Obama’s DNC Speech

This has to be the best speech I’ve ever seen.  It amazes me the he writes the majority of all his speeches.  His passion and integrity are incredibly inspiring. I seriously believe that he can turn this country around. Please consider voting for him this November!

WTF? Vice President Palin?

I’ve been thinking about this for the last day or so now and I just can’t figure it out. The nomination of Sarah Palin seems like such a stupid move to me.  With all of the other well qualified and popular candidates he could have chosen (Romney, Huckabee, Ron Paul etc.) it just doesn’t make sense to pick Palin.  Even if he was dead set on choosing a woman to try and get those Hillary voters, why not pick Condoleeza Rice or Kay Hutchinson the governor of Texas or any number of well qualified Republican women.  But Sarah Palin?  I know she’s cute but come on!  Here’s why I don’t think it works:

1. She’s dangerously unqualified.  Her only major experience in office has been the governorship of Alaska for the last year and a half.  She has zero foreign policy experience and mentioned several weeks ago that she had no idea what a Vice President actually does. Historians are saying she is the least qualified person to join a political ticket in the modern era.

I can understand McCains desire to put someone younger on the ticket, because if elected (god forbid) he would be the oldest president ever going into his first term.  Why risk the second in command having no idea what she’s doing, if something should happen to him? Especially at a time when we’re fighting two wars and the economy is in crisis.  I don’t get it.

Plus she’s going to look like a light weight next to Biden in the vice-presidential debate.

2.  It’s demeaning to woman.  It’s clear the main reason she was picked was the vain attempt to pick up disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters from the Democrats. She made this crystal clear in her acceptance speech citing Hillary Clinton’s historic run and her 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling motif.  I think its insulting to think that the only reason Clinton voters liked Hillary was because she was a woman. What does it say about the guy, that he picked his VP not because of her experience but because of her gender?  

Seems like her insistence on mentioning Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail isn’t going that great either.

3. She’s not the moderate or change agent McCain says she is.  When it comes to her social views she is to the right of the religious right.  She wants creationism taught in schools and doesn’t believe in abortion under any circumstances even in the case of rape or incest.  Unlike the portrait McCain painted of her in his speech, she is in the pocket of Big Oil in Alaska.  She wants to drill in ANWAR and wants polar bears taken off the endangered species list to make it easy for oil companies to drill in their habitats.  She has also been on each side of the issue of the ‘bridge to nowhere‘ lamenting the fact that congressional funds were not more forthcoming to complete the bridge as late as 2006.  

I still think Romney would have been the best choice for McCain.  He has a lot of love among conservatives.  Every Republican I know at work was pulling for him in the primaries. He also ran a successful business and has the perception of knowing a lot about the economy, which is shaping up to be the major issue of the campaign and is something McCain has admitted he doesn’t know much about.  He also has a strong personality that could possibly stand up to Biden in the VP debate.  

Hopefully this will turn out to be one of the worst VP picks in presidential history.  It certainly says a lot about McCains judgment.  I’m seriously looking forward to the Biden-Palin debate.  It’s going to be a massacre.  

Vote Obama-Biden ’08 for real change in Washington!

Put me in the Cone of Mistrust…

I hate to say it, but Senator Obama should have seen this coming.  In this weeks “Saddleback Presidential Forum” both candidates were set to do some hard-core pandering to the religious right.  In theory, Rick Warren was supposed to host a fair Q&A time, asking both presidential contenders the same questions with neither of them knowing the questions beforehand.

Barack took questions first and, sadly, despite Warren’s assurance that he had “put McCain in a ‘cone of silence'”, he was in nothing of the sort.  He sat in his limo (which is well equipped with a radio and television) for the first half hour of the forum, before being escorted by the secret service to a room with a television monitor (though supposedly not hooked up), none of which would have stopped him from getting text messages or calls detailing the questions he was to receive.  And as the Huffington Post points out “presumably his aides have Blackberries. Coaching could have taken place without McCain hearing anything directly from the broadcast at all”.  This ridiculous incompetence and/or outright attempt to make Obama look less presidential or prepared is why churches shouldn’t be hosting presidential appearances in the first place.

None of this proves that McCain cheated of course.  But what can be verified is that both McCain and Warren violated their promises of a fair interview.  McCain violated an implied or expressed promise to have arrived at the venue by the time that Barack Obama’s interview began. Warren implied to a national audience that McCain was in a quarantined area at the time Obama’s interview began, but in fact McCain was not.  It just goes to show you that progressives shouldn’t trust evangelical leaders.  They’re not interested in being fair.  They’re interested in furthering their own conservative agenda, and eroding the walls between church and state.

Meanwhile I won’t be holding my breath for Sam Harris to host the Atheists Presidential Forum.