Obama

[n2tattoos.lol]

it's the first time since the public spending system was put into place, in 1976, that a presidential nominee has elected not to participate. obama has raised and spent more money than any presidential campaign in history.

[Trips]

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obama's cash flow is 180+mil while McCain's is about 76 mil. Obama has so much that hes giving money to other campains for legislature seats. Also, fun fact, 120 mil of obamas money is nameless. No one knows where it came from nor do they have to tell. Fun stuff

[Randal Graves]

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I bet it's Bin Laden.

[Trips]

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Rofl yeah. His original name is Obama bin laden. If you ask our red state anyways.

[n2tattoos.lol]

Would the Last Honest Reporter Please Turn On the Lights?
By Orson Scott Card

Editor's note: Orson Scott Card is a Democrat and a newspaper columnist, and in this opinion piece he takes on both while lamenting the current state of journalism.

An open letter to the local daily paper — almost every local daily paper in America:

I remember reading All the President's Men and thinking: That's journalism. You do what it takes to get the truth and you lay it before the public, because the public has a right to know.

This housing crisis didn't come out of nowhere. It was not a vague emanation of the evil Bush administration.

It was a direct result of the political decision, back in the late 1990s, to loosen the rules of lending so that home loans would be more accessible to poor people. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were authorized to approve risky loans.

What is a risky loan? It's a loan that the recipient is likely not to be able to repay.

The goal of this rule change was to help the poor — which especially would help members of minority groups. But how does it help these people to give them a loan that they can't repay? They get into a house, yes, but when they can't make the payments, they lose the house — along with their credit rating.

They end up worse off than before.

This was completely foreseeable and in fact many people did foresee it. One political party, in Congress and in the executive branch, tried repeatedly to tighten up the rules. The other party blocked every such attempt and tried to loosen them.

Furthermore, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were making political contributions to the very members of Congress who were allowing them to make irresponsible loans. (Though why quasi-federal agencies were allowed to do so baffles me. It's as if the Pentagon were allowed to contribute to the political campaigns of Congressmen who support increasing their budget.)

Isn't there a story here? Doesn't journalism require that you who produce our daily paper tell the truth about who brought us to a position where the only way to keep confidence in our economy was a $700 billion bailout? Aren't you supposed to follow the money and see which politicians were benefiting personally from the deregulation of mortgage lending?

I have no doubt that if these facts had pointed to the Republican Party or to John McCain as the guilty parties, you would be treating it as a vast scandal. "Housing-gate," no doubt. Or "Fannie-gate."

Instead, it was Senator Christopher Dodd and Congressman Barney Frank, both Democrats, who denied that there were any problems, who refused Bush administration requests to set up a regulatory agency to watch over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and who were still pushing for these agencies to go even further in promoting sub-prime mortgage loans almost up to the minute they failed.

As Thomas Sowell points out in a TownHall.com essay entitled "Do Facts Matter?" ( http://snipurl.com/457townhall_com] ): "Alan Greenspan warned them four years ago. So did the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers to the President. So did Bush's Secretary of the Treasury."

These are facts. This financial crisis was completely preventable. The party that blocked any attempt to prevent it was ... the Democratic Party. The party that tried to prevent it was ... the Republican Party.

Yet when Nancy Pelosi accused the Bush administration and Republican deregulation of causing the crisis, you in the press did not hold her to account for her lie. Instead, you criticized Republicans who took offense at this lie and refused to vote for the bailout!

What? It's not the liar, but the victims of the lie who are to blame?

Now let's follow the money ... right to the presidential candidate who is the number-two recipient of campaign contributions from Fannie Mae.

And after Freddie Raines, the CEO of Fannie Mae who made $90 million while running it into the ground, was fired for his incompetence, one presidential candidate's campaign actually consulted him for advice on housing.

If that presidential candidate had been John McCain, you would have called it a major scandal and we would be getting stories in your paper every day about how incompetent and corrupt he was.

But instead, that candidate was Barack Obama, and so you have buried this story, and when the McCain campaign dared to call Raines an "adviser" to the Obama campaign — because that campaign had sought his advice — you actually let Obama's people get away with accusing McCain of lying, merely because Raines wasn't listed as an official adviser to the Obama campaign.

You would never tolerate such weasely nit-picking from a Republican.

If you who produce our local daily paper actually had any principles, you would be pounding this story, because the prosperity of all Americans was put at risk by the foolish, short-sighted, politically selfish, and possibly corrupt actions of leading Democrats, including Obama.

If you who produce our local daily paper had any personal honor, you would find it unbearable to let the American people believe that somehow Republicans were to blame for this crisis.

There are precedents. Even though President Bush and his administration never said that Iraq sponsored or was linked to 9/11, you could not stand the fact that Americans had that misapprehension — so you pounded us with the fact that there was no such link. (Along the way, you created the false impression that Bush had lied to them and said that there was a connection.)

If you had any principles, then surely right now, when the American people are set to blame President Bush and John McCain for a crisis they tried to prevent, and are actually shifting to approve of Barack Obama because of a crisis he helped cause, you would be laboring at least as hard to correct that false impression.

Your job, as journalists, is to tell the truth. That's what you claim you do, when you accept people's money to buy or subscribe to your paper.

But right now, you are consenting to or actively promoting a big fat lie — that the housing crisis should somehow be blamed on Bush, McCain, and the Republicans. You have trained the American people to blame everything bad — even bad weather — on Bush, and they are responding as you have taught them to.

If you had any personal honor, each reporter and editor would be insisting on telling the truth — even if it hurts the election chances of your favorite candidate.

Because that's what honorable people do. Honest people tell the truth even when they don't like the probable consequences. That's what honesty means . That's how trust is earned.

Barack Obama is just another politician, and not a very wise one. He has revealed his ignorance and naivete time after time — and you have swept it under the rug, treated it as nothing.

Meanwhile, you have participated in the borking of Sarah Palin, reporting savage attacks on her for the pregnancy of her unmarried daughter — while you ignored the story of John Edwards's own adultery for many months.

So I ask you now: Do you have any standards at all? Do you even know what honesty means?

Is getting people to vote for Barack Obama so important that you will throw away everything that journalism is supposed to stand for?

You might want to remember the way the National Organization of Women threw away their integrity by supporting Bill Clinton despite his well-known pattern of sexual exploitation of powerless women. Who listens to NOW anymore? We know they stand for nothing; they have no principles.

That's where you are right now.

It's not too late. You know that if the situation were reversed, and the truth would damage McCain and help Obama, you would be moving heaven and earth to get the true story out there.

If you want to redeem your honor, you will swallow hard and make a list of all the stories you would print if it were McCain who had been getting money from Fannie Mae, McCain whose campaign had consulted with its discredited former CEO, McCain who had voted against tightening its lending practices.

Then you will print them, even though every one of those true stories will point the finger of blame at the reckless Democratic Party, which put our nation's prosperity at risk so they could feel good about helping the poor, and lay a fair share of the blame at Obama's door.

You will also tell the truth about John McCain: that he tried, as a Senator, to do what it took to prevent this crisis. You will tell the truth about President Bush: that his administration tried more than once to get Congress to regulate lending in a responsible way.

This was a Congress-caused crisis, beginning during the Clinton administration, with Democrats leading the way into the crisis and blocking every effort to get out of it in a timely fashion.

If you at our local daily newspaper continue to let Americans believe — and vote as if — President Bush and the Republicans caused the crisis, then you are joining in that lie.

If you do not tell the truth about the Democrats — including Barack Obama — and do so with the same energy you would use if the miscreants were Republicans — then you are not journalists by any standard.

You're just the public relations machine of the Democratic Party, and it's time you were all fired and real journalists brought in, so that we can actually have a news paper in our city.

[Trips]

Too many words. Blah blah gay sex blah blah congress

[n2tattoos.lol]

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this is not your diary, it's a news article.

[BlackCrypt]

That was a pretty good article. Doubt it will make many papers though.

[Mr Handlebars]

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No truer words spoken. You probably hit it on the head BC.

[beastley]

u can write a very similar article blaming pubs for the iraq war, which we can almost all(should be everyone, but in america warhawks abound) agree was a huge mistake....

how about this article which is very telling as well?

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If you want to know what it's like to be a veteran in John McCain's home state, stop by the Justa Center in downtown Phoenix.

On a Thursday morning not long ago, a volunteer named Twyla stands in front of a group of clients at Justa, a day program for homeless seniors, explaining what she's brought from the food bank.

"I hope that those of you who don't have many teeth, that you'll be OK with the salad," she says, adding that she's also brought blueberry pomegranate juice. "And cake for dessert!"

Scott Ritchey rolls his eyes good-naturedly as he passes through the room, where the fluorescent light doesn't do any favors to the dirty linoleum and the worn-out, mismatched couches. For the past three years, this decrepit little building near the Arizona capitol has been a godsend for about 100 homeless seniors at a time who have nothing to do with their days after waking up at a nearby shelter.

On any given day, about half the participants are veterans.

When Ritchey, a Methodist minister, started the program — which operates on about $260,000 in private donations a year — one of the first things he did was call the local office of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to get some help for the vets. It took a year for anyone to show up. And in three years, Ritchey says, the VA has yet to place a single vet from the Justa Center in housing.

Bobby Collins, 59, is a homeless Vietnam vet who shows up at Justa from time to time. He's been waiting for a benefits check from the VA for eight months. Collins was shot in the throat in Vietnam; his leg's full of shrapnel. He's got two purple hearts, but he didn't claim his medical benefits for years. He didn't need to — he had steady jobs as a welder and a carpenter. Then last Thanksgiving, he came to Phoenix and couldn't find work and quickly found himself homeless. Now he needs his money.

The people at the VA are very nice, Collins says, but the bureaucracy is impossible. They've told him he'll get his money; he doesn't understand why it's taking so long. Collins says he's working hard not to be bitter, but when he arrived in Phoenix and saw what few services there were for him as a veteran, he was mad at John McCain.

"I have a lot of respect for Sen. McCain as a war hero," he says, but "I would never vote for a veteran who lets veterans in his state be treated this way."

McCain has had 25 years in Congress to help veterans. Instead, he has regularly voted against plans to increase funding for veterans services, including proposals that would have improved conditions at veterans hospitals and increased rehab services for vets. Meanwhile, McCain has served as one of Washington's most vocal war hawks.

In the last few minutes of the first presidential debate, on September 26, McCain made a statement that probably blew past most economy-obsessed Americans, but it stopped a lot of military veterans short.

Barack Obama had just remarked that he's approached all the time by Iraq War veterans who say they can't get help for post-traumatic stress disorder. When it was his turn to reply, McCain seemed incensed.

"I know the veterans, and I know them well," he said. His voice shook with emotion. "And I know that they know that I'll take care of them. And I've been proud of their support and of their recognition of my service to the veterans. And I love them, and I'll take care of them. And they know that I'll take care of them."

Veterans groups are finally speaking out about their frustration with McCain, who rides on his reputation as a war veteran at the same time he's compiled a long record of opposing legislation benefiting vets.

McCain's campaign did not return a call Monday for comment regarding his voting record and his constituent services operations.

At the second presidential debate, on October 7, McCain told the American people that he supports a spending freeze that excludes veterans. Here are a few examples of pro-veteran legislation that didn't get McCain's support:

• January 2008 — McCain didn't vote on the National Defense Authorization Act, which included an increase of 3.5 percent in basic monthly pay for active military and permitted vets who are 100 percent disabled to get both retirement and disability pay.

• October 2007 — He didn't vote on another version of the Defense Authorization Act, which included billions of dollars in veterans health services funding.

• February 2006 — He voted against an amendment proposed by Christopher Dodd, a Democrat from Connecticut, that would have appropriated $1 billion for hospital improvements at places like Walter Reed Army Medical Center and also included $14 billion for the Veterans Benefits Administration for Compensation and Pensions for 2006-10 and $6.9 billion for the VA for medical care for 2006-10.

• November 2005 — He voted against an amendment that would have provided $500 million each year from 2006 to 2010 for "readjustment counseling, related mental health services, and treatment and rehabilitative services for veterans with mental illness, post-traumatic stress disorder, or substance use disorder."

• October 2005 — McCain voted against an amendment that would have required that funding for VA health administration be increased each year to adjust for inflation and the number of veterans served.

*
Jamie Peachey Photography
Vietnam veteran Bobby Collins wonders why McCain forgot about him.
Vietnam veteran Bobby Collins wonders why McCain forgot about him.

• March 2004 — He voted against closing tax loopholes to create a reserve fund to allow for an increase in medical care for veterans of $1.8 billion.

Brandon Friedman is a former Army officer who served in Iraq and Afghanistan; he's now vice chairman of a national veterans support group called Vote Vets, an organization devoted to electing veterans — with one notable exception — to public office.

Friedman calls McCain's statements in support of vets "a slap in the face." He says, "Coming from a guy who's kept us stuck in Iraq at the expense of the fight against al Qaeda in Afghanistan — and who opposed the new G.I. Bill — [such comments don't] carry much weight. Those are empty words. John McCain is all talk when it comes to supporting veterans, and his voting record shows it."

Until the 2008 presidential race, the only veterans really harping about McCain were from a group called Vietnam Veterans Against McCain, and you need only visit their website, vietnamveteransagainstmccain.com, to see how fringe the group's members and their complaints can be. They've called McCain "the Manchurian Candidate" and disparaged the senator for ignoring their efforts to find missing POWs in Vietnam. McCain has never been particularly patient with them either — he famously made the mother of one missing POW cry at a congressional hearing in the early 1990s and engaged in heated arguments with others. They will never forgive him for voting to normalize relations with Vietnam.

The new complaints, though, focus on bread-and-butter issues. It's not only about a difference of opinion over how the war in Iraq is being handled, though that's part of it. It's a story about how the soldiers are treated once they come home.

Another vets organization, Veterans for Common Sense, posted this comment on its website earlier this year: "John McCain is yet another Republican former military veteran who likes to talk a big game when it comes to having the support of the military. Yet, time and time again, he has gone out of his way to vote against the needs of those who are serving in our military. If he can't even see his way to actually do what the troops want, or what the veterans need, and he doesn't have the support of veterans, then how can he be a credible commander in chief?"