Antoher Liberal Conundrum...

Barack Obama was swept into the Presidency by (the promise of) a wave of change. He was able to build excitement throughout the nation for a complete change of course from the preceding 8 years of sheer hell. (By the way, please disregard the first 6.5 years of unchecked real estate appreciation.) So, change is what the people want and change is what he will deliver.

He even convinced voters in NC to get on board that train of change. All good. In fact, record numbers of new voters registered including people who for one reason or another decided not to vote in previous elections (uh-oh.) These people do apparently watch a lot of television.

They voted along party lines, thinking that all democrats represent change, and all republicans represent a failed system.

You know who ended up in our Governor's seat? A candidate who has been in the capitol for 22 years! Who lost? A maverick Mayor from Charlotte who would have shaken up the legislature, fought for lower taxes, and directed some much needed attention to the western part of the state.

They weren't for change after all.

And that's another liberal conundrum.

Auto industry bailout

Well here is the first battle of our next President's term. Yes, I know his term hasn't officially started yet...not sure if he knows that.

The US auto industry, which has been pillaged for decades by union slimeballs, is finally almost out of cash. They had a good run, in fact, during the 1990's era of cheap gas who didn't have an SUV? In fact, I still have a Suburban, one of the kings of the guzzlers. That's a long story in itself. Suffice it to say it was poor judgement along with poor timing. We drive about 50 miles a week in it. But let's separate the car business from the truck business.

The truck lines have kept Ford and GM afloat for years. It's the car lines that are the problem. They've been getting hammered by the foreign versions which boast more appealing design, more thorough engineering, more efficient performance, and frankly more solid build quality and reliability.

In most businesses you either improve your product, cut your costs, or go out of business. The threat of going out of business is what forces the first 2 options. Why should the auto companies be immune to that possibility?

I know the impact such companies have on affiliated businesses and jobs. But I believe those will not be greatly affected. Why? Because foreign companies are making their cars here now! I see this as an opportunity for the foreign manufacturers to have access to all of those side industries and labor.

Where will this have the most impact? In Michigan of course and upon the union members who are sucking at the teat of the auto companies. Who supports the unions? President-elect Obama.

I smell trouble brewing.

Let the car companies go bankrupt. Let the unions fizzle. Then let new companies rise from the ashes. Then a new crop of workers who appreciate their jobs and hopefully don't want to drive their companies into the ground will arise.

Don't reward poor performance and corruption at the taxpayers expense!

Things a liberal robot might think

I am a loyal and devoted liberal Democrat.
I believe Republicans are bad and their policies are evil.
I believe Republicans are narrow-minded fascists.
I do not agree with their choices.
Colin Powell is a Republican.
And Colin Powell endorses Obama.
So Colin Powell’s choice must be bad.
But I think Obama is a good choice and I am a liberal Democrat.
Therefore do I agree with a conservative Republican?
Illogical, illogical, must compute!

Vote Your Conscience, but get all the facts first

This column by Dr Krauthammer is a convincing argument for McCain. I noticed he didn't mention anything about Gov Palin though.

McCain for President, Part II

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 31, 2008; A19


Last week I made the open-and-shut case for John McCain: In a dangerous world entering an era of uncontrolled nuclear proliferation, the choice between the most prepared foreign policy candidate in memory vs. a novice with zero experience and the wobbliest one-world instincts is not a close call.

But it's all about economics and kitchen-table issues, we are told. Okay. Start with economics.

Neither candidate has particularly deep economic knowledge or finely honed economic instincts. Neither has any clear idea exactly what to do in the current financial meltdown. Hell, neither does anyone else, including the best economic minds in the world, from Henry Paulson to the head of the European Central Bank. Yet they have muddled through with some success.

Both McCain and Barack Obama have assembled fine economic teams that may differ on the details of their plans but have reasonable approaches to managing the crisis. So forget the hype. Neither candidate has an advantage on this issue.

On other domestic issues, McCain is just the kind of moderate conservative that the Washington/media establishment once loved -- the champion of myriad conservative heresies that made him a burr in the side of congressional Republicans and George W. Bush. But now that he is standing in the way of an audacity-of-hope Democratic restoration, erstwhile friends recoil from McCain on the pretense that he has suddenly become right wing.

Self-serving rubbish. McCain is who he always was. Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment -- a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation.

An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.

Obama, on the other hand, talks less and less about bipartisanship, his calling card during his earlier messianic stage. He does not need to. If he wins, he will have large Democratic majorities in both houses. And unlike Clinton in 1992, Obama is no centrist.

What will you get?

(1) Card check, meaning the abolition of the secret ballot in the certification of unions in the workplace. Large men will come to your house at night and ask you to sign a card supporting a union. You will sign.

(2) The so-called Fairness Doctrine -- a project of Nancy Pelosi and leading Democratic senators -- a Hugo Chávez-style travesty designed to abolish conservative talk radio.

(3) Judges who go beyond even the constitutional creativity we expect from Democratic appointees. Judges chosen according to Obama's publicly declared criterion: "empathy" for the "poor or African American or gay or disabled or old" -- in a legal system historically predicated on the idea of justice entirely blind to one's station in life.

(4) An unprecedented expansion of government power. Yes, I know. It has already happened. A conservative government has already partially nationalized the mortgage industry, the insurance industry and nine of the largest U.S. banks.

This is all generally swallowed because everyone understands that the current crisis demands extraordinary measures. The difference is that conservatives are instinctively inclined to make such measures temporary. Whereas an Obama-Pelosi-Reid-Barney Frank administration will find irresistible the temptation to use the tools inherited -- $700 billion of largely uncontrolled spending -- as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake the American economy and social compact.

This is not socialism. This is not the end of the world. It would, however, be a decidedly leftward move on the order of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. The alternative is a McCain administration with a moderate conservative presiding over a divided government and generally inclined to resist a European social-democratic model of economic and social regulation featuring, for example, wealth-redistributing growth-killing marginal tax rates.

The national security choice in this election is no contest. The domestic policy choice is more equivocal because it is ideological. McCain is the quintessential center-right candidate. Yet the quintessential center-right country is poised to reject him. The hunger for anti-Republican catharsis and the blinding promise of Obamian hope are simply too strong. The reckoning comes in the morning.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

How often did Obama vote with Bush?

Obama's attack ads trumpet that McCain voted with Bush like 90% of the time (or more.)

Well Mr. High and Mighty voted with 41% of the time and with his party 96%. So much for being a force for change.

41% of the time Obama voted with Bush.

McCain bucked his party 19% of the time (nine senators bucked their party more) while Obama bucked his party only 4% of the time. That is, McCain was more than four times more likely to stand up to his party (and their political pressure) than Obama.

Also note that Obama didn't vote 228 of the 568 times (40.1%) he could have voted for during his total time in the senate.

http://www.cqpolitics.com/cq-assets/cqmu... (party/Bush unity)

http://www.votesmart.org/voting_category... (missed votes)

Warning from the Mecklenburg GOP

Suggestion

ALERT

As Friday evening is Halloween, and there is usually much mischief, please take down your campaign signs (especially the McCain/Palin signs) for the evening and put them back up Saturday morning.

This may help save some of our signs and therefore some money.

Economy's Silent and Heavy Toll on Children

Homeless Rates Among Children on the Rise
By JUSTIN ROOD
October 27, 2008—
In once-booming Northern Virginia suburbs, children who never had to worry about having a roof over their head don't know where they will sleep tonight.
In Cincinnati , newly-homeless families are splitting their children up among relatives because they can't find shelter together, much less feed everyone.
In Las Vegas , sons and daughters of the city's housekeepers and kitchen workers -- already living on the margin of the American economy increasingly rely on "weekend food bags" from their school in order to feed themselves from Friday afternoon to Monday morning, when they can eat a subsidized school breakfast.
Welcome to the economic crisis for thousands of Americans too young to have a mortgage, a retirement account, or the right to vote.
"Normally we would get a few calls now, our phones are ringing all day long," says Kathi Sheffel, coordinator for homeless services for Fairfax County Public Schools.
In Fairfax as in many other school areas, homelessness among students is up about 25 percent from last year and last year's figures were a sad increase from the year before, according to First Focus, a Washington, D.C.-based nonpartisan group which pushes to improve public policies that affect children. The group is conducting its second annual survey on homelessness among students.
"We now have families that are more middle-class, that have run into issues they didn't expect and have become homeless," explains Fairfax 's Sheffel. Some families lost their home after defaulting on a home loan or a parent lost a job, she says, but many became homeless because the home they rented was foreclosed upon when their landlord didn't pay the mortgage.
When children lose a home, their health and studies suffer. "Kids in greater number are coming to school who probably haven't eaten breakfast. Who don't have access to a washer and a dryer. Who live with fear," explains Karen Fessler, a school official in Cincinnati , Ohio . "How important is a long division problem when they don't know where they're going to sleep tonight?"
The New Homeless
In Cincinnati , homelessness among students is also up more than 25 percent from last year, according to Fessler, the homeless education liaison for the city's schools. Families are having to split up to survive, she explains.
"It reminds me of stories my mom told me about the Depression," says Fessler. "People with three, four, five children are having to farm their children out" because it is financially or logistically impossible to stay together, she says.
The new homeless in Cincinnati , says Fessler, aren't from the ranks of the chronically poor, but are families whose tenuous livelihoods are being crushed by the fallout of the economic crisis.
"We're seeing that more families who were living on the edge, paycheck to paycheck, who can't make it anymore," she says. "Families who were just barely hanging on, now. . . can't hold it together."
"It's alarming," says Phillip Lovell, a policy expert at First Focus, discussing how the economic meltdown is hitting kids. But just as alarming, he says, is that no one is talking about the plight of children when they talk about the troubled economy.
"You'll hear next to nothing from most politicians about how this is effecting kids and what they're going to do about it," says Lovell.
In Las Vegas , many of the 600 children who attend Whitney Elementary call home the "daily-weekly-monthly" hotels that ring its small campus -- including the massive Sportsman's Royal Manor, whose medieval-themed architecture led the schoolchildren to call it "The Castle."
Lunchtime at Whitney is where you can see the real effects of the economic crisis, says school counselor Vicki Bustos. At Whitney, 85 percent of her students now qualify for a free or reduced-price meal.
"It's tremendously worse we can see the hunger in the lunchroom," Bustos says. "There's less food for them at home now. For a lot of them, lunch is their only meal."
The foreclosure crisis has battered Las Vegas , and the economic meltdown it triggered has kept the Strip in the worst business slump it's seen in at least a quarter century. That means fewer jobs for the parents of Whitney's Elementary's students, says Bustos. Some leave town. Others double-up in other families' apartments. For most, resources to feed, clothe and care for their sons and daughters is stretched to breaking.
Weekend Food Bags
Three years ago, Whitney officials realized many students had no food to eat over the weekend -- in fact, were taking ketchup packets home from the school cafeteria to eat for dinner. Rounding up donations from local businesses, they started putting together "weekend food bags" of pop-top canned goods, Slim Jims, and other food that needs no preparation, since most of the families' short-term apartments have no kitchens.
Last year, says Bustos, they handed out 120 or so bags each week. This year, they're up to 161 a week, and expect to be giving out 250 per week by Christmas.
Of course, the economic downturn also hits those trying to stave off its impact. While many of Whitney Elementary's programs rely on private donations, the Clark County, Nev. school district is worried its tax-funded homeless aid programs will face cuts soon.
In Cincinnati , the nonprofit which supports the school system's homeless services has struggled to raise money to meet the students' needs.
That frustrates youth advocates, who see hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars going to bail out financial giants, while children are suffering.
"The bailout and everything how is it really going to cycle back down to the individual person?" asks Fessler in Cincinnati . "When are we going to see the impact of that on an individual, human being level?"
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