The Vices of Their Virtues

The top 1% of earners earns 22% of the income and pays 40% of the taxes. So, that leaves 60% of the taxes to be paid by 99% of the people. Please, tell me what is fair in this equation. How much more does Obama want them to do? And, when Obama says 95% of the American people will get a tax cut, he forgets to say that 40% pay NO tax. So, while some do get a tax cut, he'll be sending a new "welfare" check to those that never paid in the first place. That's socialism, folks!

I think anytime you have the media printing stories estimating when a person could die is totally F....k Up. The Obama campaign and the media have went too far and if this is the kind of print that they are willing to write, If I was McCain I would leave the race. It is one thing to no like a person, it is one thing to disagree with a candidate, ( I think Obama is the lowest leader we have in this country) but to say McCain might die in the middle of his second term is just sicken and disgusting, and the American people buying into this nonsense is foolish. It it worth saying someone is going to die in a few years in order to scare voters into voting for the candidate of choice. This is truly a say and painful way of greed and revenge the American people have toward bush, enough is enough, and I am for one am tired of this childish acts in the Media. Yahoo, Newsweek, The New York Times, all three can ............. fill in the blanks

I have no white guilt, anymore. I am from Iowa - never owned a slave, obviously. However, I grew up in Arizona.
Many Mexican-American (Latinos, Chicanos, take your choice), and married a wonderful woman from Mexico City. So, why are the "press" outraged by a question they seem to be hostile to Barack? Gee, could it be that they have an inordinate amount of "whitel guilt"? By the way, it is no secrect - most Mexican-Americans do not like blacks.

Hey, I love Fox News !! Fox News helps to keep the ignorant masses in check, the American public is too dumb to really understand what is going on in general. A few smarter Republicans figure that out years ago, so by feeding MIS-INFORMATION via Fox News to the majority of STUPID Americans helps to the social order, Fox News, in a sense, is providing a public services, because why would any American need to understand anything ! Educating the masses would be counter productive to acquiring personal wealth, that would just un- Republican, errr... I mean un-American.
I say keep the people ignorant, so I can profit !
Make America into a third world country !
VOTE REPUBLICAN, it is only natural that a few should PROFIT !!

The long primary and presidential campaigns have tired the electorate and the unflappable Obama seems soothing to a beat up country. The antics, tactics and just pure length of this fight for the White House hasd weighed on our country and pushed us to the point of fatigue. Obama reminds me of Mr. Rogers. He is soothing. McCain is the exact opposite, with a pasion that is rare. But the more I try to reflect on what we will be bearing in the next 4 years, i start to think about fighting with somebody, usually a spouse, who doesn't fight back and how infuriating that becomes. Is Obama thoughtful or just doesn't care enough to show some manliness and blow up once in awhile. Even Jesus threw the moneylenders out of the temple in a rage. So, what do we really have here? I think with the bombardment of press against McCain he's handled himself alot cooler than most people I know, yet at least he shows he'is willing to take the gloves off.

Ironically, although McCain has been around for so many years, the country is only now beginning to know him. The reason is that he has never really been vetted during this campain. During the Republican primary, his party were too busy vetting Guliani, Romney, and Huckabee. McCain only surfaced after the other Republican candidates were found unacceptable. All I remember about the Republican primary is that the far right were warning the world that he made bad decisions.

On the other hand, Obama has been intensly vetted over the past twenty months. And he came out ahead and even beat Hillary.

The point is that we are only just beginning to know McCain. And we are finding his decisionmaking really bad.

This is a well written and informative article that helps you see who the real Obama is behind his facade. Definitely worth the read as it unravels a story of his early years in the political arena.

Barack Obamas Lost Years
by Stanley Kurtz
08/11/2008, Volume 013, Issue 45

The senators tenure as a state legislator reveals him to be an Old-Fashioned, Big government, Race-conscious Liberal.

Barack Obamas neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title Springfield Report, between 1996 and 2004. Read in isolation, Obamas columns from the state capital tell us little. Placed in the context of political and policy battles then raging in Illinois, however, the young legislators dispatches powerfully illuminate his political beliefs. Even more revealing are hundreds of articles chronicling OBAMAs EARLY POLITICAL AND LEGISLATIVE ACTIVITIES in the pages not only of the Hyde Park Herald, but also of another South Side fixture, the Chicago Defender.

Obama moved to Chicago in order to place himself in what he understood to be the de facto CAPITAL of black America. For well over 100 years, the Chicago Defender has been the voice of that capital, and therefore a paper of national significance for African Americans. Early on in his political career, Obama complained of being slighted by major media, like the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Yet extensive and continuous coverage in both the Chicago Defender and the Hyde Park Herald presents a REMARKABLE RESOURCE for understanding WHO OBAMA IS. Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obamas early political career - the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the LOST YEARS, the period OBAMA seems LEAST EAGER TO TALK ABOUT, in contrast to his formative years in Hawaii, California, and New York or his days as a community organizer, both of which are recounted in his memoir, Dreams from My Father. The pages of the Hyde Park Herald and the Chicago Defender thus offer entrée into Obama's heretofore hidden world.

Full article:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/386abhgm.asp?pg=

Part II

3. Obama appears unflappable because as a leader he demonstrates self-management in a time of crisis. He does not allow anxiety, ambivalence and ambiguity to weaken his ability to lead. In addition, he does not use scare tactics or prey on the vulnerabilities of the American people to get them to act, but inspires with authenticity to get the American people to act. This why Obama does not joke when the subject matter is a serious one because he is not anxious. He is not aloof.

4. Obama cannot become a populist, if he keeps true to his word that he cares about all Americans, despite of race, gender and class. Obama???s plan is to bring America together, so he can serve everyone, including his critics. This is why Obama can make the ???Hard Choices???. It???s easier to divide people and pick sides than join people and build a bridge.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them. - Albert Einstein

Last, Obama is an emotionally intelligent leader with a systemic understanding of our society. He understands that the individual, their groups and our nation is intertwined and interdependent. He is passionate about understanding our problems as a whole and not as separate parts.
???Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing patterns of change rather than static "snapshots." It is a set of general principles -- distilled over the course of the twentieth century, spanning fields as diverse as the physical and social sciences, engineering, and management.... During the last thirty years, these tools have been applied to understand a wide range of corporate, urban, regional, economic, political, ecological, and even psychological systems. And systems thinking is a sensibility -- for the subtle interconnectedness that gives living systems their unique character.??? ???Peter Senge
So, is Obama to cool? Yes and that???s a cool thing!

P.S. Also, I guess Obama would be both an Angry Black and White man, which cancels out and makes him Mr. Cool.

Patrick Jean-Pierre
Rutgers University

Here's something I think everyone should read before they cast their vote in NOV. I am a Democrat however, for the first time I think I'm leaning towards voting for a Republican. I'm very upset at some of the things I have been reading on Obama. PLEASE TAKE TIME TO READ THIS. PLEASE! WE ALL NEED TO BE AWARE OF THIS BEFORE WE PUT HIM INTO THE WHITE HOUSE.

www.michellemalkin.com

Denise

There is something to be said about a future leader of this country being TOO CEREBRAL . . . Hmmm. I found this older article that definitely makes one pause and think about the outcome of a possible POTUS being just TOO CEREBRAL.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
(Part 1 of 3)

BECKER AND POSNOR
June 17, 2007
Intelligence and Leadership: Posner

Here is a puzzle: EFFECTIVENESS in SENIOR LEADERSHIP positions in GOVERNMENT does NOT seem to be well CORRELATED with INTELLIGENCE.

Washington was a better President than Jefferson, though less able intellectually. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan WERE NOT AS BRIGHT as Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton. Lincoln, a brilliant lawyer, is an exception; Theodore Roosevelt perhaps another exception; and doubtless there are others. But OVERALL THE CORRELATION BETWEEN INTELLIGENCE AND EFFECTIVENESS IN THE PRESIDENCY MAY actually be NEGATIVE.

Even more striking are the FAILURES of Kennedy and Johnsons NATIONAL SECURITY TEAM in Vietnam and George W. Bushs national security team in Iraq. McNamara and his whiz kids (such as Daniel Ellsberg, Harold Brown, and Alan Enthoven), the Bundies, Walt Rostow, George Ball. These were EXTREMELY ABLE PEOPLE; many of them (like McNamara and McGeorge Bundy) truly brilliant. And Bush assembled an outstanding national security team: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Wolfowitz, Rice, Tenet (appointed by Clinton but held over by Bush). Two members of the team, Cheney and Rumsfeld, were former secretaries of defense! And Powell was a former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff.

It could just be bad luck, but I think not. Economists distinguish between general and specific human capital, the FIRST created BY IQ AND EDUCATION and the SECOND by TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE in a particular job. A person who has a large amount of general human capital is likely to find a job in which that capital, augmented by on the job training and experience, is HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE. The resulting success will make him an attractive candidate for a HIGH-LEVEL GOVERNMENT JOB.


(Continued in my post below - Intelligence and Leadership: Posner)

Obama to purge CIA headquarters. "i am gonna fire all those people who were involved in the development of the HIV virus and its dissemination throghout the world" said a visibly angry candidate in Virginia today. Several reporters applauded.