Where Have You Gone, John?

FM/FM PAID OUT MONEY TO DEMOCRATS SUCH AS CHRIS DODD, BARACK OBAMA AND OTHERS SO THEY WOULD KEEP QUIET ABOUT HOW BADLY FM/FM WERE FAILING, GIVING THOSE IN CHARGE TIME TO GET OUT WITH MILLIONS IN THEIR OWN POCKETS. CROOKS ALL OF THEM. AND YOU WANT TO REVIEW MCCAIN'S AIDE AND HIS ASSOCIATION WITH FM/FM? HOW ABOUT OBAMA'S SENIOR CAMPAIGN ADVISOR, RAINES GETTING OUT WITH NINETY MILLION DOLLARS? GIVE ME A BREAK. DO YOUR JOB AND REPORT THE TRUTH ON BOTH SIDES.

Both candidates have lost their center because of their coaching staffs. Obama lost his fire and genuiness, and my respect. McCain lost his focus and his ability to communicate.
Both were better before the "team" was set in place.
The problem is we the people have lost the opportunity to see the future clearly because of their missteps and "flash-dancing". I don't care about lipstick, shoes, cars, ministers and allegations, I want answers we can bank on for our future!

Smart, regulatory policies are an unfortunate necessity (and can boost confidence) when human beings have unlimited wants and organized GREED will always seek to be unbridled. History teaches this when you analyze any large market system with many competing interests.

As a public high school teacher, the current state of our public institutions reflect our values as a society, from my point of view. I ask Newsweek readers to PLEASE consider the following comparison of our institutions: our pubic schools and our private financial "powerhouses" that are now being bailed out with our taxpayer dollars.

We are bailing out these failing institutions with taxpayer dollars while the state of our public school system continues to decline. Think about this, voters PLEASE! Not just for the sake of your own personal interests, but for the sake of our country.

Good teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing. No child left behind is a law that requires improvements without funding to implement these improvements. Schools are listed as "failing schools" (terrible for morale) because of unrealistic goals/unfunded mandates funded by politicians seeking to score political points. What is often "left behind" in our public schools is often a stressed out skeleton staff that does not have the ability to properly educate our students.

Meanwhile, these corporate lobbyists that effectively secured deregulation and what they consider "optimal" conditions for success (deregulation). And a few well-connected people have lined their pockets with enormous amounts of other peoples' money.

John McCain has a record of being a major player and advocate of deregulation and has taken money TIME AFTER TIME from the deregulation lobbyists - the very same "fat cats" he's now criticizing! NOW McCain is calling for change, when his deregulation in part has created this mess?

This sort of short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth way of thinking has infected our entire way of running our society.

Unfortunately, young people (the MAJORITY) of our future do not have the money or the resources to hire corporate lobbyists. Their teachers and their schools have limited resources. And there are little organized efforts to reform and progress/ lead our public schools into the 21st century. In every other developed and developing country we compare our students' progress with, there are sustained efforts to improve, fund, and prioritize education.

In America, we are starving our schools while bailing out reckless fat cats who've thrived on greed. Is this the American Way? Or have we lost our way?

Let this difficult period be a lesson. We all want healthy money markets and retirements. We must see the connection between healthy public schools and a healthy economy that is investing in human capital. Hopefully (as we say in class) we will learn from all of this and use it to improve, grow, and succeed.

Hope Mr. Alter caught the forum on CNN tonight.
McCain kicked butt.
I'm waiting to see what Mr Alter writes about it.....

It's a story as old as mankind. A man is beaten by forces more powerful than himself, and rather than withdraw to his own corner he wants so badly to be a part of the ruling group that he agrees to adopt an attitude of subservience toward those who beat him.

To me these days John McCain, a man I once had some respect for, looks more like a whipped dog; glad that hes not being thrown out into the cold, and willing to fawn and pander to those who beat him previously.

To me that makes the prospect of him becoming president very frightening. Because it's clear to me that whoever the persons were who made him nuckle under; those same persons will be the real forces who will be running the country. John McCain is at this point nothing more than a saleable brand, being used for it's utility.

I would consequently expect that all of us in the U.S. will be subjected to the same or worse as McCain recieved should it suit their purposes

Ron Suskind Must be the only real journalist left in this country but I guess its just the "Way of the World"


By Ron Suskind
What just happened? Evidence. A secret that has been judiciously kept for five years just spilled out. All of what follows is new, never reported in any way:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush -- a man still carrying a $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush's famous deck of wanted men -- has been America's secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger. The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, "resettled" Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD -- as Habbush had foretold -- the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a "small team from the al Qaeda organization."

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists like Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of the CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting the CIA from conducting disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

So, here we go again: the administration is in full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn't remember any such thing -- just like he couldn't remember "slam dunk" -- and reporters are scratching their heads. Everything in my book is on the record, with many sources. And so, we watch and wait....

There will be more falling by the wayside after this book is read and there may be an impeachment in the works. Wait there already is! This will give it lots of strength. If you are a patriotic American write all of your congressmen/women and senators and ask them what's up with this.

Ambition gone awry is what is making a once arrogant but honorable man adopt the campaign playbook of the man who slimed him out of the 2000 election. Politics not only makes strange bedfellows in this republican campaign. It makes McCain little more than a prostitute who will sell his hard earned honor to the devil just to get elected.

A very good precis of the problem, Jon. Eight years ago, John McCain was savaged by a "push-pull" telephone campaign in South Carolina, run by Karl Rove and his "agents of evil." They insinuated that John McCain had a "black love child," when actually McCain and his wife had merely adopted a Bangladeshi orphan. Now, eight years later, afer John McCain has spent much of his time humping George W. Bush's leg like a sex-crazed miniature poodle, he hire Rove's acolyte, the abominable Steve Schmidt, to run his negative ad campaign, along "Darth Vader" himself, Karl Rove. By their company, ye shall know them.

Face it, John McCain is a flea-ridden, neutered Pekinese.

One of the best articles about how John McCain has chosen the "Dark Side" -- i.e., Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt and the Republican *** merchants (who push-pulled in South Carlina in 2000 , insinuating he had a "black love child" when he'd actually adopted a Bangladeshi orphan). I blame McCain for this -- he "sold out" to the very people who had trashed him and his family. Such is politics -- for Republican scum. (And now, we see that McCain is as bad as asny of these scum-sucking pigs.)

Great article. Obama has his hands dirty too, but someone has to point out the absurdity of McCain's campaign.

Jonathon Alter's comments about the pettiness of politics seem a little...petty. It is the job of reporters to keep campaigns focused on substance by continually redirecting candidates to the big issues that define elections, not go along with the tit for tat by endlessly parroting the campaigns' blast faxes and text messages. If he's so concerned about wasting "precious media oxygen" on the rhetorical food fights that inevitably go on, why does he waste his by whining about them? Sportscasters don't spend time reporting on the trash talk that goes on between opponents during a competition, they report on the game and players' actions. Political reporters and commentators should do the same.

As for Alter's lofty idea of "precious media oxygen", I find that with an endless 24 hour cable news cycle, blast email, text messaging, bloggers, websites and the preaching and posturing that worms its way into every form of pass produced entertainment we have during election years, media coverage is neither precious nor oxygen. A gas does come to mind, but oxygen isn't it.

It's always enlightening how supposedly intelligent gents like Alter resort to mindless drivel in response to anyone opposing their heir apparent. And, of course, gents like Alter never provide email addresses for responses. It's frankly cowardly. Nice try Alter...but intelligent Americans see through Obama to the Marxist, vain, ignorant fellow he is. He has no ideas of his own and is directed in his responses by "poll results"


rather the

Sad. So sad. Good article. When will people ever stop selling out?

According to TIME magazine

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1829354,00.html?cnn=yes

John McCain's sole idea to "drill here and drill now" won't produce oil until the year 2030, and then it will only be 200,000 barrels per day. In comparison, the government estimates that if everyone made sure their car tires were fully inflated, we could start to reduce our oil consumption by 800,000 barrels per day, right now.

Extend your inflated PAIN with your vote for McCain