They just showed last night on the

• Black Panthers providing "security" - sam
  • Thugocracy is starting already...nm - votermt
    • You're response - HaHaHa
      • Of course you would say that, that's the way you operate.here's an alert, just because - onlyinamerica
  • Also heard about conservative watchers at the polls...sm - ms
  • According to Rush, one voter who was - sm
    • Oooohhhh! Scary!!! - HaHaHa
    • the exmilitary man is on the link I provided - - Amanda
  • There are always those people out there, black and white - ss
  • They also tried to call police on the news reporter that - Backwards typist
    • see the video at the enclosed link - - Amanda
      • thank you, Amanda. That is some - linda
      • Did I understand correctly? sm - m
        • They just showed last night on the - linda
          • I guess it's okay then............sm - m
        • The one with the nightstick DID NOT live in the - sm
          • I understand the night stick guy was made to leave. sm - m
            • It is probably in a "community type center" in the - sm
        • I read on the link I posted that he lived in the building - - Amanda
          • The reporter said it as well, sm - m
  • sorry - the man is not a pollworker - is a poll watcher and lives in the building - nm - Amanda
  • Trouble brewing baby...happening already... - onlyinamerica
  • Denied they had a "nightstick", then told it was on - videotape... oops. THUGS!.nm
  • the one left there is a pollworker - nm - Amanda
    • would you feel comfortable going there to vote? - TTMT
      • Heck no - sbMT
        • I hate any of these radical groups - mortified
        • It's so stupid though - TTMT
          • I'll probably be bashed for this but - Backwards typist
            • you are correct..it's still that way, - onlyinamerica

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By FRANK RICH
Published: February 14, 2009

AM I crazy, or wasn’t the Obama presidency pronounced dead just days ago? Obama had “all but lost control of the agenda in Washington,” declared Newsweek on Feb. 4 as it wondered whether he might even get a stimulus package through Congress. “Obama Losing Stimulus Message War” was the headline at Politico a day later. At the mostly liberal MSNBC, the morning host, Joe Scarborough, started preparing the final rites. Obama couldn’t possibly eke out a victory because the stimulus package was “a steaming pile of garbage.”

Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again.

On Wednesday, as a stimulus deal became a certainty on Capitol Hill, I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.
“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill.

A useful template for the current political dynamic can be found in one of the McCain campaign’s more memorable pratfalls. Last fall, it was the Beltway mantra that Obama was doomed with all those working-class Rust Belt Democrats who’d flocked to Hillary in the primaries. The beefy, beer-drinking, deer-hunting white guys — incessantly interviewed in bars and diners — would never buy the skinny black intellectual. Nor would the “dead-ender” Hillary women. The McCain camp not only bought into this received wisdom, but bet the bank on it, pouring resources into states like Michigan and Wisconsin before abandoning them and doubling down on Pennsylvania in the stretch. The sucker-punched McCain lost all three states by percentages in the double digits.

The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama “losing control,” also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly. The bill was not a stimulus package but an orgy of pork spending. The ensuing deficit would amount to “generational theft.” F.D.R.’s New Deal had been an abject failure.

This barrage did shave a few points off the stimulus’s popularity in polls, but its approval rating still remained above 50 percent in all (Gallup, CNN, Pew, CBS) but one of them (Rasmussen, the sole poll the G.O.P. cites). Perhaps the stimulus held its own because the public, in defiance of Washington’s condescending assumption, was smart enough to figure out that the government can’t create jobs without spending and that Bush-era Republicans have no moral authority to lecture about deficits. Some Americans may even have ancestors saved from penury by the New Deal.

In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president’s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) — not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts.

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on.

Republicans will also be judged by the voters. If they want to obstruct and filibuster while the economy is in free fall, the president should call their bluff and let them go at it. In the first four years after F.D.R. took over from Hoover, the already decimated ranks of Republicans in Congress fell from 36 to 16 in the Senate and from 117 to 88 in the House. The G.O.P. is so insistent that the New Deal was a mirage it may well have convinced itself that its own sorry record back then didn’t happen either.

who waited outside for 5-6 hours in freezing temps just to save maybe $50.  Lord have mercy.  I guess I'm thankful I don't need or want anything enough to do that!!

You're right about the me-me-me and it makes me sick.  People will kill each other for a dollar!! 

I dont have to defend my education or knowledge of history.  I know what I have been taught.  This endless attack gets tiring.  Time to go do something more constructive than read your attacks to me.  Later Gator

This is definitely scary.  When we lose control to raise or own children......what else do they want to take away from us.  This is beyond ridiculous.

You people who cry and whine about government staying out of your uterus....well how about stay out of my home and let me raise my kids I decided to have instead of aborting.  What about those rights? 

And they wonder why people are upset and worried?

It's going to be hilarious!

For those of you who miss it, you can see clips at their website.

I don't post under a name, because when you do you are crucified by the drive-by bombers.  It's best to keep the them confused.

And Tucker Carlson is hardly a liberal.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13459509/

But first to a story horrifying even by the coarsening standards of Iraq, the brutal murder and torture of two U.S. soldiers. 

Privates first class Kristian Menchaca and Thomas L. Tucker went missing Friday after an attack on a checkpoint they were manning south of Baghdad.  Their bodies were found on Monday night.  They were reportedly so badly mutilated they were tentatively identified by tattoos and scars.  The corpses were also booby-trapped, an apparent effort to kill recovery teams.

Al Qaeda‘s new leader in Iraq has claimed responsibility for the soldier‘s slaughter. 

In the face of brutality like this, is Iraq worth the cost in American lives?  Here to answer that question, Brad Blakeman.  He‘s the former deputy assistant to the president.  He joins us tonight from Washington. 

Brad, thanks for coming on.

BRAD BLAKEMAN, FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you, Tucker.

CARLSON:  So we have spent untold billions of dollars, 2,500 American soldiers killed, all in an effort to bring democracy and prosperity to Iraq.  In return, they torture and murder and mutilate our soldiers.  Remind me why this is a good bargain?

BLAKEMAN:  Well, Tucker, look, this is a tough thing, and our hearts go out to every soldier who has made the ultimate sacrifice so that we can live in freedom. 

But Iraq is worth fighting for.  The region is worth fighting for.  It‘s in our interest.  These terrible, brutal dictatorships must be brought down when they become a threat to our national security.  You know...

CARLSON:  OK.  But that‘s not the rationale the president has offered.  He has said now, because as you know, and not to rehash the whole war, but no weapons of mass destruction were found.  And he‘s said now this is worth doing because it‘s worth bringing freedom to the Iraqi people.  They yearn for freedom, and it‘s our duty to give them the freedom they yearn for. 

My question is how have they earned our sacrifice to bring them that freedom?  What about Iraq justifies the death—brutal deaths of American soldiers?  Why should we feel like it‘s worth it to bring these people democracy when they behave like animals like this?

BLAKEMAN:  We‘re focusing on the animals and not the good and decent people of Iraq.  The vast majority of Iraq is peaceful. 

CARLSON:  Is that right?  I don‘t think—I don‘t think there‘s any evidence of that.

BLAKEMAN:  There are 12 million people who went to—who went to the polls.  They have four successful elections.  They have a new government.  We tend only to focus on the very bad, on the insurgencies, and the evil people.  But the vast majority of Iraqis want to be free. 

You know, if we took your attitude...

CARLSON:  Is that true?  Is that true?

BLAKEMAN:  Hold on, Tucker.  If we took your attitude, we would have turned back at the beaches of Normandy when all those people...

CARLSON:  Spare me the tired, hackney, cliched World War II analogies.  Let‘s get to the war in progress, and that‘s Iraq.  There are decent people there.  I have been there.  I‘ve met decent people there.  I know firsthand. 

However, your claim that most people want peace is bosh as they say. 

Let me show you...

BLAKEMAN:  It is not.

CARLSON:  It certainly is.  A poll undertaken by the ministry of defense from Great Britain, part of the coalition, said 65 percent of Iraqi citizens support attacks on U.S. citizens. 

Our own polling, done by World Opinion, public opinion, 47 percent approve attacks on U.S. forces, 88 percent of Sunnis, 88 percent approve of attacks on U.S. forces. 

These are—are these—these are the people our sons and daughters are dying to make rich and free?  How does that work?

BLAKEMAN:  It is our responsibility.  We brought down this dictator, this evil dictator...

CARLSON:  How are we responsible?

BLAKEMAN:  ... who used weapons of mass destruction against his own people.  Now, it‘s our responsibility to bring democracy to these people.  We can‘t cut and run and defeat the dictator and then leave...

CARLSON:  Why is it our responsibility?  There are countries across the world who live in shackles.

BLAKEMAN:  We are the freest nation on earth.  That‘s why it‘s our responsibility.  We‘re the freest nation on earth.  We brought down the dictator, and now it‘s our responsibility...

CARLSON:  How does that work?  They have not done one thing for us.  Look—look, think of the implications of what you are saying.  I don‘t know if you have thought this through.

BLAKEMAN:  I‘ve thought it through very well.

CARLSON:  Nation after nation after nation, starting with Mugabe in Zimbabwe, moving all the way to communist—still communist, still unfree China, people who are living in fetters who are unfree, who are oppressed, is it our, as you put it, obligation as a free a nation to free those nations?  Do you really want to play this?

BLAKEMAN:  Is it—do you know what our obligation is?  It‘s to bring freedom to those people who yearn to be free.  And China has come a long way. 

CARLSON:  So it‘s your obligation to sent your son, my obligation...

(CROSSTALK)

CARLSON:  ... people I‘ve never met in countries that hate us?  You‘ve got to be kidding.  It‘s my obligation to do that?

BLAKEMAN:  Yes, it is our obligation.  Was it our obligation to go—was it our obligation. 

CARLSON:  Where does the obligation come from?  I didn‘t sign up for that obligation.

BLAKEMAN:  It‘s our obligation.  Was it our obligation to go—was it our obligation to go into Europe where we weren‘t attacked?  No, Europe let a dictator get so strong that collectively they couldn‘t take him down, and we had to come down. 

CARLSON:  We got in war when we were attacked.

BLAKEMAN:  We lost 400,000 Americans in that war.  We lost—a million people were wounded in that war.

CARLSON:  Right.  And there were...

BLAKEMAN:  But was it worth it?

CARLSON:  Let me just remind you, we entered that war on December 7, 1941, when our soil, the protectorate of Hawaii, was attacked by a foreign nation and thousands of Americans died.  We went to war on that day, and not before.  OK?  So the overall principle you are stating here, that we have a moral obligation to free the unfree, think it through, man.  It‘s... 

BLAKEMAN:  I didn‘t say that, Tucker.  I said when we took down the dictator, when we made an obligation to risk our soldiers to free a country, we just can‘t cut and run.  We have to establish a government for them.  We‘ve got to give them the opportunity to succeed.  That‘s our obligation.

CARLSON:  And you may be right as far as that goes.  But the blanket obligation that Bush implies, and you just stated, that we have to go free the world, to send our sons and daughters to go...

BLAKEMAN:  No, we don‘t have to free the world

CARLSON:  ... die for other people‘s freedom, people who hate us, it‘s a scary thing.

BLAKEMAN:  Well, then you know what?  Didn‘t the Japanese hate us? 

Didn‘t the Germans hate us?  Do they hate us today?

CARLSON:  They attacked us first.  We had no choice.

BLAKEMAN:  They‘re our allies.  They our allies, and they stand shoulder to shoulder with us.  Should we have waited to get attacked by the Iraqis?  No.

CARLSON:  You know, I thought—when I supported the war initially, I thought that they were capable of attacking us, and it turns out, as you know, and I‘m sad to report, that we weren‘t. 

BLAKEMAN:  They were pretty capable of attacking us if they wanted to. 

CARLSON:  Brad Blakeman, thanks a lot.

BLAKEMAN:  You are welcome. 

on TV.  I didn't see the whole video clip of them singing but the little bit I did see was enough to show me how eerie and just messed up that is.  This whole thing is just creepy. 

where someone had decorated their house for Halloween and hanging from a rope was a mannequin dressed like Sarah Palin.  They had her hanging by the neck.  How horrible is that?  The authorities said that they couldn't do anything since it was a Halloween decoration.  That is just sick though.  I mean seriously....if they had Barrack Obama hanging by the neck or Joe Biden.....I'd still be sickened by it.  What is wrong with people?

Leaning to the right said it and I want to put it in a separate post.  I think this is one of the main reasons why people are voting for McCain.

I need to be able to sleep at night

about the election.  He's 10 and they're studying this election in social studies.  He told me they were going to have an "election" in class.  I asked him if he knew who he was voting for and he immediately answered Obama.  When I asked him why, he said because he likes him.  I asked him if they studied the issues and the candidates' stances on these issues and he said yes.  I began asking him some general questions -- their running mates, their economic policies, their military stances, etc.  He didn't really know much other than who their running mates were and that Obama was going to "cut taxes on anyone making less than 250 thousand". 

I thought that's not bad for a fifth grader, but when I asked him about their stance on abortion and same-sex marriage, he didn't know how the candidates stood.  I told him that Obama is pro-choice and McCain is pro-life and I explained the difference.  My son didn't know what an abortion was yet, so I didn't go into any graphic detail, just that the doctor could do a procedure on a woman to end the pregnancy.  He was shocked that Obama would believe in this. 

All these kids in his class are so hyped about Obama and yet I wonder how many wouldn't be here today if Obama had been elected 12 years ago.  After I was done talking with him, I asked him what was more important to him:  money or life? 

He chose life.  He said he was voting for McCain, even if it wasn't the popular choice, and when his class asks him why he's supporting McCain, he's going to tell them.  Maybe some of these kids will go home and educate their parents.  It's a shame how many people are going to vote next week without any clue as to how their candidate stands on the issues. 

will all of you just PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE grow up!!!  You all sound like a bunch of little kids - - my dad is bigger than your dad, my dad can beat you up.  GROW UP ALREADY WILL YA!  The freakin' election is over with!!!  I have my opinions on the matter but I won't voice them here, as I am a little too mature for the nonsense that has been going on, on this forum!   

I come on here to gain knowledge and information, not to hear WWIII going on for goodness sake.  I don't know about you but I am getting tired of it.

He actually provides enough goofs to keep 2 channels busy -- MSNBC and Comedy Central.

I have to watch O'Reilly.  It's like watching a train wreck.  How else would I know what Jon Stewart and Colbert and talking about....LOL.

seemed to be trying to put fear at the retreat. He started out calm enough but before it was over, he was livid, blaming the pubs for everything. He WAS trying to put fear in the dems to the words that they HAVE to pass this bill. No way was he going to let it fail.  He wants the package the way it is. He doesn't want to compromise on this package no matter what he says to the media with his smiling face.

....are you ready....Fox News....OMG. 

Anyway, they were talking about the vicious and personal attacks on Miss CA.  One guy said that she used to be a man and had to have breast implants and cut her penis off to be in the pageant.  Just crude and horrible things.  So they brought on this feminist to see what she thought about the cruelty and the vicious personal attacks on Miss CA.  This feminists who is supposed to be for women's rights said that Miss CA should have opted for a heart transplant instead of breast implants. 

OMG....a feminist cutting down a woman because she was outspoken and voiced her honest opinion.  I'm so sick and tired of hearing how people who don't agree with same sex marriage are heartless people full of hate.  I don't hate gay people.  Just because I don't agree with something doesn't give others the right to cut me down for it.  I don't cut down gay couples even though I don't agree with it. 

I just don't understand why all these so-called liberal open minded groups are so open minded unless someone has a difference of opinion.  You cannot call them names or cut them down but if you disagree with them, you are fair game and they will cut you down brutally anywhere and in any way they can.  Talk about a double standard here.

Any feminist should be outraged by the treatment of Miss CA.  So she believes in traditional marriage....so what.  That doesn't make her a bad person and I don't see her going around cutting down other people who disagree with her but she has had one vicious attack after another and it is just a shame. 

I don't much care about pageants and all that jazz and I was really tired of hearing about how she lost because of her answer but these attacks on her are just insane.  If these leftist groups are all about compassion......where is it?

They keep talking about equality for all but yet you can't have an opinion that is different.  How is that equality when you bash people who don't agree with you?  Aren't we all entitled to our opinions without viciously and personally attacking those who don't agree with us?