end game Hillary?

Have you checked defense spending as a % of GDP? Lowest point in the last 30 years, despite war on two fronts. Those we discuss, do not "surround" him...he has sought them out, and has had relationships with each that have lasted years.

Policies? Yes....one person can screw things up in four years. He's Carter with a better speech! When told that higher taxes on windfall profits actually reduce revenue, he stated that it was not a situation of revenue, but one of fairness. Fairness? Does being the only one to vote against the Born Alive Act, make him more mainstream? Is that a position that will unite.....killing children actually outside the womb? Regardless of your position on abortion, that is barbaric! Look into this guy rather than venting your hatred of Bush and placing this country into his hands. As far as reduction is lobbyist influence, you must know that Obama is as political as they come. The lobbyist's hold since 1994? Please! Your leftist utopianism and lingering rage over 2000 are leading you down the wrong path. Don't blindly place all these "hopes" and "dreams" into a guy who has no record of achieving any such things. Gullible!

You guys are all funny. Attempting to act smart about things when all this talk is pointless. Nobody is going to be right. There is no good choice. There will probably never really be a good choice. They are all crooks at some point in time and all tend to say what they have to. Sure they might have some stances that they don't stray too far from, but that is rare.

Talk about something that actually matters.

Don't get me wrong though, this is funny to read.

Hello fellow republican

I wasn't sure if you were a republican, until you started tying the Defense spending to the GDP which is an awful way to determine how "efficient" military spending is. The us spends ~10x more than any other nation in the world on defense.

1. US - $522 Billion

2. China - $62 Billion

The chinese GDP is 1/4 of ours

So our spending as a fraction of GDP is 2.5 times that of any other country in the world. We spend about 4x that of Japan as a fraction of GDP and they have a larger GDP than we do.

our government could pay for the defense budgets of...

China, Russia, the UK, Japan, France, Germany, India, South Korea, Saudia Arabia, Italy, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Turkey, Israel, Netherlands, Spain, Taiwan, Indonesia, Mayanmar, Ukraine, Singapore, Sweden, North Korea, Poland, Norway, Greece, Iran and Kuwait.

COMBINED

Everyone knows it's utter nonsense, and the only person to actually use it as a useful measure is GW himself who is quoted as talking down budgets constantly because of the %GDP.

Get a clue.

Japan has a larger GDP than China I meant.

political man wrote:

Have you checked defense spending as a % of GDP? Lowest point in the last 30 years, despite war on two fronts.

Ok, I checked. Unless you're still living in 2000, you are incorrect. You could spin this data in at least two ways. 1) We're near the historic low since the start of the Cold War era. 2) Defense spending as a percent of GDP has risen over 30% during the Bush administration:

If rush believes he is the one influencing the election, why didnt his canidate get elected? Hell why didnt he run for president... Gimme a break..

ditto heads wrote:

If rush believes he is the one influencing the election, why didnt his canidate get elected? Hell why didnt he run for president... Gimme a break..

If Rush didn't influence the election, then why did John Kerry attribute Obama's loss in Indiana to Limbaugh's "Operation Chaos"?

you think you know so much, yet you are so wrong. and it's clear from your lengthy postings that you don't know anything about Obama's policies or comprehend the importance of the fundamental differences in his campaign's approach to politics. your problem is that you can't get beyond seeing him as the "other side", the scary socialist right? you claim although you think his character is a "facade" and you really think he is a secret america-hater, that's not why you don't like him. but then you go on to say basically (other than the typical 'AHHHH THE LIBERAL SAID TAXES!! B.S.) that you just don't believe he can get anything done. the strange part is that you automatically accuse the "liberal" candidate of accommodating bureaucracy, yet lament that he won't bring enough "gridlock" to washington for your conservative taste. so is the real issue that you don't believe Obama when he says he can unite people and make things happen (he has run an unprecedented campaign that says otherwise), or that you are afraid of what real change this man can bring to the status quo?

i just find it hard to understand how any rational person can look at the three candidates and decide john mccain's ideas are the best for america right now, simply because rich people might pay a little less in taxes under his policies. how does that outweigh his continuation of bush's iraq stance, flippant attitude toward war with iran, and downright idiotic gas tax holiday pandering? where is your little economic analysis of that little gem? i'd like to hear your disagreements with nobel prize winning economists and everyone else with a brain who can see where that will get us.

the bottom line is that there are times when the status quo needs to be significantly altered, and this is one of them. and if you can't see the positive impact obama has already had on the political scene then i feel sorry for you. you may not believe his words, but how do you argue with what he has been able to do? over 1.5 million individual donors have contributed to his campaign, he has broken all kinds of fundraising records, and he did it on the strength of the American people who have believed in his vision enough to get involved and actively contribute. so when he gets to office, the American people are the ones he has to answer to, not the lobbyists and special interest groups. do you realize what a significant shift that is from the current system? that's not just empty words and hoping, my friend. that is the reality of Obama's campaign. and if you consider where he started when he announced his bid for president last year, i think you would have to agree that he has run the most successful campaign up to this point of any of the candidates. does that say nothing about the man's executive abilities? and if he is such a left-wing radical, why does Obama continue to draw heavy independent support? he even drew 47% of the republican cross-over vote in the indiana primary, despite rush limbaugh's best efforts to send his minions to vote for hillary. you decry what you see as a false impression of diversity among Obama's supporters, but let's look at it like it really is. he does draw the support of both poor blacks and affluent whites. the young and college-educated overwhelmingly support him. who has he had problems with? the old, white, and uneducated, mainly female because of hillary's base. but in every primary we see, the more time Obama spends talking to voters in those states, the better he does. maybe you should stop being so cynical and actually objectively examine what each candidate is offering the country, aside from whether they happen to be a democrat or a republican. we have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to elect a president who can really represent a fundamental positive shift for the direction of the country. john mccain is not that chance. barack obama is. and you better get used to it.

Not Again wrote:

"1.5 million individual donors have contributed to his campaign, he has broken all kinds of fundraising records, and he did it on the strength of the American people who have believed in his vision enough to get involved and actively contribute. so when he gets to office, the American people are the ones he has to answer to, not the lobbyists and special interest groups."

One hundred percent correct! This is EXACTLY the reason I have been supporting him! The power will be brought back to the people where it belongs anyway. "Greed" will get a muzzle for once!

Remember that that corporate American greed is running the country right now. Government no longer serves the people, it serves corporate America's desire for more and more profit - at the expense of everything. Including America itself! Your families (dependence on dual income > divorce, declining family values), your jobs (overseas), your health (work more for less > exercise and cook less), the environment > drill and pollute)- everything. All in the name of insane profit for the few.

Obama will penetrate this problem like a missle, and ERADICATE it! This is the "CHANGE" he's talking about!

You sound an awful lot like another shall-go-unnamed poster on this board, but you articulate your ideas much better and you are not nearly as vitriolic. Plus, you actually make some good points. I think you are misconstruing my posture. I am not a Republican and I am not a McCain fan. And, I am absolutely looking at this situation objectively. Don't know why people keep bringing up the gas tax holiday example as what they consider to be an effective way of disarming one's ammunition (it's already revealed the stupidity of the other anonymous poster), but I think it's a horrendously dumb idea. A dumb idea, and one that Obama was actually the only one of all the candidates to ever implement, to his own chagrin (ironic). As to the Iraq situation, yes, some level of diplomacy is and has been needed, but what created 9/11 to begin with was the mess and power vacuum that we left after thwarting the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan to begin with (the US just simply cannot comprehend the reality that the clean-up is much trickier, much, lengthier, and much more important and significant that the initial military engagement). And we are destined to repeat the same mistakes in Iraq.

Now, I really don't want this to be yet another useless thread about Iraq, but 50+ years of foreign policy blunders, and what do we do, we not only repeat them, but we tear apart the clandestine, nefarious, on-the-ground and necessary intelligence gathering operations in addition to failing to get serious about any kind of domestic energy policy (yes, BOTH sides of the aisle are culpable on this issue). Guess what, the transition cannot happen as quickly as you would hope, so we are beholden to some type of presence in the Middle East for at least two more decades. Actually, the entire world economy is. This isn't merely about the US. And you'd better believe that whether your golden boy gets elected or not, Israel is going to be proactive (read between the lines) about Iran. It's going to happen and it's going to need to be addressed.

Look, here's my point. Obama would be more palatable with a Republican Congress. The pendulum swung way too far to the right, and now we are going to make the opposite, Jimmy Carter-esque mistake in the other direction. We need independent thinking and compromise, and one party domination will never facilitate the kind of CHANGE we ultimately need. I dwell on fiscal and economic policy, because, mostly, it's my job, and secondly, because it's the single most important issue in any campaign. Always has been. If the neighbor on either side of you loses his job, no one much gives a darn about anything else. And the kind of fiscal peril that Obama can put us in could be much more severe than Carter. That's where we are folks. Weak dollar, credit deflation, exponentially growing medicare liabilities. This has nothing to do with greed and "taxing the rich." This has to do with implementing policies that, while in the short run they may appear to be beneficial, will do irreparable harm. They will force "smart money" offshore. They, along with the emergence of the overzealous regulatory and inflationary climate will discourage domwestic investment and job creation (Jobs follow capital -- just ask Old Europe). They will encourage tax sheltering ad mal-investment. They will, in effect, not accomplish what they were intended to accomplish. And that not-so-subtle point is not even lost on your golden boy, but HE (the agent of change -- oh really??) gets to be the arbitrater of EQUITY and FAIRNESS.

Obama is a beacon of hope for all of you, but it is YOU who need to really dissect his policy and experience. He has enacted no SUBSTANTIAL policy, only anecdotal snippets. He has not shown that he can reach across the aisle in any significant way (though he's ultimately not going to need to), and it is his presentation and demeanor that has so snowed people (He has one heck of a campaign manager, that's for sure). But following the old, tried-and-true, axiomatic Democratic folly of reallocating wealth from the productive, job-creating class to the nonproductive class will not give you the kind of unity you think it will and you think you want. It will only create more divisiveness and a hollowing out of the morals, ingenuity, principles, and work ethic that once made this country great. The falling dollar is more than just an economic nuance. It's very much symbolic. And you are all asleep at the switch. Now, I have little doubt that Obama has a better than 50/50 chance to win this election. And, that's not the worst thing in the world, because, it's going to take an even bigger mess (we'll get there) to bring about the kind of CHANGE we ultimately need. And the pendulum keeps swinging.

not again wrote:

i just find it hard to understand how any rational person can look at the three candidates and decide john mccain's ideas are the best for america right now, simply because rich people might pay a little less in taxes under his policies.

I, and a lot of other American's, work very hard for our money. When Obama wants to stop the tax breaks we "rich" people get, all in the name of fairness, I want to puke. For everyone out there who think the rich have all the breaks should look into a little thing called ATM. You'll see that "we" rich people pay way more than our fair share. You sad, sad, poor people. I had a kid and bought a hybrid car in 2007. No tax benefit for me; I made too much. All you sad, sad poor people got a economic stimulous check in the mail this week. Not me, I made too much.

The median household income in 2006 was $48K. If any of you college kids voting for Obama make more than that, get ready to pay a little extra tax to support you Liberal Arts classmates. Because that's the "fair" thing to do...