astralis

julie,

i was going to erase the post on basis of this crap alone. as JAD said, plenty of stuff to make people think twice about obama- this garbage isn't one of them.

__________________
The human mind cannot grasp the causes of phenomena in the aggregate. But the need to find these causes is inherent in man’s soul. And the human intellect, without investigating the multiplicity and complexity of the conditions of phenomena, any one of which taken separately may seem to be the cause, snatches at the first, the most intelligible approximation to a cause, and says: “This is the cause!"

-Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace

Julie

That is not my personal writing, but an article with the posted link. However, I beg to disagree with you about it being garbage.

There is well documented evidence that draws upon the on-the-ground interviews by researchers in Indonesia and Kenya, published quotations of Obama’s childhood friends and his school records, as well as the candidate’s own autobiography, which substantiates Obama's Muslim background.

About That ‘Obama Grew Up Muslim’ Story | Sweetness & Light

Every American has a right to know everything about a presidential candidate. If, in fact, the above can be disproven, I will erase it myself. Until then, it stands until debunked.

JAD_333

lol...former dem...that's funny. No party has a corner on virtue.

But I didn't mean it as a criticism of you. I read all that stuff and check it out for real meat.

__________________
To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

Julie

Okay, here goes:

Barack Obama has campaigned on the issue of “equal pay”, casting John McCain as a villain for not supporting federal legislation widening grounds and timing for pay-discrimination lawsuits. Yet Obama may have a fair-pay issue of his own. According to Fred Lucas at Cybercast News Service, women on his staff made $6,000 less than men on average. McCain, on the other hand, has more women in key positions — and the women on his staff average slightly higher salaries than the men:

On average, women working in Obama’s Senate office were paid at least $6,000 below the average man working for the Illinois senator. That’s according to data calculated from the Report of the Secretary of the Senate, which covered the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2007. Of the five people in Obama’s Senate office who were paid $100,000 or more on an annual basis, only one — Obama’s administrative manager — was a woman.

The average pay for the 33 men on Obama’s staff (who earned more than $23,000, the lowest annual salary paid for non-intern employees) was $59,207. The average pay for the 31 women on Obama’s staff who earned more than $23,000 per year was $48,729.91. (The average pay for all 36 male employees on Obama’s staff was $55,962; and the average pay for all 31 female employees was $48,729. The report indicated that Obama had only one paid intern during the period, who was a male.)

McCain, an Arizona senator, employed a total of 69 people during the reporting period ending in the fall of 2007, but 23 of them were interns. Of his non-intern employees, 30 were women and 16 were men. After excluding interns, the average pay for the 30 women on McCain’s staff was $59,104.51. The 16 non-intern males in McCain’s office, by comparison, were paid an average of $56,628.83.

First, one has to ask why Obama has 64 non-intern staffers while McCain has 46. Obama doesn’t chair any committees, and the subcommittee he chairs has not exactly had a prodigious output. The difference in salaries comes to almost a million dollars a year. What exactly is the value that taxpayers have received for this extra assistance? Obama has a negligible legislative record for his three years in the Senate, and has spent most of the last two years running for President, as has McCain, who managed to get by with much less.

If CNS has its figures correct, then Obama has some explaining to do.

Hot Air » Blog Archive » Does Obama pay women less than men?

Julie

When Russia attacked Georgia, McCain blasted the bad guys.

Today, news reports indicate that Russian military forces crossed an internationally-recognized border into the sovereign territory of Georgia. Russia should immediately and unconditionally cease its military operations and withdraw all forces from sovereign Georgian territory. What is most critical now is to avoid further confrontation between Russian and Georgian military forces. The consequences for Euro-Atlantic stability and security are grave.

Obama put down the Strawberry Daiquiri (freshly made at the beach bar in Maui) and gave his best Rodney King.

“I strongly condemn the outbreak of violence in Georgia, and urge an immediate end to armed conflict. Now is the time for Georgia and Russia to show restraint, and to avoid an escalation to full scale war. Georgia’s territorial integrity must be respected. All sides should enter into direct talks on behalf of stability in Georgia, and the United States, the United Nations Security Council, and the international community should fully support a peaceful resolution to this crisis.”

Nothing about Russia getting the hell out of another sovereign country. Nothing about who is wrong and who is right. Just a small shriek at the sight of blood and whining to stop the fighting.

Overnight somebody must have told Obama that Georgia is an American ally and McCain (surprise) had the more appropriate response. So Barry puffed up and came out with his amended, revised, and updated response.

“I condemn Russia’s aggressive actions and reiterate my call for an immediate ceasefire… Russia must stop its bombing campaign, cease flights of Russian aircraft in Georgian airspace, and withdraw its ground forces from Georgia.”

Laika’s Last Woof suggests this for the next McCain ad:

“I don’t need to Google Georgia to know which side we’re on.”

Obama Flip Flops on Russia v. Georgia - Now Agrees With McCain | The Patriot Room

JAD_333

May be something there; may not. It all depends on the jobs they do. Strict parity is too much to ask. A woman file clerk does not rate the salary of a press secretary. Remember the Congressman whose entire staff was women?

astralis

julie,

according to the link sent.

i understand you didn't write that, but i think when the very "proof" presented is actually lambasting said position....

Julie

Senator Obama’s proposed ‘tax cuts for the middle class’ are actually marginal rate hikes in disguise.

Senator Barack Obama declared recently that he wants to “reform our tax code so that it rewards work and not just wealth.” We think that is a great goal if it means a simple tax system with low marginal tax rates. Unfortunately, a close inspection of Obama’s proposals reveals something disquieting: he would raise marginal tax rates for many middle-income taxpayers, a bad move for anyone seeking to promote economic growth.

Although Obama is offering a new series of tax breaks, they undermine rather than improve economic incentives. First, whether or not you get those breaks will depend on your income. In Washington, taking away tax breaks as families work harder to make more money is called a “phase-out.” Economists have a different name for it—we call it a tax. Reducing a person’s tax credit as his income goes up also reduces his incentive to earn more income.

Second, Obama would make some credits refundable for families with credits bigger than their tax liability, which would also have the nefarious effect of raising marginal tax rates. For example, consider a worker in the 10 percent bracket with $1,000 of tax liability before credits who claims $1,200 in credits. The tax impact of earning an extra $100 depends on whether the credit is refundable. If it’s not refundable, there’s no tax penalty on earning the extra $100 because the worker’s tax liability stays at zero. But if the credit is refundable, earning the extra money pushes the tax up from negative $200 to negative $190—that’s a 10 percent penalty on earning income.

the effective marginal tax rate under Obama’s tax proposals (based on the authoritative “Preliminary Analysis of the 2008 Presidential Candidates’ Tax Plans,” published by the Brookings Institution/Urban Institute’s Tax Policy Center). These are the marginal rates in 2009 for a two-earner couple with two children—a college freshman and a 12-year-old receiving after-school care—under some specific assumptions. For comparison, the dotted line on the chart illustrates the effective tax rates under current law. The rates shown in the chart are not spelled out in the tax code; they are the result of giving and taking away tax breaks as the household’s income changes.

As the chart shows, Obama’s give-and-take tax policy results in marginal tax rates of 34 percent to 39 percent in the $31,000 to $45,000 income range for this family. That’s an increase of 13 percentage points or more from the current rates.

What accounts for the higher rates? First, Obama expands the maximum child and dependent care credit for families with one young child from $1,050 to $1,500 and phases down the credit over a longer income range, from $30,000 to $58,000. Throughout this income range, the credit is phasing out at a rate of $30 per $1,000 of income, thus raising the effective tax rate by 3 percentage points. Obama also makes certain credits refundable, which introduces a tax penalty of 10 percent or 15 percent, depending on the income bracket.

While Obama has publicly embraced a tax rate of 40 percent for couples earning over $350,000, his tax policies would result in a staggering 45 percent effective marginal rate in the $110,000 to $120,000 income range for this family. That is 11 percentage points higher than under current law.

The culprit in this case is Obama’s proposed reform of the Hope Scholarship Tax Credit for college tuition, which he would rename the “American Opportunity Tax Credit.” He would increase the credit’s maximum value from $1,800 to $4,000 while still phasing out the credit over the same income range, $100,000 to $120,000. The larger phase-out would boost the penalty on work from 9 percentage points to 20 percentage points.

Although Senator John McCain would not eliminate the existing phase-outs, he would avoid adding new ones, with one small and temporary exception. While McCain has proposed increasing the personal exemption for children, he would make it immediately available only to lower-income taxpayers. Until the bigger exemption is offered to everyone in 2016, some households would face an additional effective marginal tax rate of about 2 percentage points.

To be sure, Obama’s proposals would not tarnish an otherwise pristine tax code. As the chart shows, the U.S. tax code is already littered with phase-ins and phase-outs. For that matter, it’s hard to know how much phase-outs actually discourage people from earning additional income. Because the phase-outs are so hard to decipher, many Americans may ignore them when making their work and saving decisions. Of course, those people are still burdened by the long and frustrating IRS worksheets required to compute the value of their tax credits; and creating a more confusing tax code certainly does not make for good government.

While both candidates will reduce their tax plans to clever sound bites, voters should consider how those plans would affect incentives to earn income. Unfortunately, Senator Obama’s proposed “tax cuts for the middle class” are actually marginal rate hikes in disguise.

The Folly of Obama’s Tax Plan — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Julie

Astralis, I am not in any way accusing Obama being a present-day Muslim. What I am bringing forth is that he did practice Islam at one point in time which is validated in his autobiography, then converted to Christianity while in Chicago.

But my intention, and of grave concern to me, are the persons he continues to surround himself with from his past, appointing them advisors and committee members, paving their way to the WH if elected. I have a right to know the forming of his cabinet members he plans on surrounding himself with and taking to the White House with him to do business that will concern me the next four years.

gunnut

Sir, you are talking reason here. Reason is not allowed in a liberal's thinking. Everyone must be paid the same.

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"Only Nixon can go to China." -- Old Vulcan proverb.

Herodotus

There's nothing wrong with being a Muslim, or even a former Muslim. Are you casting wide aspersions about Muslims, that they are all terrorists, or unpatriotic, etc. and so forth?

Herodotus

This to me was the most damning of his recent actions. He had a very tepid response to a serious international crisis; hell even the British press were more forceful than Obama. Weak-kneed Democrat, shades of Jimmy Carter?

Shek

He did his foreign policy trip. Wait, you mean it's an everyday thing

There's plenty of time for Obama to recover, but juxtaposed against his Middle East/Europe romp, it detracts from whatever foreign policy burnishing that the trip produced. Form vs. substance. It will be interesting to see how the debates go and whether McCain's experience on many issues will stand out in that format.

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"So little pains do the vulgar take in the investigation of truth, accepting readily the first story that comes to hand." Thucydides 1.20.3

Julie

Not at all. I am casting wide aspersions about the company that may be in tow, and kept, at the White House, which may or may not, have connections to terrorist organizations, and/or corrupt financial dealings.

astralis

julie,

prove it.

understand and sympathize with what you're doing, but some of the sources you're getting information from and posting here seem to be thinly sourced at best.