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www.NationalView.org's Note From a Madman
October 16, 2008
Joe gets to Hear about Health Care at the Last
Debate
Say it ain't so to a new Joe. After watching the final debate between Senators
Barack Obama and John McCain last night, live, from Hofstra University on new
York, Long Island, I have made my decision:
I'm changing my name to Joe.
That's right, no longer shall I be Noah Orrin Greenberg of New Jersey by way of
Brooklyn, NY; beginning today I will call myself Joe the Engineer or Joe the
Diet Ginger Ale drinker, or maybe just Joe.
After hearing Sarah Palin's "Joe Six-Pack" reference followed up by McCain's Joe
the Plumber citings, it appears the only way to get noticed by the GOP
candidates is to rename myself Joe.
That is unless I started giving huge sums of money to the McCain-Palin campaign,
the Republican National Committee or owned a bank.
McCain tried to restrain his true self last night, but the signs were there.
After letting the "this one" remark go in debate number two, last night saw the
mean come right out of McCain, and it wasn't pretty. After being cited for his
apathy7 in debate number one when Obama was speaking; and his trips around the
stage while his opponent was making positive points in debate number two, a
seated McCain had to take a different tact in debate number three. Last night
Senator McCain took every opportunity to interrupt both Senator Obama or
moderator Bob Schieffer with short quips no less than eighteen times.
I guess that's what being a Maverick is all about.
For awhile in the beginning of the debate it appeared that the "I get the first
and last word" strategy McCain was using was actually working. However, then a
shift occurred when the subject of Health Care came about. McCain who still
believes in the "Yo-Yo" health care plan ("You're on Your own") stated that he
was going to raise everyone's taxes. But that's not the worst part of what
McCain stated about his own health care plan. In defense of his $5,000 health
care scheme - because, that's what it is, a scheme - the Candidate Formerly
Known as The Maverick said the following:
"Now, 95 percent of the people in America will receive more money under my plan
because they will receive not only their present benefits, which may be taxed,
which will be taxed..."
-McCain, from debate number three
This is the first half of the quote which demonstrates the McCain health care
scheme. Notice that, at first, McCain tried to say that only some will be taxed
under his plan when he said "may be taxed"; then notice how he immediately
corrected himself when he said "will be taxed". In fact, everyone who now
"enjoys" the benefit of the only tax break many of us in the middle class have -
the health care cafeteria-style employee contribution where we pay only pre-tax
dollars for our employee-paid portion of our health care plans - is going to be
taken away. And to add insult to injury, not only is McCain going to tax the
money we contribute towards health care, he is going to tax the money our
employers pay towards our health care as well.
That's a business tax to some small business owners, unless they decide to drop
health care coverage altogether.
So the McCain health care scheme, which will allow you $5,000 of the $12,000
average health care plan cost, will not merely cost you an additional $7,000 -
it will cost you the tax on every dollar you pay towards health care.
It is also safe to assume that McCain will remove the income tax deductions on
our health care bills as well. So when we get the bills from our doctors which
go beyond the "usual and customary" - a sum which cost some people thousands of
dollars and causes others to file for bankruptcy protection - there prospect
that we will be taxed on those dollars is real as well.
Add these taxes to the interest taxes we pay on our growing credit card bills
(loan interest is no longer deductible as it was years ago), and those of using
the middle and lower economic classes are watching our dollars shrink right
before our very eyes.
And they will get smaller yet under a McCain presidency. he just told us so.
Now for the second part of the McCain statement, which is even more callous than
the first:
...but then you add $5,000 onto it, except for those people who have the
gold-plated Cadillac insurance policies that have to do with cosmetic surgery
and transplants and all of those kinds of things,"
-McCain, continued
Getting cosmetic surgery and transplants confused is not exactly a common
problem for most Americans. Cosmetic surgery, other than for burns or the
removal of painful scar tissue or fixing a clef palate, etc, is something that
McCain's "base of haves and have mores" have to deal with. In my neighborhood
nobody is saving up for a face lift or tummy-tuck. And I'm certain that they
aren't" saving up" for those procedures in any of McCain's various ten
neighborhoods around the nation he can call home. For them money actually does
seem to grow on trees.
But comparing transplants to cosmetic surgery is just what someone who is this
out of touch with real Americans would do. Transplants save lives and John
McCain wants to make sure that it is treated as an elective procedure. I'm sure
those waiting on the various transplant lists for years will be happy to know
that when they finally get their organ, if they get their organ, they're going
to have to pay a little bit more for it.
One thing's for certain: no one will want John McCain's heart if he should check
the "donor" box on the back of his driver's license. By the time they find it,
it's be too late anyway.
If Social Security, a subject missing from the debate last night, is the
800-pund gorilla in the room then health care is its 700-pound cousin. And
health care is, probably more than any other issue, where McCain's plans and
schemes are the most dangerous.
-Noah Greenberg
THE INTERNET ELECTION
by Victoria A. Brownworth
copyright c 2008, Journal-Register Newspapers, Inc.
The viral emails come fast and furious and are never original, but always
forwarded from a friend of a friend. The blog posts are minute by minute and
beat out print and even TV media almost every time.
This is the internet election of 2008 where truth and lies are laid out in equal
measure, but both are often given the same weight with potential voters online.
In the past week I have received emails about Barack Obama’s alleged unsavory
connection to former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines, others about his alleged
links to the corrupt Kenyan government, and still others claiming he is not
really a U.S. citizen.
I received one purporting to have been written by New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd that alleges Obama got campaign money from the Saudis. Another,
allegedly written by a mother of four, queried why Obama changed his name from
“Barry” to “Barack” after he vacationed in the Middle East and had two Muslim
roommates in college.
Four different emails allegedly from former servicemen who served with McCain in
Vietnam asserted that McCain conspired with enemy soldiers in Vietnam and was
never really wounded or tortured.
Another email insisted that McCain was seriously ill and had suffered from
either a stroke or had a malignant brain cancer.
Still another said that McCain himself hadn’t been born in the U.S. and thus was
not a citizen.
Interspersed with these were emails about Sarah Palin, including one with a list
attached of books she allegedly banned from the Wasilla library, most of which
hadn’t even been published at the time she was mayor of the town.
Then there was the email that claimed Joe Biden hadn’t been at a funeral at all,
but was himself suffering from a serious health problem and was soon going to
withdraw from the race to be replaced by Hillary Clinton at the last minute.
Many have called the 2008 presidential election the first internet election and
in many respects it is. While 2004 saw internet campaigning and fund-raising by
Democratic contender Howard Dean as well as John Kerry, 2008 has been the first
presidential election to use the internet as a primary tool for fund-raising,
campaign information, breaking news and telling lies about the other side.
Not one of the above emails is true, although two do have partial truths
imbedded in them: Obama does indeed have an association with Franklin Raines,
the former Fannie Mae CEO, who is a senior advisor on his campaign. But the
substance of the email is false–Obama did not bail out Raines nor did he take
money from him. And McCain was born on a Naval Air station in the Panama Canal
Zone to a father in the Armed services, but that base was considered U.S.
territory and thus he is a U.S. citizen.
Viral emails are the ugly side of the internet and while there are numerous
fact-checking sites like Politifact.com or Factcheck.org where one can uncover
the veracity of such claims, partisanship keeps most people from doing so.
Conventional wisdom says if it’s on the internet, it must be true. That is the
dictum most people follow with regard to political issues and that is definitely
the operative mode for this election. The Obama campaign even added a section to
their website to refute rumors as they come in.
One of the reasons the internet has attained such political sway in the past few
years is because the mainstream media has neglected its role as watchdog of the
government and its politicians.
Many feel the Bush Administration got little oversight from the bastions of the
Fourth Estate, some of whom were even implicated in Bush scandals. This inaction
and sometimes outright failure on the part of the mainstream press meant the
virtual end of the media–the internet blogosphere–took over.
Serious political websites like Slate, Salon, Politico, Huffington Post, Daily
Kos, TPM, Wonkette, Town Hall, Red State, National Review and others brought out
issues that the mainstream media either glossed over or ignored altogether. Like
the mainstream media, they lean either left or right of center, but unlike the
mainstream media, none pretends non-partisanship.
In many respects, the Obama campaign would not have existed and certainly would
not have succeeded to the extent it has without the internet. Howard Dean might
have been the first to use the internet for grassroots political campaigning,
but it was Obama who ran with it in the current election, using every avenue of
access to potential voters, with an emphasis on people under 30.
Obama has a MySpace page, a Facebook page and countless YouTube videos. He’s on
Twitter, he’s on LinkedIn and in both formats viewers can talk to the candidate
and present questions that will be answered.
And while McCain is also on MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn and has his own
retinue of YouTube videos, his discomfort with the internet medium is apparent
in all. Obama’s online pages are fluid, McCain’s are static.
The advantage to being the first tech-savvy presidential candidate is one of
timing, age and acumen. Obama was in the right place at the right time with a
bunch of tech-savvy under-30s thronging to his campaign in and around the
internet.
Obama’s online power has been most apparent in his fund-raising. He has raised
more money than any presidential candidate in history totally online–nearly a
half billion dollars in a year’s time, including a record $70 million in
September.
But what the internet giveth can also be taken away–and the internet has not
always been kind to Obama. When YouTube videos of sermons given by Obama’s
pastor and mentor of 22 years, Rev. Jeremiah Wright surfaced in early February,
with Wright saying the U.S. was responsible for 9/11 and calling on God to damn
America, the outrage among even many supporters was palpable.
The internet is also where photos of Obama in traditional African garb first
appeared during the primary. The photos were no secret–they were taken on a
formal trip he took as senator–but they caused Obama valuable campaign time as
he tried to explain them to voters still unsure of who he was.
The Wright videos are still on YouTube–with nearly a half million viewers having
logged in to see them. But their power has been diffused–largely by Obama’s own
internet campaigning to reverse their message.
In August, it was McCain’s turn to feel the internet heat when Sarah Palin was
chosen as his running mate. When Palin came on the scene, the left-leaning
blogosphere kicked in full-time, going after her with gleeful alacrity.
For months the right-leaning blogs had been detailing Obama’s sketchy career on
the Illinois state legislature and other issues in Obama’s past that the
mainstream media had shrugged off or ignored. These blogs made Obama’s lack of
any substantive experience the central issue of their internet campaign against
him.
Then there was Palin. Left-leaning blogs went after her with the same vengeance
they had wreaked on Hillary Clinton when she was Obama’s only rival in the
primary. But where Clinton’s politics and voting record lay solidly if
marginally to the left of Obama’s and thus presented problems for left-leaning
blogs touting his progressive stance over hers, there was no such problem with
Palin. She was young, from what many called a “rogue” state, didn’t play by
Washington rules and she was–like the moose she hunted in the Alaskan
wilderness–fair game.
While the mainstream media was once again caught in slow-motion, the blogosphere
was not. Stories about Palin were everywhere on the left blogs–all of them
negative, all of them presenting her in the same scary, not-like-us light in
which the right had tried to hold Obama for months.
The internet wars have become more explosive in recent weeks as the final days
of the campaign tick away. While right blogs had long referred to Obama
supporters as cultist, left blogs, now angered by McCain’s latest ads presenting
Obama as unready to lead and lacking in character, have responded by attacking
McCain’s supporters as, to quote one blog, “unhinged” and “lunatic.”
When the McCain campaign ran ads linking Obama to a 1960s domestic terrorist
turned college professor who had previously held fund-raisers for Obama, the
Obama campaign responded online with a 13-minute video attacking McCain for his
links to the 1980s savings and loan scandal.
Game, set, match.
Left blogs have called McCain’s campaign what the mainstream media have not:
thinly veiled racism. Right blogs have called Obama what they couldn’t in the
mainstream press: foreign and untrustworthy.
With only a few weeks left in the campaign, the urgency in both camps to close
the electoral gaps is palpable. The economic crisis has benefitted the Obama
campaign and strengthened his support, but McCain is far from throwing in the
towel–and his supporters have become increasingly strident.
What we see in the news–on TV or in the daily papers–represents a mere fraction
of what is actually being written, analyzed, promoted, refuted and alleged
regarding the candidates, their platforms and their characters. The influence of
the internet on the election is far greater than TV and print media combined.
And it is there, online, that the election–whether it’s on the daily comments
and diary sections of the blogs or from the blog reporters themselves–is being
won or lost through facts, semi-facts and outright lies.
Much of what we read online, whether on respected blogs or in those omnipresent
viral emails is often quite partisan opinion, not fact. Which means the
prospective voter needs to verify the actual facts, which few seem willing or
able to do as evidenced by those comments’ sections online .
So while this may be the first election to expand our range of information
through the power of the internet, that power has been used to slander
candidates as much or more than it has been used to promote them–something to
think about when you cast your vote November 4th.
In response to, "If there is a nation where these terrorists call home, it is in
the mountains of Afghanistan (and parts or Warziristan, in Pakistan bordering
the Afghan mountains). Joe Biden and Barack Obama actually do know that," Pat
Thompson writes:
If the US gets bogged down in Afghanistan, it won't be successful. The Soviet
Union tried that, and it became their last gasp, before they became just
"Russia" again.
Ronald Reagan took credit for the end of the Soviet empire, but others give
credit to their invasion of Afghanistan wearing down their military. No one will
ever conquer these mountain people, unless we use nuclear weapons and that would
be a horrible mistake. Is that what we are electing Obama to do? His saber
rattling against Afghanistan, hopefully, is to gain votes from the center.
Send your comments to: NationalView@aol.com
-Noah Greenberg