Thirty-one of the 47 people so far named to Obama's transition or staff posts have ties to the Clinton administration.http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1108/15617.html
Seriously, what a ridiculous story! It's frickin' GE! They are involved with EVERYTHING! Singling out one division of their business is pretty flimsy, Politico.Sam Nunn, whose national security expertise drove his selection as a senior informal Pentagon adviser to Barack Obama’s transition team, sits on the board of a major defense contractor that sold critical infrastructure equipment to Iran.
Nunn, who has staked out a reputation as one of the world’s preeminent experts on nuclear non-proliferation, joined the board of General Electric in 1997, shortly after stepping down from his four terms representing Georgia in the Senate.
From 2000 to 2007, the company won 281 contracts from the Defense Department worth a total of $8.8 billion.And, in 2006, the Securities and Exchange Commission singled out the company’s nonmilitary business in Iran, inquiring in a letter why GE didn’t reveal sales to the country in its corporate filings.
Neither he nor the Obama transition team responded when asked if his continued paid service on GE’s board was a conflict of interest with his informal role helping to guide Obama’s transition in the Defense Department.
“The issue of whether to conduct business in certain countries is complex,” GE wrote back in July 2006. “We must take into account not only the views of the U.S. government but all relevant stakeholders."
Nunn, now 70 and listed as chairman of “public responsibilities” for GE, was copied on the letter.
Stephanie Cutter, a spokeswoman for Obama, pointed to a transition statement clarifying that Nunn, who was mentioned as a possible vice presidential pick for Obama, “will play an informal senior adviser role throughout the defense transition process.”
Cutter added in an e-mail to Politico that Nunn “has no formal role. He's an outside informal adviser, offering his advice as needed. He's not part of the agency review team.”
GE's divisions include GE Capital (including GE Commercial Finance and GE Money and GE Consumer Finance,[16]), GE Technology Infrastructure (including GE Aviation,the former Smiths Aerospace and GE Healthcare), GE Energy Infrastructure, and NBC Universal, an entertainment company.
Through these businesses, GE participates in a wide variety of markets including the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity (eg. Nuclear,[17] gas and solar), lighting, industrial automation, medical imaging equipment, motors, railway locomotives, aircraft jet engines, and aviation services. It was co-founded and is 80% owner (with Vivendi) of NBC Universal, the National Broadcasting Company. Through GE Commercial Finance, GE Consumer Finance, GE Equipment Services, and GE Insurance it offers a range of financial services as well. It has a presence in over 100 countries.
LIMA (Reuters) - Peruvians crazy about their national dog, a bald and often toothless breed popular among Incan kings, offered Monday to send a hypoallergenic puppy to the Obama family.
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has promised daughters Malia, 10, and Sasha, 7, a new pet for the White House. But Malia is allergic to most breeds, he said Friday as speculation swirled about the dog the family would choose.
Owners of the Peruvian Hairless Dog, a breed dating back 3,000 years and depicted in pre-Hispanic ceramics, say it is perfect for kids who are sensitive to dogs.
"They do not cause any type of allergy and are very friendly and sweet," said Claudia Galvez, 38, director of the Friends of the Peruvian Hairless Dog Association.
"We want to give a male puppy to Obama's daughters, so they get to experience all the joys of having a dog but without any allergies."
Shirley Nagel passed out candy Friday on the scary U.S. holiday, but only to those who shared her support for Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice presidential pick Sarah Palin.
Television station WJBK reported that a sign posted outside Nagel's house in suburban Detroit served this notice to children seeking treats: "No handouts for Obama supporters, liars, tricksters or kids of supporters."
Nagel told WJBK that "Obama's scary." When asked about children who were turned away empty-handed and crying, she said: "Oh well. Everybody has a choice."
...this is another reason why I support Sen. Obama. He's so grounded.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/Vote2008/Story?id=6136995&page=4
Obama said he has considered what he would do in the future if he lost the election.
"Michelle and I were extraordinarily happy before I started running," he said. "And, you know, I'm a relatively young man. You know, they say that there are no second acts in politics, but, you know, I think there are enough exceptions out there that I could envision returning to the Senate and just doing some terrific work with the next president and the next Congress."
When asked to complete the sentence "On Nov. 5, I'm so happy I won't have to...," Obama laughed and said, "Pack. I am so tired of packing. ... I'm so tired of not having breakfast with my girls. You know, waking up and hearing their chatter -- sometimes, they'll crawl into bed with Michelle and me and they're bouncing around and poking and prodding you and telling you about what's going to happen in their day. Then going downstairs and fixing them some waffles or something. That is -- that is the sweetest of moments. And I haven't had enough of those over the last two years."
Posted: 08:57 PM ETFrom CNN Political Producer Peter Hamby
SHIPPENSBURG, Pennsylvania (CNN) – As the McCain campaign continues to press Barack Obama over a 2001 radio interview in which he uttered the phrase “redistributive change,” Sarah Palin on Tuesday accused the Democrat of wanting to re-write the Constitution to give the judiciary the power to redistribute wealth by confiscating the property and income of ordinary Americans.
Palin brought up the interview almost immediately after beginning her evening speech at Shippensburg University in central Pennsylvania.
“Sen. Obama said that he regretted, he regretted that the Supreme Court hadn't been more radical and he described the Court's refusal to take up the issues of redistribution of wealth as a tragedy,” Palin said. “And he said that he also regretted that the Supreme Court didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers there in the Constitution, that's a quote.”
Palin was suggesting Obama had expressed support for a broad redistribution of wealth in American society that would be carried out by the Supreme Court, but as fact-checkers noted on Tuesday, Obama was discussing the courts in the context of the civil rights movement, and was not referring to taxes.
Additionally, Obama said in the interview it was a mistake for civil rights leaders to rely too heavily on the courts to affect social change, and that issues of income redistribution were better left to legislators and community organizers.
Nevertheless, Palin claimed that Obama — a former constitutional law professor — favors allowing the judiciary to seize property and personal income in order to “spread the wealth around.”
“So you have to ask: Is this a suggestion that he'd want to re-write the founding document of our great nation to accomplish his goals, and what does that say about his ideas on future Supreme Court justices?” Palin asked.
Under an Obama administration, Palin said, judges would “confiscate your property and your hard, all of your hard-earned money and then re-distribute that. He may call that a tragedy, but I call it fairness and adherence to our U.S. Constitution.”
For her part, Sarah Palin, who has lately taken to calling Obama “Barack the Wealth Spreader,” seems to be something of a suspect character herself. She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.
So Sen. Obama's a socialist (hiss, boo), huh? Let's define socialism with some help from our friend Wikipedia.
Socialism refers to a broad set of economic theories of social organization advocating state or collective ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods, and the creation of an egalitarian society.[1][2] Modern socialism originated in the late nineteenth-century working class political movement. Karl Marx posited that socialism would be achieved via class struggle and a proletarian revolution which represents the transitional stage between capitalism and communism.[3][4]
Egalitarian society? What is that?
Egalitarianism (derived from the French word égal, meaning equal) is a political doctrine that holds that all people should be treated as equals, and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights.[1] Generally it applies to being held equal under the law and society at large. In actual practice, one may be considered an egalitarian in most areas listed above, even if not subscribing to equality in every possible area of individual difference.
OK, now we've gotten our terms defined. But has anyone bothered to ask any REAL socialists (i.e. those who are affiliated with a number of socialist parties) if Sen. Obama measures up.
First, here is an article from September published in Human Events, a conservative magazine founded in 1944.
Here's what Greg Pason of the Socialist Party USA had to say:
Barack Obama's programs are not socialist. The vast majority of his proposals are anti-worker (or he might say ‘pro-business’). His health care proposals are more to save the for-profit insurance industry and do not have the goal of ending for-profit insurance. He has refused to support a Senate version of HR676, which would create a single-payer program (not socialist but much better than we have, and [which has] the support of labor and community organizations across the US). Many of his other economic proposals are pro-corporate.Not even close.
A socialist program (even a reformist one) would not be a program that props up capitalism when it fails, but one that transforms the economy. None of Senator Obama's proposals do that. Senator Obama’s tax plan is regressive and even less ‘progressive’ than programs put forward under such conservative administrations like the one of Richard Nixon.
What about F.N. Brill of the World Socialist Party?
Obama is as much a socialist as the Pope is an atheist. Income redistribution isn't a socialist act. It might aid in ameliorating income disparities within a capitalist economy for a limited time. But the logic of capitalism demands the rich grow richer (more capitalization is needed) and the poor grow poorer (their work creates the needed capital used by the rich).So the REAL socialists say no.
Here's some more from the Chicago Tribune.
McCain booed after trying to calm anti-Obama crowd
By PHILIP ELLIOTT and BETH FOUHY, Associated Press Writers 48 minutes ago
LAKEVILLE, Minn. - The anger is getting raw at Republican rallies and John McCain is acting to tamp it down. McCain was booed by his own supporters Friday when, in an abrupt switch from raising questions about Barack Obama's character, he described the Democrat as a "decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."
A sense of grievance spilling into rage has gripped some GOP events this week as McCain supporters see his presidential campaign lag against Obama. Some in the audience are making it personal, against the Democrat. Shouts of "traitor," "terrorist," "treason," "liar," and even "off with his head" have rung from the crowd at McCain and Sarah Palin rallies, and gone unchallenged by them.
McCain changed his tone Friday when supporters at a town hall pressed him to be rougher on Obama. A voter said, "The people here in Minnesota want to see a real fight." Another said Obama would lead the U.S. into socialism. Another said he did not want his unborn child raised in a country led by Obama.
"If you want a fight, we will fight," McCain said. "But we will be respectful. I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments." When people booed, he cut them off.
"I don't mean that has to reduce your ferocity," he said. "I just mean to say you have to be respectful."
Presidential candidates are accustomed to raucous rallies this close to Election Day and welcome the enthusiasm. But they are also traditionally monitors of sorts from the stage. Part of their job is to leaven proceedings if tempers run ragged and to rein in an out-of-bounds comment from the crowd.
Not so much this week, at GOP rallies in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and other states.
When a visibly angry McCain supporter in Waukesha, Wis., on Thursday told the candidate "I'm really mad" because of "socialists taking over the country," McCain stoked the sentiment. "I think I got the message," he said. "The gentleman is right." He went on to talk about Democrats in control of Congress.
On Friday, McCain rejected the bait.
"I don't trust Obama," a woman said. "I have read about him. He's an Arab."
McCain shook his head in disagreement, and said:
"No, ma'am. He's a decent, family man, a citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with (him) on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign is all about."
He had drawn boos with his comment: "I have to tell you, he is a decent person and a person that you do not have to be scared of as president of the United States."
The anti-Obama taunts and jeers are noticeably louder when McCain appears with Palin, a big draw for GOP social conservatives. She accused Obama this week of "palling around with terrorists" because of his past, loose association with a 1960s radical. If less directly, McCain, too, has sought to exploit Obama's Chicago neighborhood ties to William Ayers, while trying simultaneously to steer voters' attention to his plans for the financial crisis.
The Alaska governor did not campaign with McCain on Friday, and his rally in La Crosse, Wis., earlier Friday was much more subdued than those when the two campaigned together. Still, one woman shouted "traitor" when McCain told voters Obama would raise their taxes.
Volunteers worked up chants from the crowd of "U.S.A." and "John McCain, John McCain," in an apparent attempt to drown out boos and other displays of negative energy.
The Secret Service confirmed Friday that it had investigated an episode reported in The Washington Post in which someone in Palin's crowd in Clearwater, Fla., shouted "kill him," on Monday, meaning Obama. There was "no indication that there was anything directed at Obama," Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren told AP. "We looked into it because we always operate in an atmosphere of an abundance of caution."
Palin, at a fundraiser in Ohio on Friday, told supporters "it's not negative and it's not mean-spirited" to scrutinize Obama's iffy associations.
But Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania an author of 15 books on politics, says the vitriol has been encouraged by inflammatory words from the stage.
"Red-meat rhetoric elicits emotional responses in those already disposed by ads using words such as 'dangerous' 'dishonorable' and 'risky' to believe that the country would be endangered by election of the opposing candidate," she said.
Earlier today, Obama remarked on recent outbursts of "Traitor!" "Terrorist!" and "Kill him!" at McCain campaign events. "It's easy to rile up a crowd," Obama said. "Nothing's easier than riling up a crowd by stoking anger and division. But that's not what we need right now in the United States."In response, McCain senior adviser Nicolle Wallace released this statement, NBC's Kelly O'Donnell reports. "Barack Obama's assault on our supporters is insulting and unsurprising. These are the same people obama called 'bitter' and attacked for 'clinging to guns' and faith. He fails to understand that people are angry at corrupt practices in Washington and Wall Street and he fails to understand that America's working families are not 'clinging' to anything other than the sincere hope that Washington will be reformed from top to bottom."
"Attacking our supporters is a new low for the campaign that's run more millions of dollars of negative ads than any other in history."
*** UPDATE *** McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers adds in another statement: “Barack Obama’s attacks on Americans who support John McCain reveal far more about him than they do about John McCain. It is clear that Barack Obama just doesn’t understand regular people and the issues they care about. He dismisses hardworking middle class Americans as clinging to guns and religion, while at the same time attacking average Americans at McCain rallies who are angry at Washington, Wall Street and the status quo."
"It is going to be part of the president's job to deal with more than one thing at once." - Sen. Obama, CNN, 9/24
