President demagogues the issue of intelligence collection
Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ), Chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, responds to President Bush
Monthly Archives: February 2008
How To Watch a Political Debate on TV
I have discovered an excellent way to watch political debates on television.
When anything is going on except a candidate answering a question, mute the sound.
This simple technique let’s you avoid hearing inane questions from moderators who have no clue. They are unable to poison your mind if you do not listen to them.
In no case have I ever been unable to figure out the subject matter by just listening to the answers.
Clinton and Obama’s 2007 Senate Records
Here is an article on DailyKos about the 2007 Senate records of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
This article helps with some perspective on accomplishments and effectiveness.
Terrorist Attack By The Credit Card Companies
The 02/08/2008 edition of Nightly Business Report said that “Credit card companies have begun telling customers their interest rates are going up sharply, even on balances already owed.”
This move, although self defeating to the credit card companies, could have a more damaging impact on our economy than the terrorist attack on 9/11. The impact may even be bigger than that of the bursting housing bubble.
If this actually increased the revenues of the banks, this would sharply curtail credit use within the consumer economy. In fact, there may be so many defaults on credit cards that the banks will only sink deeper into trouble with bad debt write-offs.
As consumers struggle to unwind their credit card debt, the value of recent government action to give out tax rebates will be completely negated. Much of the rebates will be used in attempts to pay down credit card debt.
I don’t have the information to calculate the size of the problem that the banks will be creating. I can only suspect that it will be sizable. If we are lucky, federal regulators and/or legislators will step in to prevent this disaster from occurring.
What’s Right About Barack Obama
Here is the letter that I sent to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette today.
Barack Obama is the clear choice for President.
He has been a community organizer, a lawyer, and a professor of constitutional law. He has held elected office for 12 years.
In his actions, speeches, and books he has shown a wisdom that I have not seen in a Presidential candidate in my 42 years as a voter. He has an equally essential quality in that he can convey that wisdom to the voters in a way that can inspire them to turn ideas into actions.
His management of his multi-million dollar campaign has shown that he has exceptional management skills.
I like Hillary Clinton too, but she has not shown the same level of wisdom as has Barack Obama. I can better explain the pluses and minuses of Bill Clinton’s free trade policies than she can.
After all this time she can still not explain how she allowed herself to be duped by George Bush, not once but twice. The first example was her trusting his assurances that he would not turn the authorization in the Iraqi resolution into an actual war. The second time was when she voted for the resolution that could have been a prelude for him doing the same thing in Iran.
Whatever her reasons for those votes, if she ends up being a Presidential candidate, she had better come up with an explanation that sounds better than John Kerry’s lame, “I voted for the war before I voted against it.”
What Worries Me About Hillary
For me, the most troubling issue about Hillary Clinton is her inability to come up with a good explanation for her initial vote on the Iraq War resolution.
This reminds me of Kerry’s “I voted for the war before I voted against it.” It is a lame excuse, the opposition keeps hitting you with the issue, and yet you cannot come up with anything better. I came up with better for Kerry. You’d think he would have had his staff working full time on better wording.
Her claim that she had assurances from George Bush that he would not do exactly what he ended up doing are not helping her. When most of the rest of us could see his transparent lies, why was she so easily deceived?
In Clinton’s situation, I can also come up with a better excuse for her vote. She should have said, “At the time of the vote we all thought that Hussein might have WMD. I knew that Bush’s assurances that he would not use the resolution to start a war were lies. I was hoping that Hussein would back down before Bush would go completely bonkers. There were no good options to choose at that time. I had to choose the one that I thought would be least bad. If I had known that Hussein did not have WMD, it would have been easy to choose to put the leash on George Bush instead. It turns out that Barack was correct in figuring out that George Bush was a bigger threat than Sadam Hussein. That does not prove that he will always be able to guess right.”
Had she not recently voted on the similar enabling resolution for Bush on Iran, the case above would be easier to believe.
If she cannot come up with an excellent answer that explains her votes with all the time she has had to prepare, how is she going to handle this issue in the general election’s more hostile environment?