Political Elections


Who Are You California?  You vote to raise taxes on yourself again?  Really?  It’s another easy way out for politicians on our backs.  How does the majority not see it?  I’m speechless and disappointed, and question what’s going on in my native state.

On the eve of the election, that’s all I’ve got to say about it for now.  I voted.  Did you?

11/20/12 Update: I’m concerned about “Obamacare” and numerous important issues, but need to respect the election results — I continue to hope and pray for what’s best for America and Americans as a whole.  It’s time for good decisions to be made.

I still write here — I’m just depressed about California’s election results on most fronts.  It appears the naive were recruited in force and we’re now left with numerous battles to be fought.  I’m currently paralyzed to write more, since there are too many problems with my beautiful home state — Excessive business taxes, regulations and restrictions, Mafioso-esk labor unions, high taxes, so-called sanctuary cities, political fraud and deceit, etc.  We mustn’t stop combating these things or we’re surely going off a cliff.  Don’t give up or give in to what’s wrong.

Voting is a very IMPORTANT tool you have and it’s essential that you use it now.  Please vote on November 2, 2010 — America must be put back on track.  Too many unacceptable things are happening to our great nation and people.  Citizens don’t forget that Politicians work for YOU, not themselves.  Remind them.  All must be held accountable for what’s been promised and we need not accept less.  The fraud, constant political bargaining, lies and theft have to stop.  It’s ruining the quality of the one life we all have here.  It’s imperative that we start heading in the right direction, to carry out the true will of the American people.  And if you don’t vote, don’t complain, because apathy is part of the problem.  Please read up and vote!

It’s clear, Meg Whitman for Governor in 2010.  She’s smart, seems tough and is what California needs.  I’m voting for her and hope you do too.  It’ll be an important vote for the future of California and her candidacy improves my outlook.  She appears and sounds quite impressive.  Our continued optimism is that she’ll stay strong and do the right thing for the tax payers and state.  It’s unfortunate that the Gubernatorial Election isn’t until November 2, 2010.  Regrettably, Arnold has been a big disappointment — We pray that he doesn’t waste the time he has left as Governor focusing on the wrong things, like so many politicians do.  I expected more from him.

In California’s upcoming Special Election on May 19, 2009, PLEASE VOTE NO on Measures 1A, 1B, 1C, 1D and 1E .  Make our Politicians act responsibly with the money they’re already taking from us.  It’s ENOUGH!  Force them to stop the fraud, waste, bribes, convolution and special interest pay outs — It’s time to do what’s best for America.  Taking more money out of our pockets for the same negligent use doesn’t make us stronger.  The failing status quo only continues.  Send the Politicians back to work to make better decisions.  Stop falling for political scare tactics and VOTE NO on the aforementioned Measures.  And YES on 1F only.

Learn More Information HERE:

http://www.socaltaxrevoltcoalition.org/9.html

http://ca.lwv.org/action/prop0905/flyer.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-hogarth/arnolds-may-special-elect_b_172876.html

UPDATE:  Good job California voters — You did it. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-props20-2009may20,0,5134709.story

Although I didn’t vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden, I’m ready to see the “change” that won them the election.  There are a lot of problems, they made a lot of promises, and now I want to see the issues resolved.  CHANGE is not just a word — It’s an action/difference.  Most specifically I want to see positive change.  I hereby ask Barack Obama and Joe Biden to PLEASE do the right things for America and Americans.  Use the power wisely and I’ll support you.

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?

by Orson Scott Card
October 20, 2008

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President’s Men and thinking: That’s journalism.  You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

 

This housing crisis didn’t come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration. It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.  What is a risky loan? It’s a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

 

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can’t repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can’t make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating. They end up worse off than before.

 

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

 

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It’s as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

 

Isn’t there a story here? Doesn’t journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren’t you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?  I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. “Housing-gate,” no doubt. Or “Fannie-gate.”

 

Instead, it was Sen. Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting subprime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

 

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled “Do Facts Matter?”  (http://snipurl.com/457to): “Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush’s Secretary of the Treasury.”  These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was … the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was … the Republican Party.


Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!  What? It’s not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?  Now let’s follow the money … right to the presidential candidate who is the number two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

 

And after Fred Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate’s campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

 

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.  But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an “adviser” to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama’s people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn’t listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

 

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.  If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.  If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

 

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

 

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.  Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That’s what you claim you do, when you accept people’s money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

 

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.  If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate. Because that’s what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don’t like the probable consequences. That’s what honesty means. That’s how trust is earned.

 

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naiveté time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing. Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards’ own adultery for many months. So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means? Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

 

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women (NOW) threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles. That’s where you are right now.  It’s not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

 

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

 

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation’s prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama’s door.

 

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way. This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

 

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie. If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

 

You’re just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it’s time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a daily newspaper in our city.

 

Source: 

http://www.linearpublishing.com/orsonscottcard.html

http://www.rtgreensboro.com/1homebody.lasso

After watching tonight’s Presidential Debate, it’s evident that I’ll be voting for John McCain — Not because I’m falsely persuaded, like much of the media is going to tell me, but because I’m an intelligent thinking adult.  Presidential Debates are important to hear more than sound bites and elite media interjections.  One can listen to an uninterrupted exchange and make his/her own decision. 

Senator Obama appears to do a lot of blaming without offering many solutions.  He simply repeats a list of debatable and non-debatable things that need to be done.  And on a few occasions he didn’t answer the specific question or address the disputed issue.  Why don’t people want to see it?  Many fell in love with Barack Obama so fast, but it’s time to break up now. 

Senator McCain asks you to look at his record, so PLEASE look at his record and let’s keep the debate pure – I’m an Independent.  Ignore ridiculous media bias and put aside party bias — Think for yourself.  Pick the best person for America today.

Related Link:  http://www.olemiss.edu/debate/

The so-called ‘Bush Doctrine’ NOT defined by Charlie Gibson in his interview of Governor Sarah Palin is a term coined by the media and used to describe a few different things in relation to President Bush.  It’s not one well known thing that everyone should know. 

How condecending Charlie Gibson was with his glasses to his nose asking Sarah Palin about the Bush Docrine, as if we all should know exactly what he means.  PLEASE.  Political reporters tend to act like they know it all.  I’ve lost respect for many of them.

Governor Palin did well.  I hope she continues to rise above it.  The country needs it.  Political reporters are not smarter than YOU — Don’t fall for it.  Make your own decisions and ignore the media commentary.  It’s usually self serving.

Related Links:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/story?id=5795641&page=1

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNPGnZurs1k

http://whateversowhat.wordpress.com/2008/09/11/charlie-gibson-interveiw-with-governor-sarah-palin/

This is another post for the Political Candidates — When advertising your candidacy on television, it’s not really necessary to tell us that you approve your own message.  I don’t believe it’s required by the FCC.  It’s pretty obvious that you’d approve your own message, don’t you think?  It sounds dorky too. 

I’m Shelly Borrell and I approve this message.  See.

ATTENTION ALL POLITICIANS:  If I receive a prerecorded telephone call or message from you regarding your candidacy, I will purposefully not vote for you.  Who likes to pick up the phone to a prerecorded message?  I think it’s rude.  Yet it’s still being done.  It tells me that you’re really not in touch with what the people want.  I’ve already received one call which required me to run to catch the phone — I don’t recall who it was from, but I’ll note it for you next time.  The headline will read, I’m Not Voting For ?  Good luck and may the BEST men and women win.

Helpful Links: 

https://www.donotcall.gov/

http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/donotcall/

http://www.ftc.gov/donotcall

Today Senator John McCain picked Governor Sarah Palin to be his Vice President.  I had not heard of her and was most surprised to learn that she’s only 44 and has five kids.  Wow!  How is it possible to be Vice President of the United States too?  I surely haven’t accomplished enough.

I hope John McCain didn’t pick her just because she’s a woman.  Too much misdirected strategy goes on in politics — But I guess she can represent CHANGE now too.  She’s young and doesn’t have much political experience, similar to Barack Obama.  Two young and experienced combos.  That makes for an interesting race.  I hope the next President and Vice President do what’s best for the people and the country.

I’ve read a little and listened to Sarah Palin’s speech on the radio this morning and she sounded real.  I like a person who fights against the odds for what’s right — We need more people with the guts to do it.  We’ve got three more months to learn more about the changes that need to occur.  It appears the political race is finally on.  Two years is too long to run for office — It has been a waste of time and money.

Finally, I’m a brat to mention this, but don’t you think her kid’s names are a bit over the top – HA.  Sorry kids, different is good. 🙂

Related Links:

http://gov.state.ak.us/

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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3jnbiHAMuY

http://www.startribune.com/politics/national/president/27681789.html?elr=KArks7PYDiaK7DUqyE5D7UiD3aPc:_Yyc:aUU

United we stand, divided we fall — It’s true.  At today’s Democratic Convention, Hillary Clinton told me that the Democrats are America’s only hope for the future.  That seemed a bit pessimistic about the country, divisive, and over dramatic, but as expected everyone clapped on cue. 

But fingers will most likely be pointed in the opposite direction at the Republican Convention next week.  Why must we so harshly divide into separate groups?  The issues remain the same and shouldn’t be oversimplified.  Politics is not a sport, nor a tag line.  Real things need to get done fast — But all we usually see is a transfer of power and wealth, not enough being accomplished for Americans.

No matter who gets elected in November, we should stand behind him and work together.  Division isn’t good for the country.  We have the freedom to say what we think, but we should first ask ourselves — Does my expression benefit the United States, our soldiers, our children, society, or relations?  If not then ask yourself, what’s my point?  Some media responsibility is needed. 

Overall, unity makes for a better America.  Stop the new civil war, the Democrats versus Republicans, and the media’s play-by-play reporting of the same.  Many times there’s no good purpose for it.

Semi-related links for background and additional information:

http://mediamatters.org/columns/200808260005

http://clivecrook.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/08/hillarys_speech.php

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gP3PidrHLYWPVbvReNhnFAjicf2AD92QDS781

Doesn’t Barack Obama know that Joe Biden is a big mouthed phony?  Can’t he see that Biden is quite full of himself?  That’s not a good quality in a leader.  Both have some time to go in this final stretch of the way too long race to The White House.  There’s a lot of crap out there regarding Mr. Biden, which I’m sure will start flinging full speed on Monday.

For the record, I’m not an Obama fan, but thought he had a better chance without Biden — In other words, I don’t know enough about Obama to become an immediate cheerleader like much of the media.  It doesn’t make sense.  I don’t have anything against him, but I’m not falling for his well delivered speeches.  That’s just fluff.

My vote will most likely be for John McCain, since Mitt Romney dropped out way too soon, or I may vote for Bob Barr — I’m not completely sure.  I want real change, not just the promise of it.  We hear the same promise each race, but don’t see it from the two over-emphasized parties.  It’s just a tug of war.  And once again we’re forced to pick the best of the worst.

Back to the heading — I do think Obama blew his chance to become President by picking Joe Biden.  I thought he was a little smarter than that.  It’s almost comical — Joe Biden is not change, he’s status quo. 

I hear that Delaware residents are happy that Biden got picked to be Obama’s running mate, since it will get him out of their state.  If that’s the popular consensus in Delaware, it’s not a good sign for the rest of the country.

POST ELECTION UPDATE:  Barack Obama won the Presidential Election, but I don’t think Joe Biden helped any — Yet perhaps he might have swayed those who never heard of him.  He was on his best behavior with his big perma-smile.  Now that he’s going to be our Vice President, I hope he does the right thing.  And let’s see this CHANGE they talked about.

Related Links:

http://blogs.usatoday.com/ondeadline/2007/01/biden_on_obama_.html

http://blogs.creativeloafing.com/politicalwhore/2008/08/23/obama-picks-biden/

http://scogginfamily.newsvine.com/_news/2008/08/23/1776991-biden-bad-choice-for-america