big on love, tolerance, and the human potential
McCain said in two different newspapers that he bought his daughter Meghan McCain a Toyota Prius. In the NYTimes he insisted, “I ought to know the name of it; I paid for it.”
On WXYZ-TV Sunday John McCain confessed “…actually she bought it, I believe, herself.”
Lying. It’s the battery, stupid.
The Unregulated Age of Gilt,
Thanks and Good Bye.
You too John McCain and your sidekick Phil Gramm
I’ve had a few Wall Street or Eurodollar projects over the years. One involved ex-Foreign Sec of USSR at $250m with Shell Oil and other players. I noticed a specialists framework even if super-rich or at the top, a very aggressive crowd of often bright but narrowly focused dealmakers. All the civil behavior was there, charm at times though usually typical bullies. In the main, goals of investment sector players seem almost entirely acquisition and prize driven – an extremely potent drug and not well regulated.
The deregulation days of the last 30 years has been a too-fun sandbox, many yachts and island cabins, many women taken, but not-so-much is left in our communities, on the streets; this ended at LBJ. Now the Street will join Government as scorned and societally inept leaving global states and larger banks, a few great firms and oligarchs too, to flex their muscle.
Will the real Reagan Era finally be understood?
Wall Street Crisis Culmination Of 28 Years Of Deregulation.
No one cog in the federal government’s machine of financial regulation let down the country by failing to prevent the latest shakeout on Wall Street. The entire system did.
“They just haven’t done a particularly good job,” said James Barth, a senior finance fellow at the Milken Institute, a nonpartisan research group based in Los Angeles.
“None was willing to end the financial revelry.”
I think we’ll see a long period of consolidating powers as many of the loose and libertine are swatted down or reigned in. At the end, the shape of world powers will be different. It’s likely I think this period will be writ as the poor legacy of Bush, yet it’s a culture that done it not one self-aggrandizing crowd. The group we’ll see next, maybe with relief, I heard one pundit say today, is All The King’s Horses and All The King’s Men.
As time goes toward the mid-term, I think the USA will accept a cooperating and invigorating role in the global holonomy – groups of stable vector bundles 🙂 – as city by city revises its economy and firms weave true value. The silver lining of the so-called Crash of 2008 is that the neocon revivalists are dead in the water, and good riddance.
Plain language indictment of Wall Street here at Asia Times.
In Mao’s day, Party officials were forced to work in the fields as if to force empathy into the leadership classes. Imagine! Suits in the ghetto before their next promotion! It’s empathy that’s needed in leadership on all levels. There’s no doubt this could re-start and re-define an entirely new era of Trickle-Down Economics.
In getting, get understanding.
For me, I wanted to build a balanced person, able across disciplines, with a broad sense of true wealth. I was struck by Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long. There will be many unemployed leverage and trade pro’s learning to do a few more things too.
A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
What if they gave a civilization and nobody came?
There is nothing complicated about finance.
It is based on old people lending to young people. Young people invest in homes and businesses; aging people save to acquire assets on which to retire. The new generation supports the old one, and retirement systems simply apportion rights to income between the generations. Never before in human history, though, has a new generation simply failed to appear.
Palin Insensitive. Palin Incompetent. Palin Incapable.
Sarah Palin’s Alaska doesn’t produce enough heating fuel, gasoline, diesel and aviation fuels for its own people!
Milk is as much as $11. Energy costs skyrocket. Native Alaskans are in great pain and the government says, ‘Please don’t move to our cities’. Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Department of Energy intervene.
Alaska Daily News:
“We need immediate relief. I don’t want to see all the young people and families leave to live in Anchorage and leave the elders behind in the village.”
The cost of fuel has risen to as much as $9.25 a gallon for diesel/heating oil in Kokhanok, a village on Lake Iliamna.”
All of the oil companies in Alaska were invited to participate in helping rural residents. So far only one has offered any help.
“This has reached a critical point to where we will now have decide if we are going to feed our young or keep them warm,” said Ron Hoffman president and CEO of the Association of Village Council Presidents.
I’m for a new bridge in Alaska, a bridge for oil executives from ice floe to ice floe.
McCain nixed funding the national low-income fuel assistance program, saying his attention is on “whatever is necessary to help people meet literally incredible challenges this winter.”
Oil is spending more than $2 million dollars a day to influence public policy and opinion – including $12.2 million in the six months of Newt Gingrich’s “Drill Here, Drill Now” campaign. McCain received nearly $1 million dollars flip-flopping to support offshore drilling.
Reminds me that oil companies skirted paying royalties for offshore drilling rights, $11 billion, because the federal government was bought off with, well, skirts, and a little cocaine. [Wall Street Journal]
Literally incredible!
I never go anywhere without voter registration forms, I don’t run voter drives, I AM a voter drive.
DocJess says:
When I was in Texas last week, I brought 10 forms, and signed up 5 voters – 4 when I stopped for directions at a construction site (my directions were really, really bad, and this was FAR out in the country) and a waitress one night at dinner. Five Obama votes Texas might not have had otherwise. And yes, it even matters in a red state.
So get out there — give that other $5. Give that hour. This is YOUR campaign and YOUR country. And this is how we win.
Whoa up!
The Pentagon’s cubicle mercenaries
During the George W Bush years, American war fighting has been privatized and the Pentagon largely turned over to corporate contractors, hired guns, hired hands, private cubicle mercenaries and private sub-contracting warriors, who raked in US$151 billion in 2006. What’s left is “a Pentagon bloated almost beyond recognition and crippled by its dependence on private military corporations”. – Frida Berrigan
A professor of international relations and political science at San Francisco State University and the author of Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy looks deeper than media experts.
Analysis – a warning to voters – picked up at Asia Times:
McCain’s actions have been nothing short of provocative…
“Few people in the American political class have contributed more to provoking possible military escalation with Russia than Republican presidential nominee Senator John McCain.
“McCain’s main foreign policy adviser and spokesperson, Randy Scheunemann, is a former registered lobbyist for the Republic of Georgia… strongly anti-Russia line… insisting that the United States should move forward with missile defense in the region… regardless of the negative consequences…
The McCain-led International Republican Institute, an international wing of the National Endowment for Democracy, was involved in training and financing the revolutionary opposition [in territories south of Russia]…
Holding neo-conservative political beliefs, these American lobbyists see conflict with US national interests: McCain had come to the region with his conclusions already formed.
McCain’s IRI presented its activities as a support of elections and the democratic process, but in reality it was biased in favor of [pre-selected candidates]…
During the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, McCain was again on the frontline.
Russia has always been presented by McCain in an extremely negative light, and as deserving of only a hard-line response. Assisted by the American media, the Republican Senator never missed an opportunity to blame Russia for everything that was going wrong in the former Soviet region and outside. It was following McCain’s statement warning of “a creeping coup against the forces of democracy and market capitalism”.
McCain’s disdain for Russia’s view was clearly revealed during a Republican debate on the US missile defense system when he said “I don’t care what [Vladimir Putin’s] objections are to it.”
Putin has replied in general in an interview by France’s Le Figaro newspaper, noting unofficial agitation from American citizens in the region, and saying the “U.S. spoiled our relationship and should fix it.”
I expect improvement in those relationships. They spoiled them, so they should fix them.
You know, in Lincoln’s time, a political figure of the day, the then Secretary of State, said that we always prefer relationships with Russia to relationships with all other European states, at least because Russia always wishes us well.
Of course, a lot has changed since then. Our relationships have been determined by various factors in different periods. However, whenever the world faced a global crisis, Russia and America have always emerged together.
That does mean something. It means that, during global crises, common interests prevail over certain differences. This was the case in World War One and World War Two. We in Russia never forget that, and we would like our American partners to remember that too.
McCain may be restrained
The analysis ends with an interesting point, America!
“Some have suggested that, if he is elected president, McCain may be restrained in his further actions toward Russia. American institutions and the heavy burden of responsibility for maintaining peace and stability in the world may indeed encourage him to try diplomacy rather than belligerent rhetoric and hot-headed actions in Eurasia.
“But there is also the possibility that McCain will do what he says, and chose steps leading to a military escalation with the second largest world nuclear power.”
Thomas Friedman:
Of course, we’re going to need oil for many years, but instead of exalting that – with “drill, baby, drill” – why not throw all our energy into innovating a whole new industry of clean power with the mantra “invent, baby, invent”?
Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology – fossil fuels – rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology – renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the IT revolution – on the eve of PCs and the Internet – is pounding the table for America to make more IBM typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
Fundamentalism may be anarchy, a re-post for the times.
Religious and political radicalism is not imported from the Middle East.
Olivier Roy at Eurozine asserts from the Institute for Human Sciences that religious revival among Europe’s Muslims reflects many of the dynamics of contemporary American evangelical movements.
No surprise then that, instead of being tolerant and liberal, it is a movement based on dogmatism, communitarianism, and scripturalism.
“This explains the affinities between American Protestant fundamentalism and Islamic Salafism: both reject culture, philosophy, and even theology in favor of a scriptural reading of the sacred texts and an immediate understanding of truth through individual faith, to the detriment of educational and religious institutions.”
“Today, we see forms of religious revival leading to the “born again” phenomenon, in other words, people are born again into their religion [ but not the tradition of their religion]. It is perhaps the most striking phenomenon of contemporary religiosity in all denominations.
“What we have is …two totally different trends: one is the crisis of religions as institutions and cultures, the other is the return of religiosity.
“The return of religiosity acts against religion.”
It seems that fundamentalists may be religious but without religion. They haven’t the deeper wisdom of tradition nor the restraint of community, are often isolated even among others, and are carrying few of the shared principles of a religion.
Without a practice of community and without religious organizations to help make sense of spiritual longings, today’s fundamentalist makes private demands, a loudening voice of unrestrained individualists. Without a structure of fellowship and tradition, fundamentalists may be the modern anarchist demanding radical political favors.
We can hope that over a longer period, there may be a deeper want. Religion is a fellowship and joining of traditions, but today’s fundamentalist seldom reflects the aspirations of the whole and rejects the fellowship of the traditional church, synagogue or mosque, which are abandoned over the last decades.
In a siege of personal ambition and arcane belief, fundamentalism may be repelling against isolation and separateness. Alone in a stadium church or a rural congregation or alone along a street, religiosity in politics may be less a spiritual movement than an effort to force culture to deal with alienation.
Seeking to create so-called spiritual governments, railing against the state, and arguing against secular culture, fundamentalists are demanding that our state and culture serve their selfish interests.
And why not they choose anarchy? Only true church, true community and true government restrains the libertine.
The Vinegar Spectrum and the Acerbic Electorate,
an election year rant on
Couch & Cab Broadcasting and the Carnival Church.
This is city boy poetry best read aloud, flick the lights baby, nix the glare, nap later, hear this ink, cat, this is expresso mainlined at the tabloid throat of Republican engineering of our elections. This speech is hip, sphere peering, an eye over the pollster penthouse on their eagle’s nest and an ear too far to hear their rap.
Against our cities, Red States are under radio and it’s rage, television and it’s terror, where change is backward and the future is doom, a hairdo lock on brazen congregations, and Republicans put them there. As the years go by, polyester DJs at high power towers skipping the ionosphere, linen Preachers at neon pulpits of the Satellite Wildwood, tweed Candidates in hallway of the Pork Seasons Resort, silk Developers in the limousines of link chain industries, counting recliners where days are slow and persecution remains in compounds of poverty already sold to the Bought.
A recent internal Republican poll found that 30 percent of their likely voters shop at Wal-Mart at least once a week with a 56 point Republican edge of Wal-Mart women and 64 percent of men in the group for McCain.
In the Republican pewsuit of demographics, the only reach the Republican Party has organized in its history is the terrible wee avarice they parade to denominations of the fearful, their showcase of cameo demons on the alter of the purse and the coin, a tax table choir of paycheck jingles, bowtie jingo, logo limbo, me too voodoo, slogan lotto, fraudulent kudos and felonious salutes to the am-fm militia and television’s seeramic army, the group for McCain, sculptured earwax under a propaganda hill in a wilderness we cannot protect.
Men too bold for honor strut the spectrum these many years, stained our airwaves in the electoral spittoon, cheap humor, short pride, quick bully, permanent pathology and war, not security nor diplomacy nor sensibility nor community nor prosperity nor civility nor mobility nor warmth on their muddy plank, it is their sneer of pride, genius for applause, wit of scorn, casino pollsters snarking oil’s balm in snakes of tilt-up campaigns in a mall of lies.
Our Kilroy is not safe, cannot be, was never, is not behind America’s gates, but hour by hour is penetrated by microphones taunting skulls across dry Nevada to Wyoming, crude Alaska, Oklahoma and Texas, the pew’s manure onto Dakota and Montana in waves of hatefulness across the plains, stalking Iowa, Nebraska, frequencies of bile billow our flag, fresco of gluten judgment and starch dominance, a white knuckle winter across the South, the Republicans police their privy dominance to proffer veneer homesteads to drive-by pioneers that will bring to the polls rural Americans the Republicans have driven to paranoia, cynicism and distrust.
Michael Moore may come and go in popularity. No shareholders are funding the light of day.
While Voters Sway on Punditry,
“Americans Pay 19% taxes, while the French pay 22% taxes; yet the French get free healthcare, free college tuition, 30 days mandatory vacation with pay, no limit on sick days…I’ll pay that extra 3%!” says Michael Moore on youtube.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcR59F9w6xA&hl=en&fs=1]
Breaking today!
The Church of England apologizes to Charles Darwin.
Via the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, Reverend Dr Malcolm Brown, the director of mission and public affairs of the Archbishops’ Council, and the Church’s managing body:
“People, and institutions, make mistakes and Christian people and Churches are no exception.“When a big new idea emerges that changes the way people look at the world, it’s easy to feel that every old idea, every certainty, is under attack and then to do battle against the new insights.
“The Church made that mistake with Galileo’s astronomy and has since realized its error.
“Some Church people did it again in the 1860s with Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection.
“So it is important to think again about Darwin’s impact on religious thinking, then and now.
“There is nothing incompatible between the scientific theories adopted by Darwin and Christian teaching.”
The statement will read:
“Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practise the old virtues of ‘faith seeking understanding’ and hope that makes some amends.” [Google News]
Further from the Church of England, “Good religion needs good science.”
Two quotes from McCain’s campaign.
A TV ad, for the general population, promotes stem cell research:
“They’re the original mavericks. Leaders. Reformers. Fighting for real change. … John McCain will lead his Congressional allies to improve America’s health. … Stem cell research to help free families from the fear and devastation of illness. … Change is coming.”
On his website, for click-to Republicans, he’s against it:
“As president, John McCain will strongly support funding for promising research programs, including amniotic fluid and adult stem cell research and other types of scientific study that do not involve the use of human embryos.“
McCain Runs Pro-Stem Cell Ad, Plans The Opposite
McCain doesn’t mind breaking his word to get a vote.
SPENDING: The McCain campaign has said that it will balance the budget by the end of McCain’s first time.
But McCain chief economic adviser, who was President Bush’s chief economist, Douglas Holtz-Eakin said McCain would balance the budget by the end of his second term.
CLIMATE CHANGE: In 1999, McCain opposed lifting the ban on offshore drilling, saying that it was just the “special interests in Washington” that advocated it.
In 2008, McCain announced that “there are areas off our coasts that should be open to exploration and exploitation.”
IRAQ CONDUCT: He said in 2004 that Donald Rumsfeld was doing “a fine job” and was “an honorable man.”
But in 2008, McCain was arguing that he was “the only one that said Rumsfeld had to go.”
TORTURE: In 2005, McCain pushed President Bush to sign a bill that would prohibit “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment” of anyone in U.S. government custody.
But in 2008, McCain voted against the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which bans waterboarding.
See “The Flip-Flop Document” – not in major media.
Change is coming
John McCain is getting caught with a very bent morality and a worrisome scorn for our democracy. Now that’s change we need.
Occasionally you will hear McCain-Palin insert ‘tax reform’ into their stump. Be careful.
McCain’s economic advisor was President Bush’s chief economist!
“In an ideal world I would like to see the corporate tax system repealed,” says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior economic advisor, “But then of course you have the question of how to replace the revenue loss.”
“I think everyone recognises [a tax reform] is coming,” said Holtz-Eakin.…”a single tax system which a PhD economist could understand.” [?]
“Step one would be to move the code toward something that is ultimately more simple, said Holtz-Eakin.
“Senator McCain has proposed to repeal in its entirety the alternative minimum tax so we have only a single tax system. That would by no means exhaust the list of things that one would do in a real tax reform.”
Douglas Holtz-Eakin, senior policy adviser to McCain, said they looked carefully at possible corporate tax reforms, beginning outreach meetings last January. “We met with industry groups, read academic literature, talked to tax experts and then briefed the Senator.”
“Senator McCain has proposed three things,” he continues.
- lower the [corporate] rate from 35% to 25%
- first year expensing to replace depreciation
- make permanent the R&D tax credit
Critics of Obama say he’ll cut taxes by $2.9 trillion from 2009-2018 and McCain would reduce taxes by nearly $4.2 trillion.
Yes, McCain will reduce taxes. Corporate and Crony taxes.
Obama cuts taxes for nearly all families, ends the war in Iraq, and breaks America’s dependence on Mideast oil within a decade.
We must purge manipulative fraud and habituated misuse from our government.
[MCCAIN] “Energy. She knows more about energy than probably anyone else in the United States of America. She’s a governor of a state where 20% of America’s energy supply comes from there. And we all know that energy is a critical and vital national security issue. We’ve got to stop sending $700 billion of American money to countries that don’t like us very much. She’s very well versed on that issue.”And, uh, she also happens to represent, be governor of a state that’s right next to Russia. She understands Russia.”
[PALIN] Let me speak specifically about a credential that I do bring to this table, Charlie, and that’s with the energy independence [see Cheerleading Lies] that I’ve been working on for these years as the governor of this state that produces nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy…
And another lie!
Alaskan production accounts for only 4.8 percent of all the crude oil and petroleum products supplied to the U.S. in 2007, counting both domestic production and imports from other nations.
According to US Energy Information Administration, the total supply was just over 5.5 billion barrels in 2007, and only 3.5% of US energy.
Man, what’s Palin been inhalin’? – comment at FactCheck.org.
Both nuts and cruel:
Senate conservatives voted down bipartisan legislation that would have “provided an additional $2.5 billion in funding for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program (LIHEAP),” a federal program “that helps low- income families pay their cooling and heating bills.”
Conservatives trumpet the battle cry “drill drill drill” saying more gas and oil would do more to help struggling families pay for heating oil. These claims are a “shill shill shill’. [see Green Isn’t Crude]
“The choice is between a “pollution-based suicidal economy” and a green economy that lifts everyone up.” – Van Jones, founder of Green For All and a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
Guess which resume belongs to which candidate.
Here’s Obama’s new one-stop voter registration website.
A full head of hair provides surprisingly low protection from the sun, Australian researchers warn.
Color made no difference.
Short hair provides slightly more protection than long hair; the weight of long hair exposes more of the scalp.
Scalp melanomas are 13% of melanomas.
Hair Protection Factor? 5 to 17
“No one should ever sit in this office over 70 years old, and that I know” – Dwight D. Eisenhower
EcoGeek points out, “Lots of people are getting excited about all the various technologies for using biofuels of one sort or another as a replacement for fossil fuels, and they may present a short-term option.”
But look!
Biofuels fail the Miles Per Acre test.
Without displacing one food producing acre, solar systems are hands down the winner. Yes, biofuels are needed, for alternative chemical feedstock and geo-favored fleets or power, but it’s clear that solar technology “produces 1000x more energy per acre than soybeans”.
Mainstream media publishes flurry of investigative reports revealing John McCain is lying, Sarah Palin is lying, mistakes, cynicism, foolishness abounds.
McCain-Palin
“They lean to their corporate masters,” notes DailyKoss.
And lie to us.
Roger Ebert stated in the Chicago Sun Times:
I think I might be able to explain some of Sarah Palin’s appeal. She’s the “American Idol” candidate.
There’s a reason “American Idol” gets such high ratings. People identify with the contestants. They think, Hey, that could be me up there on that show!
My problem is, I don’t want to be up there. I don’t want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq. Someone who doesn’t repeat bald- faced lies about earmarks and the Bridge to Nowhere.
Five different schools in six years. What was that about?
And how can a politician her age have never have gone to Europe?
But some people like that. She’s never traveled to Europe, Asia, Africa, South America or Down Under? That makes her like them. She didn’t go to Harvard? Good for her!
I trust the American people will see through Palin, and save the Republic in November.
Obama’s Campaign is asking us to think about 170 lobbyists moving into the White House.
A 65-page .pdf report from the Democratic National Committee, “No Reformer” finds that McCain’s employees are lobbyists and his Campaign Chairman is a bank lobbyist.
“McCain has his own herd of more than 170 lobbyists that are managing his campaign, speaking for him, directing his policy or fundraising.
McCain’s crew of lobbyists, now campaign surrogates, would be familiar to all of us if McCain were elected. [story]
If raped, you have to pay to get your rapist convicted. And if he impregnated you, you would have to have his child. Screwed three times!
The only town in Alaska
Under Sarah Palin’s administration, Wasilla cut funds paid for rape kits and medical exams and began charging victims $500 to $1200 fees.
New Evidence:
Palin Had Direct Role.
Palin fired police chief Irl Stambaugh and replaced him with Charlie Fannon, who with Palin’s knowledge slashed the budget for the exams and began charging the city’s victims of sexual assault. Palin read and signed the new police budget.
A year later, alarmed Alaska lawmakers passed legislation outlawing the practice.
For victims of rape and incest and all women, Palin’s policy only allows abortion if the life of the mother is in danger. “This is my personal opinion,” she told ABC.
Palin said she “owes it to Americans” to explain her personal opinion which “may end up different than what the policy in an administration might be.”
Personal opinion over facts? And very, very different after she replaces McCain!
Barriers must come down.
Superstitious policies must stop.
65% to 80% of femicide victims were abused.
Getting in the way of reporting abuse increases the number of murdered women.
Could We Have Known?
Barack Obama’s Platform:
PREVENTING VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN
Reducing Domestic Violence:
One in four women will experience domestic violence in her lifetime. Family violence accounted for 11 percent of all violence between 1998 and 2002. Barack Obama introduced legislation to combat domestic violence by providing $25 million a year for partnerships between domestic violence prevention organizations and Fatherhood or Marriage programs to train staff in domestic violence services, provide services to families affected by domestic violence, and to develop best practices in domestic violence prevention.Strengthening Domestic Violence Laws:
Approximately 1,400 women a year – four every day – die in the United States as a result of domestic violence. And 132,000 women report that they have been victims of a rape or attempted rape, and it is estimated that an even greater number have been raped, but do not report it. Senator Obama co-sponsored and helped reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act. Signed into law in January 2006, the bill funds and helps communities, nonprofit organizations, and police combat domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking. The legislation establishes a sexual assault services program and provides education grants to prevent domestic violence.Fighting Gender Violence Abroad:
The genocide in Darfur has had particularly devastating consequences for women. Tens of thousands of women have been killed, raped, and displaced since the conflict began in 2003. Barack Obama has been a leading voice in Washington urging the end of genocide in Sudan. He worked with Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) on the Darfur Peace and Accountability Act, a version of which was signed into law. Obama has traveled to the United Nations to meet with Sudanese officials and visited refugee camps on the Chad-Sudan border to raise international awareness of the ongoing humanitarian disaster there. He also worked with Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) to secure $20 million for the African Union peacekeeping mission.
Global Facts:
Who said this?
“We have drastically, drastically reduced our earmark request since I came into office.”
But your state is highest by far.
We sure are — and this is what — you go out and you ask any Alaskan this. This is what I’ve been telling Alaskans for these years that I’ve been in office, is no more.
But, genetics of harbor seals, money to study the mating habits of crabs?
Those requests, through our research divisions and fish and game and our wildlife departments and our universities, those research requests did come through that system, but wanting it to be in the light of day, not behind closed doors, with lobbyists making deals with Congress to stick things in there under the public radar.
And then what did she say?
That’s the abuse that we’re going to stop. That’s what John McCain has promised over and over for these years and that’s what I’m joining him, also, saying, you’re right, the abuse of earmarks, it’s un-American, it’s undemocratic, and it’s not going to be accepted in a McCain-Palin administration. Earmark abuse will stop.
Oh.
