DebateGate

Just when I think it can't get any more weird or Byzantine, it does. Thanks, Hnumpah, really interesting.

Socialism seems to be working very well for all those government workers, be they city, county, state, or federal. 
We pay tax money into a big fund, and they get paid from it.  So we have firefighters, teachers, police, military, meat and water and safety inspectors. We pay people to administer tests to doctors and nurses so we have qualified people taking care of our sick and wounded. 
The highway that Ike had built was socialism, all across the country. So is Social Security, SSDI, SSI, SCHIP, Medicare, Medicaid, and so on.
And we're still The United States of America. It doesn't seem to hurt us any.
I don't understand why pooling resources and using them for the common good is seen as such a devious or deviant thing.  Is it a hangover from the McCarthy era?  Are you now or have you ever been...Yes. I think socialism is a fine idea and even better in practice.  I hope to see it in Universal Health Care. We are a huge rich country and we don't deserve to die, when an ounce of preventative health care could have saved us.

Horrible, if true.  I see Michelle Malkin has some doubts about this.
http://michellemalkin.com/2008/10/23/why-that-mccain-volunteers-mutilation-story-smells-awfully-weird/

Well it's shocking I know but evidently, the "report" about the meal was made up out of whole cloth.

Consider The Post's Lobster
by Matt Haber  |  October 21, 2008
|  Tags:

    * Barack Obama
    * Michelle Obama
    * Page Six
    * Rush Limbaugh
    * The New York Post
    * The Waldorf-Astoria Hotel

But This is True
via thesmokinggun.com
But This is True

Correction of the day award goes to The New York Post's Page Six, which ran this item today:

    The source who told us last week about Michelle Obama getting lobster and caviar delivered to her room at the Waldorf-Astoria must have been under the influence of a mind-altering drug. She was not even staying at the Waldorf. We regret the mistake, and our former source is going to regret it, too. Bread and water would be too good for such disinformation.

The original item, which ran on October 17th, has been scrubbed from the Post's Web site, but that doesn't mean it hasn't had an impact.

Rush Limbaugh's Web site has a transcript of the radio host reading the Page Six item and saying, "Now, the first thing about this is, if I'm the Obamas, I'm thinking, 'Who the hell called the newspaper on this?' These hotels are not supposed to say a word about what goes on in there. Trust me, they do." Mr. Limbaugh also termed the Obamas non-existent meal order "hypocrisy." (Weirdly—appropriately?—Mr. Limbaugh's transcription service renders the hotel's name 'Waldorf-Hysteria.')

Town Hall's Carol Platt Liebau wrote, "Look, I don't begrudge the Obamas their caviar and lobster. I like lobster, too (caviar? not so much). It's just that the whole mentality strikes me as typical of Democrat thinking."

It wasn't just professional talking pointers jumping on the story. This "P.U.M.A." Web site (remember "P.U.M.A."? Good times...) mocked up a fake receipt signed by Ms. Obama. A different site ran with the headline The Audacity of Michelle Obama's $447.39 Snack Tab. Here's another which noted "Obama is swimming in the $$$$" and then quipped, "What does one do with all that cash?"

http://www.observer.com/2008/media/consider-posts-lobster

I guess if you don't want to invest in the infrastructure of the country, its schools, teachers, power grids, etc., you should move to a country with much more lax standards.  Places where roads aren't safe, the water is dirty, the meat isn't inspected, the police are corrupt, no fire departments, and so on.  Everyone who shared a mite of their tax dollars in years past didn't say, "Hey. I got mine, to hell with you."  I'm sure some did, but it didn't seem to be so fashionable to come right out and say it. 
 And so we shouldn't say that either if we achieve a comfortable income.  We are Americans. We do owe it to our country to leave it a little better than when we got here---or at least try to.   

McCain and ACORN
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ9wy2MI1NI

http://www.newsweek.com/id/163396

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/opinion/09kristof.html?em

Can This Be Pro-Life?

   
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: October 8, 2008

The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.


Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.

The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.

There is something about reproductive health — maybe the sex part — that makes some Americans froth and go crazy. We see it in the opposition to condoms to curb AIDS in Africa and in the insistence on abstinence-only sex education in American classrooms (one reason American teenage pregnancy rates are more than double those in Canada). And we see it in the decision of some towns — like Wasilla, Alaska, when Sarah Palin was mayor there — to bill rape victims for the kits used to gather evidence of sex crimes. In most places, police departments pay for rape kits, which cost hundreds of dollars, but while Ms. Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the town decided to save money by billing rape victims.

The latest bout of reproductive-health madness came in the last couple of weeks when the U.S. Agency for International Development ordered six African countries to ensure that no U.S.-financed condoms, birth control pills, I.U.D.’s or other contraceptives are furnished to Marie Stopes International, a British-based aid group that operates clinics in poor countries.

The Bush administration says it took this action because Marie Stopes International works with the U.N. Population Fund in China. President Bush has cut all financing for the population fund on the — false — basis that it supports China’s family-planning program.

It’s true that China’s one-child policy sometimes includes forced abortion, and when traveling in rural China, I still come across peasants whose homes have been knocked down as punishment for an unauthorized child. But the U.N. fund has been the most powerful force in moderating China’s policy, and a State Department team itself found no evidence of any U.N. involvement in the coercion.

Mr. Bush’s defunding of the U.N. Population Fund — backed by Senator McCain — has persisted since 2002. What is new is the extension of that policy to a leading private family-planning organization like Marie Stopes International.

“The irony and hypocrisy of it is that this is a bone to the self-described ‘pro-life’ movement, but it will result in deaths to women who just want to space their births,” said Dana Hovig, the chief executive of Marie Stopes International. The organization estimates that the result will be at least 157,000 additional unwanted pregnancies per year, leading to 62,000 additional abortions and 660 women dying in childbirth.

That may overstate the impact. Kent Hill, an official of the U.S. aid agency, insists that there will be no increase in pregnancies because the American contraceptives will simply be routed to other aid groups in Africa.

That will work to some degree in big cities. But it’s a fantasy in rural Africa. Over the years, I’ve dropped in on a half-dozen Marie Stopes clinics, and in rural areas there’s typically nothing else for many miles around. Women in the villages simply have no other source of family planning.

“This nearsighted maneuver will have direct and dire consequences,” a group of prominent public health experts in America declared in an open letter, adding that the action “will translate almost immediately into increased maternal death and disability.”

Proponents of the cut-off are not misogynists. They are honestly outraged by forced abortions in China. But why take it out on the most impoverished and voiceless people on earth? Mr. McCain seems to have supported Mr. Bush, mostly out of instinct, and when a reporter asked him this spring whether American aid should finance contraceptives to fight AIDS in Africa, he initially said, “I haven’t thought about it,” and later added, “You’ve stumped me.”

Retrograde decisions on reproductive health are reached in conference rooms in Washington, but I’ve seen how they play out in African villages. A young woman lies in a hut, bleeding to death or swollen by infection, as untrained midwives offer her water or herbs. Her husband and children wait anxiously outside the hut, their faces frozen and perspiring as her groans weaken.

When she dies, her body is bundled in an old blanket and buried in a shallow hole, with brush piled on top to keep wild animals away. Her children sob and shriek and in the ensuing months they often endure neglect and are far more likely to die of hunger or disease.

In some parts of Africa, a woman now has a 1-in-10 risk of dying in childbirth. The idea that U.S. policy may increase that toll is infuriating.