Powell pals around with Obama.

Therefore, Powell is a terrorist.

I’m with Rep. Bachmann of Minnesota. There should be an investigation of Congress for Un-American activities.

I leave it on until the ‘basically gits come on and tell us how basically everything is. This week it took til 6 and half minutes when I turned it off.

Please join my campaign to eliminate the tedious use of the word ‘basically.’

Here is the reasoning::

The word “basically” is an overused verbal tic which demeans and condescends to the listener. It is at the same time a way for the speaker to inflate his own self esteem by flogging and repeating words that appear to emphasize personal knowledge.

It is a fault which has become, I fear, some sort of custom or accepted colloquialism.

This is the scary part. Obama is quite correct to warn his supporters, as he did yesterday, to not get cocky. “I have two words for you”, he said, “New Hampshire” He reminded everyone that going into the New Hampshire primary he was heavily favored to win, but he lost.

Today the TV networks started to discuss how they might fill an election-night where the winner is decided before people sit down to dinner. They’re expecting a big Obama blow-out. So is the world’s most accurate “poll”,
the Iowa Electronic Markets,
http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_Pres08_WTA.cfm

But McCain has shown that he’ll stop at nothing to paint Obama as a scary bogey-man, and of course the GOP might still have an “October Surprise” waiting offstage. And a Harvard professor friend of mine is still convinced that when many people are in that voting both, alone with their ballot, they just won’t be able to pull the lever for a black man.

So let’s not buy tickets to the inauguration before November 5th.

Agreed. I miss the good old days of the Daisy Girl ad.

Yes, bigtime. Practically everything McCain has done in this campaign has backfired. The only reason he’s not behind by 20 points is because Obama’s black and there’s enough residual racism in the US to keep it close.

So how did plumbers become such political icons? Remember the “Polish Plumber” (Plombier polonais) in the French EU Constitution campaign? Here’s a refresher:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_plumber

If you think tariffs are a good idea going into a recession I suggest you look up “Smoot-Hawley”.

Joe the the non-plumber is an incredibly sloppy and cynical tactic. Turns out that the McCain campaign didn’t even check if this guy is legit, and the press should be all over this as incompetence or as misrepresentation.

This guy complains about taxes which he doesn’t even pay! — so maybe he shouldn’t be using all the services he gets from local, state, and federal taxes…..

Last, McCain’s assertion that he speaks out against the violent and dangerous statements that his campaign rhetoric encourages is false, and I wish that more commentators and news analysts would call him on it unequivocally. We have lost too many good national leaders to assassination. Maybe Lewis’ comments about McCain are regretable, but McCain’s and Palin’s statements (now these statements are part of their robo-dial campaign) are incendiary and really do give extremists a reason to resort to violence. McCain and Palin need to denounce these statements in no uncertain terms when they happen

Obama was patient (or just lucky not being able to think of a reply for awhile). McCain showed some immediate distress on his face–not a good reaction. It was a nonverbal confession of his weakness on a point he harped on for the entire evening.

The debate was monitored well by Bob Sheiffer, almost as good as Jim Lehrer, but superior to Gwen Ifill and Tom Brokow, the latter was clearly last in effectiveness, too many self made distractions.

The general rule is, style beats substance when substance doesn’t have a clear advantage; so we know who won all three Presidential debates.

I hope we put tarrifs on outsourcing like we do on goods. Maybe the people could afford the gas, regardless of the price–giving us the comparative advantage in buying the abundance of oil in the world.

I’m out!

Some of us already know that, but you are right that most people don’t understand that.

Now: multiply this topic (business taxes) by all the other issues – monetary policy, global warming, geopolitics, healthcare funding, the “bailout”, stem cell research, missile-defence systems, funding the deficit, trade policy, etc, etc, et cetera, and we can see a problem.

A few of us are geeks who enjoy being policy wonks. We know what the “Bush Doctrine” is and why we should care about LIBOR and why the Senate bailout bill had to be attached to an unrelated piece of legislation to get voted on. But most voters are not wonks; they don’t know this stuff and aren’t interested!

So why do so many people here castigate them for making their decisions in a different basis? I like being wonkish, but what right do I have to impose my ivory-tower value system on other voters? This is a free country and it’s elitist for someone to tell someone else how they should choose for whom to vote.

At this point it seems that everyone is confused. The income of a business is not taxed as a whole only the NET PROFITS are taxed, after all the expenses of the business are taken out including utilites, local taxes, empolyees pay, health benefits, vhicles, parts, depriciation of buldings and equipment what have you, be it a corporation, sole propritership or an S-corpration, only then whatever is left for the owner is taxable. A Business could have a million dollars in sales but the owner may not even make a hundred thousand doallrs in income.

Both McCain and Neal Boortz and the other right wing mouth pieces are trying to scare people. To bad Obama himself could not explain it in the debate.

The vote of a “low information” voter counts just as much as your vote. Infact, if the “low information” voter lives in a swing state it probably counts more.

But what makes you think voters base their decisions on “information”?

What makes it “sad”?

Other than being an entrepreneur how else do you “grow your own money”?

And, statistically, the odds of success in being an entrepreneur are POORER than making money in the stock market, since the vast majority of small busineses fail in the first few years. Furthermore, being an entrepreneur doesn’t insulate you from the decisions of others – your customers, competitors, suppliers, etc, will all make decisions that determine YOUR success.

Lots of Low Information Voters (there’s that phrase again) are calling in with feelings and nothing to back them up. And NPR is supposed to know these things already without all the “on the one hand on the other”isms.

. . .

Meanwhile, people keep paying many times over for the privilege to have marginally lower taxes, if at all, while paying through the nose for healthcare and their kids’ colleges.

What perplexes me is why so many people here criticize me for pointing out that politics is all about theater and perception, and then claim to be “perplexed” that Americans don’t get the basic numbers, as you describe, above.

YES, you are absolutely correct that the NUMBERS don’t make rational sense. Obviously, in numeric terms a different distribution of taxes and more spending on healthcare and education would work better and make more sense.

But it’s not about numbers and all the science on the way humans make decisions in a social context such as politics underscores this. Emotion, intertemporal choice, group affiliation, symbolism, “aspirationalism” etc, etc, will trump numbers like yours (or mine, because I totally agree with your economic analysis) almost every time.