Update
No I didn't burn out... I am on 12 hour shifts for an exercise at work.
Obama still scares me.
I am still voting for Palin.
Seriously, how cool is Todd Palin?
Ask yourself this one question?
When a crisis hits, who would you rather be at the helm? Obama or McCain? Obama or Palin?
If you answered Obama for either one of those questions, you are seriously deluded. then I disagree.
Don't even talk about experience. If you really cared about experience, you would of voted for Hillary, since she had the benefit of President Clinton as an advisor.
UPDATE: ms-teacher made me feel guilty. There are valid reasons why someone would vote for Obama.
6 comments:
If you answered Obama for either one of those questions, you are seriously deluded.
I guess differing opinions are not acceptable. There is plenty that I see wrong with Palin, but I won't knock your choice if that is who you want to vote for. I would never claim that your delusional.
As a fiscal conservative who is unaffiliated, I have not made a decision in this election, though I often vote third party out of dissatisfaction with both parties. In regards to the speech, I would agree that she delivered a great speech to her crowd. That, however, is what bothers me. She is extremely socially conservative, and there is no way to argue that those positions make her an agent of change. In fact, anyone who has watched her speak would be surprised that conservative Republicans have been in control of the White House for eight years and Congress for six and a half. This did not appeal to independent voters who question the current state of the nation.
One of the issues where this matters the most is fiscal policy, and voters can rightly criticize the policies and the tax cuts of the last eight years. Cuts on the supply side, which is a conservative position, haven't been as helpful as they are billed, and voters could be reasonably interested in cuts on the demand side, which are things such as predominantly middle class tax cuts and the Earned Income Tax Credit. For me, the budget/debt is a huge concern, and I'm on the side of former comptroller David Walker and the Concord Coalition who argue that our long term problems will only be alleviated with tax increases AND spending cuts.
There appears to be a real systemic change afoot with the recent news of the market, and I can hardly see McCain/Palin as an effective force in that regard. But, as noted by ms-teacher, we each have our own reasons for voting. I'm not sure on Obama, but I know I can't vote for McCain.
Considering that the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac is another bone headed Democrat program crashed and burned, and that only one politician got more money from Fannie Mae than Obama, and that Obama wants more of the same, Obama is the status quo candidate -- or more accurately, the "back to Jimmy Carter" candidate.
No thanks. I lived through it and survived. As for Palin's social conservatism, you haven't looked at her record. She may be socially conservative, but she's not much interested in legislating it.
I'd vote for Mickey Mouse before I voted for Obama.
Right Wing Prof,
That's an interesting point, though it was only after Fannie/Freddie were privatized that they went over the cliff. Fannie worked quite well for forty years as a government program.
At least voters know what they're getting with Obama. The Bush Administration can deride socialism right up to the point that they basically nationalize the largest insurer in the world, and McCain can be a de-regulator who is now pushing regulation. Debating the necessity of their actions is another discussion.
Sadly, as PJ O'Rourke is fond of saying, "Republicans campaign on the fact that government doesn't work, and when they get elected, they prove it." That does seem to be the case, doesn't it? If you are going to have a strong central government (and, and by the way, we concluded that after the failure of the Articles of Confederation), it might be logical to choose someone who actually believes it can work.
NOTE: I am neither a registered Democrat, nor have I committed to Obama. I generally vote both sides and Libertarian. However, I am astute enough of a critic of history and policy to determine that McCain/Palin is the wrong choice for me.
They were not privatized. There is no such thing as a government company that is privatized. It's like the "housing crisis," when Democrats were screaming about "predatory lenders," when those lenders were following guidelines set down by Democrats in both the Carter and Clinton eras to force banks to lend to underqualified applicants, you know, to help the "disadvantaged."
McCain sounded the alarm about Fannie Mae three years ago. So did Bush. The Democrats blocked any reform, and insisted there was no problem.
The Democrats, and their utter lack of concern for the consequences of their actions, are wholly behind this collapse. And we're stuck with the bill because these were not private sector companies, but socialist (or if you prefer the term, corporatist) entitlement programs.
You have a valid point that FNM/FRE weren't truly privatized, though they were moved off the federal governments books, and they became less than the "government institution" that had worked well since the 1930s.
We'll have to disagree about assigning blame, though we should probably acknowledge the links pointed out by Ed Gramlich, a Fed official, who was criticizing sub-prime lending and trying to get Greenspan to increase oversight by 2004. This, of course, he related to the repeal of Glass-Stagall, engineered by Phil Graham, passed by a Republican Congress, and signed by Bill Clinton. That deregulation of banking contributed to the problem far more than the existence of Fannie Mae.
Keep in mind that up to Gramlich's warnings in 2004, sub-prime was only 8.5 percent of mortgages in the US. However, by three years later, it surpassed twenty percent. At this time, Fannie/Freddie had nothing to do with the sub-prime, and were becoming insignificant in the mortgage game precisely because they can't do any subprime lending. They are restricted by law from sub-prime lending. Additionally, regulators by 2003 put new restrictions on them as a result of growing financial scandals.
Granted, their problems came not in lending but in not maintaining enough capital to back any downturn in the market. Thus, we have the issue of finance and regulation. NOW, I'm not arguing that deregulation is the sole culprit or that excessive regulation is the answer. But I certainly can't endorse oversimplying the issue into the standard "government is the problem" mantra. Government appears to be the only solution at this point - though I don't entirely agree with Bush/Paulson's actions.
Again, this implosion occurred during the past eight years when, in the words of Gramlich “the subprime market was the Wild West. Over half the mortgage loans were made by independent lenders without any federal supervision.” What he didn’t mention was that this was the way the laissez-faire ideologues ruling Washington -- a group that very much included Mr. Greenspan -- wanted it. They were and are men who believe that government is always the problem, never the solution, that regulation is always a bad thing."
Now, I'm no economist (though I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night - (sic)), but I think Gramlich has the credentials to know what he's talking about. And it's hard to see how a deregulator who claims to know little about the economy and who was advised by someone many blame for partially instigating this mess is going to know how to do the right things in terms of governing.
Again, I'm not sure on Obama (but I like Rubin - an advisor), but I'm sure McCain is not up to the job.
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