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PoliGAF 2nd Pres. Debate 2008 Thread (DOW dropping, Biden is off to Home Depot)

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cjdunn

Member
camineet said:
t1wide.wallstreet3.ap.jpg
:lol

Part of this will be my new avatar.
 

GhaleonEB

Member
speculawyer said:
WTF?!?!? Now that is total bullshit! They'll release what they like and keep the rest.

Someone has to leak the report if they do that.
Some sections of the report contain legitimately private information. The report's findings will come out.
 

Chichikov

Member
JaY P. said:
Looks like another intellectual conservative discovers hopium. William F. Buckley's own son no less.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2008-10-10/the-conservative-case-for-obama
You see, that doesn't make me happy.
I'm a liberal, progressive, social democrat, and a supporter of Obama, but this country need a balanced, smart and competent conservative wing to function, not to mention an opposition to the government, even if it is one that I support.
 
You all need to read Sean's latest post on 538. Absolutely eviscerates Michael Barone, a FOX pundit, on his down-playing of Obama's ground game.

This sums up Sean's opinion on how Reps feel on the matter:

Sean said:
Wow. They. Are. So. Fucked.
 
Cloudy said:
It's a new Fox/Opinion Research poll:



Look at some of the questions:




I did like this parrt though:



http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/101008_foxpoll.pdf

I remember that article that came out months ago that showed MSNBC and CNN viewers would be voting for Obama while Fox News viewers would vote for McCain. I sometimes question Fox News and their polling. I mean, afterall, the network tried selling Bush's policies and the Iraq War to its viewers.
 

Fatalah

Member
Anyone post this yet?

Obama Proposes Small Business Rescue Plan
CHILLICOTHE, Ohio -- Barack Obama today proposed a plan of tax cuts and loans for small businesses hurt by the current credit crisis, a temporary program he said is needed to help Main Street and complement what has already been done for Wall Street.
 

Stinkles

Clothed, sober, cooperative
Fragamemnon said:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/10/obama-called-traitor-agai_n_133613.html

Obama gets called a traitor again by McCain's crowd, he says nothing and just keeps talking. Classy! Only the candidates on the stump can keep this under control, and they are doing nothing but encourage this behavior with their silence.


I wonder if he'll play this out 'til the end, or see the writing on the wall for his legacy and softly concede - play nice for a few weeks.

Who am I kidding?
 
Chichikov said:
You see, that doesn't make me happy.
I'm a liberal, progressive, social democrat, and a supporter of Obama, but this country need a balanced, smart and competent conservative wing to function, not to mention an opposition to the government, even if it is one that I support.

You want a balanced, smart,and competent conservative wing? The Blue Dog Democrats in Congress, who will likely add more to their ranks this year and exhibit far more control over legislation than the progressive wing of the party will, is the place you want to be. Fiscallly conservative (far more than the GOP) and socially moderate, they're honestly a better choice for conservatives than the bankrupt , broken GOP is at this point.
 

JaY P.

Member
Jason's Ultimatum said:
Goldwater wasn't very fond of Reagan.

QFT. I wish the Republican party had more people from the same mold of Goldwater. The man was an ideologue, but he was a compromising ideologue. Most on the right today resort to absolutes and cannot be reasoned with. Although there are a rare few that can defend conservatism on an intellectual level there are not enough to influence the party.
 
OuterWorldVoice said:
I wonder if he'll play this out 'til the end, or see the writing on the wall for his legacy and softly concede - play nice for a few weeks.

Someone big in the media needs to put the McCain campaign down like old fucking yeller.

Who am I kidding? :lol
 
Fragamemnon said:
You want a balanced, smart,and competent conservative wing? The Blue Dog Democrats in Congress, who will likely add more to their ranks this year and exhibit far more control over legislation than the progressive wing of the party will, is the place you want to be. Fiscallly conservative (far more than the GOP) and socially moderate, they're honestly a better choice for conservatives than the bankrupt , broken GOP is at this point.

Don't lead me on like that! It's not fair!
 

JaY P.

Member
Chichikov said:
You see, that doesn't make me happy.
I'm a liberal, progressive, social democrat, and a supporter of Obama, but this country need a balanced, smart and competent conservative wing to function, not to mention an opposition to the government, even if it is one that I support.

I'm with you on this. The right needs some intellectuals to balance out the left. I fear that any party, right or left, get too radical without a check on the other side. Obama however, appears to be very moderate and open. If Obama does catalyze another 'liberal' era, I hope there are some some new competent, and reasonable, conservatives out there that can help to balance out the nation.
 

maynerd

Banned
Fragamemnon said:

Mom: I'm sorry son but the bank foreclosed on the house, my retirement savings is all gone and they are about to cut off my telephone service. I'll be out on the street, maybe we can share a cardboard box to live in.
 
Jason's Ultimatum said:
I've always wondered. Obama mentions that only a small percentage of small business owners make over $250,000. How small?

I think after the last debate one of the networks' anchors said 15% of small business owners make more than $250,000.
 

ShOcKwAvE

Member
Jason's Ultimatum said:
I've always wondered. Obama mentions that only a small percentage of small business owners make over $250,000. How small?

Today in one of his speeches he said it was 1%. I don't really know how "small business" is measured though.
 
Jason's Ultimatum said:
I've always wondered. Obama mentions that only a small percentage of small businesses owners make over $250,000. How small?

Dunno about business (various tax structures which obfuscate the general question of "how many small businesses get taxed on $250,000"), but the number of households who make more than $250,000 is only 1.5% of the total based on 2005 census data.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_States
 

Cloudy

Banned
Jason's Ultimatum said:
I've always wondered. Obama mentions that only a small percentage of small business owners make over $250,000. How small?

How can you even be a "small" business if you have $250,000 left over after operating expenses?
 

DMczaf

Member
Cheebs said:
Am I the only one who LOOOOOVES how Republicans are scared shitless about Obama? They mocked and belittled Gore and Kerry, but they never feared them. They shake in their boots about Obama. I absolutely love it.

bdtmo3.gif
 

GhaleonEB

Member
Anecdote:

For the second day in a row, I'm overhearing political chatter all over the café during lunch. Right now a group of white guys - mostly in their 50's, some a touch older - are making fun of McCain for talking up Ayres. Basically, "So someone does bad things in the 60's, and is now living his life right and doing good work, means you can't work with him? How does that work?"

And "Sarah Palin's husband was a former member of the Alaska separatist movement. A separation movement RIGHT NOW. This whole thing is stupid."

McCain is getting Ayres chatter, at least.

And everyone is talking about the markets. Our stock is crushed along with the market, and everyone in the company has a lot of stock. Unhappy people all over the place.
 

JaY P.

Member
For those that cannot access the Christopher Buckley article, here you go.

Sorry said:
Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.
 

Imm0rt4l

Member
Tamanon said:
:lol Yeah right, he just wants to make Franken look bad if he does a negative ad about his suits.
Exactly, he's already losing on the negative tip anyways, Franken has had some pretty funny attack ads on coleman, but I've noticed he's taken a much more positive approach as of late.
 
Well I did find this:

http://www.patterico.com/2008/10/07/obamas-tax-plan-and-small-businesses/

At tonight’s Town Hall Presidential debate, I think Barack Obama said this about his tax policies [EDIT: according to the CNN transcript]:

“Only a few percent of small businesses make more than $250,000 a year. So the vast majority of small businesses would get a tax cut under my plan.”

The US Small Business Administration (SBA) defines a “small business” according to its average annual receipts or the number of its employees. Here are examples from the SBA’s Table of Small Business Size Standards setting forth the maximum average annual receipts by industry that a business can have and still be classified as a small business:

Crop production of all types — $750,000
Animal production except for cattle & chicken/eggs — $750,000
Cattle feedlots — $2.5M
Chicken/egg production — $12.5M
Forestry & logging — $7M
Fishing — $4M
Irrigation, sewage, water supplies — $7M
Housing construction — $33.5M
Heavy and civil engineering construction — $33.5M
Dredging and cleanup — $20M
Concrete, framing, and other housing contractors — $14M
Car dealers — $23-29M
RV, motorcycle, & boat dealers — $7M
Furniture, hardware, clothing & sporting good stores — $7M
Electronic stores — $9M
Supermarkets, gas stations & department stores — $27M
Pharmacies — $7M

There are many more examples at the link. In addition, most of the industries in the Table — such as manufacturers of food, beverages, apparel, print, oil/gas, plastics, plumbing, machinery, computers, electronics, electrical, transportation, and furniture — are considered small businesses based on their total number of employees instead of average annual receipts. In those industries, the cut-off between small and large businesses ranges from 500-1,000 employees per business/industry.

It’s difficult for me to imagine a business that has 50 or more employees (let alone 500-1,000) that has receipts of less than $250,000 per year. And, given the SBA definitions of “small business,” it seems likely that many small businesses in a wide range of industries have receipts of more than $250,000 per year.

If so, it is appalling that Obama would imply that, if he is President, a small percentage of businesses exceed the $250,000 per year cut-off for increased taxation under his tax plan. In fact, the number of businesses subject to additional tax may be large and could well be the 50% number I think John McCain mentioned.

Small businesses are vital to the American economy and Americans’ livelihoods, and it sounds like Obama wants to tax as many as he possibly can.
 
Jason's Ultimatum said:
I've always wondered. Obama mentions that only a small percentage of small business owners make over $250,000. How small?
From what i've read, about 4-6% :
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/07/fiorinas_fuzzy_math.html

Okay, let’s assume there are now 23 million small businesses in the U.S. today (the latest stats I could find were 21.5 million "schedule C" class businesses in 2005). There’s no way that all 23 million of those are netting more than $250,000. In fact, 94.5% of all “flow-through” entities (self-employed folks, which generally tend to be small businesses, though Tiger Woods also falls into this category) had receipts under $100,000 in 2007.
Citing : http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/UploadedPDF/411606_income_tax_favor.pdf

I tried checked the stats to make sure the numbers weren't cooked, but couldn't understand a thing. Would be nice if someone more knowledgeable on the subject could chime in.
 
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