Out of the Past

NY Post, wow. Maybe FoxNews will report this soon, and THEN we can take it seriously. There are direct quotes from Zebari in the article and it appears to me that the quotes were not cut midsentence the way liberals are fond of doing so they are not out of context. Do you think the quotes were fabricated? Anyway, Obama's campaign admitted he asked the Iraqis not to rush through an agreement until after the election. That's similar to Zebari's version.

I hope my mortgage company goes belly up. Then hopefully I can find a way to payoff my note on pennines on the dollar. :lol Not so fast. They'll just sell those mortgages to another company and you'll have to pay them instead. You're not getting a free ride on someone else's failure. If he wants he could just walk away from the mortgage and rather than being called a deadbeat he would be called a victim.

I don't know how you could call Roosevelt's foreign policy 'fascist'. I would, however, call Reagan, Bush Sr, some of Clinton, and certainly Bush Jr.'s policies very fascist. We are once again starting to try and overthrow democratically elected governments in South America that we don't like (Bolivia and Venezuela for instance). Reagan did the same thing in Central America and the Caribbean with his use of both overt and covert wars against governments we didn't like, but certainly posed no threat to us. Reagan and Bush Sr (until 1991) were good friends with Saddam's regime in order to go after the Iranians, until he invaded Kuwait. What "democratically elected governments" in Central America did Reagan try to overthrow?

"The fundamentals of the economy are strong." -John Mccain, September 15, 2008 You cut-off his quote mid-sentence to make a point. I think that's dishonest. Is that what they teach in law school? I don't think you could say that the fundamentals of the economy are strong at any point. We're in a serious financial meltdown. That's a fundamental part of the economy. This is not one of those "the fundamentals are strong, but we have some issues" type of economy, like he's been saying. This is a "this is a serious credit and liquidity crisis which could become global in scope and lead us into the biggest economic downturn since the Great Depression" economy. He's trying to have an optimistic outlook when it's clearly not so. Just for the record: I am an attorney in the finance industry. I deal with all the players we've been talking about on a daily basis. I can confirm to you that sh*t is indeed hitting the fan, and this is beyond "serious". Although many economist believe the economy is fundamentally strong I wasn't arguing about that. The point of my post is that I found the way you cut McCain's quote mid-sentence to be dishonest.

Why shouldn't felons vote? You make it sound like it's not right that they vote. If they've served their time, why would you not allow them to vote? Where did I say felons shouldn't vote? A few weeks ago I pointed out that Democrats own the felon vote and some of your liberals friends were outraged by my statement. This article is relevant to the previous discussion so I posted it.

Cute. You don't see anything racist in what you just said? No.

"The fundamentals of the economy are strong." -John Mccain, September 15, 2008 You cut-off his quote mid-sentence to make a point. I think that's dishonest. Is that what they teach in law school?

The New York Times quotes the study posted here a few weeks ago that concluded that the Democrats own the felon vote by a landslide. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/us/polit...agewanted=print September 14, 2008 States Restore Voting Rights for Ex-Convicts Striding across a sweltering strip-mall parking lot with her clipboard in hand, Monica Bell, a community field organizer in Orlando, Fla., was looking for former convicts to add to the state's voter rolls. Antonious Benton, a gold-toothed 22-year-old with a silver skull-shaped belt buckle, a laconic smile and a criminal record, was the first person she approached. "I can't vote because I got three felonies," Mr. Benton told Ms. Bell. He had finished a six-month sentence for possession of $600 worth of crack cocaine, he said. But Ms. Bell had good news for him: The Florida Legislature and Gov. Charlie Crist, a Republican, changed the rules last year to restore the voting rights of about 112,000 former convicts. "After you go to prison you do your time and they still take all your rights away," Mr. Benton said as he filled out a form to register. "You can't get a job. You can't vote. You can't do nothing even 10 or 20 years later. You don't feel like a citizen. You don't even feel human." Felony disenfranchisement often a holdover from exclusionary Jim Crow-era laws like poll taxes and ballot box literacy tests affects about 5.3 million former and current felons in the United States, according to voting rights groups. But voter registration and advocacy groups say that recent overhauls of these Reconstruction-era laws have loosened enough in some states to make it worth the time to lobby statehouses for more liberal voting restoration processes, and to try to track down former felons in indigent neighborhoods. "You're talking about incredible numbers of people out there who now may have had their right to vote restored and don't even know it," said Reggie Mitchell, a former voter-registration worker for People for the American Way. In Florida, "we're talking tens of thousands of people," he said. "And in the 2000 election, in the state of Florida, 300 people made the difference." A loose-knit group of national organizations working to restore voting rights includes the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or Acorn (Ms. Bell's employer); the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; and the Brennan Center for Justice. Two other groups, the Sentencing Project and the American Civil Liberties Union, said they had given briefings to officials for Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign about how to register former felons. But the Obama campaign has been reluctant to acknowledge any concerted effort. An Obama spokesman, Bill Burton, said via e-mail, "We are trying to register voters across the country and follow the state laws wherever we are." Charles J. Ogletree Jr., a Harvard law professor and senior adviser to the Obama campaign on criminal justice issues, said he had briefed campaign officials about felony disenfranchisement issues and the various and often-confusing state requirements to restore voting rights to former convicts. Campaign volunteers get briefed on specific state laws governing voting rights restoration in case they come across former felons during general voter registration drives, Mr. Ogletree said, "but it's not as if the Obama campaign said, 'Here's a plan for felony disenfranchisement.' " None of the felony voter registration organizations contacted for this article could recall hearing from Senator John McCain's campaign. And a campaign spokesman said there had been no effort to reach out to former prisoners specifically. Last month, Obama campaign workers took down a sign at their headquarters in Pottstown, Pa., that said "Felons can vote," because it might have sent the wrong message. "The fear is that it might cost them more votes to be portrayed as the candidate of the felons than it could gain them," said Anthony C. Thompson, a New York University law professor and Obama campaign adviser. "This is a mistaken belief, in my view, when there are tens of millions of citizens with criminal records." In fact, felony voter restoration efforts have received bipartisan support in many states including Alabama, Florida, Indiana and Maryland. Still, surveys have shown that about 70 percent of former convicts lean Democratic, according to Christopher Uggen, a University of Minnesota criminologist who said that had led some to believe that Democrats benefited from felony voter restoration more than did Republicans. "That's because of the high rate of incarceration among African-Americans, who have strong Democratic preferences," Mr. Uggen said, "and because many people who have committed felonies are working class, relatively young, unmarried and in particular individuals with less than a high school education. These are all demographics that traditionally align themselves with the Democrats." Muslima Lewis, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union in Florida, said: "Really, you're not having a full participatory democracy if you disenfranchise so many people. It weakens the whole system and, in particular, communities of color." All of Us or None, a prisoner-advocacy organization in San Francisco, held a rally last month about restoration of voting rights in California. Also last month, the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition successfully lobbied the Denver County jail system to begin registering felons upon their release. The A.C.L.U. is also advising lawyers' groups planning to deploy to polling places in November to enforce the rights of former convicts who have restored their voting privileges. According to the A.C.L.U. only two states, Maine and Vermont, allow prisoners, parolees and probationers to vote. Thirteen states allow parolees and probationers to vote, eight states reinstate probationer voting rights, and 20 states restore voting rights to people who have completed their sentences, although each state has different processes, exceptions and limits on eligibility requirements. Kentucky and Virginia permanently disenfranchise nearly all felons. Florida's felony voter registration law divides applicants into three categories based on the seriousness of their crimes: nonviolent criminals, the biggest group, need not apply for restoration of voting rights and just need to re-register. Violent criminals, but not murderers or rapists, must apply to the clemency board. The board either grants those rights immediately or investigates on a case-by-case basis. The most violent criminals are subjected to a more rigorous investigation and must attend a hearing of the clemency board, which meets only four times a year, before their rights can be reinstated. Despite the state's liberalization of felony voter procedures, only 9,000 out of a potential 112,000 former convicts in Florida registered to vote in the last year, according to a report last month in The Orlando Sentinel. Part of the reason is that thousands of notifications sent by the state went to the wrong addresses because of poor data and former prisoners' high mobility. Fred Schuknecht, the director of administration for the Florida Clemency Board, acknowledged in an interview that there was a backlog of 60,000 former felons who could potentially have their rights restored, but must first be reviewed by the agency. Despite the fact that 3,500 newly released prisoners are added to the caseload every month, the Legislature cut 20 percent of the staff devoted to felony voter restoration cases, Mr. Schuknecht said. Further, Ms. Bell said that many former convicts shun attention, even if that means abdicating their voting rights. "You might want them to fill out the registration form, but they have an outstanding warrant," she said. "And in order to help them, I need to ask what their crimes are, but they might not want to say." Cheria Murray, 24, of Orlando, regained voting rights this year, after serving a two-day jail sentence with two years' probation for grand theft in 2003. Ms. Murray lives in a housing project where, she said, many people had been stripped of their rights because of their records. Her companion, Duane Miller, 28, recently returned from serving a sentence for illegal firearm possession, and has not applied to reinstate his voting rights. Ms. Murray said she thought about restoring her voting rights only recently, inspired by the presidential campaign. "When I saw Barack Obama, that's when I got excited to get my rights back," she said. "I wanted to vote for history."

I think an individual's success is predicated both on personal choices and the opportunities they are given in life. You can't say it's all on the individual, just like you can't say it's all on society or the community. It is simplistic to think there is no interaction between the two. I don't think it's solely based on the personal choices. That's why I said choices are the foundation. There's more to it than that. Obviously the government needs to take care of the disabled. The particular circumstances in one's life will have an impact and there'll be some who don't "make it" because of circumstances beyond their control but these are the exceptions and you don't make policy based on the exceptions.

This is one of my favorite youtube music videos. Great song... great performace.. and Stevie Nicks in her prime was gorgeous! Couldn'd embeed it.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/09152008/posto...htm?&page=0 WHILE campaigning in public for a speedy withdrawal of US troops from Iraq, Sen. Barack Obama has tried in private to persuade Iraqi leaders to delay an agreement on a draw-down of the American military presence. According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July. "He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview. Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion." "However, as an Iraqi, I prefer to have a security agreement that regulates the activities of foreign troops, rather than keeping the matter open." Zebari says. Though Obama claims the US presence is "illegal," he suddenly remembered that Americans troops were in Iraq within the legal framework of a UN mandate. His advice was that, rather than reach an accord with the "weakened Bush administration," Iraq should seek an extension of the UN mandate. While in Iraq, Obama also tried to persuade the US commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, to suggest a "realistic withdrawal date." They declined. Obama has made many contradictory statements with regard to Iraq. His latest position is that US combat troops should be out by 2010. Yet his effort to delay an agreement would make that withdrawal deadline impossible to meet. Supposing he wins, Obama's administration wouldn't be fully operational before February - and naming a new ambassador to Baghdad and forming a new negotiation team might take longer still. By then, Iraq will be in the throes of its own campaign season. Judging by the past two elections, forming a new coalition government may then take three months. So the Iraqi negotiating team might not be in place until next June. Then, judging by how long the current talks have taken, restarting the process from scratch would leave the two sides needing at least six months to come up with a draft accord. That puts us at May 2010 for when the draft might be submitted to the Iraqi parliament - which might well need another six months to pass it into law. Thus, the 2010 deadline fixed by Obama is a meaningless concept, thrown in as a sop to his anti-war base. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and the Bush administration have a more flexible timetable in mind. According to Zebari, the envisaged time span is two or three years - departure in 2011 or 2012. That would let Iraq hold its next general election, the third since liberation, and resolve a number of domestic political issues. Even then, the dates mentioned are only "notional," making the timing and the cadence of withdrawal conditional on realities on the ground as appreciated by both sides. Iraqi leaders are divided over the US election. Iraqi President Jalal Talabani (whose party is a member of the Socialist International) sees Obama as "a man of the Left" - who, once elected, might change his opposition to Iraq's liberation. Indeed, say Talabani's advisers, a President Obama might be tempted to appropriate the victory that America has already won in Iraq by claiming that his intervention transformed failure into success. Maliki's advisers have persuaded him that Obama will win - but the prime minister worries about the senator's "political debt to the anti-war lobby" - which is determined to transform Iraq into a disaster to prove that toppling Saddam Hussein was "the biggest strategic blunder in US history." Other prominent Iraqi leaders, such as Vice President Adel Abdul-Mahdi and Kurdish regional President Massoud Barzani, believe that Sen. John McCain would show "a more realistic approach to Iraqi issues." Obama has given Iraqis the impression that he doesn't want Iraq to appear anything like a success, let alone a victory, for America. The reason? He fears that the perception of US victory there might revive the Bush Doctrine of "pre-emptive" war - that is, removing a threat before it strikes at America. Despite some usual equivocations on the subject, Obama rejects pre-emption as a legitimate form of self -defense. To be credible, his foreign-policy philosophy requires Iraq to be seen as a failure, a disaster, a quagmire, a pig with lipstick or any of the other apocalyptic adjectives used by the American defeat industry in the past five years. Yet Iraq is doing much better than its friends hoped and its enemies feared. The UN mandate will be extended in December, and we may yet get an agreement on the status of forces before President Bush leaves the White House in January.

I swear, if Obama is elected I will sell my business and start a blog called www.fundmylifegovt.com (similar to my fav. blog out there...www.fundmymutualfund.com, btw.) What's the point of me struggling to try to make more money? Why shouldn't I go back to my college days and just bartend, not declare the tips (I'll be a low wage worker making 3.15 an hour) and ask for money from you, the rich lawyer (hypothetically) to support my drinking binges? You don't mind how the government spends your money, right? So spend it on me Sugar Daddy! I've considered doing the same thing and i'm not kidding. If I quit my job and Obama gives me health care for free and I don't have to pay any taxes on my investment income then I'll probably quit my job and call it very early retirement. Obviousdly I would have to work out the numbers to see if I could maintain the standard of living I desire but this is a definite possibility. prim, I think the foundation for an individual's success or failure are the choices he makes throughout his life and as such I don't think success (good choices) should be penalized or failure (poor choices) should be rewarded with the income redistribution policies you support.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/pr...mp;R=13C12251CB Tax Cuts, Real and Imaginary Obama's spending programs in disguise. by Newt Gingrich & Peter Ferrara 09/15/2008, Volume 014, Issue 01 Thirty years of Republican tax policy have now completely eliminated federal income taxes on the poor and lower middle-income Americans, and almost eliminated them on middle America. The latest data from the Congressional Budget Office and the Internal Revenue Service show that the lowest 40 percent of income earners as a group actually receive net payments from the federal income tax system. (They get 3.8 percent of total federal income tax revenues instead of paying any income taxes.) The middle 20 percent of income earners pay 4.4 percent of federal income taxes. Thus the bottom 60 percent of income earners together, on net, pay less than 1 percent of all federal income taxes. (These workers earn 26 percent of national income.) The data show that the top 1 percent of income earners now pay 40 percent of all federal income taxes, which is almost double their share of the national income. The top 10 percent pay 71 percent of federal income taxes, though they earn just 39 percent of the nation's pretax income. This is a result of the across the board income tax rate cuts adopted by Ronald Reagan and the current President Bush, plus the Earned Income Tax Credit first proposed by Reagan in the 1970s, and the child tax credit enacted into law as part of the 1994 Contract With America. Barack Obama claims to be proposing income tax cuts for low and moderate income and middle class workers, but Reagan Republicans have already eliminated most of their income tax liability. What Obama is calling tax cuts for the middle class is really a slew of refundable federal income tax credits that would primarily go to those who are paying little or no federal income taxes now. Such credits would primarily not reduce tax liability, but instead be checks from the federal government for child care, education, housing, retirement, health care, even outright giveaways. These are not tax cuts. They are new federal spending programs hidden in the tax code. When Obama says that he will cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, he is talking about his proposal for a $500 refundable income tax credit for all but the top 5 percent of income earners. For the bottom 40 percent of income earners, this will be just another check from the federal government rather than a reduction in tax liability. It is another sharp increase in government spending rather than any sort of tax cut. An arbitrary cash grant does not, moreover, do anything to improve the economy or incentivize productive business. That only comes from cutting tax rates. What Obama is proposing here is really quite similar to George McGovern's 1972 plan to send everyone a $1,000 check, which voters rightly saw as a crass vote-buying scheme rather than serious policy. Obama also proposes to increase the top marginal tax rates for virtually every major federal tax. These increases would not come remotely close to financing the trillion dollars of increased direct federal spending Obama is promising--including a new national health insurance entitlement that would be bigger than any of the massive entitlement programs we already have and already have trouble paying for. Indeed, if the tax rate increases cause a serious enough economic decline, they will lose revenue on net. Obama's plans are the opposite of tax reform. Instead of closing loopholes and lowering rates, he is creating new loopholes and raising rates. But there is a real tax agenda that would benefit middle-America. America has the second-highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world, with a federal rate of 35 percent--rising to 40 percent on average with income taxes. The average corporate tax rate in the European Union countries is 24 percent. Even India and China have lower corporate tax rates. Ireland adopted a 12.5 percent corporate tax rate 20 years ago. Since then per capita income has soared from the second-lowest in the EU to the second-highest. John McCain is proposing to reduce our federal corporate tax rate to 25 percent. The top income tax rates borne by noncorporate small businesses and investors should be reduced to 25 percent as well. Obama is taking the opposite tack, calling for increases in the income tax rates that small businesses pay and additional tax increases for larger corporations (such as the so-called windfall profits tax on oil companies that would only further hurt the American economy with higher energy costs). With two-thirds of the American people now owning stocks, capital gains taxes are another middle America issue. Obama proposes to increase the top capital gains tax rate by 33 percent, which will cause a decline in the value of stocks held by middle-income families. History has also proven, time and again, that rising capital gains tax rates cost the federal government money. From 1968 to 1975, the capital gains tax rate was raised four times, and capital gains tax revenue fell by more than 50 percent. When capital gains tax rates were raised by 40 percent as part of the compromise in the 1986 tax reform act, revenues fell by 40 percent the next year, and by 1991 they had fallen by 63 percent. McCain is proposing to retain the current capital gains rate of 15 percent. But to maximize economic growth for working people and middle-income families, the capital gains tax rate should be zero. The capital gains tax is just another layer of taxation on capital income. It taxes the present discounted value of future income that will be taxed again--multiple times, in fact--when it is earned. That is not fairness or good economic sense. Many of our international competitors maintain a zero tax rate on capital gains--including 14 out of 30 OECD countries, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Eliminating the capital gains tax would cause the stocks held by two-thirds of the American people to soar in value. The most important middle-income tax issue, however, is payroll taxes--the taxes withheld by your employer to pay for programs like Social Security and Medicare. The federal payroll tax is now the largest tax most workers pay. With federal income taxes already abolished for the poor and lower middle-income workers, and almost abolished for middle-income workers, the next big tax cut for these working people would be the ability to utilize personal accounts for Social Security. Over time, personal accounts could expand to replace the entire payroll tax and finance the same benefits. Instead of paying a tax, working people would be saving and investing in their own personal family wealth engine. With fully expanded accounts, average families could expect to accumulate a million dollars or more, even while paying in about 25 percent less than the current 15.3 percent payroll tax. Such accounts are estimated to pay at least twice what Social Security currently promises and provide the only real hope of addressing the long-term funding problems of Medicare without harming retirees. This would be nothing less than a revolution in the personal prosperity of working people. McCain at least favors starting such personal accounts. But, as is so typical of Barack Obama, he would just slam the door on a truly revolutionary change, and hark back to the stale ideas of the 1960s or even the 1930s. Obama's tax policies would take America in exactly the opposite direction of the tax reform and threaten economic disaster in already difficult times.

I think tax rates should be slightly progressive but I think they are too progressive as they are. Almost everyone should pay income taxes. Under Obama it's estimated 50% of households would get a free ride. I also think we should eliminate the income tax credits which is another name for welfare. The tax code should not be used as a welfare tool.

Good article on Obamanomics. I think the writer may be wrong in that the percentage of households that are free loading on the rest of us that actually pay income taxes is 38% and not the "one-third" he noted but it's still a good article. http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editoria...anomics?mode=PF Seeing through Obamanomics By Jeff Jacoby, Globe Columnist | September 14, 2008 ALL THROUGH the spring and summer, opinion polls tracked a growing confidence that Barack Obama could handle the economy better than John McCain. Just before the Democratic convention in August, Gallup had Obama leading McCain on the economy, 54-38 - a 16-point margin. But now Obama's lead has nearly vanished. Gallup's latest numbers show the candidates nearly tied. Just 48 percent say Obama would be more adept at superintending the economy; 45 percent choose McCain. Looks like voters have started paying attention to Obama's economics. On Sept. 8, Fox News broadcast an interview between Obama and Bill O'Reilly that focused on taxation and the economy. Obama repeated his pledge to cut taxes for 95 percent of Americans, while raising taxes on the tiny fraction who earn more than $250,000. "That's class warfare," O'Reilly objected. "You're taking the wealthy in America, the big earners . . . you're taking money away from them and you're giving it to people who don't. That's called income redistribution. It's a socialist tenet. Come on, you know that." "Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill," Obama replied. "Teddy Roosevelt supported a progressive income tax." He acknowledged that he doesn't enjoy paying taxes either - "you think I like writing the check?" - but that "there are certain things we've got to do." His tax proposal, he explained, was a matter of civility: "If I am sitting pretty and you've got a waitress who is making minimum wage plus tips, and I can afford it and she can't, what's the big deal for me to say, I'm going to pay a little bit more? That's neighborliness." If that is Obama's rationale for making the tax code even more steeply progressive than it already is, it's no wonder voters are having second thoughts about his economic aptitude. "Neighborliness." Perhaps that word has a nonstandard meaning to someone whose home adjoins the property of convicted swindler Tony Rezko, but extracting money by force from someone who earned it in order to give it to someone who didn't is not usually spoken of as neighborly. If Citizen Obama, "sitting pretty," reaches into his own pocket and helps out the waitress with a large tip, he has shown a neighborly spirit. But there is nothing neighborly about using the tax code to compel someone else to pay the waitress that tip. Taxation is not generosity, it is confiscation at gunpoint. Does Obama not understand the difference? Perhaps he doesn't. Eager though he may be to compel "neighborliness" in others, he has not been nearly so avid about demonstrating it himself. Barack and Michelle Obama's tax returns show that from 2000 through 2004, when their adjusted gross income averaged nearly a quarter of a million dollars a year, their annual charitable donations amounted to just $2,154 - less than nine-tenths of 1 percent. Not until he entered the US Senate in 2005 and began to be spoken of as a presidential possibility did the Obamas' "neighborliness" become more evident. (In 2005-2007, they gave 5.5 percent of their income to charity.) Obama claims his proposal would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans, but well over 43 million tax returns, one-third of all those filed, already reflect an income tax liability of zero. In fact, Obama says, his plan would eliminate income taxes for an additional 10 million taxpayers. What he is really proposing, therefore, is not tax relief but a bald transfer of cash - $1,000 per family, he pledges - from the wealthiest Americans to everyone else. In 1972, George McGovern advocated something similar - a $1,000 "demogrant" for every US citizen. Just last year, Hillary Clinton suggested that the government start off every new baby with a $5,000 savings account. Voters didn't take the bait when McGovern and Clinton offered it. Here's betting they won't take it now. Why not? Because you don't have to be rich to be skeptical when a candidate argues that the top 1 percent of taxpayers, who already pay 40 percent of federal income taxes, aren't being taxed enough. You don't have to be an economist to wonder about the grasp of a nominee who tells 95 percent of the public that they can have something for nothing. Obamanomics may look pretty at first glance. But voters are focusing more closely now, and they can see beyond the lipstick.

regardless of what Krauthammer would prefer, that's what it's taken to mean pretty much every time I've seen it. Just ABC News has used 11 different definitions of what the Bush doctrine is. Palin's question was a fair one in order to avoid confusion. I think she could have asked her question is a different way but it was still a fair question.

No, it is just frustrating as an American to see so many of my fellow Americans completely fooled by this woman and try to pretend that she knows enough to be VP or President of the United States. Now you know why I despise Obama. Palin is the GOP's answer to Obama. Four years ago Obama was a state senator when he did an amazing job reading the speech someone else wrote off a teleprompter and managed to look handsome and charismatic while doing it and he was right then and there the front runner for the '08 nomination (assuming Kerry lost). At least Palin has some accomplishmest.

Female left wing wackos"? I can't tell if that is a sexist remark, or just an ignorant one. I think for the most part only a left wing wacko would make such a demeaning remark as yours. If you're not a left wing wacko and you were offended then I apologize. If you're a left wing wacko, I don't apologize.

More like McCain/Embarassment to Females Everywhere '08! From the polls I've seen females have a favorable view of Palin and since her selection there has been a significant shift in the female vote from Obama to McCain. I think females left wing wackos hate her but other than the wackos most of the others like her a lot. The're nothing wrong in being hated by left wing wackos. That's actually an honor in my opinion.

First of all, if you take Hermida out, who is batting .177, then the average would be higer. Second of all, do you think it could have hurt us? You dont think we could have been a better team if we had aquired him? Third of all, the Dodgers are 15-16 since they traded for Manny. Im pretty sure they would be somewhere around 12-19 or maybe even 11-20 if they didn't pick him up. Why? Like you said, the Dodgers are 15-16 since the trade. Before the trade, they were 69-70. Their win-loss is actually worse! Games under .500 is the same. You can't say for sure, or for any reason, that the Dodgers would actually be worse without him because they have been winning games at the same pace with him as they did without him. I think it should be obvious that a team, any team, wouid win more games with Manny playign rather than Juan Pierre but I guess not everyone agrees.

Fire Bo, Jim and Freddie.

'Cause lack of secondary pitch, it prove that Lindstrom can not a certain closer. Look at the awful opp avg. Or you can look at his awesome opp OPS since the break. Or you can learn to not make too much out of small sample sizes.

He's a lock for the rotation next year, yeah. But he needs to be shut down for the rest of this season. Why? Not arguing, just asking.

Yes, he's a lock for the rotation. I doubt he's injured. The last time he hid an injury it potentially cost him several millions depending on the outcome of the arbitration hearing so I would hope he learned his lesson.

Treanor has a rep as a good defensive catcher, but isn't his CS just as bad Bake's? Treanor's rep is undeserved. Good guy + talks to the media = genius game caller + great defense