastercard about 40% ($28b) was spent online. If 8% of people spent just 5% more that translates into an additional $280m. If it is more like 8% of people spending 25% more the number jumps to $1.4b, or an overall increase of 2%.
Another survey by the National Retail Federation projects that 2008 holiday spending will increase 1.9 percent over 2007 spending. In a nutshell, Obama could provide a lift in Holiday shopping that could double the expected growth in 2008 spending.
Even more impressive is the overall potential impact on the US and the global economy. Gallup daily tracking poll of consumer confidence in the US has shown a 9 point drop (80 to 71) in the people who view the economic outlook as “negative” just over the last week. Not significant? The negative score has not been at 71 since February.
By Daily Mail ReporterLast updated at 6:01 PM on 07th October 2008
A man told today how he was shot three times in a London street for wearing a Barack Obama T-shirt.
Dube Egwuatu was buying a mobile telephone top-up card in an off-licence when the gunman confronted him and glared at the top, which carries an image of the Democrat US presidential candidate underneath the legend 'Believe'.
The man then launched into a tirade of racist slurs, shouting 'I f***ing hate n*****s' and urging 36-year-old Mr Egwuatu to leave the shop with him.
Respect: Dube Egwuatu wearing the Obama T-shirt that provoked a racist attack
The man then left the shop but when Mr Egwuatu re-emerged, the attacker was waiting for him in broad daylight with a threatening-looking dog and holding a gun behind his back.
Realising what had sparked the increasingly violent assault, the terrified Mr Egwuatu zipped up his jacket to cover the image of Mr Obama and walked to his car.
But the shaven-headed man, who was white, followed Mr Egwuatu and after pulling open the passenger door pointed the gun at him.
After pleading with the man to leave him alone, the married former street warden put the keys in the ignition and turned the engine on.
The attacker then fired the gas-powered ball-bearing pistol three times, hitting the civil servant in the face, hand and shoulder.
Fearing for his life and bleeding heavily, Mr Egwuatu raced away in his car and found somewhere safe to call for help.
He was taken to hospital and later sent to have a piece of metal removed from his jaw.
Mr Egwuatu, a data analyst with Croydon Council, said: 'The venom in his voice was frightening.
'He was telling me that he was going to kill me.
'I couldn't believe it was happening - and just because I was wearing an Obama T-shirt. He was trying to make me walk somewhere quieter, saying: 'I've got something for you,' and 'I'm going to kill you.'
He added: 'Obama inspires me, his educational track record alone is quite unbelievable - that is why I was wearing the T-shirt.
'I did not think for one minute it could stir up such powerful feelings of hatred and I never said a word to him.'
Mr Egwuatu's wife, Angela, 35, said neither of them had experienced anything like it during their childhood in Nigeria.
Mrs Egwuatu, an immigration officer, said: 'At first my feelings were pure horror and now it is pure anger.
'If he had been carrying a real gun I would have been a widow. It is just ridiculous.
'I don't know how a person's mentality works. Why would a T-shirt get you to the point where you want to shoot someone.'
To the untrained eye, ball-bearing guns like the one used in the attack look every bit like a real firearm.
The potentially lethal weapons are often converted by criminals to fire real bullets, and can be bought easily in high-street shops and on websites.
The Met said it was investigating the incident, which took place in South Norwood, and that police searched a nearby house which the attacker was seen going into.
No one has been arrested
just like in the days of noah they was giveing in drink and marriage and picking aking
danceing and all kinds of foil things was done.
same as today giveing in marriage drinking partying killing stealing all kinds of foil
things lawless citys same as in the days of noah,
this election is very inportaince" and not because of a black man are a white woman.
we are headed into a new world order, and just in the days of noah things were
ugly. then and same now NO the aintichrist" is on the seen but has not been revealed yet
most people are going to get cart off guard. because there looking for something
spooky."we are at the begaining of the larbor pains,the larbor pains are such as no
jobs, homes being gone." whites against blacks"~ kids are out of control, police dont
care anymore, gays are liveing as husbands & wives" banks falling and the G7
is seting up for the NEW WORLD, "kids are haveing (STD)s" as young as 13 of age.
mothers are sleeping with her childs boyfriends, no dads in the homes .B & W
all i have to say the next guy who come. in office has to deal with this mess weather
he like it. are not i rather have "obama" than anybody eles.even if obama wins we
need to repent, because when its all said and done HELL is real and jesus is
coming back and it wont be long" PLEASE GET YOUR HEART RIGHT WITH GOD
According to a poll taken over the weekend by Fox News and Rasmussen, Sen. Obama has now taken the lead in Missouri by 3% after trailing Sen. McCain for months.
Missouri 10/5, 1,000 LV 3% Obama 50, McCain 47, Barr 1, Nader 1, McKinney 0
CNN also shows Obama in the lead by 1% from a poll taken two days earlier. It will be interesting to see if there is impact from the debate last night and how this story will play out in Missouri - the only state to pick the president in every election for the past 80 years.
i was looking at john mccain face every time he though he had Obama in a corner he has
a smarky smile on his face he john is a snake dont you agree!!!!!!!!!!!
The National Enquirer has exposed a Sarah Palin scandal that, if true, threatens to derail the McCain/Palin campaign. According to the Enquirer, Palin cheated on her husband Tom with Todd’s former business partner, Brad Hanson, who at the time was a married man.
Hanson owned a snowmobile dealership with Palin’s husband Todd, who angrily dissolved the partnership after he heard about the affair, which occurred around 1996.
Hanson denies ever having an affair with the 44-year-old candidate, but his family members say otherwise
MACAIN IS A LIRA JUST LIKE HIS DADDY BUSH, IF YOU REALLY LISTEN TO HIM HE IS SAYING THE
SAME THING BUSH SAID EIGHT YEARS AGO.
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some white people will ,never understand why Obama mean so much untill"
you relive the history of black people.long as you keep your mind closed.
you will always say race has no place in the elecition,well let me remind you
that our kin played the race card,against blacks in the 1700-1968.and most if
not all of 2000.and we never said not one word long as we whites got the best,
of both worlds,we have always had our freedom and our grandfarthers had.
slaves,and we whites only have what we have because of the black hand because
they did jobs that we dint want plus they raised out uncles and aunties so
we as whites needs to wake up and get and new way of thinking and liveing
john mccain is 71 years old and your not going to tell me his daddy didnt
have a black slave !!!!!!!!come on his age alone tells you he came up doing
the time when we whites hated blacks
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In 1998/1999, a bill was introduced in congress to break down the barriers between investment firms, banks, and insurance companies. These barriers were put in place after the 1929 stock crash because banks and investment firms were blamed. I was conducting competitive intelligence at Allstate and hr-10 had major implications for the company and the industry. So I tracked all news related to hr-10 for months and soon became familiar with Phil Gramm. Not only did senator Gramm champion the deregulation but he spoke at numerous financial forums and summits.
According to Phil Gramm, deregulation of the financial services industry would be an economic improvement for the industry and the country.
Fast forward through the Bush Administration and the lack of regulatory oversight and the country is saddled with financial crisis because the financial industry was put in charge of regulating itself. Thank you Senator Gramm.
Now, Senator McCain admits he does not understand the economy as well as he should but his advisers are experts, like Phil Gramm -- Banking Industry Lobbyist.
I do not want John McCain and Phil Gramm put in charge of fixing the problems they played a role in creating!!!
Thursday 11 September 2008
by: Paul Krugman, The New York Times
According to Paul Krugman, the McCain-Palin campaign is built on a "blizzard of lies." (Photo: Getty Images)
Did you hear about how Barack Obama wants to have sex education in kindergarten, and called Sarah Palin a pig? Did you hear about how Ms. Palin told Congress, "Thanks, but no thanks" when it wanted to buy Alaska a Bridge to Nowhere?
These stories have two things in common: they're all claims recently made by the McCain campaign - and they're all out-and-out lies.
Dishonesty is nothing new in politics. I spent much of 2000 - my first year at The Times - trying to alert readers to the blatant dishonesty of the Bush campaign's claims about taxes, spending and Social Security.
But I can't think of any precedent, at least in America, for the blizzard of lies since the Republican convention. The Bush campaign's lies in 2000 were artful - you needed some grasp of arithmetic to realize that you were being conned. This year, however, the McCain campaign keeps making assertions that anyone with an Internet connection can disprove in a minute, and repeating these assertions over and over again.
Take the case of the Bridge to Nowhere, which supposedly gives Ms. Palin credentials as a reformer. Well, when campaigning for governor, Ms. Palin didn't say "no thanks" - she was all for the bridge, even though it had already become a national scandal, insisting that she would "not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that's so negative."
Oh, and when she finally did decide to cancel the project, she didn't righteously reject a handout from Washington: she accepted the handout, but spent it on something else. You see, long before she decided to cancel the bridge, Congress had told Alaska that it could keep the federal money originally earmarked for that project and use it elsewhere.
So the whole story of Ms. Palin's alleged heroic stand against wasteful spending is fiction.
Or take the story of Mr. Obama's alleged advocacy of kindergarten sex-ed. In reality, he supported legislation calling for "age and developmentally appropriate education"; in the case of young children, that would have meant guidance to help them avoid sexual predators.
And then there's the claim that Mr. Obama's use of the ordinary metaphor "putting lipstick on a pig" was a sexist smear, and on and on.
Why do the McCain people think they can get away with this stuff? Well, they're probably counting on the common practice in the news media of being "balanced" at all costs. You know how it goes: If a politician says that black is white, the news report doesn't say that he's wrong, it reports that "some Democrats say" that he's wrong. Or a grotesque lie from one side is paired with a trivial misstatement from the other, conveying the impression that both sides are equally dirty.
They're probably also counting on the prevalence of horse-race reporting, so that instead of the story being "McCain campaign lies," it becomes "Obama on defensive in face of attacks."
Still, how upset should we be about the McCain campaign's lies? I mean, politics ain't beanbag, and all that.
One answer is that the muck being hurled by the McCain campaign is preventing a debate on real issues - on whether the country really wants, for example, to continue the economic policies of the last eight years.
But there's another answer, which may be even more important: how a politician campaigns tells you a lot about how he or she would govern.
I'm not talking about the theory, often advanced as a defense of horse-race political reporting, that the skills needed to run a winning campaign are the same as those needed to run the country. The contrast between the Bush political team's ruthless effectiveness and the heckuva job done by the Bush administration is living, breathing, bumbling, and, in the case of the emerging Interior Department scandal, coke-snorting and bed-hopping proof to the contrary.
I'm talking, instead, about the relationship between the character of a campaign and that of the administration that follows. Thus, the deceptive and dishonest 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign provided an all-too-revealing preview of things to come. In fact, my early suspicion that we were being misled about the threat from Iraq came from the way the political tactics being used to sell the war resembled the tactics that had earlier been used to sell the Bush tax cuts.
And now the team that hopes to form the next administration is running a campaign that makes Bush-Cheney 2000 look like something out of a civics class. What does that say about how that team would run the country?
What it says, I'd argue, is that the Obama campaign is wrong to suggest that a McCain-Palin administration would just be a continuation of Bush-Cheney. If the way John McCain and Sarah Palin are campaigning is any indication, it would be much, much worse.
