Obama/Biden vs. McCain/Palin

[Michael]

As an elitist I must say this thread offends me. Is the sweat of my undocumented housekeepers any different than your own? Do we not all shed the same tears when when our yachts are docked due to this nasty hurricane? People it's time to come together.

[Popeye_Card]

The good news is, a decent chunk of that "foreign oil" comes from Canada (~2MM bbl/day) and Mexico (~1.2MM bbl/day). Friendly allies. Additional good news is that Canada could ramp up to ~3MM bbl/day. Bad news is, Mexico will likely ramp down to nearly 0 over the next 10 years, as they will soon run into a defecit with their oil supply.

Now, how do we get to the happy zone of consuming ~10MM bbl/day that we could conceivably produce between the US and Canada?

I was going to post something with regards to getting most of our oil Mexico and Canada...thanks for reminding me.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petr ... mport.html

The only way to get into the "happy zone" would be to cut our consumption in half. How can that be done right now? If we could get the majority of car owners to hit the 25-30 mpg range and shift to a 4 day work week (10 hours per day)...I think we could get pretty close. Plus with the advances and production of hybrids and hopefully fuel cells...we could get there quicker than if we started drilling in ANWR.

JMHO.

I wish I could find the numbers, but the consumer market is only something like 30% of all consumption. The rest is commercial, industrial, and military (the US Army is the single largest consumer of oil in the world--144 million bbls per year).

So yes, increased consumption on the consumer market would certainly help. But there has to be heavy buy-in from commercial, transportation, and industrial leaders as well. Plus the government.

[Freed Roger]

See, I tried agreeing with you and you had to go all liberal on me.

Sorry - hung up on the war.

[JL21]

As an elitist I must say this thread offends me. Is the sweat of my undocumented housekeepers any different than your own? Do we not all shed the same tears when when our yachts are docked due to this nasty hurricane? People it's time to come together.

If you prick us, do we not bleed blue blood?

I can't help but be reminded of this song:

Love is but the song we sing,
And fear's the way we die
You can make the mountains ring
Or make the angels cry
Know the dove is on the wing
And you need not know why
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
Some will come and some will go
We shall surely pass
When the one that left us here
Returns for us at last
We are but a moments sunlight
Fading in the grass
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
If you hear the song I sing,
You must understand
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand
Just one key unlocks them both
It's there at your command
C'mon people now,
Smile on your brother
Ev'rybody get together
Try and love one another right now
Right now
Right now!

[Radbird]

As an elitist I must say this thread offends me. Is the sweat of my undocumented housekeepers any different than your own? Do we not all shed the same tears when when our yachts are docked due to this nasty hurricane? People it's time to come together.

Now I know what's been missing from this thread.

Where's maddash???

[PujolJunkie]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politic ... john_.html

Poll shows Barack Obama's lead over John McCain in New York falling
By KENNETH LOVETT
DAILY NEWS ALBANY BUREAU

Monday, September 15th 2008, 10:23 AM


ALBANY - Barack Obama's once-commanding lead in New York has shrunk to just 5 points, a poll released Monday shows.

The Siena College poll shows Obama leading McCain 46% to 41%.

The five point margin is down from 18 points in June in a state considered among the most heavily Democrat in the nation.

The race for New York is the closest it’s been in six months, but Barack Obama still leads John McCain by 13 points, 55% to 42%, in the latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of voters in the state.

Obama has the support of 79% of Democrats and 21% of Republicans, while McCain is backed by 77% of GOP voters and 19% of Democrats. Unaffiliated voters favor McCain 50% to 44% (see crosstabs).

Nice poll. I'll take Rasmussen over Siena any day. Even if they are right-leaning and just changed their party ID sample.

[PujolJunkie]

Change from yesterday:

DailyKos.com (D) / Research 2000
McCain -1, Obama 0

Diageo / Hotline
McCain -1, Obama +2

Gallup
McCain 0, Obama +1

Rasmussen
McCain -1, Obama 0


Average Change:
McCain -0.75, Obama +0.75

Average Swing:
Obama +1.5

[KyCardinalFan]

Just to follow-up on the column I posted a week (and dozens of pages) ago from Leonard Pitts:

Wake-up time for `real conservatives'
Posted on Sat, Sep. 13, 2008

By LEONARD PITTS JR.
lpitts@miamiherald.com

So it seems George W. Bush is not really conservative.

Nor are Mitt Romney, John McCain and, indeed, the vast majority of the Republican Party. Or so I'm told by a number of readers who took exception to a recent column lambasting Romney for his speech at the GOP convention. In it, Romney declared that the way to fix Washington is to turn it over to conservatives. If you didn't know any better, said I, you'd think conservatives had not been in charge most of the last decade. This kind of babblespeak, I argued, has become increasingly characteristic of the political right.

Except, according to my correspondents, those conservatives in charge weren't really conservative at all. As Roy from Sanger, Calif. put it in an e-mail: 'If you believe what we have had in D.C. so far this century is a conservative Washington, your perceptions are colored by a memory loss of what real conservatism looks like. Bring back to life `real' conservatives who died before 1996, and they would think only one party ruled in D.C. now, the tax and spend, spend and spend some more party.''

The funny thing is, I agree. Stack the traditional definition of ''conservative'' alongside the events of the last few years, and it's hard not to. It is, for example, difficult to find evidence of government getting out of people's way in the Terri Schiavo affair. Or evidence of lean, mean government efficiency in the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Or evidence of fiscal restraint in a projected $500 billion budget deficit. Or evidence of foreign policy pragmatism in the invasion of a country that had not attacked us and did not threaten to. Or evidence of accountability in the eagerness to duck blame for all the above.

Conservatism, an ideology once driven by principle, has shrunk until its purview can be, and often is, delineated in three syllables: God, guns, gays. Worse, it has embraced a win-at-all-costs ethos and intellectual dishonesty that are, even by the seamy standards of modern politics, astonishing.

To pick just one of many available illustrations: Last month, Karl Rove praised the choice of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate, citing among other things, her two long years as governor of Alaska and her experience as mayor of Wasilla, which has a population smaller than some apartment complexes. This came a few weeks after Rove said Tim Kaine was unfit to be Barack Obama's running mate because he, Kaine, had been governor of Virginia only two years, before which, he was mayor of Richmond which, with about 200,000 residents, is ``not a big town.''

Now, I don't care what your ideology is: You cannot, if you've got half a brain, define that as anything but hypocrisy. And if true conservatives hate seeing that kind of duplicity associated with conservatism, I understand. But I have a question for them: Where have you been the last 15 years? Where were you when conservatism was untethered from principle, unhooked from reality? Where were you when it became smug and self-righteous, when it traded its integrity for situational outrage, its credibility for angry certitude, its honor for ballot box success? Where were you when it sold out to evangelicals and anti-intellectuals? Where were you when it got hijacked?

American Muslims are often challenged to speak out against extremists in their religion, but for my money, that challenge can more fairly be leveled at those people Roy calls real conservatives. They sat silent as their principles were discarded, as their very name was stolen and used to drive the country off a cliff. I hope e-mails like Roy's mean their long silence is about to be broken, but I have some advice for him and anyone else who doesn't think the Republicans are truly conservative:

Don't tell me. Tell the Republicans.

[TimeForGuinness]

There was 1 real conservative republican that ran this year and didn't get many votes...Ron Paul.

[Richie Allen]

There was 1 real conservative republican that ran this year and didn't get many votes...Ron Paul.

He was my original horse in this race but it was quickly evident that he was never going to reach double-digit support. I've sat out too many of these elections because my guy was done/out before February.