10 Million Women Scorned

I think we can all agree

Someonewhocares — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 12:44:42 EDT

This is very alarming. Reguardless of who you support or what you want. Anyone who has ever been involved in a civil rights demonstration sometimes you do not have to do anything wrong to be one of those who get hauled in with a group who was acting up. Correct me if I am wrong.... this has never happened before.
Here is the story those who are intrested in others thoughts please follow the link and read the comments below.

LMFAO OMG REALLY!?!?!?!

Someonewhocares — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 16:02:11 EDT

http://img.timeinc.net/time/daily/2008/0807/spray_on_condom_0731.jpg

Spray-On Condoms: Still a Hard Sell Wednesday, Aug. 13, 2008 By CALLIE LEFEVRE Spray-on condoms Tyne News / WENN Edison had his lightbulb, Ford had his Model T, and Jan Vinzenz Krause has his spray-on condom. Inspired by the mechanics of a drive-through car wash, the German sexual-health educator designed a custom-fitting male contraceptive using liquid latex and some materials from a hardware store. "I felt a little like MacGyver," he says of building the contraption.

List of what not to bring at convention

Someonewhocares — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 15:57:48 EDT

LMAO ok sorry but yeah some of this was duh a given!!
#6 seems odd to me but whatever

Green is good!

Someonewhocares — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:50:18 EDT

Oh yeah woohoo Finally green jobs will boom!!
Anyone know what exactly sort of field you need to have experiance in to get one of these jobs?

1 of the impacts the convention has on Denver

Someonewhocares — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 13:16:27 EDT

Saw this on the local news website thought I would share. If you follow the link and read the comments it is not going over well. This will cut thru the heart of Downtown. link

Hope I do not get banned for this

Someonewhocares — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 12:19:15 EDT

Intresting articl I found.

Some Clinton backers won't go quietly at convention

By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 6 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Still sore from an epic primary battle, some of Hillary Rodham Clinton's supporters aren't buying the unity theme planned for the Democratic National Convention.

REQUIEM FOR A TROLL or TROLL IGNORED

Lincoln Park Dem — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 23:45:44 EDT

Our campaign has successfully united for CHANGE on BARACKOBAMA.COM and other Democratic websites.

The grass roots efforts are expanding all across AMERICA. As we increase our attention to GOTV, Hosting and attending events and phonebanking,the attacks on our nominee have intensified.The intent is to distract and disrupt.

This tactic will not survive our unified decision to ignore. No Response, No Debate....Ignore.

We can do this,

Yes we can.

Join other Party Builder and Obama bloggers now and sign up for this event:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/event/detail/gpg22s

REPOST (MOD PLEASE READ INCASE YOU MISSED)

Someonewhocares — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 17:46:42 EDT

Mr Ortega

I posted a blog earlier please read and respond

Link

Party Builder Bloggers

Lincoln Park Dem — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:41:11 EDT

In the event some of you don't know we have a group of bloggers from this blog that have created a group at the Obama site called PB Bloggers:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/PartyBuilderBloggers

This is what we have been able to do collectively so far:

Average Individual Activity 0

# of Members 78

Events Hosted 958

Events Attended 2,329

Calls made 3,983

Doors Knocked 16

Number of blog posts 2,989

Amount raised $5,130.23

These numbers include all individual and group efforts.

Our Group is within $125 of meeting our goal form donations.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/outreach/view/maingroup/PartyBuilderBloggers

Just wanted to extend an invite to any that have not joined as of yet and send a BIG thank you to all who have helped us!

"This is our time, Our moment."

Yes We Can!

Obama '08 and '12

Mr. Ortega

Someonewhocares — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:05:48 EDT

Ok I am wondering if you could lay out the rules of PB and what standards you must hit to be banned. In the past it has always been a question as to what are the rules and what will and will not get someone banned. Vague statments like "anything used by the gop will not be tolerated" is not good enough. One could argue anyone who does not agree with Obama and his stance on lets pick.... um energy and they say they do not agree then that leaves them open for someone to say that is a gop thing. So please can you lay out some rules???

Oh and another question and I mean no harm but only asking. How many pro Obama people have been banned for their insults? Also what of those dems who have worked hard to elect dems in other areas of goverment.... are they no longer needed here?
Why can people be banned for speaking about Obama but other dems can be slammed?

Making a difference

Lincoln Park Dem — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 11:34:32 EDT

As some may know, we have a group of bloggers on the Obama site. We are really making a difference there.

Our stats:

Party Builder Bloggers is making a difference together5Activity IndexMore Details Party Builder Bloggers STATSAll 7 Days 30 Days Average Individual Activity 0# of Members 77Events Hosted 952 20 56 Events Attended 2,291 53 312 Calls made 0 0 0 Doors Knocked 12 12 12 Number of blog posts 2,855 182 182 Amount raised $5,130.23 $286.22 $1,067.91

Please join us:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/PartyBuilderBloggers

Clinton’s supporters petition to have her name on the ballot at the National Convention

Bob — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:28:37 EDT

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton says her defeating Barack Obama at a contested Democratic National Convention “is not going to happen” but she is looking for a way for her delegates to vent before getting behind the future nominee ahead of the November election.

Clinton, who battled Obama for 18 months but came up shy of the delegate votes needed to capture the nomination, told a mostly female group of backers at a California fundraiser last week that she wants unity in the party, but she is asked every day whether she will put her name on the ballot.

Clinton said that her delegates want to have a role and feel that their “legitimacy is validated,” before the group moves forward to back Obama.

“I happen to believe that we will come out stronger if people feel that their voices were heard and their views respected. I think that is a very big part of how we actually come out unified,” Clinton, D-N.Y., said to applause.

“Because I know from just what I’m hearing, that there’s incredible pent-up desire. And I think that people want to feel like, ‘OK, it’s a catharsis, we’re here, we did it, and then everybody get behind Senator Obama.’ That is what most people believe is the best way to go,” she said.

“Doesn’t work that way,” shouted one supporter. The video clip of her remarks was posted on YouTube accompanied by the one-word remark, PUMA, an acronym for a group of Clinton supporters who have not committed to Obama. PUMA stands for “Party Unity My Aâ€".”

Click here to see the YouTube video of Clinton.

In the video, Clinton, who endorsed Obama on June 7 after the final Democratic primary, said that she is fully behind Obama and actually has offered more help to him than other candidates have done for other nominees in previous years.

“I think it’s fair to say if you look at recent history, I have moved more quickly and done more on behalf of my opponent than comparable candidates have. And most of them didn’t endorse until the convention,” she said, naming Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy, former California Gov. Jerry Brown and former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart, all past presidential candidates who lost the party nomination.

Obama spokesman Bill Burton nothing has been decided in terms of the role of Clinton’s delegates. He said Democrats remain united, despite the hard-fought battle between Clinton and Obama.

The Democratic convention is being held in Denver on Aug. 25-28, with the first three nights’ activities taking place at the 21,000-seat Pepsi Center. Obama is expected to accept the nomination at Invesco Field at Mile High, a 75,000-seat stadium where the Denver Broncos play. Convention planners said the venue would demonstrate the massive support Obama commands.

“You don’t have to be a delegate or party insider to witness this historic moment firsthand,” Democratic National Convention Committee CEO Leah Daughtry said, announcing the plans for credentials.

Ticket selection was designed “to showcase the gains the party has made in the West,” she said. Nearly two-thirds of the tickets will go to residents of the West and Southwest, including Colorado, where Democrats have made inroads in recent elections.

But several of Clinton’s supporters are insistent that the former first lady get a vote on the convention floor. One self-identified delegate at the California fundraiser said a petition had been formed to put Clinton’s name on the ballot.

Clinton did not oppose that idea, but said it won’t change the outcome.

“I have made it very clear that I am supporting Senator Obama and we’re working cooperatively on a lot of different matters, but I think that delegates can decide to do this on their own. They don’t need permission. They can decide under the rules of the DNC, and so I think it would be better if we had a plan that actually we put in place and everybody knew what it was and then we executed it because I just think that would go more smoothly,” she said.

Former Clinton campaign manager and Howard Wolfson also obliquely acknowledged Thursday that relations between Clinton’s and Obama’s delegates aren’t all roses and sunshine.

“You know the these two people ran against each other for 18 months there were some moments of … friction as you might imagine,” he said, stressing that Clinton is doing her part to contribute to Obama’s election.

“If you have some people that are concerned that they are not getting the respect that they are looking for, that the party not quite yet unified, what is the way to bring those people back into the party to make sure that they are enthusiastically supporting Senator Obama by the time the November election comes around? And one possible way of doing that is to have roll call that has Senator Clinton’s name placed in nomination, that is one option. There are other options and I think that the important thing is that this is going to get decided between Senator Clinton and Senator Obama in a way that I think both can agree unifies the party and bring people together,” he said.

Democratic strategist Bob Beckel added that a vote for Clinton would help relieve some of the tension between the Obama and Clinton delegates.

“They can’t stop them if they want to do it. They cast their vote for Hillary Clinton and before the final roll call is finished they are going to go back through and make it unanimous by state. That’s one way I think to let a little bit of the pressure out of this pressure cooker, but it’s there. I mean it’s bound to be. You can’t have a convention with 1,800 delegates out of 4,400 be for somebody else and not expect there is still going to be some latent animosity,” Beckel said.

Clinton is expected to deliver a prime-time address to delegates on Aug. 26, the second night of the gathering. Typically the vice presidential nominee delivers the address on the third night of the convention.

Action Alert

Lincoln Park Dem — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 12:06:39 EDT

Please see following:

Subj: FW: Voting Rights
From: Heather Smith, Rock the VoteDear Rock the Vote staff,I was outraged when I found out the other day that the Department of Veterans Affairs has forbidden voter registration drives in its hospitals, rehab centers and other facilities.

This ban hurts thousands of young veterans who have been injured while fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. We should be helping our veterans register and vote, not making it more difficult.

Last week, the Senate introduced a bill to overturn the ban and allow states to require V.A. hospitals to offer voter registration to their clients.

Will you join me and ask your Senator to co-sponsor the “Veteran Voting Support Act”?

http://action.rockthevote.com/site/Advocacy?pagename=homepage&id=107

Banning the most basic act of democracy from Americans who have fought for our democracy just doesn’t make any sense. We need to stand up for our veterans--especially for the thousands of young veterans who are eligible to vote in their first presidential election.

Please contact your senators today.

Sincerely,

Heather Smith

Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae Update

Bob — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 13:56:52 EDT

As the one-year anniversary of the housing and credit crunch approaches, investors in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have nothing to celebrate. They won’t see an end to the losses at these mortgage finance giants until after next year.

Moreover, a report from the regulator of the two mortgage finance giants gives embarrassing new detail on how Fannie (FNM: 12.25, +0.42, +3.55%) and Freddie (FRE: 7.94, +0.42, +5.58%) were mindlessly gunning the securitization engines well after the housing bubble had burst and Wall Street backed off.

Freddie Mac will report its second-quarter financial results Wednesday. Fannie Mae will release its results on Friday. Freddie Mac’s shares are down 88% this year, while Fannie’s shares have dropped 83%. More losses and writedowns for the two are likely on the way.

The Office of Housing Enterprise and Oversight says in a new report that the two combined own about $217 bn in securities minted by Wall Street firms that are backed by the shakiest home mortgages dating to 2004 and 2005, the height of the housing bubble.

The mortgages here are subprime and Alt-A loans, just a notch above subprime. To the extent that Wall Street firms book fair value losses on this pool, “Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac may have to do so as well,” OFHEO says.

As delinquencies and defaults on subprime loans continue, and increasingly even prime loans bellyflop, Fannie and Freddie will continue to book losses into 2009, says Credit Suisse. Some analysts say they may lose an additional $24 bn or more.

This should alarm both taxpayers and investors across the country.

Elected officials enacted a $300 bn housing bailout bill that gives these two carte blanche without any statutory limits on their colossal $5.3 tn book of business (Lehman Bros says the two have another $3.3 tn in hedges, among other items, off the balance sheet). The two have reported more than $11 bn in pre-tax losses over the last three quarters and have a history of accounting misdeeds (on a fair value basis, Fannie incurred a loss of $13.3 bn, Freddie, $24.7 bn, OFHEO says).

The housing rescue now lets the government inject tens of billions of taxpayer dollars into these two publicly traded companies, who clearly have failed in their fiduciary responsibilities. The government can now use tax dollars to buy unlimited equity stakes in the companies and their bonds if needed.

The thinking is, the Treasury will simply mint more debt and use that resulting capital to inject more liquidity into Fannie and Freddie, despite their history of accounting misdeeds, losses, misstatements and repeated dilutive equity raises that prove that these two companies do not know what they are doing. Also, the two can now borrow at the Federal Reserve.

Fear is now rampant that if the rescue doesn’t work, the US government must spend more than what the Congress said it would cost to bolster Fannie and Freddie, $25 bn, a sum it cooked up in order to sell the $300 bn housing bailout bill.

Remember, the government’s estimate of the cost to taxpayers for the S&L crisis rose from an initial $50 bn to more than $124.6 bn (not inflation adjusted).

More importantly, Congress spitballed that $25 bn number even though just this past month it sent in bureaucrats from the Federal Reserve and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to go find out what the heck is really sitting on Fannie and Freddie’s books, as it clearly doesn’t believe the management at these two levered up examples of crony capitalism.

The fear is, too, that the government may have to swallow these two obesities, causing the US dollar to plunge in anticipation of the need to mint more dollars, creating more inflation (not to mention the $99 tn in unfunded liabilities at Social Security and Medicare, according to Fed stats).

In effect, US taxpayers have been loaded into the backseat of Congress’s spaceship pointed directly at the center of the sun.

Because the market believes the US government has given Fannie and Freddie an “implicit guarantee”of their debt, for years both have used that backing to execute a sweet carry trade, where they can borrow money much more cheaply than banks and then turn around and use that money to buy things such as higher-yielding mortgage-backed securities from lenders, in turn injecting liquidity into the lending system to make more loans. The two also sell guarantees against defaults on loans for a fee.

For years, Wall Street believed their obligations were “nearly as good as Treasurys themselves,” notes Dennis Gartman of The Gartman Letter. Indeed, their securities traded as if the government backed them, and US government debt traded as if the government did not back them.

Fannie Mae was born in 1938 as part of FDR’s New Deal to get the country out of the Great Depression and provide home ownership. Back then, millions of Americans were struggling to buy homes, and also faced foreclosures, as banks weren’t lending and mortgage money had dried up.

For years Fannie sat on the government’s books, helping to expand the real estate industry. In 1968, the LBJ administration, worried about the effect of the Vietnam War on the federal budget, moved Fannie Mae off the government’s books, and Fannie became a publicly traded company.

When the savings-and-loan industry wanted its own mortgage financing creature to play with beginning in 1968, Congress obliged and in 1970 Freddie Mac was born. The two quasi-socialist mortgage finance giants then became to the US economy what off-balance sheet vehicles were to Enron, Gartman says.

When Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were limited in the dollar amount of mortgages they could buy and securitize, to $417,000, in the ‘90s, Wall Street stepped in to securitize these loans.

Wall Street then manufactured all sorts of subprime paper, paid the credit ratings agencies to get rosy ratings, and then sold this drunken daisy chain of paper to all sorts of unwitting investors from here to the Arctic Circle, now sitting as landfill in portfolios run by pension funds, hedge funds and local governments.

Wall Street firms then kept a sizable slug of this bad paper off their balance sheets to keep financial results rosy, and then wrote themselves sweet bonus checks off the goosed-up numbers.

So Wall Street, with the help of Fannie and Freddie, shot these risky loans into the ether, thus breaking the bond between the overseer, meaning the lender, and the borrower. Why care about monitoring a borrower who has no skin in the game with a zero-down mortgage when you’ve entirely offloaded that loan as a security?

As far back as 1987 the Financial Accounting Standards Board warned there was no adequate way to value these derivatives, and now Frankenstein derivatives are sluicing financial poison through the system.

Then Fannie and Freddie itself started buying Wall Street’s mortgage backed securities, securities backed by zombie loans given by banks such as Countrywide Financial (CFC), which already had pointed its conveyor belt of bad loans at Wall Street.

When the credit markets seized up in 2007, Wall Street stopped doing much of these securitization deals as its recycling machine for these cut and paste jobs had sand thrown in its gears.

But as Wall Street stepped back, check out how Fannie and Freddie stepped in big time.

OFHEO says in its recent report that while the volume of single-family mortgatges securitized in 2007 fell by 8% to $1.9 tn, as the number of single family mortgages originated declined, “Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s combined share of MBS [mortgage-backed securities] issuance rose substantially to 61.6% from 46.7% in 2006.”

Indeed, OFHEO says Fannie and Freddie “increased their MBS issuance by nearly one-third in 2007 as competition” from Wall Street “virtually ceased in the second half of the year,” though OFHEO says the two started to curtail their purchases of securities backed by shoddy loans. Too little too late.

Now teetering atop Fannie’s and Freddie’s painfully razor thin $54 bn in net worth is a pyramid of $5.3 tn in debt that is nearly half the size of the US gross domestic product. The two have much higher leverage ratios than banks or hedge funds, but lower borrowing costs due to their implicit government backing. The two whittled down their capital cushions after they gunned their lobbying engines on Capitol Hill, showering elected officials with money.

JPMorgan Chase (JPM: 41.10, +0.96, +2.39%) or Bank of America (BAC: 33.69, +1.07, +3.28%), for example, have almost as much bank-level capital as these two “combined supporting one fifth of the commitments,” says the research website The Institutional Risk Analyst, published by Lord, Whalen LLC.

So the fear is that, as mortgages belly flop right and left and an increasing number of homes go into foreclosure, the two are insolvent. Former Fed official William Poole has said as much of Freddie Mac.

But instead of reining in their colossal, outsized portfolios which has caused such danger to taxpayers, the new housing rescue legislation went in the opposite direction. It would increase the statutory limit on the national debt by $800 bn, to $10.6 tn, as the two would now get to buy and back jumbo loans worth $625,000.

And as economist Edward Yardeni points out (his reports are a must-read), both “have been scrambling to plug all the holes in their huge mortgage portfolios.” Citing the Wall Street Journal, Yardeni notes that at the end of last year, the two “started guaranteeing payments on loans that back mortgage securities held by others to delay recognizing losses on some delinquent loans.”

Yardeni adds that “earlier this year, in their most shocking (desperate) tactic to reduce losses, Fan and Fred started making loans of up to $15,000 to people who have fallen behind on their mortgage payments.”

Here are the stink bombs, potholes and steam pipes bursting in these two reckless publicly traded companies:

*Both have a total of a microscopicâ€"did you see it, did you catch it?â€"$54bn in net worth, generally assets minus liabilities (don’t listen to the $81 bn figure tossed around for their total capital, that’s a pro forma fake number that doesn’t include certain losses).

*Teetering atop that razor thin wedge is a pyramid of $5.3 tn in debt.

*One stink bomb is the total of $260 bn in securitized assets backed by subprime and Alt-A loans, loans which sit in between subprime and prime. Those sums dwarf their capital positions.

*Freddie has $156.8 bn in level three assets, those illiquid securities it can’t get a pricetag on because no one wants them now. Remember, under US accounting rules, it gets to assign its own values to these assets, they could be worth more, they could be worth less.

*Fannie has $56.1 bn in level three assets, or about a seventh of its fair valued assets.

*Fannie and Freddie have combined debts of $1.59 tn, borrowings they made merely to operate their businesses. Again, that’s against just $54 bn in total net worth. Their guaranteed liabilities were 29 times their net worth at the end of the first quarter.

*They each have $2.25 bn pipelines into the Treasury, which the government now wants to expand.

*Forty years ago, when they went public, Fannie had debt of about $15 bn. Do the math against Fannie’s $804 bn in liabilities today, and the pipelines should be about $120 bn each.

Still believe that $25 bn figure Congress is selling you?

Almost $800

Lincoln Park Dem — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 09:39:30 EDT

As many of you know, there are a group of Party Builder Bloggers that also blog at the Obama site. We have grown to a group of almost 80 bloggers.

Yesterday was Obama's Birthday. We raised almost $800 on our Obama site, and most of it was raised yesterday. That's Party Building you can take to the bank!

A Big 'Thank You" to all that helped raise money. It is never too late to donate or join us on our blog :-)

http://my.barackobama.com/page/group/PartyBuilderBloggers

Take It Back!

Lincoln Park Dem — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:46:38 EDT

"This spirit of Woody Guthrie lives on!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMSsm_B8iaE

I loved this video. It says it all.

Enjoy!

Obama '08"

I didn't consider the song to be country but I guess it leans that way.
Hope you'll give it a listen and if you dig, pass it on to friends...

The highest post-World War II budget deficit

Bob — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:36:43 EDT

The budget office predicts the economy will grow at a rate of 1.6 percent this year and will rebound to a 2.2 percent growth rate next year. That's a half percentage point more than predicted but also the widely cited "blue chip" consensus of leading economists. The administration also sees inflation averaging 3.8 percent this year, but easing to 2.3 percent next year â€" better than the 3.0 percent seen by the blue chip panel.

"The nation's economy has continued to expand and remains fundamentally resilient," said the budget office report.

Senior administration officials downplayed the impact of the number, with one noting that as a percentage of the U.S. gross domestic product, the deficit projection would be roughly 3 percent to 4 percent.

Another senior administration official said "a lot can happen" in 18 months that could worsen or improve the outlook, such as an improved economy leading to better tax returns, or increased spending under a new administration. The official specifically warned about the impact a Democrats.

"Democrats could blow the doors off spending and drive the deficit even higher," the official said.

Congressional Democratic leaders took aim at the administration â€" and the Republican candidate for the next administration â€" for what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid called misguided priorities.

"The large budget deficit is a symptom of the many serious problems that Bush-McCain Republicans refuse to address. Rather than continuing the flawed policies that produced this result, Democrats believe we must change course," Reid, D-Nev., said.

Among the problems Reid said Republicans neglected were renewable energy, health care reform, and refocusing military efforts on Afghanistan. "Until we deal with these underlying problems, our budget deficits and the squeeze on Americas families will only get worse."

Likewise, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi criticized what she called unrestrained spending.

"President Bush has mortgaged our future with record deficit spending on the wrong priorities. An unnecessary and extraordinarily costly war in Iraq has turned record surpluses into record deficits. Meanwhile, our economy is in a severe economic slump as a result of this President’s mismanagement," she said.

White House officials said the increase from February's $407 billion projection for the coming year is due largely to a worse economy as well as higher-than-expected costs from the $168 billion economic stimulus package passed by Congress earlier this year.

The highest post-World War II budget deficit, in terms of a portion of the GDP, was in 1983 when it was 6 percent of the national economy. The record high-dollar mark to date was in 2004, when the deficit reached $413 billion.

The new figure actually underestimates the deficit, since it leaves out about $80 billion in war costs. In a break from tradition â€" and in violation of new mandates from Congress â€" the White House did not include its full estimate of war costs.

White House press secretary Dana Perino had no comment on the new outlook figure. But she told reporters that the White House and lawmakers acknowledged months ago that they were going to increase the deficit by approving a short-term boost for the slumping economy.

"Both parties recognized that the deficit would increase, and that that was going to be the price that we pay," Perino said.

Officials said revenues are holding up better than officials hoped for the current year: With costs running about $10 billion lower than expected, the budget deficit is expected to be less than $400 billion at the end of the fiscal year this September.

The deficit for 2007 totaled $161.5 billion, which represented the lowest amount of red ink since an imbalance of $159 billion in 2002. The 2002 performance marked the first budget deficit after four consecutive years of budget surpluses.

That stretch of budget surpluses represented a period when the country's finances had been bolstered by a 10-year period of uninterrupted economic growth, the longest period of expansion in U.S. history.

In his first year in office, helped considerably by projections of continuing surpluses, Bush drove through a 10-year, $1.3 trillion package of tax cuts.

However, the country fell into a recession in March 2001 and government spending to fight the war on terrorism contributed to pushing the deficit to a record in dollar terms in 2004.

House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt, D-S.C., said the deficit projection confirms "the dismal legacy of the Bush administration: under its policies, the largest surpluses in history have been converted into the largest deficits in history."

President Bush approved the execution of an Army private

Bob — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 19:23:59 EDT

Bush signed the paperwork on Monday from the Oval Office, said the officials, who agreed to reveal his decision only on grounds of anonymity. They said he approved the military's request to execute Ronald A. Gray, now 42. Gray was convicted in connection with a spree of four murders and eight rapes in the Fayetteville, N.C., area over eight months in the late 1980s while stationed at Fort Bragg.

U.S. military personnel cannot be executed unless the president approves it. Gray has been on death row since 1988.

Old and New

Someonewhocares — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:16:45 EDT

question I have asked before.
Was the party this torn and Bitter back in the election season with Reagan?
Older dems who were around then. Did you forgive reagan dems?
Newer and older dems.... does this seem like history repeating itself in a way? If so what is it we did not learn that we should have?

Also how many Reagan dems will not be voting Obama?

Sen. McCain off his rocker II

Bob — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 12:43:47 EDT

John McCain said rival Barack Obama does not understand what’s at stake in the Mideast a and the world and therefore chose to call for a withdrawal in Iraq based on political expediency and not conditions on the ground.

The presumptive Republican presidential nominee said he does not doubt Obama’s patriotism, but he does question his actions in calling for a troop withdrawal in March 2007.

“If Senator Obama had had his way, we’d have been out last March and we’d been out in defeat and chaos, and probably had to come back again because of Iranian influence,” McCain said in an interview on ABC’s “This Week,” taped at his home in Sedona, Ariz.

“He was wrong, I was right,” McCain said, noting that he chose to support the surge of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops last spring that has now been widely credited with reducing violence in Iraq by 80 percent.

McCain said Obama made a decision on the surge based on whether it was the best way to appeal to the Democratic Party base.

“I am saying that he made the decision, which was political, in order to help him get the nomination of his party,” he said.

Obama originally opposed the war in Iraq, which began in March 2003. He said he still does not support the surge, saying if his plan had been enacted to withdraw troops, conditions on the ground also would be very different right now.

Obama says if he is president he will initiate a withdrawal over the first 16 months of his administration. Visiting Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, the Palestinian territories and three European nations, Obama said he was told by Iraqi leaders that nation does not want an open-ended presence of U.S. combat forces and now is an appropriate time to start planning for a reorganization of troops in Iraq. He also noted that the war costs about $10 billion a month, which could be used to shore up the U.S. economy.

McCain criticized that timeline even though he acknowledged Friday that that 16 months is “a pretty good timetable.” However, he repeated Sunday that “anything is a good timetable” if it is based on conditions on the ground.

“I like six months, three months, two months. I like yesterday. I like yesterday, OK? That seems really good to me. But the fact is, the conditions on the ground have not dictated it,” he said.

McCain said the Democratic presidential candidate does not understand the purpose of the surge or the war itself.

“He does not understand, and did not understand, and still doesn’t understand that the surge was the vital strategy in us not having to lose a war. Chaos, genocide, increased influence of Iranians in the region, the consequences of failure would have been severe, and now the benefits are enormous,” McCain said.

“Saddam Hussein … imposed a threat to the United States of America and our security. And the Oil for Food scandal, the $12 billion he was skimming, the fact that he had said that he’d had in operation and he wanted to have weapons of mass destruction, the fact that this society that he ruled in such a brutal fashion was really awful, and he did pose a long-term threat to the security of the United States of America,” he said.