Election Day Results

[Update 11:50p]: Likely my last update tonight.  I have another all-day meeting tomorrow that will be brutal to sit through if I stay up any longer.  I’m watching a couple of numbers: IN, OH, VA, NC, FL Presidential numbers.  The vote differential in these states (O-M) at this time stand at: 23,000 (IN), 160,000 (OH w/ 83% precincts reporting), 121,000 (VA), 12,000 (NC), 200,000 (FL).  If these differentials don’t change, that’s an additional 25 electoral votes (IN & NC); OH, VA, FL have been called already.  But these are small vote differentials.  The fact that these five states have likely voted for Obama is amazing.  A whole lot of blue has been painted over the country tonight.

[Update 11:30P]:

A clear trend has emerged: Coloradans don’t want to amend their Constitution.
A46: 50%-49% (N-Y)
A47: 55%-44% (N-Y)
A48: 73%-26% (N-Y)
A49: 60%-39% (N-Y)
A50: 58%-41% (N-Y)
A51: 62%-37% (N-Y)
A52: 63%-36% (N-Y)
A54: 48%-51% (N-Y) the only one so far
A58: 57%-42% (N-Y)
A59: 55%-44% (N-Y)

[Update 11:15P]: The b.s. spin by Cons has begun on CNN.  This election did not bring in a new set of conservative Democrats to Congress.  It brought in a set of Democrats that are proud of being Democrats; proud of being liberal.  America is a more liberal country than it is a conservative country.  The corporate media has, unfortunately, spun a very different story to the American people for too long.  Americans want solutions to the climate crisis, the occupation of Iraq, the economic crisis, the health care crisis, etc.  Americans tonight quite clearly rejected the failed Con policies of the past 30 years.  They want to move in a very different direction.  That means that Obama doesn’t need to cater to the right-wing extremists that have taken over the Republican party.  He should interact honestly with moderate and liberal Republicans, because they more accurately represent more Americans.  The pundits will try their darndest to move Obama to the right over the next four years.  It is up to the 3 million+ donors to Obama’s campaign and his 55 million voters (so far) to ensure he stays true to what he ran on during this election.

[Update 10:45P]: President-elect Obama had another outstanding speech.  America did not vote for fear or anger this year.  America voted for opportunity and equality.  I didn’t keep good track of the state-by-state electoral vote calculations, but Obama has 338 to McCain’s 156 right now.  Again, Obama has garnered more electoral college votes than Bush did the past two elections.  Obama has also taken the lead in Indiana, which has 11 electoral college votes as well as North Carolina, which has 15 electoral college votes.  Obama is behind in Missouri currently, which also has 11 electoral votes.  I don’t expect final results from Missouri for quite some time – tomorrow at the earliest.  They have some repressive voting rules, unfortunately.  Obama currently leads in Montana, which only has 3 votes, but would represent a major political coup if he can win there.

Senator-elect Udall’s lead is 53%-43%.
Polis’ lead is 60%-36%.
Markey’s lead is 56%-43%.  Post calls it for Markey.

Republican’s ceilings in Colorado seems to be 43-45%.

Unfortunately, Amendment 58 didn’t get passed.  If it passed, oil and gas corporations would have paid the taxes they owe to the state, instead of using a loophole to avoid doing so.

[Update 9:00P]: CNN just called the race for Obama nationally.  I cannot believe what I’m hearing.  I’ve waited 8 long years to see a Democratic President elected.  I hope this result holds.  CNN has projected 297 electoral votes for Obama, 139 for McCain.  Those 297 are more than Bush received in 2004 or 2000.  Let’s start talking about mandates, shall we?

[Update 8:25P]: Obama is up in Colorado 55%-42% with 16% of precincts reporting.  Mark Udall is up by a similar margin: 55%-40%.

[Update 7:45P]: Dropping down into Colorado, Mark Udall is performing well in early returns versus Bob Schaffer: Udall is up 50%-39% with 8% of precincts reporting.  Betsy Markey is ahead of Marilyn Musgrave 61%-39% with 31% of precincts reporting for CO-04.  So far, it’s about 93,989 votes to 61,041 votes. In CO-02, a race I worked on this year, Democrat Jared Polis is leading his wing-nut Republican opponent 67%-30% with 9% of precincts reporting.  So far, the vote totals are 36,554-16,117.  Jared is going to make an awesome Representative.

CNN has called LA and KS for McCain.  No surprises.  Still no path toward success with PA and OH being called for Obama.

[Update 7:15P MST]: A number of states have been called.  I’ve been tooling around on interactive sites so far tonight while watching CNN, which is doing a pretty good job overall.  A couple of early calls, in my opinion, which I’ll get into later.  I’ll start with states called for each candidate.  Obama has: ME, NH, VT, RI, CT, MA, NJ, MD, DE, NY, NJ, IL and PA.  I can’t believe they’ve called PA already.  I expect Obama to win it eventually, but I’d like more actual votes to come in.  Oh well.  McCain has: SC, KY, TN, OK.  That’s it.

Obama has had some additional states called: MI, WI, MN, and DC.  No surprises there.  McCain got some more also: AL, AK, and WY.  Right now, Obama’s electoral vote lead is 175-52.  Obama needs 95 more votes.

CNN gave McCain ND.  I wouldn’t have done that.  Obama was polling very well in ND for a Democrat, coming up with right around 50% of the vote in a traditionally deep-red state.  It’s not going to make much difference in the electoral collage, but it’s a big swath of red that could change blue.  We won’t know until all the votes are counted.

—–

I’ll update this as the afternoon shifts to evening.  Polls likely just closed in portions of IN & KY.  A number of states’ polls could close within the hour.  I haven’t yet heard of any news reports of polls being ordered to stay open later.  I’m also not aware of any long lines in the eastern states.  If you haven’t voted yet, get out there and get it done!  Nothing is set in stone until you make your own voice heard.  I voted early.

Science Items To Come

With most of everybody’s attention focused on tomorrow’s election, I haven’t written as much as I could have about science issues.  There has been a lot of climate change and energy related news in the past couple of months that I plan to address starting later this week.  We as a country stand poised to start acting aggressively to lessen our forcing of the climate system.  With each passing day, the urgency to do so increases.

11/3/08: Election Eve

Tomorrow (still 11:10P MST) is Election Day, 2008.  It’s been a long, hard slog getting here.  I’ve been more involved with elections at multiple levels for a couple of years now.  Barack Obama won’t be the perfect President.  Mark Udall won’t be a perfect Senator.  And on down the line.  But in each case, the Democratic candidate is better than their Con counterpart.  Conservatism has failed.  The worst part to that truth is it will take unimaginable work to correct the mistakes of the past 30 years.  That work will be made all the harder by Cons who will continue to bleat about their failed policies.  Cons will invoke fear and smear everybody in their way in a constant barrage starting Nov. 5, no matter what tomorrow’s outcome is.

I want Obama to win the election.  I want Democrats to expand their majorities in both the Senate and House.  I want the government to take serious steps to address climate change, which I consider to be the absolute most important issue we’ll face in the entire 21st century.  I know the Cons would continue Business As Usual, which will destroy the planet as we know it.  I hope Democrats take the necessary action.  It will be my effort and the effort of countless others to ensure they do.

I think Obama will win.  The question at this point, I think, is by how much.  By what percentage will he beat McCain?  What will the popular vote total differential be?  How many electoral votes will he garner?  How effective will the Cons’ vote suppression techniques be?

Tomorrow will likely see the beginning of a new era.  I can’t wait for it.

News Items 10/18/08

John McCain’s campaign continues to flail away helplessly as November 4th approaches.  Republicans think they can win this year by beating on the “taxes are bad” drum.  It has always been nonsensical to do so, but the way in which McCain is doing it right now is especially ridiculous.  According to McCain, his own tax cuts (for the richest only) are “reform”, but Obama’s tax cuts are “welfare”.  Really, John?  Tax cuts for rich people and corporations aren’t “reform”: George Bush Jr., George Bush Sr. and Ronald Reagan implemented them for the past 28 years.  It’s what’s led to the sorry state of America’s infrastructure and threatens Social Security and Medicare.  Americans are obviously tired of the pro-corporate welfare Republicans have pushed for so long.  They realize they’re not getting any benefit from that policy.  By the way, this ridiculous claim is McCain’s 158th lie since February.  Heroes don’t lie.

[Update]: The McCain campaign is trying to scare voters by accusing Barack Obama of being a socialist.  They’re trying to scare voters into believing that Obama’s redistribution of wealth will be a bad thing.  It will be bad … for McCain and his multi-millionaire backers.  They’re the only ones who benefitted from Bush’s tax cuts.  It’s the millionaires that will have to pay more taxes under an Obama administration.  What McCain won’t tell the American people is that his proposal to make Bush’s tax cuts permanent will cause the collapse of Social Security and Medicare.  McCain’s economic policies would mean no more funding for education and no more funding for renewable energy research.  But we would keep occupying Iraq at the exorbitant cost of $10 billion per month.  And millionaires would be allowed to invest even less of their money in the public’s infrastructure that they use so heavily.  That’s immoral.

billmon has a post that well worth the time to read.  McCain’s description of Obama as “socialist” and Palin’s description of only certain regions of America as “pro-American” is disturbing on many levels.  One particularly important paragraph:

We’ve crossed some more lines, in other words — in a long series of lines that have made it increasingly difficult to distinguish between the ultraconservative wing of the Republican Party and an explicitly fascist political movement. And John McCain and his political handlers appear to have no moral compunctions whatsoever about whipping this movement into a frenzy and providing it with scapegoats for all that hatred, simply to try to shave a few points off Barack Obama’s lead in the polls.

This demonstrates something I’ve been saying: Sarah Palin has nothing to offer in foreign policy discussions.  She was not invited to discuss the draft Iraq security agreement with the White House.  Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and John McCain were.  Sarah Palin doesn’t have the experience or qualifications necessary to be Vice-President.

NASA has a new spacecraft that will launch this weekend: Ibex.  Ibex will investigate the region of space where our star’s influence meets the interstellar wind.  Voyager 1 has already moved beyond the heliosphere.  Ibex will study the heliosphere as it orbits Earth.

A planet 1.5 times the mass of Jupiter has been found orbiting its parent star once per local day.  In comparison, Mercury takes 88 days to travel around our star.  WASP-12b is the hottest planet ever discovered: about 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or 2,200 degrees Celsius.

The European Space Agency has tentatively delayed the launch of their ExoMars mission by 2 years, to 2016.  Some countries are balking at the 1 billion euro cost of the mission, which doesn’t include 23 possible instrument packages.  The ESA, NASA and the Russian Space Agency are still negotiating who will pay for what portion of the mission.

Jet streams above Jupiter and Saturn flow eastward.  Jet streams above Uranus and Neptune flow westward.  Earth’s tropical jet stream flows eastward.  The subtropical jets flow westward.  A reason why: the amount and location of water vapor in the respective atmospheres.  Condensation of water vapor releases energy in the form of heat to the atmosphere.  Eddies and vortices form from rising water vapor.  As they shear apart, they transport momentum to the jet streams.

News Items 10/17/08

Hurricane Omar weakened to a Tropical Storm yesterday.  [Update: A new analysis this afternoon supports categorizing Omar as a Hurricane again, for the time being.  He is expected to weaken back to Tropical Storm strength by tomorrow.]  The Lesser Antilles really dodged a bullet as Omar passed between islands.  This has been a year of dodging bullets.  New Orleans and Galveston/Houston almost got walloped too.  I fervently hope a President Obama will take the threat of more/stronger hurricanes more seriously than the science-hating Republicans in government today.

A few different looks at how Obama and McCain are different:

AlterNet

Side-by-side on every issue

Boston.com

What has the U.S. done about the climate crisis during the Bush administration?  Check out this timeline: The Lost Eight Years

Rumors are rampant that former Secretary of State Colin Powell is set to endorse Barack Obama on one of the Sunday talk shows.  Different progressive media have hyped this up today.  To which I have to say: I don’t care.  Powell has zero credibility with me.  His acquiescence to the Bush administration’s Iraq line was pitiful.  Powell knew Iraq posed zero threat to the U.S. when he went to the U.N. to cheerlead for Bush/Cheney.  We’re still occupying Iraq five-plus years later.  That occupation is running at $10 billion per month, and the “fiscally responsible” CONServatives have kept that cost off the U.S. budget.  We’re accumulating interest on that debt, which Obama will be forced to deal with.  So to me, Powell’s endorsement is worth less than nothing.  It would be something else entirely if Powell forked over $600 billion to pay the American people back for his boss’ failed occupation.

The corporate media continue to fail to fully explain ACORN’s role in voter registration.  It’s really quite simple: they hire people to register new voters.  Once those hires turn their forms in, other ACORN employees work to verify every registration.  If they can’t verify someone’s identity or if the registration looks suspicious, ACORN employees flag them as such.  ACORN then turns every single registration form into country clerks, as is required by law.  It is up to election officials to accept or deny registration forms.  If accepted, the new registrants are added to voter rolls by elected county clerks.  It is truly disgusting that John McCain, Sarah Palin and other Republicans continue to lie and mislead the American people about the reality of this situation.  They want to intimidate people from voting, which is undemocratic and unpatriotic.  I don’t really expect anything less from cowards, I suppose.  It is equally disgusting that the corporate media is just as culpable for maintaining the public’s low understanding of ACORN.

3rd Presidential Debate – McCain Is Finished

I’ve watched all the debates this season.  Last night, John McCain supposedly needed a game changer.  Despite the fact that Barack Obama hadn’t slipped at one debate and got all his dirty laundry aired during the Democratic primaries earlier this year, McCain came out aggressively.  And it didn’t work.  McCain came off as whiny, and rude.  He certainly did not display any characteristic that comes close to Presidential.  A quick question: will the media talk non-stop about McCain’s constant heavy breathing?  The entire debate, he huffed and puffed so much that at times it was difficult to listen to Obama’s solutions.  Remember when Al Gore sighed a couple of times in the 2000 debate?  He was ridiculed for weeks about that so-called “gaffe”?  Let’s put it this way: I won’t hold my breath waiting for the corporate media to do the same to McCain.  They’re scared he’ll throw another temper tantrum at them.

Just what did McCain mean by saying his ads have turned 100% negative because Barack Obama wouldn’t meet him in a series of town-hall meetings?  Here is the obvious problem: McCain didn’t take responsibility for his own campaign.  If McCain were President, how many actions would his administration blame on everybody but themselves?  No, we already have a “President” that does that.  Americans want a President that accepts responsibility for their actions.  Telling America that his opponent is a traitor and is dangerous is not an appropriate response for rejecting a debate style.  It’s simply cowardice, a trait that McCain has shown us too often this election cycle.

Then, McCain had the nerve to demand an apology or a repudiation.  Despite running nothing but negative ads for the past three weeks, McCain tried to get Americans to believe he was somehow the victim.  The kind of self-victimization is typical for Republicans – that’s how they’ve stayed in power for the better part of 30 years now.  But let’s be honest: allowing supporters to call a sitting Senator a terrorist or allowing demands to kill him isn’t in the same ballpark as calling someone erratic.  It’s not even the same freaking sport.  If you think it is, you’re beyond rational discourse.  Am I saying Obama’s ads are excused from criticism?  No.  But equating the two is another act of cowardice.  Threats against Senators’ or Presidential candidates’ lives have no place in our society.  Letting those slide is purposefully stoking the flames of hate and racism.  So McCain wants an apology and a repudiation.  I’m waiting for McCain to apologize for his comments.  I’m waiting for McCain to repudiate the hate speech that is all too common from his base: the most extreme among us.  Has McCain ever called on Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, Ann Coulter or the dozens of other hate-mongers of his party to repudiate their disgusting comments?  No.  No, Mr. McCain, do not waste America’s time with your one-man pity party.  Your party has a long history of inciting hatred and violence against fellow Americans.  You’ve long remained silent about that.  Trying to make the cast that being called erratic is somehow above the top is pathetic.

McCain made no sense when he was talking about teacher certification.  Does he really think American education will be better if teachers aren’t expected to become certified or pass examinations?  How about doctors?  Would our health system improve if they didn’t have to take tests?  McCain was at the bottom of his class at the Naval Academy.  Maybe that’s where he developed his ‘no certification’ approach to education.  If only his professors weren’t required to know what they were teaching, he could have done better.

There is a parallel between his education policy and his buddy Joe “the plumber”.  Except Joe is no plumber: he isn’t registered to work as one anywhere in Ohio.  Joe lied.  He has worked for only 6 years, not 15.  Joe lied.  He isn’t about to buy the company, like he told Barack Obama.  Joe lied almost as much as McCain has during this campaign.  But put that aside.  If Joe’s imaginary company is making more than $250,000 per year, that company is in the top 5% of all companies in the U.S.  Only 1.4% of actual small businesses will be affected by Obama’s plan.  That plan is all about paying their fair share.  Under Republicans, the largest corporations and the wealthiest people have paid less and less.  Meanwhile, the vast majority of Americans are making less and less and our towns and cities are crumbling around us.  Joe’s imaginary company can afford to move from paying 36% tax to 39% tax.  Millions of Americans are not achieving the American dream because of backward policies like Ronald Reagan’s, George Bush’s, John McCain’s and Joe’s.

[Update].  So Joe was all worried about his taxes, was he?  As I thought, it doesn’t look like that was the case.  It seems Joe Worzelbacher has had troubles in the past paying the taxes he owes.  But all of Obama’s policies are socialist!!  Joe, it’s time to get better talking points.  You’re part of the 23% of Bush-backers that has wrecked this country.  Your invocation of scary socialism isn’t going to work in this election.

In The News 10/15/08

The last Presidential debate of the 2008 cycle is tonight.  I expect John McCain to come out aggressively – he’s losing the race quite handily right now and so has nothing to lose.  Opponents are dangerous when they have nothing to lose.  Barack Obama will do fine in the debate as long as he continues to project his presidential demeanor to America.  That’s a big reason he won the first two.  I don’t think he’ll get run off of his successful approach.  Folks who are looking for excitement or passion will likely be disappointed tonight.  One thing I’m looking for is how this debate is moderated.  Will Obama and McCain be allowed to engage each other to any degree?

John McCain is up to 133 lies.  Heroes don’t lie.

Want a decent return on your investments?  Elect Democrats.  Seriously.  If you had invested $10,000 under Democratic presidents only since 1929 (Ds & Rs have held the post for 40 years each since 1929), your investment would have grown to $300,671.  If you had invested $10,000 under Republican presidents only since 1929, your investment would have grown to only $11,733.  That’s pretty sad.  Okay, so Herbert Hoover was included in the Republicans and he screwed up the economy almost as bad as George Bush has.  So if Hoover is thrown out, your $10,000 investment would have grown to … $51,211.  That’s a crappy return for 36 years’ investment.  The average annualized return under Republican presidencies: 0.4% including Hoover, 4.7% not including Hoover.  The average annualized return under Democratic presidencies: 8.9%.  Don’t ever let a Republican get away with saying they’re better for capitalism.  It just isn’t true.

A new solar research facility will open in Aurora, Colorado.  SolarTAC, or Solar Technology Acceleration Center, is the second facility created by the Colorado Renewable Energy Collaboratory.  The Colorado Center for Biorefining and Biofuels opened July 1.  The U.S. needs to end its use of fossil fuels in the near term.  R&D is important – getting technologies into the market is just as important.

CO-04 Democratic candidate Betsy Markey was profiled by Council for a Livable World.

The economic downturn took drilling away as a CONservative weapon in this year’s election.  Just remember: they won’t let up next year.

Mark Udall issued a warning to the Bush administration over oil shale drilling.  Due to the incredible resources such drilling require, it’s obviously not viable in the short-term.  With a global recession and damped demand for fossil fuels, it’s not viable any time soon.

Retail sales plunged to the lowest level in three years as consumers cut way back in September.  The Federal Reserve noted that economic activity was depressed across the country.  The markets responded by shedding over 700 points again.  The thing to glean from all of this is the system has to work out the kinks.  Credit availability has been yanked.  Consumers have been forced to spend less because their incomes haven’t risen in real terms in decades.  They’re up to their eyeballs in credit card debt and their home equity has been tapped.  The solution to this crisis is rooted in making new jobs available to Americans and paying them better to do what they’re already doing.  Invest in the people and their infrastructure and the economy will be righted quite nicely.  It took a lot to get into this mess.  It’s going to take a lot to really get out of it.

News & Discussion Items 10/9/08

The electoral map for this year’s Presidential election looks better and better for Obama.  Florida is going his way.  So is New Mexico and Colorado.  So are Virginia and North Carolina!!!  As of yesterday, Missouri, Nevada and Indiana were toss-ups.  Today, add West Virginia to that list!  (That’s a dynamic link – it updates at least daily)  McCain leads Obama by only 1 percentage point in composite polling.  Obama would garner at least 320 electoral college votes, compared to only 158 for McCain if the election were held today.  Only 60 votes are up for grabs.  There is the distinct potential for a landslide election.

[Update]: Conventional Wisdom, as defined by the corporate media, is lagging way behind the polls of the past few weeks.  Obama’s likely electoral college lead has been above 270 (needed to be elected President), and is above 270 by at least 50 votes today.  Yet the corporate media haven’t reported on that reality.  Instead, the New York Times, CNN and MSNBC all show Obama with a 260-264 count.  The NYT is about the worst: their analysis ignores dozens of state-level polls from across the country that have been conducted since October 1st.  The corporate media’s best-case scenario is a close race.  They’re not doing reporting – they’re trying to produce entertainment.  Unfortunately, the public has no idea that the corporate media sucks so bad at these predictions.  Notice also that there are no cries from right-wingers about the “liberal media” on this story.

That same corporate media put pro-coal and pro-oil ads on air after the Presidential debates.  The “we campaign’s” ads were refused by the same media (not liberal!).  This is what happens when war corporations own media.  All is not lost: you can ask ABC to run the Repower America ad.

From a friend:
Politics is like driving.
To go backward, put it in R.
To go forward, put it in D.

The markets had another brutal trading day.  The Dow finished 678 points lower – another 7% loss.  One year ago today, the Dow hit its all-time high of 14,164.53.  One year ago today, the sub-prime mortgage crisis was well known and its effects were spreading.  Wall St. and most Republicans didn’t want to do anything about it (some pro-corporate Dems are in that box too, btw).  Now look at where we’re at.

In slightly better news, the Treasury Department said today that it was looking into buying stakes in some of the country’s banks, as I noted Britain had decided to do yesterday.  That one step closer to a wiser solution than the Bailout Bush and Paulson pushed.  There are still plenty of easy policies to implement that would have a more positive long-term impact.

The American budget is $3 Trillion.  Thanks to Reagan, Bush Sr. and Bush Jr., America’s debt is $10 Trillion.  The next President is going to operate under very adverse economic constraints.

How aggressive do you suppose the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Alaska Senator Ted “Tubes” Stevens is, considering the DoJ is stuffed full of Bush cronies?  Not very, if their case history is any guide.  They have screwed up major elements of the trial thus far.  It makes it seem like there are really two defense teams for the Senator.  If only former Governor Siegelman had belonged to the correct party…

Economic News: Bad and Worse

Wall St. continues its free fall, with the Dow falling over 500 points today after falling 370 points yesterday.  Indices are at the same level as they were in the fall of 2003.  Retirement accounts have lost $2 Trillion in value.  The problem?  Despite the approval of the Bush Bailout by Congress last Friday, no one has any confidence in anyone else.  Banks still refuse to lend to one another or to credit-worthy customers.  As I and others stated last week, the Bush Bailout didn’t address the fundamental problems in the economy.  More and more people recognize that and are reacting to it.

They’re also reacting to the realization that the Bush administration’s refusal to do anything about the housing bubble for over two years spread tons of bad debt and risk around to world banks.  So the world is staring a deep recession in the face because the Bushies decided they’d rather wait until America was in debt past its eyeballs before proposing something.

The Federal Reserve is offering to buy up another $300 billion of loans from banks, without collateral of course, to unfreeze credit markets.  How are they going to pay for that?  By borrowing money from the banks.  By printing more money.  Printing more money, by the way, increases inflation, which was at 5.4% last I checked (and that’s a b.s. low-ball calculation by economists who want to pretend the economy is doing better than it really is).  In an era of stagnant incomes and rising unemployment, higher inflation will simply wreck the middle class’ ability to stay afloat.

The economy has been running on credit, as everyone should be well aware of by now.  First in the 1980s and 1990s with credit cards.  Then in the 2000s with home equity.  Now that credit is being taken away in a flash.  What’s left has two distinct faces: consumer borrowing is down for the first time since 1998.  While it’s good that people are borrowing less, it also means they’re going to spend less.  After all, incomes after inflation haven’t increased in years.  Consumers without credit will have no money to spend unless one of two things happen: incomes increase (the better solution) or credit flows again (the worse option).  Raising incomes will put our economy back onto the path of health again in a meaningful way.

Oh, here’s the worse economic news.  Foreclosures were running at record rates for the past 12 months or so.  Well, it turns out that the government uses numbers from RealtyTrac.  So good, so far?  Well, RealtyTrac hasn’t kept track of foreclosures in 900 rural counties across the United States.  Here’s a choice piece of the article:

But in West Virginia last year, it [RealtyTrac] counted fewer than 500 foreclosure notices. New federal statistics counted 12,000 notices in the state, since the start of 2007.

Heck, that’s only 24 times as bad.  Who’s counting?  Thankfully, a Democratic Senator in July co-sponsored the Foreclosure Prevention Act, which Congress passed in July. The bill required the Department of Housing and Urban Development to measure foreclosure rates in each state.

So amid stagnant wages, rising unemployment, rising inflation and worse foreclosure numbers than have been reported in two years, the Republicans have done a pretty good job of wrecking America’s economy.  Their pursuit of making the richest Americans uber-rich has affected millions of good, hard-working Americans negatively.  That’s the reason Barack Obama is leading John McCain by double digits in polls and is nearing a blowout in the electoral college numbers.  That’s the reason why John McCain and Sarah Palin are inciting their supporters with hate speech.

McCain on Climate and a Vet on McCain

John McCain, bastion of maverickness and good decision making has flip-flopped on dozens of issues over the years. He’ll say anything to anybody if he thinks it might help him. If Sen. Kerry had flip-flopped so much, the right-wing would have burst with joy. Interestingly, they just don’t care enough about McCain to say one something one way or the other, if you can get them to talk about him at all. Well, add the 21st century’s most critical issue to the list of issues McCain just can seem to talk straight about: climate change.

Recently, he was for a cap-and-trade carbon market. Quietly, he has taken such a proposal off materials from his campaign web site and hasn’t mentioned it in speeches recently. So McCain, like so many other staunch Republicans, has decided to show how little courage he really has for his convictions. If he doesn’t want a cap-and-trade system, he should be proud to bring that up and fight against it in debates. But hiding it away after he brought it up is cowardly.

More importantly in my mind, McCain continues to solidify himself as the most uncapable person available for the position of President of the United States. He wants to continue the failed approach of drilling in his energy “policy”. It’s been proven not to work in the past 30 years, but maybe four more would do the trick, right? McCain is running away from viable solutions to the most critical issue we face. He can keep doing so as a Senator and not the President next year.

***

I read an interesting piece written by a former classmate and POW of John McCain’s. It’s a well written expose regarding McCain’s capabilities as our chief executive. General Wesley Clark got slammed for saying something similar, but I want to continue pressing it:

I furthermore believe that having been a POW is no special qualification for being President of the United States. The two jobs are not the same, and POW experience is not, in my opinion, something I would look for in a presidential candidate.

I couldn’t agree more. John McCain is no more qualified to be president than Barack Obama just because he was a POW. He cheapens his service to our country by advocating as such.