Again With A Response...

In response to an article I read on one of my peer’s blogs, TheNonPartisan.com(there you will find a copy of the article I am talking about, otherwise this may not make sense.) I would like to say that: I would vote for Hillary; well for U.S. Storyteller that is. But that’s just me; I bet she would tell a wicked horror story around a campfire. But in all seriousness, I think that the author made some good points with his argument. I would think that most women would walk if they found themselves in the middle of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. But then again, that was an extremely unique situation I suppose. I guess you could say that speaks to her character?!? Overall, I would have to say that Mrs. Clinton is going with the “any press is good press” moto at this point in the race. She has run numerous negative attacks in several different states, dividing the Democratic Party even further. I also agree that it is time to pick the nomination and focus on the actual presidential election at this point, November is coming quick. Like the author of the article said, it is all a giant popularity contest in the end, one that only will only be decided with time. The overall humorous tone in the article really helped it flow nicely, and the idea of the storyteller position is an awesome idea, like I said I would vote for her, for storyteller.

Indecision...

As the much anticipated Pennsylvania primary approaches tomorrow there is still a great deal of indecision among the Democratic Party. Hopefully by the close of tomorrow night, or early Wednesday morning we should know which candidate captured more of the precious delegates that were up for grabs. So, with a little more than seven months to go before the Presidential general election the Democratic Party has yet to lock a candidate in stone. The democrats seem to still be closely divided between the candidates, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. After forty five primary elections Mr. Obama has won a total of 1636.5 delegates which comes to roughly around eighty percent of the necessary 2025 delegates. Mrs. Clinton on the other hand has won herself 1479.5 total delegate, or around seventy three percent of the needed delegates. The great state of Pennsylvania has a total of one hundred eighty eight delegates that have yet to be distributed to the Democratic candidates. This means that even if either candidate were to win every single delegate, flat out, neither one would have enough to win the nomination. Now, this does not cause a problem because we still have nine primary races to go (all the way up until June 3rd) giving away a grand total of four hundred eight delegates. This means that there are still plenty of delegates to go around in the overall big scheme of things. So with just a bit more than two months until the last primary election, who will win the democratic nomination? I suppose that only time will tell the true answer to this question. One thing is becoming alarmingly clear as the last primary approaches, that the democrats need to hurry up and pick a candidate and focus on beating the their true nemesis, John McCain. The Republicans have it easy at this point, well to an extent. They already have their front runner picked; now they can and are focusing on making sure they win the big game, the Presidency. While the Democrats on the other hand are still distracted by intra-party conflict. If you ask me, I think the Democrats need to just, as Dave Chapell put it so elegantly, “Wrap it up B!!.” They need to finish with all the formalities and decide already; then focus on beating out the Republicans. It might not be such a good idea for us to give the Republicans a significant time advantage over the Democrats just because we cannot decide who is the right candidate for us. So, even though there are still plenty of delegates to go around I would hope that the Democratic candidates do not draw this out until the bitter end as it is just hurting the party as a whole. Oh yeah if you have not figured it out this is written from a Democrats perspective, sorry if I offend anyone.

In Response...

This weekend I read a commentary on one of my peer’s government blogs; and it got me thinking.You can find a direct link to the blog Me,Myself, and My Government, where you can read the commentary.If not, here is the gist of the article. The author proposes that the national government raise the minimum wage to seven dollars an hour to help Americans deal with the rising cost of living. The commentary goes on to say that this increase in the minimum wage will help boost our “economic spending.” This got me thinking, could it really be this simple? Unfortunately, the answer is no.

Here are a few reasons why this proposal would have a very minimal, if any effect on our economy. In 2007, about 2.3% of all hourly paid workers here in America reported wages at or below minimum wage ($5.85), or roughly about 1.7 million people. That is a very small number of Americans when compared to the 75.9 million hourly paid workers reported in 2007. These numbers were taken directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. By no means do I disagree with a minimum wage change, I just don’t know if it will have a significant impact.

When it comes to rising gas prices: this is a trend that will continue until the day we die. Perhaps we may receive temporary relief from the rising gas prices, but we have to face the ultimate truth. One day our planet will stop yielding crude oil; that is one thing that is almost guaranteed. I am sure that when that day comes; oil will be a luxury, these are the facts. I doubt in our lifetimes we will ever see the day oil production stops completely (at least I hope not), but the day will come.

As for the last comment of the article, “Were going to end up the poorest country in ten years if this keeps up.”, I don’t think that this is the case at all, granted I am no mathematician. The Unites States is ranked tenth in the world for GDP (gross domestic product), with around 45,000. Our economy would have to practically disintegrate in order for us to fall to one of the poorest countries in the world. For example, some African nations have GDP’s less than 500. Now like I said I am no mathematician, but provided Fort Knox doesn’t get robbed, and the dollar collapse: I don’t think we will be one of the poorest nations in the world.

A Second Look...

By definition our economy is NOT in a depression cycle. So let me ask you this, why is our national government sending out a “stimulus rebate”? Early this year President Bush asked Congress to pass a 145 billion dollar package with would enable the government to send out tax incentive checks to taxpayers. These incentive checks can be used any way the taxpayers see fit. The idea being that it will stimulate our declining economy and save us from the dreaded “D” word. This is an unprecedented idea to help stimulate the economy. Particularly since once again, we are not in a depression. In my opinion our government needs to maybe take a second look at its ideas on how to help, as Bush puts it “give the economy a shot in the arm.”We need to take a look at how to create more US based jobs and ways to help out small business. Granted, Bush said he would give aide to small business in the form of tax relief, but we need to focus on growing our economy from within. Some would argue that is exactly what the tax invectives will do, but many will also tell you that they are going to put their money right in a savings account, and this will not help our economy. We do need to find a way to provide temporary relief for families in need, and perhaps this stimulus check will do just that, but it could backfire completely. Let me ask you this: who do you think will be paying for these checks down the road? Our kids, or their kids, or theirs?

In 1933, President Roosevelt passed a series of efforts to help stimulate and eliminated the economic despair faced by millions of Americans, this was called the New Deal. Many people opposed these initiatives because they believed that it gave the federal government too much power, and it was growing far too large. The New Deal created the Social Security Administration and Welfare. Did Roosevelt know how social security would be doing in 2008, of course not, but I would bet you that it is much worse that he would have expected. My point is, is that our government should take a second look at how it plans to stem our economic crisis. Otherwise future generations will have some new government subsidized time bomb to deal with.

He Said, She Said...

Okay, so in my last post I stated that I noticed a trend appearing: the candidates seemed to be taking shots much more frequently at each other. It would most certainly appear that this is in fact the case, and the candidates are just getting more critical of each other. I saw this article on Fox News.com and it really just seemed highlight this point. The title says it all: Obama Tries to Shake Off Questions About His Foreign policy. As I read the article I noticed several things that just seemed a little strange and led me to believe that perhaps the article could have been a bit more throughout in their reporting.

One thing that was prevalent throughout the entire article was an endless amount of quotes from Obama. Most of the quotes included in the article seemed to be framed in a sense that makes them seem like they were cropped and cut to be used specifically for this article’s context. I understand that this can have a greater impact to the readers, but in this case a story that should have COMPLETE the coverage, it seemed to have a negative impact on Obama, and Clinton as well. Another thing that hurt the ethos of the article and the author were some of the comments that were made after the quotes. One that stands out in particular is; “whether he was a closet Muslim.” This comment just seemed to be unnecessary and the article could have gone without it.
“Democrat Barack Obama” these are the first words of the article, right off the bat, for some reason, this just seemed funny to me. It just seemed as if they wanted to push the point that Obama is a democrat. In my personal opinion I think they could have had a bit more tact with their introduction, and that is my personal opinion.
It really seems that it will ultimately come down to a giant session of He said, She said. For the first part of this article much of it is quotes that just go back and forth from what Clinton said then to what Obama said in his defense, and vice versa. It is unfortunate when the Associated Press manipulates statements and quotes to further various agenda’s. This just goes to show that you shouldn’t always necessarily believe what you read.

Neck and Neck

So, at the end of the Wisconsin primary it would appear that Mr. Obama has extended his lead even further. Mr. Patrick Healy and Jeff Zeleny, of the New York Times wrote a very thorough and insightful article, Wisconsin Hands Obama a Victory, the Ninth in a Row, which provided complete coverage over tonight’s primary races. It would appear that “candidate bashing” is the new trend. Both Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain were quoted tonight taking shots at Mr. Obama. Although much of the first page of this article includes many of those derogatory comments made by the various candidates, it gave a very nice perspective of where everyone stands in the race right now. In the Democratic corner, Obama and Clinton are neck and neck, and it would appear that McCain has a firm grasp on the Republican side. When you get to the heart of the article the authors break down the remaining primary races and explain exactly who has to win what in order to be the victor. The authors also go into great depth on whose support they are campaigning for and what platforms they are using. For instance, Mrs. Clinton is “burning the midnight oil” as she puts it to capture more blue-collar and union votes. While Mr. Obama is working hard to get the youth’s attention. One thing that was extremely interesting in the article was exactly how much they broke down the individual results and exactly who voted for who. Both the authors,
Mr. Healy and Mr. Zeleny have been political commentators for many years with the New York Times. Mr. Healy in particular has been following the presidential race like a hawk posting daily on his blog at nytimes.com. Overall, if the authors intended to give a thorough outline of where the race stood they did a great job. They were very clear and concise as far as exactly where everyone stood. In particular they did a very nice job giving both the Democrats and the Republicans their fair share of the coverage. This helped inform the reader and give them an overall clearer picture of things. The only thing that was a bit much was the extensive coverage of the various smear campaigns of the candidates. In my personal opinion I could care less what one candidate has to say about the other, let us, the voter decide what should be taken into account when filling out our ballot. I don’t believe that the authors’ inclusion of the derogatory comments took away from the overall impact of the article, in fact it added to it by creating the whole picture.However, from the perspective that I get it looks like the race is going to get a bit dirtier.

2009 Federal Budget

Bush's Budget Projects Deficits

Yesterday,The Bush Administration released their 2009 federal budget. Many of the items proposed in the budget will make it very difficult for the next presidential administration to balance it in upcoming years. To no surprise, military and defense spending is up, the Defense Department in particular will grow by nearly seven percent. Once again it appears that The Administration is continuing to push their agenda of homeland security and the ongoing war on terror, as it may be their last chance. The 2009 federal budget also contains provisions that would keep tax cuts, that are scheduled to expire in 2011, on the books as permanent. In total the 2009 federal budget would create a deficit over $410 billion. In 2004, at the end of President Bush’s first term in office the deficit was pushing $413 billion. When he had stepped into office three years earlier there was in fact a budget surplus. Many of the nations financial problems can be attributed to the steady increase of defenses. The economy has also slowed down considerably in the past years. Bush proposed several items in the budget to help stop the growing deficit, one of them by collecting healthcare fee’s from non-disabled veterans. They have also proposed that any domestic program not related to defense keep their funding at $393 billion over the next five years. The next administration will have their hands full trying to get the budget out of the red.

DIRECT LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/04/AR2008020400493.html