Obama is going to save us.. .it will take time... NO MORE PALIN hahahahaha no more RABIDS nm

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Doomsayers and bad toothsayers ARISE! link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/26/defying-doomsayers-sp-and_n_179251.html

The S&P 500, which is the value-weighted index of 500 most actively traded large cap common stocks in the United States, ended the day on Thursday higher than when Obama took office: 832.86 to its 805.22 closing on January 20, 2009.

This is, of course, just one index. But there are others. The Nasdaq, which lists more than 3,000 companies, has gone from 1,440.86 on the day of Obama inauguration to 1,587.00 on Thursday. (The Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, closed on Thursday at 7,924.56, just 25 points under where it was when Obama took office, 7,949.09.)

To be sure, Obama and his staff have long insisted that they are not measuring their progress on the whims of the markets. One day's gains can be tomorrow's losses. But for those in the commentariat who are down on what has happened under the current president's watch, it's worthwhile putting recent developments in historical context.

Sometimes politics has the uncanny effect of mirroring the national psyche even when nobody intended to do that. This is perfectly illustrated by the rousing effect that Gov. Sarah Palin had on the Republican convention in Minneapolis this week. On the surface, she outdoes former Vice President Dan Quayle as an unlikely choice, given her negligent parochial expertise in the complex affairs of governing. Her state of Alaska has less than 700,000 residents, which reduces the job of governor to the scale of running one-tenth of New York City. By comparison, Rudy Giuliani is a towering international figure. Palin's pluck has been admired, and her forthrightness, but her real appeal goes deeper.

She is the reverse of Barack Obama, in essence his shadow, deriding his idealism and exhorting people to obey their worst impulses . In psychological terms the shadow is that part of the psyche that hides out of sight, countering our aspirations, virtue, and vision with qualities we are ashamed to face: anger, fear, revenge, violence, selfishness, and suspicion of "the other." For millions of Americans, Obama triggers those feelings, but they don't want to express them. He is calling for us to reach for our higher selves, and frankly, that stirs up hidden reactions of an unsavory kind. (Just to be perfectly clear, I am not making a verbal play out of the fact that Sen. Obama is black. The shadow is a metaphor widely in use before his arrival on the scene.) I recognize that psychological analysis of politics is usually not welcome by the public, but I believe such a perspective can be helpful here to understand Palin�s message. In her acceptance speech Gov. Palin sent a rousing call to those who want to celebrate their resistance to change and a higher vision.

Look at what she stands for:
--Small town values -- a denial of America's global role, a return to petty, small-minded parochialism.
--Ignorance of world affairs -- a repudiation of the need to repair America's image abroad.
--Family values -- a code for walling out anybody who makes a claim for social justice. Such strangers, being outside the family, don't need to be heeded.
--Rigid stands on guns and abortion -- a scornful repudiation that these issues can be negotiated with those who disagree.
--Patriotism -- the usual fallback in a failed war.
--"Reform" -- an italicized term, since in addition to cleaning out corruption and excessive spending, one also throws out anyone who doesn't fit your ideology.

Palin reinforces the overall message of the reactionary right, which has been in play since 1980, that social justice is liberal-radical, that minorities and immigrants, being different from "us" pure American types, can be ignored, that progressivism takes too much effort and globalism is a foreign threat. The radical right marches under the banners of "I'm all right, Jack," and "Why change? Everything's OK as it is." The irony, of course, is that Gov. Palin is a woman and a reactionary at the same time. She can add mom to apple pie on her resume, while blithely reversing forty years of feminist progress. The irony is superficial; there are millions of women who stand on the side of conservatism, however obviously they are voting against their own good. The Republicans have won multiple national elections by raising shadow issues based on fear, rejection, hostility to change, and narrow-mindedness.

Obama's call for higher ideals in politics can't be seen in a vacuum. The shadow is real; it was bound to respond. Not just conservatives possess a shadow -- we all do. So what comes next is a contest between the two forces of progress and inertia. Will the shadow win again, or has its furtive appeal become exhausted? No one can predict. The best thing about Gov. Palin is that she brought this conflict to light, which makes the upcoming debate honest. It would be a shame to elect another Reagan, whose smiling persona was a stalking horse for the reactionary forces that have brought us to the demoralized state we are in. We deserve to see what we are getting, without disguise.

www.deepakchopra.com

Here is Obama's response on all the Palin family stories swirling around. He said he would fire any staffer found to be stoking the fires on these stories. I agree with him 100%:

Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown reports: At a press avail in Monroe, Mich., Barack Obama on Palin: "Back off these kinds of stories."

"I have said before and I will repeat again: People's families are off limits," Obama said. "And people's children are especially off-limits. This shouldn't be part of politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin's performance as a governor and/or her potential performance as a vice president. So I would strongly urge people to back off these kinds of stories. You know my mother had me when she was 18 and how a family deals with issues and teenage children, that shouldn�t be a topic of our politics."

As a matter of fact, he was supposed to be on last night; but due to Ike, he cancelled his appearance. You know, it was a bad hurricaine and unlike your hero, he was not going to sit around and watch an entire city drown.

http://articles.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20060523153709990005&ncid=NWS00010000000001

ALL who will need it in the next four years. That would be everyone who feels duped for having voted Obama in. Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

In the words of Yogi Berra: 'It ain't over till it's over.' There will be another election in four years.

We gave Carter - the 1-term wonder - a chance and he wrecked the economy. Reagan fixed the economy (with tax cuts) and bankrupted the USSR out of the arms race. There could be no more stark example of socialism vs free-market economics.

the trouble, let me be the first to accuse you of being a racist, a paranoid, a nasty, hateful person (did I miss anything?) for bringing up all these facts about the president and the party who only have your best interests in mind. How dare you say these things when our brave president is trying his very best to fill your gas tank and pay your mortgage. You should be ashamed.

See? Now nobody else has to break a sweat typing furiously to put you in your place. I'm sure we all feel much better now.

It looks like our wonderful govt is thinking about another stimulus -- remember those tax rebates we got back in the spring of this year? It was $600 an individual and $1200 a couple. The govt doesn't want to do quite the same kind of stimulus as last time because -- get this -- 80% of the Americans who received it used it to either pay down debt or bolster savings. Here's what they want the new stimulus to do:

�The extension of unemployment benefits and possibly food stamps from 39 to 52 weeks.

�A boost in infrastructure spending, despite the problems of getting the money to work quickly.

�Some relief for state and local governments facing tighter budgets because of lower tax receipts and rising Medicaid costs.

God forbid we give something to the middle class -- let's extend the food stamps and boost the "infrastructure spending" -- what is that anyway? I'm guessing it's a way to line the pockets of the suits even more. When is it going to end?

From time to time in human history, there occur events of seismic significance, when one orthodoxy is overthrown and another takes its place. Today, the scale of the global financial crisis demands that we re-evaluate the economic policy and philosophy that brought us to this point.

George Soros has said that "the salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock. ... The crisis was generated by the system itself." He is right. The current crisis is the culmination of a 30-year domination of economic policy by a free-market ideology that has been variously called neo-liberalism, economic liberalism or economic fundamentalism. The central thrust of this ideology has been that government activity should be constrained, and ultimately replaced, by market forces. In the past year, we have seen how unchecked market forces have brought capitalism to the precipice.

Instead of distributing risk throughout the world, the global financial system has intensified it. Neo-liberal orthodoxy held that global financial markets would ultimately self-correct - the invisible hand of unfettered market forces finding their own equilibrium. But as economist Joseph Stiglitz has caustically observed: "The reason that the invisible hand often seems invisible is that it is not there."

Just as it fell to Franklin Roosevelt to rebuild American capitalism after the Depression, and to the American Democrats, strongly influenced by John Maynard Keynes, to rebuild postwar domestic demand, to engineer the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe and to set in place the Bretton Woods system to govern international economic engagement, so it falls to a new generation to reflect on and rebuild our national and international economic systems.

If centrist governments are to save capitalism, they must face three challenges. First is to use the agency of the state to reconstitute properly regulated markets and to rebuild domestic and global demand. With the demise of neo-liberalism, the role of the state has once more been recognized as fundamental. The state has been the primary actor in responding to three clear areas of the current crisis: in rescuing the private financial system from collapse; in providing direct stimulus to the real economy because of the collapse in private demand; and in the design of a national and global regulatory regime in which government has ultimate responsibility to determine and enforce the rules of the system.

The second challenge for social democrats is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. As the global financial crisis unfolds and the hard impact on jobs is felt by families across the world, the pressure will be great to retreat to some model of an all-providing state and to abandon altogether the cause of open, competitive markets both at home and abroad. Protectionism has already begun to make itself felt, albeit in softer and more subtle forms than the crudity of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. Soft or hard, protectionism is a surefire way of turning recession into depression, as it exacerbates the collapse in global demand. Social democracy's continuing philosophical claim to political legitimacy is its capacity to balance the private and the public, profit and wages, the market and the state. That philosophy once again speaks with clarity and cogency to the challenges of our time.

A further challenge for governments in dealing with the current crisis is its almost unprecedented global dimensions. Governments must craft consistent global financial regulations to prevent a race to the bottom, where capital leaks out to the areas of the global economy with the weakest regulation. We must establish stronger global disclosure standards for systemically important financial institutions. We must also build stronger supervisory frameworks to provide incentives for more responsible corporate conduct, including executive remuneration.

The world has turned to co-ordinated governmental action through the Group of 20: to help provide immediate liquidity to the global financial system; to co-ordinate sufficient fiscal stimulus to respond to the growth gap arising from the global recession; to redesign global regulatory rules for the future; to reform the existing global public institutions - especially the International Monetary Fund - to provide them with the powers and resources necessary for the demands of the 21st century.

The IMF's governance arrangements must be reformed. It is only reasonable that, if we expect fast-growing developing economies such as that of China to make a greater contribution to multilateral institutions such as the IMF, they should also gain a stronger decision-making voice in these forums.

The longer-term challenge for governments is to address the imbalances that have helped to destabilize the global economy in the past decade: in particular, the imbalances between large surplus economies such as that of China, Japan and the oil-exporting nations, and large debtor nations such as America.

The magnitude of the crisis and its impact across the world means that minor tweakings of long-established orthodoxies will not do. Two unassailable truths have already been established: that financial markets are not always self-correcting or self-regulating, and that government can never abdicate responsibility for maintaining economic stability.

For governments, it is critical that we get it right - not just to save the system of open markets from self-destruction, but also to rebuild confidence in properly regulated markets, so as to prevent extreme reactions from the far left or the far right taking hold.

Governments must get it right because the stakes are so high: There are the economic and social costs of long-term unemployment; poverty once again expanding its grim reach across the developing world; and the impact on long-term power structures within the existing international political and strategic order. Success is not optional. Too much now rides on our ability to prevail.

He figures he can win on the Dem ticket because PA has turned Dem. Well, I have news for him.....I doubt it. He only won by a couple votes in the last election because of Pat Toomey running against him. He will definitely lose this election.

I always split my ticket and I usually voted for him, but no more. I don't care what party anyone is affiliated with; but, to me, he is a traitor and that's someone else who is not needed in the Senate.

To those who vote straight party, open your eyes. They are only out for themselves (but is that really news to anyone?)

As posters have said before, we have to educate the people who don't watch/investigate/read up on the candidates running to make sure we vote the best candidates for the job...those who value the constitution, listen to their constituents (which is hard), and vote for the good of the country. Get rid of the a-holes who are in there. We really need to clean house this coming election.,

Obama is going to save us.. .it will take time... NO MORE PALIN hahahahaha no more RABIDS nm

What government must do to save capitalism

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