Multiply Your Vote

I am voting for Barack Obama for President of the United States of America. You should too. I used to think that there wasn’t much difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Was I wrong about that. The last eight years have shown me the light. If Al Gore had been named president by the Supreme Court in 2000 instead of Bush, we wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. We wouldn’t have given a huge tax cut to people who didn’t really need one and a tiny tax cut to people who did. We would already be working to solve the global warming problem. We would have gone forward these past eight years instead of backward.

I am going to talk with as many of my friends and acquaintances as I can between now and election day and encourage them to vote for Obama. If you can get one undecided person to vote for Obama, you have multiplied your vote. If you can persuade a Republican, Libertarian or Green party voter to vote for Obama, you have multiplied your vote. Talk to people. You don’t have to get “in their face”. Be polite and civil. No yelling allowed. Ask them who they are going to vote for. Some people don’t bother to vote. Show them how easy it is to register and offer to help. Some people are actually worried that they won’t know what to do once they get in the voting booth. It’s true. I know that for a fact. Find out what type of machine they will be voting in and help them get familiar with it in advance. Most counties in the United States have a Board of Elections or something like it that can help you with voting machine information.

Robert Caro, writing in the New York Times, has a thoughtful article about Obama’s speech, Dr. Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress regarding the Voting Rights Act of 1965.  Many African-Americans risked their lives and their jobs to vote in the 1960’s. It took courage just to register.

I want people to know I am voting for Obama. I have an Obama ’08 bumper sticker on my car. I took off my Kerry/Edwards sticker in order to put it on. I suppose I could have left it on, but I think four years is long enough.  Can a bumper sticker multiply my vote? I don’t know, but it can’t hurt to try and I like seeing it there.

Last week, I put an Obama ’08 sign in my yard.  I can’t remember ever putting a political sign in my yard and I have lived through a few elections.  The first presidential contest that I remember was in 1964 when Barry Goldwater, another Republican from Arizona, ran against President Lyndon Baines Johnson, a Democrat from Texas. I was eleven years old and for LBJ because my parents were Democrats and everyone knew Goldwater was going to blow up the entire planet with nuclear weapons. Johnson won and went on to get the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965. Here is a link to more information about the Voting Rights Act. I stuffed envelopes for Eugene McCarthy in 1968 too. Wow. It’s been forty years since I did something besides complain. How about you?

I have an Obama pin that I wear on my shirt or hat. It’s a conversation starter and it lets people know where I stand. Of course, some people like it and some people don’t.

I am going to volunteer as a driver to take Democrats to the polls on November 4th. If I can provide transportation for one person that wouldn’t have been able to vote, I have multiplied my vote.

You can also visit the Barack Obama website to multiply your vote. You can donate money, find out what events are going on in your state, sign up to volunteer and register to vote.

As of today, August 30th, there are 65 days until the election. You can make a difference between now and then. There are 142 days left until Bush’s last day.

Barack Obama  will become the President of the United States of America on January 20, 2009.

Honesty

I watched Michelle Obama at the Democratic National Convention last night on CNN. She impressed me as being an honest person. She appeared genuine and trustworthy and her message was uplifting. She seems very intelligent too. I was going to say that she must be very smart because she graduated from prestigious Princeton University, but as the world now knows, you can have an Ivy League education and still be an idiot.  I think she will keep Barack on track when he is elected President of the United States of America. I can’t imagine that she would let her husband invade another country based on a bunch of lies or pardon someone like “Scooter” Libby, who was convicted of obstructing justice and lying under oath, before he served even 5 minutes of his sentence. One of the lies was that Libby blamed an innocent person, the late Tim Russert, for leaking classified information about Valerie Plame. Judith Miller, an innocent New York Times reporter, spent 85 days in jail for refusing to discuss the case with a grand jury. A lot of things would be different if Libby had just been honest. It’s not too late though. He could still confess if he wanted to.

After 8 years of lies from Bush and his thugs, it will be refreshing to have a president and administration you can believe in.

The Republicans are running television lies that say Obama is going to raise your taxes. More lies? Yes. I was at the Washington County Fair, in upstate New York Sunday. I stopped by the Democratic party’s booth to pick up an Obama lawn sign. As I was leaving, a man in the next booth saw my sign and said, “he’s going to raise your taxes.” I stopped, looked at him and said “that’s not true”.  I told him to read the article in the New York Times Magazine of August 24, 2008, “Obamanomics“, by David Leonhardt.

To briefly quote from the article: “For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.”

It’s an excellent article with a lot of detailed information. Read it and you will know how to respond to people who say “he’s going to raise your taxes.”

Rush Limbaugh, the Republican radio loudmouth who broadcasts from Palm Beach, Florida, apparently read the Obamanomics article too and distilled a very thoughtful, well documented article into a cheap slogan. He quoted Barack Obama paraphrasing Warren Buffett and turned it into “Just tax the heck out of people”. He suggested that McCain could use it as a campaign ad. Obama didn’t say it, he was paraphrasing Buffett. But, it doesn’t matter to Rush, the truth is irrelevant. If Rush was Pinocchio, his nose would stretch from Palm Beach to the South Side of Chicago.

I suppose that the campaign ads will just get worse from now until the election. I expect that the ads will be mostly negative, especially from the Republican side. Who cares about honesty? Just take a snippet of something somebody said, or a soundbite out of context and turn it into propaganda.

A Billion Dollars

Senator Joe Biden said he will ask for ONE BILLION DOLLARS in aid for the Republic of Georgia to help them rebuild. I know a billion dollars isn’t what it used to be, but where is that money coming from? Can’t we just tell them we would like to help but we’re already broke and up to our ears in debt?  I can think of at least a few places in this country where the money could be better spent; Maybe we could fix a bridge or something. If you were working for minimum wage ($7.25 an hour), saved everything you made and no  deductions were taken, it would take you over 137 million hours to acquire one billion dollars. That’s 3,425,000 weeks at 40 hours a week. You are going to have to live a very long time. The people who allegedly represent us just throw money around like it’s, like it’s just paper.

While researching this post, I was reminded of a story I read a long time ago called “Not Yours to Give”. It is from “The Life of Colonel David Crockett” compiled by Edward S. Ellis (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1884). Here is a link to the story on the Foundation for Economic Education website,

https://fee.org/resources/not-your-to-give-2/

It should be required reading for every senator and congresswoman. Where is the 21st century Davy Crockett when we need him? Contact your states senators today and tell them you don’t want to give the Republic of Georgia ONE BILLION DOLLARS.  Tell them to vote like Davy Crockett. http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm?OrderBy=last_name&Sort=ASC