Miners Union: McCain "Twisting Truth" on Obama and Coal

The union representing coal miners came to Obama's defense Monday.

"Sen. John McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have once again demonstrated that they are willing to say anything and do anything to win this election. Their latest twisting of the truth is about coal and some comments Sen. Obama made last January about the future use of coal in America," said Cecil E. Roberts, president of the United Mine Workers of America, in a statement released Monday afternoon.

Roberts noted that McCain and the Republicans ignored Obama's overall point during his interview.

The Democratic candidate told the Chronicle, "This notion of no coal, I think, is an illusion," noting the amount of energy the US dervies from coal. Obama pushed for development of technology to sequester carbon emissions, the central tenant of so called "clean" coal.

"Despite what the McCain campaign and some far right-wing blogs would have Americans believe, Sen. Obama has been and remains a tremendous supporter of coal and the future of coal," Roberts said.

The coal issue is a particularly tricky one for McCain. Before he became the Republican Party's presidential nominee, McCain demonstrated his willingness to diverge from GOP orthodoxy on climate change and environmental regulation. In 2003, he and Sen. Joe Lieberman co-sponsored one of the first cap and trade bills in the Senate aimed at reducing carbon emissions. McCain removed his name from a similar measure that was debated earlier this year.

Indeed, on his Web site, McCain still touts his proposal for a cap and trade system and development of low-emissions alternatives. Surely he and Obama would quibble on the details of such a system, but they share the same basic goals.

Nonetheless, the coal industry traditionally supports Republicans, and John McCain is now the party's nominee. So the industry is doing its part to flog the campaign's latest talking point painting Obama as anti-coal.

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Barack Obama's Grandma "Toot" Dies Day Before Election

Barack and Grandma "Toot"

HONOLULU – Barack Obama's grandmother, whose personality and bearing shaped much of the life of the Democratic presidential contender, has died, Obama announced Monday, one day before the election. Madelyn Payne Dunham was 86. Obama announced the news from the campaign trail in Charlotte, N.C. The joint statement with his sister Maya Soetoro-Ng said Dunham died peacefully late Sunday night after a battle with cancer.

They said: "She was the cornerstone of our family, and a woman of extraordinary accomplishment, strength, and humility. She was the person who encouraged and allowed us to take chances."

Obama learned of her death Monday morning while he was campaigning in Jacksonville, Fla. He planned to go ahead with campaign appearances.

The family said a private ceremony would be held later.

Last month, Obama took a break from campaigning and flew to Hawaii to be with Dunham as her health declined.

Obama said the decision to go to Hawaii was easy to make, telling CBS that he "got there too late" when his mother died of ovarian cancer in 1995 at 53, and wanted to make sure "that I don't make the same mistake twice."

The Kansas-born Dunham and her husband, Stanley, raised their grandson for several years so he could attend school in Honolulu while their daughter and her second husband lived overseas. Her influence on Obama's manner and the way he viewed the world was substantial, the candidate himself told millions watching him accept his party's nomination in Denver in August.

"She's the one who taught me about hard work," he said. "She's the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me."

Obama's nickname for his grandmother was "Toot," a version of the Hawaiian word for grandmother, tutu. Many of his speeches describe her working on a bomber assembly line during World War II.

SOURCE: ASSOCIATE PRESS

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How Republicans Plan to Steal the Election

Destroying free and fair elections -state by state

When we want your opinion,

we'll tell you what it is 

From the movie "Uncounted"

In previous videos we saw that the count from electronic voting machines can easily be altered and that once altered an audit was not possible.

Then we saw that a total solution to this problem exists - and not one state, political party or major political figure has been willing to advocate for it, much less adopt it.

In this third video from "Uncounted" we see what happened in one town when a twenty-three year veteran county clerk opposed the adoption of voting machines he knew made vote count fraud possible.  It's only six minutes and well worth your watching.

Democrats are Better for the Stock Market

Peter Siris of Guerrilla Capital:

Since 1929 both parties have controlled the White House for 40 years and Siris estimates that the $10,000 would be worth $11,733 under Republican administrations and $300,671 under Democratic ones. According to Siris, "for whatever reason, Republicans have been in office during the three worst stock market declines: The Great Depression, the early to mid-1970s, and the current market."

What about recent presidents? Under the Clinton administration, the S&P 500 rose the most in the last 60 years -- up an average of 17.4% per year. The only president who posted a negative performance is a familiar name -- George W. Bush -- under his administration, the S&P 500 has fallen 27% from 1,342 to 979.

This is consistent with our recent post,
How the American Economy Was Destroyed.

The Whole World is Watching -- Again

Obama Speaks to Huge Crowd in Berlin

Barack Obama Will Restore U.S. Reputation Worldwide

40 years ago, in 1968, disenfranchised Democratic voters demonstrated in Chicago while police teargassed them and beat them with clubs. Martin Luther King and their hope for the future, Bobby Kennedy, had been assassinated and their candidate, Eugene McCarthy, was replaced by the DNC's hand-picked stooge, Hubert Humphrey. Their cry to the world in front of TV cameras was: 'THE WHOLE WORLD IS WATCHING". Now, it is watching again.

If the world could vote, Barack Obama would win by a landslide.

He'd take 78% of the vote in France, 72% in Germany, 70% in Canada and 61% in Japan, according to global newspaper polls and Harris Interactive, a market research firm in Rochester, N.Y.

Beneath those numbers, running parallel to Obama-mania, is a shifting global view of the United States. One week before Election Day, the world is revising its opinion of America. After a drop of confidence in the United States, presidential candidate Barack Obama has revived the U.S. brand, exporting a vision of American renewal to a world watching the election with unprecedented interest.

"He's just stirred the imagination of ordinary people," said Daniel Kinnear, a veteran diplomat based in South Africa. "For a country like South Africa that is coming out of a legacy of apartheid and is still dealing with its legacy, Obama remains a sign of hope. There's an incredible romanticism of having a black American on the forefront of change in the United States."

"If Obama does win, this could also be the moment when the world stops hating America," Vir Sanghvi, an Indian columnist, wrote in the Hindustan Times. "The world will feel engaged by an Obama presidency. By electing Obama they have the chance to earn ... goodwill, to transform their country's image, and to finally stem the rising tide of global anti-Americanism."

Since President Bush took office in 2000, approval of the United States has dropped, along with its soft power -- indirect influence by which the United States can advance its policy goals without the use of force or coercion.

SOURCE: ABC NEWS

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Bragi Thor Antoniusson, a 23-year-old student in Iceland, thinks the answer is: at least some.

"We're not asking to have a vote, what we're asking is that Americans open their eyes and see that the world's opinion matters," Antoniusson told The Trail.

Antoniusson helped create the online survey site If the World Could Vote, where users click to vote by country. To prevent multiple votes and voting by bots, the site counts one vote per IP address (the identifying code for a computer's network). If you've clicked on either Sen. John McCain or Sen. Barack Obama to cast a vote using your personal or work computer, whichever country that computer may be in, the site only counts the vote once. There are ways to abuse this, of course -- users can vote from more than one computer, for example -- but, for the most part, it works. One click, one vote. "Some people may think the site is just silly, or just something to pass around with friends," Antoniusson said, "but it's still saying something."

And Antoniusson, an Obama supporter, was happy to report that as of Monday night, it's a digital landslide for the Democrat. Out of 475,000 votes cast from 200 countries, Obama drubs McCain, 87 percent to 13 percent. More than 40,000 votes-by-clicks were cast in Canada, about 20,000 came from Australia and Finland and some 4,000 from China. About 170,000 came from America.

The results of Antonoiusson's unscientific poll are in sync with findings from the most recent Gallup polls conducted in 70 countries. Gallup's world poll, which can be accessed on Foreign Policy's site, shows Obama leading McCain 66 percent to 15 in Japan, for example.

"For me, my vote for Obama goes back to his opposition to the Iraq war. I know it's not high on the list of what Americans want to talk about, but America's invasion of Iraq affected more than just America. There are about 40 other countries with troops in Iraq because America decided to go to war," Antoniusson continued. (Most of the troops from the coalition that assisted with the initial phase of the war have since departed).

SOURCE: WASHINGTON POST

An Open Letter to Red States

Dear Red States...

We've decided we're leaving. We intend to form our own country, and we're taking all the Blue States with us. In case you aren't aware, that includes Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, all the Northeast, perhaps even Pennsylvania and my home state of Arizona which no longer bleeds red. Add to that Nevada, New Mexico and perhaps even Virginia and Ohio. We believe this split will be beneficial to the nation, and especially to the people of the new country of New California.

To sum up briefly: you get Texas, Oklahoma and all the slave states. We get stem cell research and the best beaches. You get Sarah Palin.

We get the Statue of Liberty. You get Dollywood. We get Intel, Apple and Microsoft. You get WorldCom. We get Harvard. You get Ole' Miss.

We get 85% of America's venture capital and entrepreneurs. You get Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi. We get two-thirds of the tax revenue, you get to make all the Red States pay their fair share. Good luck!

Since our aggregate divorce rate is 22% lower than the Christian Coalition's, we get a bunch of happy families. You get a bunch of single moms.

Please be aware that Nuevo California will be pro-choice and anti-war, and we're going to want all our citizens back from Iraq at once. If you need people to fight, ask your evangelicals. They have kids they're apparently willing to send to their deaths for no purpose. We do wish you success in Iraq, and hope that the WMDs turn up, but we're not willing to squander our resources in Bush's Quagmire.

With the Blue States banded together we will have firm control of 80% of the country's fresh water, more than 90% of the pineapple and lettuce, 92% of the nation's fresh fruit, 95% of
America's quality wines (you may serve French wines at state dinners, if they'll let you), 90% of all cheese, 90% of the high tech industry, most of the U.S. low-sulfur coal, all living redwoods, sequoias and condors, all the Ivy and Seven Sister schools, plus Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cal Tech and MIT.

With the Red States, on the other hand, you will have to cope with 88% of all obese Americans (and their projected health care costs), 92% of all U.S. mosquitoes, nearly 100% of the
tornados, 90% of the hurricanes, 99% of all Southern Baptists, virtually 100% of all televangelists, Rush Limbaugh, Bob Jones University, Clemson and the University of Georgia.

We get Hollywood and Yosemite, thank you.

Additionally, 38% of those in the Red states believe Jonah was actually swallowed by a whale, 62% believe life is sacred unless we're discussing the death penalty or gun laws, 44% say that evolution is only a theory, 53% that Saddam was involved in 9/11 and 61% of you crazy bastards believe you are people with higher morals than we lefties.

By the way, we're taking the good pot, too. You can have that dirt weed they grow in Mexico .

Peace be with you,
Cheers from the Blue States

Obama/Biden '08

Banks Hoarding Bailout Dollars - Loans???

According to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, the chief proponent of the big bank bailout, flooding the banks with taxpayers’ money was supposed to get them to start lending freely again. And that, in turn, was supposed to stabilize the markets and prevent the downturn from being worse than it otherwise would be.

It was not entirely clear from the start exactly how Mr. Paulson would ensure that things would go that way. Indeed, earlier this month, shortly after the bailout was enacted, The Times’s Mark Landler reported that Treasury officials also wanted to steer the bailout billions to banks that would use the money to buy up other banks.

Now, lo and behold, with $250 billion in bailout funds committed to dozens of large and regional banks, it turns out that many of the recipients of this investment from taxpayers are not all that interested in making loans. And it appears that Mr. Paulson is not so bothered by their reluctance.

Mr. Paulson and the bailout recipients have some explaining to do. Congress should plan hearings as soon as possible — and take action to set a clear strategy.

In his column on Saturday, The Times’s Joe Nocera told about a conference call that he had listened in on recently between employees and executives of JPMorgan Chase. Asked how an infusion of $25 billion of bailout funds would change the bank’s lending policy, an executive said the money would be used to buy other banks.

“I think there are going to be some great opportunities for us to grow in this environment, and I think we have an opportunity to use that $25 billion in that way,” the executive said. He added that the money could also be used as a backstop in case “recession turns into depression or what happens in the future.”

There was not a word about lending — not to businesses or home buyers or car buyers or students or other consumers. Just the opposite. In response to another question, the executive said that the bank expected to continue to "tighten credit".

SOURCE: NY TIMES

Barack Obama Addresses the Nation

AMERICAN STORIES, AMERICAN SOLUTIONS

This is the complete 30-minute infomercial in which Barack Obama presented his ideas to and hopes for the American people as we approach the election on November 4. An excellent presentation.

John McCain - An Economic Disaster

McCain is Dazed and Confused on the Economy

John McCain does not have the ability to fix this economic crisis. After declaring the fundamentals of the economy strong, he created a political circus in Washington last week by mucking up bailout negotiations; a deplorable stunt, considering he and his political cronies helped cause the current meltdown.

It was McCain and his economic adviser Phil Gramm who pushed for the deregulation that helped lead to the banking crisis, and it was McCain's crony Rick Davis who had deep lobbyist ties to Freddie Mac. Don't let others be fooled by McCain's economic grandstanding because the reality is his policies and principles will only exacerbate our financial hardships. That's why you must spread this video.

McCain is being deceitful with his sudden populist message and support for regulation; his economic policies still favor our nation's wealthy elite. Call out McCain's economic dishonesty. Send this video to friends and ask them to sign up for a free Brave New Films video subscription to know the latest on TheRealMcCain.com. Then, post it on your blogs and spread it on networking sites like Digg and Reddit. These are some of the best ways to reach people who are not following this debate closely.

McCain/Palin "October Surprise" Boomerangs

Professor Rashid Khalidi

Today both John McCain and his sidekick, Sarah Palin accused Barack Obama of having ties to a PLO radical. (CNN) -- Gov. Sarah Palin on Wednesday said Sen. Barack Obama has ties to a Columbia University professor who she said is "a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization." Gov. Sarah Palin says it's "not negative campaigning to call someone out on their record."

The Obama campaign said on its Web site that "ugly insinuations about Barack Obama's relationship with a former neighbor and university colleague ... are completely false." The professor has denied he was a spokesman for the Palestine Liberation Organization, which the U.S. and Israel consider a terrorist organization.

"It seems that there is yet another radical professor from the neighborhood who spent a lot of time with Barack Obama going back several years," Palin said at an event in Bowling Green, Ohio. "This is important because his associate, Rashid Khalidi ... in addition to being a political ally of Barack Obama, he's a former spokesperson for the Palestinian Liberation Organization."

Sen. John McCain's campaign repeatedly has sought to tie Obama to former 1960s radical William Ayers, who co-founded the Weather Underground. Ayers is a professor at the University of Illinois.

Khalidi is a leading scholar of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia, and he was a contemporary of Obama's while on the faculty of the University of Chicago. He has been a harsh critic of U.S. foreign policy toward Israel and has accused the country of "occupying" Palestinian territories. But he has denied acting as a PLO spokesman during a seven-year period in the 1970s and 1980s. Khalidi said Wednesday, "I am not speaking to the media at this time, and certainly not until this idiot wind passes."

The Obama campaign called Palin's remarks "another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters' attention from John McCain's lockstep support for George Bush's economic policies."

WHAT JOHN McCAIN IS HIDING!

"A major news organization is intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi," said McCain campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb. " . . . The election is one week away, and it's unfortunate that the press so obviously favors Barack Obama that this campaign must publicly request that the Los Angeles Times do its job -- make information public."

Really?

During the 1990s, John McCain, while serving as chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI), McCain distributed several grants to the Palestinian research center co-founded by Khalidi, including one worth half a million dollars.

A 1998 tax filing for the McCain-led group shows a $448,873 grant to Khalidi's Center for Palestine Research and Studies for work in the West Bank. (See grant number 5180, "West Bank: CPRS".)

The relationship between Khalidi and McCain extends back as far as 1993, when McCain first joined IRI as chairman in January. Foreign Affairs noted in September of that year that IRI had helped fund several extensive studies in Palestine run by Khalidi's group, including over 30 public opinion polls and a study of "sociopolitical attitudes."

McCain's organization helping a Palestinian group conduct research in the West Bank or Gaza should raise questions to be asked of McCain, including why he chose to hide this information and attempt to paint Obama as a radical, when in fact he raised significant money for Khalidi.

Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan responds as follows:

“This is just another recycled, manufactured controversy from the McCain campaign to distract voters’ attention from John McCain’s lock-step support for George Bush’s economic policies. Barack Obama has been clear and consistent on his support for Israel, and has been clear that Rasheed Khalidi is not an adviser to him or his campaign and that he does not share Khalidi’s views. Instead of giving lectures on media bias, John McCain should answer why, under his own chairmanship, the International Republican Institute repeatedly funded an organization Khalidi founded, the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, over the course of many years.”