Al Gore heads to Florida to stump for Obama today. Presumably, he’ll be touting some of Obama’s scarier proposals, for example his plans for new taxes to help him finance an extra $1.2 trillion-plus in new spending. I’m white as a ghost just thinking about it…
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It’s Halloween, but with just a few days until the presidential election, Barack Obama’s got to make the most of today, just like any other day. Stumping dressed up as a ghost, or Batman, or a vampire, or Elvis just isn’t going to cut it. Nope, Obama’s going as the candidate ready to lead America forward, through tough economic and national security challenges. Here’s his costume:
(as featured on Amazon.com)
John McCain, meanwhile, is hanging out with the Governator today.
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Barack Obama’s publicly noted interest in wealth redistribution extends far beyond his brief, but telling exchange with Joe ‘The Plumber’ Wurzelbacher. Since the fiercely contested Democratic primary, Obama has toed a consistently pro-tax, pro-spending line, and if you asked his campaign strategists, they’d probably say that helped pave the way to his victory. However, Obama’s positions on taxes have neither appealed to nor evidenced common sense in the eyes of everyone, for example ABC’s Charlie Gibson who moderated the Democratic debate in Philadelphia in April. Clearly unprepared for a night of intense questioning, Obama was unable to offer a viable explanation regarding his intention to raise the capital gains tax when Gibson noted that raising the capital gains tax does not increase government revenue, but instead does quite the opposite.
It turns out Charlie Gibson and the GOP haven’t been alone in querying the sensibility of Obama’s capital gains tax proposals, though. Today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Wayne Huizenga, owner of the Miami Dolphins, intends to sell up to half of his ownership in the NFL team for fear of excessive taxes. Barack Obama, he said to a Florida newspaper, “wants to double the capital gains tax, or almost double it. I’d rather give it to charity than to him.”
As Obama’s economic proposals state, he aims, in the spirit of “fairness,” to raise taxes, including, as the WSJ points out, the capital gains tax from 15% to 20%. And his plans to do so represent another way in which Obama’s economic proposals are wrong-headed. His redistributionist approach will penalize investments, risk jobs as businesses cope with skyrocketing taxes, and raise taxes on ordinary American citizens precisely when our nation needs the opposite. And, apparently, if you live in Miami, result in ownership changes to your local NFL franchise!
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Aerosmith’s Joe Perry walks this way with John McCain.
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The WSJ has a(nother) great op-ed running today outlining the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama on trade. Here is a sampling:
Mr. McCain supports the bilateral pacts with Colombia, Panama and South Korea that have already been signed by the two governments. Colombia already enjoys preferential access to the U.S. market, and Mr. McCain stresses that opening Colombia to U.S. exports would be good for U.S. jobs and especially small and medium-sized businesses. He says it would help “a crucial democratic ally” in a region fraught with instability.
He has a similar view toward South Korea, which buys $50 billion of U.S. exports annually and has been a key ally in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Republican also favors renewing trade negotiating authority, which expired in 2007 and without which no new trade pact is likely to succeed on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Obama opposes the Colombia and South Korea agreements, for the same reasons cited by other Congressional Democrats. In the last presidential debate, Mr. Obama pointed to violence in Colombia against labor unions. The politically independent Colombian attorney general says violence against union members has come down sharply under President Alvaro Uribe, but Mr. Obama says that’s insufficient.
He also opposes the South Korea pact, which would remove auto tariffs in both directions and end South Korea’s use of nontariff barriers to protect its domestic markets. Mr. Obama says the U.S. buys “hundreds of thousands of cars” from South Korea and “we can get only 4,000-5,000 into South Korea.” The Democrat wants assurances that the imbalance in auto sales will end. The Obama campaign declined to tell us whether he supports the Panama FTA or trade negotiating authority.
The more this subject gets discussed, the more it is clear: Obama doesn’t like trade, even though as the op-ed notes, “for most of the last 80 years a rough bipartisan consensus has held that free trade is in the American national interest.” The fact that Obama—who frankly has a virtually nonexistent record where bipartisan compromise is concerned– can’t, or won’t, see that should be raising questions about his ability to lead us forward where economic issues are concerned, should he be elected next week.
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Tonight, Barack Obama will attempt, in a 30 minute, celebrific infomercial, to convince voters that he is, in fact, capable of leading the United States. In honor of Obama making his closing argument that yes, he is qualified to be our next Commander-in-Chief, I offer you this:
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Is it just me, or does this seem a bit dubious? From today’s Chicago Sun-Times:
Dr. Eric Whitaker and Sen. Barack Obama go way back.
Their friendship began when they were graduate students at Harvard University. Now, Whitaker is one of Obama’s closest advisers.
Whitaker, 43, of Chicago, often travels with the presidential hopeful on the campaign trail and has vacationed with him in Hawaii. There’s talk Whitaker could be in line for a federal appointment if Obama becomes president.
Five years ago, Obama, then an Illinois state senator, gave a “glowing” reference for Whitaker to Tony Rezko, the now-convicted political fixer who helped Gov. Blagojevich find people to run state agencies. Blagojevich hired Whitaker to be the state’s public health director.
Obama has said that’s the only time he can recall talking to Rezko — who was a major campaign fund-raiser for him and for Blagojevich — about getting anyone a state job. (my emphasis added)
It’s worth reiterating that Rezko was charged with committing a number of corruption offenses, and indeed convicted earlier this year on 16 counts.
For Blagojevich’s part, it was reported last month that investigators looking into the behavior of the man to whom Barack Obama apparently acted as a campaign adviser back in 2004 “believe they’ve established solid evidence of fraud and conspiracy.”
And Obama gave one of them a reference for a friend who was hired by the other for an important job.
If that doesn’t say change, I just don’t know what does.
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Over the last few weeks, there’s been plenty of focus among the media and individual voters alike on Barack Obama’s statement that “when you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody.” That is especially so given that Obama has indicated that he does not regret making this comment in his now well-known conversation with Joe the Plumber.
Today, however, we gather that that conversation was not the first time where Obama had indicated an interest in wealth-redistribution. In an interview from 2001 that Obama did with Chicago radio station WBEZ (h/t Drudge), he seemed to signal his regret that the Supreme Court (and the Warren Court, specifically) “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.” Hmmm….
Setting aside Obama’s comment to Joe the Plumber, a quick glance at his economic proposals would indicate that as president, he’ll be ready to venture into the issue of redistribution of wealth. The New Hampshire Union Leader really called it when they wrote that Obama “proposes to use the power of the state to redistribute outcomes as he prefers to see them” and that his policies amount to “failed redistributionism wrapped in pretty new paper.”
Just something to bear in mind before you head to the polls next week, should you be one of the many Americans, including many members of the middle class, who does not want your wealth spread around by Mr. Hope-and-Change, aided by his allies, Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid…
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Politico’s Jonathan Martin notes comments made by John McCain this morning:
This election comes down to how you want your hard earned money spent. Do you want to keep it and invest it in your future, or have it taken by the most liberal person to ever run for the Presidency and the Democratic leaders who have been running congress for the past two years — Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid?
No, I do not. Nor do I want the federal government to spend an additional $1.297 trillion over the next four years, which is another thing that Barack Obama promises to do as president.
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ACORN (the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) recently has garnered national attention in connection with the issue of vote fraud. As you may know, in February ACORN’s political action committee endorsed Obama for president, and earlier this month found itself “implicated in voter-fraud schemes 15 states.”
While Obama’s ties to ACORN are troubling, he’s not the only prominent Democrat who has them. According to today’s Boston Herald, Governor Deval Patrick (D-MA), Obama’s national campaign co-chairman, represented the left-wing, scandal-plagued group in a 1993 law suit, and even went so far as to secure a $33,000 grant for the embattled organization’s Springfield branch this year.
It’s astounding Governor Patrick would even consider dolling out taxpayer funds to Obama’s friends at ACORN. It’s all the more concerning that he actually did it.
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