They’ve done more investigations into Joe the Plumber in 24 hours than they’ve done on Barack Obama in two years…
They’ve also had more interviewers with him lately than they have with Bill Ayers. Aren’t they curious at all as to what he thinks? I mean, he was brought up in the debate, too…
[Friday morning update]
Is Joe the Plumber the forgotten man?
Amazon is having a power tool sale
Not that great for a survivalist, though, unless you can generate a lot of power. Let’s hope we’re not going back to hand tools soon.
Actually, I already have most of this stuff. I continue to be amazed at the cost, quality and innovativeness of tools since I was a kid. It has to have been a great contributor to national productivity, both professionally, and for the DIYers. And it wouldn’t have happened without China. Another reason to hope that the (newly isolationist) Dems don’t get full control of the government.
Listening to a McCain stump speech, he just used the line “…we didn’t become a great nation by spreading the wealth, we became a great nation by creating new wealth.”
Where has that John McCain been all fall? Or his whole previous life?
I fully agree with Iain Murray:
While conservatives are angry about a number of things at the moment, they should be at least as angry that the Congressional Democrats who helped stoke the mortgage crisis are getting away with blaming everyone else for it. Today, Senator Chris Dodd, the prime recipient of GSE lobbying funds and proud holder of a sweetheart mortgage from Countrywide, is holding hearings where the witnesses will blame everyone but Dodd, Barney Frank and their cronies. Republicans asked to invite witnesses but were barred from doing so.
The notion that this mess is the fault of Republicans, and “deregulation” and the free market, is one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated on the American people. And as a result, we could be heading toward both electoral and economic disaster.
[Update early afternoon]
Peter Schiff says don’t blame capitalism:
Just as prices in a free market are set by supply and demand, financial and real estate markets are governed by the opposing tension between greed and fear. Everyone wants to make money, but everyone is also afraid of losing what he has. Although few would ascribe their desire for prosperity to greed, it is simply a rose by another name. Greed is the elemental motivation for the economic risk-taking and hard work that are essential to a vibrant economy.
But over the past generation, government has removed the necessary counterbalance of fear from the equation. Policies enacted by the Federal Reserve, the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (which were always government entities in disguise), and others created advantages for home-buying and selling and removed disincentives for lending and borrowing. The result was a credit and real estate bubble that could only grow — until it could grow no more.
Prominent among these wrongheaded advantages are the mortgage interest tax deduction and the exemption of real estate capital gains from taxable income. These policies create unnatural demand for home purchases and a (tax-free) incentive to speculate in real estate.
Similarly, the FHA, Fannie and Freddie were created to encourage lending by allowing primary lenders to turn their long-term risk over to the government. Absent this implicit guarantee, lenders would probably have been much more conservative in approving borrowers and setting interest terms, and in requiring documentation of incomes and higher down payments. Market forces would have kept out unqualified buyers and prevented home-price appreciation from exceeding the growth in household income.
Read the whole thing.
I disagree, though that the solution is to take away the home-mortgage interest deduction and the capital gains break. It would be much better to restore the deduction for all interest (as it is for business, and was for individuals until the tax “reform” in 1986). It’s not fair to have to pay tax on interest earned as income, but not be able to deduct interest paid.
Also, rather than treating houses preferentially, peg all capital gains taxes to inflation, to eliminate having to pay a tax when the actual value hadn’t increased.
How many times is he going to let Obama get away with this bullshit that he’s going to cut taxes for people who don’t pay income taxes? He’s done it twice now. It’s a frickin’ handout and redistribution. As I said, John McCain could win this election if he weren’t John McCain.
Sounding a little better on spending cuts. Talking about ending ethanol subsidies and tariffs on sugar (writing off Iowa…). He should have point out how he was going to veto spending bills that Bush wouldn’t (another missed opportunity). Another missed opportunity was to point out that while earmarks are small, it’s how Congress logrolls other members on big spending bills.
[Update]
McCain is actually doing much better now. But he really should stop talking about the “overhead projector in Chicago.” People like planetariums, and it makes him look clueless about science.
[Update]
McCain just pointed out that Obama’s solution (increase taxes, restrict trade) was Hooverlike. This is good in two ways: it helps separate him from Republicans and it’s true.
[Update]
McCain is on fire on health care. Obama seems to think that having an employer providing health care is a wonderful thing, and that everyone agrees on that. But McCain had a great (non?)-Freudian slip. He called his opponent “Senator Government.”
[Update]
The discussion on Roe almost veered into a discussion on federalism. But not quite. But McCain went after him on his vote on the bill to allow failed aborted babies to die. And Obama is obfuscating on his vote.
[Final update]
Not a great debate for McCain, but it was his best. And he’s not out of it.
What was missing? Gun control. It would have been a big issue in key states.
Would anyone care to explain to me why Sarah Palin is less qualified to be vice president than John Edwards was four years ago?
Of course, there was a time when the two words meant pretty much the same thing. But that was before the “progressives” came along and hijacked the word “liberal.”
Here’s a new theory on that hijacked Iranian vessel:
At this writing, the MV Iran Deyanat is at anchor, watched closely by American, French and Russian naval units.
[Russian sources claim she] was an enormous floating dirty bomb, intended to detonate after exiting the Suez Canal at the eastern end of the Mediterranean and in proximity to the coastal cities of Israel. The entire cargo of radioactive sand, obtained by Iran from China (the latter buys desperately needed oil from the former) and sealed in containers which, when the charges on the ship are set off after the crew took to the boats, will be blasted high into the air where prevailing winds will push the highly dangerous and radioactive cloud ashore.
Is this what Ahmadinejad has been ranting about?
Maybe Barack can ask him when he sits down to talk to him with no preconditions.
Oh, wait. I guess there will be preconditions:
Vice President for Media Affairs Mehdi Kalhor said on Saturday that Iran has set two preconditions for holding talks with the United States of America.
In an exclusive interview with IRNA, he said as long as U.S. forces have not left the Middle East region and continues its support for the Zionist regime, talks between Iran and U.S. is off the agenda.
Well, if they get their preferred candidate, he’ll probably hop right to it.
Here’s an Ayers story from Ann Arbor that I’d never heard before, but it shocks me not at all:
Bill Ayers’ apartment was around the corner and a half a block away from the sorority house. The more time I spent there, the more out of place I felt with my sisters. Sometimes I would stop by just to keep from having to go back to a place I had begun to think of as boring. I guess it was one of those evenings — maybe on the way back from the library, maybe just to get out of the sorority house, I don’t remember exactly. What I do recall is that when I was getting ready to leave Ayers told me I couldn’t go until I slept with his roommate and his brother. At this point Bill and I had slept together just once. I was sexually inexperienced, having had only one serious boyfriend with whom I had recently broken up.
At first I thought Ayers was joking. I got up; and went to the door. He moved quickly to block me at the doorway. He locked the door and put the chain on it. I went to the couch and sat down and told him that I had no intention of having sex with his roommate and his brother or him. He said that I had no choice but to do as he said if I wanted to get out of there. He claimed that I wouldn’t sleep with his married roommate because he was black — that I was a bigot. I had gone to school with black kids and had them as friends all my life. I couldn’t believe he was saying that to me.
I felt trapped. I had to get out of the situation I was in and because he was so effective a guilt-tripper, I also felt I had to prove to him that I wasn’t a bigot. I got up from the couch and walked over to the black roommate’s bed and put myself on it and he f***ed me. I went totally out of my body. I floated beside myself on the outside and above the bed looking at this black stranger f*** me angrily while I hated myself.
I’m sure that he’s rehabilitated, though.
Barack Obama allied himself with a sociopath.
It’s also worth noting, for those unaware, that a large part of the feminist movement in the seventies was driven by the fact that the sixties campus radical men were famous for being prototypical male chauvinist pigs. They would busily write their manifestos, and expect the women to cook, clean and service them sexually.
[Update a few minutes later]
It just occurs to me that this was depicted very clearly in Forrest Gump.
Winning over the undecideds:
Think about it. With Barack Obama in office, assholes like us will fade into a distant unpleasant memory. Don’t get us wrong, we’ll still be hanging around, probably as junior staffers in some federal arts agency. But you have our word on it — we’ll be practically invisible. No more C-word t shirts, no more intersection blockades, no more vandalism until the next election cycle. Nosirree, we’ll be timid and well-behaved and quiet as church mice, working away on grant proposals. We think you will also be pleased to know that under Obama, negative news stories and the steady flow of shitty anti-American war movies will virtually disappear overnight.
We know what you’re thinking — “that sounds awesome, but what about the angry right wingers? Won’t they suddenly start storming congressional hearings and vandalizing military recruiting stations? Won’t they start producing Obama assassination fantasy plays at the local college?” Don’t worry, as members of the incoming Administration, we will identify any potential troublemakers and prosecute them to the full extent of President Obama’s new civility laws. And with the re-establishment of the Fairness Doctrine, you won’t have to worry about accidentally tuning into right wing hate radio.
I can’t wait.
Plus, true Grit.