Prior to the Town Hall Debates

I have read too much bad about McCain. Not only the Keating Five scandal of the 80's but the way he treated his first wife, Carol, his history of philandering, his terrible temper and bad language against colleagues in the Senate. He had to be separated from a fight he started on the Senate floor.

I read a twenty four page profile about him from the Rolling Stone magazine. He graduated fifth from the bottom of his class. He himself said he operates from his emotions and not his head. And he has started doing the negative ads out of his desperation.

He is running as a hero from 40 years ago. He was not a hero. He was a POW who broke under torture and made videos confessing his wrongs. Now, I don't think I could stand torture like that either so I don't fault him for that. But he's the one that lets everyone call him a hero. He wasn't a hero. He was a POW.

I don't want someone with his hair trigger temper to have that red button under his finger. I want a cool headed person who is willing to use diplomacy. Someone who wants to see peace in the world and who will help rebuild our reputation in the world. I don't want someone who cannot admit error. We've had enough of that from W.

I don't want anyone as president who thinks the economy is just fine until it collapses.

I'm no economist but two years ago I saw this coming and took what little I had left out of the stock market and put it in a CD at 4% interest. I did not trust the market even then and I am not a highly educated person.

Again..From The Nation

I am becoming more and more alarmed by the tone of this election campaign. As McCain gets more desperate and as the time becomes shorter until the election, we are finding more lies spread about Obama. For example, I read this article in The Nation this morning. This only a part of the article.

"I don't normally listen to Sean Hannity, nor did I watch his Fox News special on Sunday, "Obama and Friends: The History of Radicalism." But I did read the transcript. To make their case against Obama, conservatives like Hannity are relying on a highly discredited cast of characters.

Take the example of Andy Martin, the "author and journalist" Hannity quotes extensively in his segment. "I think a community organizer in Barack Obama's case was somebody that was in training for a radical overthrow of the government," Martin tells Hannity. In Martin's view, Obama is just a puppet of radicals like Bill Ayers and Louis Farrakhan. "If you love the Cuban revolution and Castro and if you love what's happening in Venezuela with Hugo Chavez, you'll love Barry Obama--Barack Obama, as he calls himself--in the White House," Martin says.

So just who is Andy Martin? Well, for starters, he's the originator of the "Obama is a Muslim" lie circulating around the Internet, as my colleague Chris Hayes first reported last year.

"In his past, Martin also has expressed anti-Semitic views," the Chicago Tribune wrote in 2006. "When he ran for Congress in Connecticut in 1986, the name of his congressional campaign committee included the phrase 'to exterminate Jew power in America,' Federal Election Commission records show."

Martin wrote in a personal bankruptcy case in 1983, "I am able to understand how the Holocaust took place, and with every passing day feel less and less sorry that it did, when Jew survivors are operating as a wolf pack to steal my property."

Martin's had numerous run-ins with the law, in Connecticut, Florida, Illinois and elsewhere.

You can see how the ignorant voter might listen to something said on the Hannity show and take it as gospel even though it is being spread by a hate monger. Too many people do not do any research themselves. They just believe anything said over the airwaves must be true. This is just so scary. I understand they doubled the security on the Obama family this fall.

Peace Colloquy Report

The Peace Colloquy was a great weekend. The Presbyterian friends who went with me really enjoyed it. I haven't heard how the Methodist liked it but she didn't miss a session.

The theme was learning to be signal communities. A signal community tries to be a force in their community and meets need as it becomes apparent to them. The signal community from Alabama, that received the #35,000 peace award was the home of Habitat for Humanity. Two people from their community came to receive the award and lo and behold a couple of dozen other members of their community drove 19 hours to be there to see them receive it too. This community was begun in the 1940's and was integrated by the sixties. They suffered a lot of violence against them for being integrated. But they never struck back. They installed lighting all around their community sensing the Klu Klux Klan would not attack in daylight or when it was all lighted. They never suffered any deaths but had bombings and shootings into their community. This was done by Klan "Christians".

The small groups at the colloquy got together twice a day and discussed what their congregations were doing and could do to build a sense of community and move out into their communities. The most important concept is that we must live our religion every day of the week and not just on Sunday. Too many of us Christians tend to do that.

Then there were two workshops to help us realize exactly what a signal community is. I realized my congregation was already a signal community. We try to live our religion. We contribute to two funds to help low income families pay their utility bills and rent, we contribute toward funding a school in the Domincan Republic, when we had our big flood last year, our church donated $10,000 toward the recovery effort. We have a food basket at the church. We participate in the Christmas Child shoebox project every Christmastime, we worked to keep a city block clean monthly until we built our church in the country. Our people serve on many boards in their communities. We have two that serve as auxillary at the hospitals, I serve on the free clinic board, two of our number serve on the senior citizen's board in their community and do lunches for shutins. We adopt two families at Christmastime and provide gifts for their children and food for their holiday dinners. I'm sure there is a lot more that I am not aware of. Our people do not tend to blow their own horns. I am sure we could do more and we will as soon as we become aware of the need.

P.S. Another Methodist couple called last night to get the dates for next year's colloquy. They want to go too.

Credit Crunch

Anyone who watched Sixty Minutes this evening heard the interviewer interview some very astute financial experts as they explained exactly how the unregulated markets got into the mess they are in right now. This is a shadow market believed to be worth around 50-60 trillion dollars. This is 4 times the national debt.

They bundled the very worst of the sub prime mortgages and tried to sell these risky packages off to buyers. In order to insure the sale, they also sold something called credit default "swap". This was really an insurance but it could not be called insurance because if they called it "insurance" it would be regulated. So they named it "credit default swap". There were no capital reserves to back up these swaps.

Those we know who participated in this unethical behavior were the CEOs of AIG (with their 85 billion dollar rescue), Citigroup, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Bear Stearns, and Morgan Stanley. There may be others who have not surfaced yet.

This Shadow market is hidden from the public, the government and even government regulators. These CEOs were dealing with sums and packages of sub prime loans that they did not even understand and had hired physicists to try to explain them with formulas. These CEOs, who were paid multimillions of dollars were not very good at their jobs and in order to enrich themselves, were taking huge risks without any capital to back them up at all.

Now, we are spending $700,000,000,000 of foreign borrowed, taxpayer money to bail these people out. Does anyone see any sense in this entire bailout mess? I do not think it will work and I believe we will be asked for even more money at a later date and I believe these CEOs, our foreign lenders and foreign banks who bought into this mess , will end up getting the bulk of the money. Mark my words!

The VIP Debate

This debate was a strange one.

Palin avoided the tough questions and went on and on about what SHE did in Alaska. Who cares what she did in Alaska where they have oil. Of course they could cut taxes for everyone there with windfall profits taxes . That's what Obama wants to do for every American. She continued to go on and on about what she did in Alaska. She insists on talking about what SHE has done.

As far as health care is concerned, a $5,000 tax credit would not begin to pay for health care for a family. Especially since McCain intends to tax those health care dollars.

She continued to bring up lies that Obama and Biden have continually corrected over and over again. She attacked and he came up with issues. She avoided issues. And it's obvious she knows little or nothing about foreign affairs. She has been briefed just enough to carry on a debate.

She went on and on about the fact that those Muslim leaders hate what we stand for. Freedom. They don't hate our freedom. What they hate is our invasion on their Holy Lands and our unconditional support of Israel.

Biden pointed out that McCain's policies are basically the same as George's Bush's. There's not a lot she could say to dispute that.

Biden said, "We're spending $10 billion a month while the Iraqis have a $80 billion surplus. Barack says it's time for them to spend their own money have the 400,000 military we've trained for them begin to take their own responsibility, and gradually over 6 month -- 16 months, withdraw.

John McCain, this is a fundamental difference between us: We will end this war. For John McCain, there is no end in sight to end this war. Fundamental difference: We will end this war."

She used talking points she had obviously memorized. She changed the focus of Ifill's questions again and again.

A strange moment in the debate, where Sarah Palin refused to answer if her ticket would have to pull back on some campaign promises in light of the financial crisis.

But, to be fair, she did a lot better then I and a lot of others thought she would.

Peace Colloquy

Tomorrow morning I leave for a Peace Colloquy in Independence, Missouri. Some friends are picking me up at 7:00 so I don't know if I will have time to post while I am there or not. It may be Sunday evening before you hear from me again. If I remember, I will take my laptop with me and hope to find the time and a place where I can keep up with you all.

Today, my grandson sent me a new picture of my great grandchild, Sage. We have three but I have more pictures of this one then the others.

I will upload the picture I scanned. This is Sage. She is 5 years old.

From The Nation

"We need a November electoral mandate rejecting reckless unregulated free-market capitalism as a model for our century. Every minute we carry that message in these days before the election, we are building that mandate. We need a peace mandate, too.

If I had a vote, I would vote "no" on the bailout package because it remains completely weighted to Wall Street's interests. Just look at Wall Street's calculation: they will get $750 billion with no new strings or conditions they haven't managed to live with, or circumvent, before. There are no performance standards for reducing foreclosures, bankruptcies and job losses. There are no penalties for failing to achieve those performance standards. There are no oversight mechanisms with new teeth, like a public monitor on private investment bank boards or inspectors-general with subpoena powers within.

Democrats at least should have posted a bill that would contain real countervailing powers, and posed the question whether Wall Street really wants the money, or only public money for private use. "

I agree with Tom Hayden from The Nation. Without effective oversight and careful administration, this bill just becomes a free handout to the CEOs involved in these deals. I believe it is just the final gift of the Bush administration to his wealthy supporters. They have already fleeced the nation with their repeal of all effective regulation. This would be fine if we lived in a perfect world and we could have free markets without regulation but unfortunately, this is not a perfect world at this point and we seem to be moving further and further away from it at this point in history. Greed dominates this society...and the greed of the rich really dominates it to the point where the impact is being felt all over the world.

I fear this "bailout" plan will backfire and not work and they will be back in six months "needing" even more. And if we don't end this terrible war, it will finish bankrupting us. I posted this comment months ago and it still is true:

"The problem with us in Iraq is not just Iraq. This war and the insurgency is the result of a number of things, not the least being that we have supported Israel against Palestine for a very long time. We should, in fact, be neutral on this issue and attempt to help build a Palestinian state as well.

As infidels, we are occupying their Holy Land on the Arabian Peninsula.

US support for Russia, India and China against their Muslim populations.

US pressure on Arab energy producers to try to lower oil prices.

US support for apostate, corrupt, and tyrannical Muslim governments.

Another problem is that we do not understand the culture and find ourselves as infidels on Iraqi and Afghanistan holy ground.

Then there is the fact that the insurgency are simply common people who want us gone because we are occupying their country. Anyone who reads and studies anything knows by this time that this war is all about oil. If someone came here and invaded our country, all of us would be an insurgency. In fact, when we were a British colony, our "patriots" were the insurgency.

As far as rebuilding their country...we've tried that and received shoddy construction and wasted millions and millions of dollars. Let's get out of there if we can't provide some decent construction...and let the Iraqis rebuild their own country with all that oil money. I bet they would be happy to do that just to get rid of us.

As far as Afghanistan is concerned, the Russians fought there for decades and could not win. They finally got out of there but not until after the cost of the war ruined their economy.

To understand the Iraqi and Afghan point of view, it is necessary to put ourselves in their place. Keep in mind that none of the 9/11 attackers were from there. This plan for war was already in place long before 9/11. The Project for the New American Century proved that. The attack just gave the administration reason to get congress to allow them to go to war. They blamed it on 9/11 but it was really all about oil.

Again, we need to get out of there before the cost of this war finishes wrecking OUR economy."