Lee P Butler

Lee's Selected Psychobabble and Political Pomp

Item #1

Biden's 14 Lies JOE BIDEN’S 14 LIES DURING THE DEBATE 1. TAX VOTE: Biden said McCain voted “the exact same way” as Obama to increase taxes on Americans earning just $42,000, but McCain DID NOT VOTE THAT WAY. 2. AHMEDINIJAD MEETING: Joe Biden lied when he said that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinijad of Iran. Barack Obama did say specifically, and Joe Biden attacked him for it. 3. OFFSHORE OIL DRILLING: Biden said, “Drill we must.” But Biden has opposed offshore drilling and even compared offshore drilling to “raping” the Outer Continental Shelf.” 4. TROOP FUNDING: Joe Biden lied when he indicated that John McCain and Barack Obama voted the same way against funding the troops in the field. John McCain opposed a bill that included a timeline, that the President of the United States had already said he would veto regardless of it’s passage. 5. OPPOSING CLEAN COAL: Biden says he’s always been for clean coal, but he just told a voter that he is against clean coal and any new coal plants in America and has a record of voting against clean coal and coal in the U.S. Senate. 6. ALERNATIVE ENERGY VOTES: According to FactCheck.org, Biden is exaggerating and overstating John McCain’s record voting for alternative energy when he says he voted against it 23 times. 7. HEALTH INSURANCE: Biden falsely said McCain will raise taxes on people's health insurance coverage -- they get a tax credit to offset any tax hike. Independent fact checkers have confirmed this attack is false 8. OIL TAXES: Biden falsely said Palin supported a windfall profits tax in Alaska -- she reformed the state tax and revenue system, it's not a windfall profits tax. 9. AFGHANISTAN / GEN. MCKIERNAN COMMENTS: Biden said that top military commander in Iraq said the principles of the surge could not be applied to Afghanistan, but the commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force Gen. David D. McKiernan said that there were principles of the surge strategy, including working with tribes, that could be applied in Afghanistan. 10. REGULATION: Biden falsely said McCain weakened regulation -- he actually called for more regulation on Fannie and Freddie. 11. IRAQ: When Joe Biden lied when he said that John McCain was “dead wrong on Iraq”, because Joe Biden shared the same vote to authorize the war and differed on the surge strategy where they John McCain has been proven right. 12. TAX INCREASES: Biden said Americans earning less than $250,000 wouldn’t see higher taxes, but the Obama-Biden tax plan would raise taxes on individuals making $200,000 or more. 13. BAILOUT: Biden said the economic rescue legislation matches the four principles that Obama laid out, but in reality it doesn’t meet two of the four principles that Obama outlined on Sept. 19, which were that it include an emergency economic stimulus package, and that it be part of “part of a globally coordinated effort with our partners in the G-20.” 14. REAGAN TAX RATES: Biden is wrong in saying that under Obama, Americans won't pay any more in taxes then they did under Reagan. Biden Tells 14 Lies During VP Debate Amanda Carpenter Senator Joe Biden lied at least 14 times during the vice presidential debate according to those counting at John McCain’s presidential headquarters. Tucker Bounds, a spokesman from GOP presidential candidate John McCain’s campaign said in a statement, “Joe Biden graduated from his trademark verbal gaffe to outright lie in tonight’s debate.” McCain’s blogger-in-chief Michael Goldfarb chronicled the 14 lies HERE. On the foreign policy front, Biden challenged Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin when she said Barack Obama’s pledge to meet with any foreign leaders, including Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, without precondition “goes beyond naivete and goes beyond poor judgment.” Biden lectured Palin, “That's just simply not true about Barack Obama. He did not say he'd sit down with Ahmadinejad.” During the YouTube Democratic primary debate last July Obama was asked if he would meet the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea without “precondition” during his first year in office. “I would,” he replied. Biden appeared to attack Obama for making that very statement in August 2007. While Biden was challenging Obama for the Democratic nomination for president Biden said he would not support such a pledge. “Would I make a blanket commitment to meet unconditionally with the leaders of each of those countries within the first year I was elected president?” he said in an appearance at the National Press Club. “Absolutely positively no." Five of the lies Biden told were related to tax and energy votes. During the debate Biden adamantly claimed McCain voted the same way as Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama did on a vote to raise taxes on those making $42,000 a year. The legislative record shows McCain was not present in the Senate for either of those votes and is recorded as “not voting.” The RNC also takes issue with Biden’s assessment Palin supports a “windfall profits tax” and Biden’s claim McCain voted against alternative energy 23 times. The independent Factcheck.org has previously stated when Obama and other Democrats made similar charges about the 23 votes “they’re overstating the case.” The other lies detailed by Goldfarb were related to Biden’s characterization of McCain’s healthcare plan, stances on bank deregulation and the $700 billion financial bailout that recently passed the Senate.

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Political Cartoons by Robert Arial What is a "Loophole"?   by Robert D. Novak WASHINGTON, D.C. -- How would Barack Obama pay for the $800 billion that John McCain claimed in the first presidential debate Sept. 26 in Oxford, Miss., that his Democratic opponent would spend if he were elected president? Obama replied, by "closing tax loopholes." Obama was no more specific in the debate, and tax experts doubt that structural changes without increasing taxes can raise anything close to that amount of money. My office asked the Obama campaign for the details, and it responded with a 19-page single-spaced paper on the candidate's "tax plans." In fact, there was precious little about tax policy in the paper, which amounted to a repeat of Democratic campaign oratory that can be heard in 30-second speeches before both houses of Congress daily on C-SPAN. Obama has made clear that he would try to roll back President Bush's tax cuts, but that does not come under the definition of a "loophole." A loophole consists of a conniving tax attorney discovering a weakness in the Internal Revenue Code or such a weakness intentionally legislated by Congress under the instigation of crafty lobbyists. The only specific tax legislation contained in Obama's paper would raise the capital gains rate for most shareholders, restore taxation on dividend income to pre-Bush standards and restore the full estate tax. These were not loopholes but presidential proposals enacted by Congress. The Obama paper paints a picture of lobbyists running wild on Capitol Hill but neglects to assess the impact on the economy during the current financial crisis of taking a serious strike against the stockholding public. Obama's dividends and capital gains proposals appear to be a major attempt at redistribution of income rather than a serious attempt to pay for the spending that he has proposed.   Rush Quote of the Day   Obama Endorses Church    Rush Limbaugh: "Senator Obama, if you give this church $22,500, you are endorsing what goes on there, and you want it to continue."

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IAEA lacks tools to expose secret work: ElBaradei By Mark Heinrich VIENNA (Reuters) - The head of the U.N. nuclear watchdog said on Tuesday its failure to detect nuclear arms work in Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s showed his inspectors lacked authority to pre-empt proliferators. His remark was telling because an investigation of Iran by the agency has stalled over Tehran's failure to explain allegations of secret nuclear arms research and its refusal to grant inspectors access to military-affiliated sites and officials they deem relevant. Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said the crux of the problem was that some countries under investigation, the latest being Syria, had failed to ratify an agency protocol permitting short-notice IAEA visits to sites not declared to be nuclear to ensure no bomb-related work was going on at secret locations. "Our legal authority is very limited. With Iraq, we have discovered that unless we have the Additional Protocol in place, we will not really be able to discover undeclared activities," he said on the sidelines of the agency's annual 145-nation General Conference in Vienna. "Our experience is that any proliferator will not really go for declared diverted activities (that would quickly reveal them as violators of the Non-Proliferation Treaty), they will go for completely clandestine undeclared activities," he said. In the 1970s and 1980s, Iraq under Saddam Hussein developed a nuclear weapons program hidden from the IAEA because of severe restrictions on access for inspectors. It came to light only after Iraq's defeat in the 1991 Gulf War and the IAEA spent the next seven years dismantling it. DECLARATIONS NOT ENOUGH Diplomats say the key to resolving current IAEA inquiries into Iran and Syria is extra access to sites not declared to be nuclear. Tehran and Damascus have both ruled this out, arguing that such sites involve their conventional military and so lie outside the IAEA's writ. Iran and Syria deny having any covert weapons programs or illicitly hiding any nuclear activity from the IAEA. ElBaradei has called on Syria for greater transparency and access. Damascus has not ratified the Additional Protocol. ElBaradei said the failure of about 100 countries, including the United States, to ratify the decade-old protocol handicapped the IAEA's verification mandate. Since May, the IAEA has been investigating Syria, based on U.S. intelligence allegations that it had almost completed a secret nuclear reactor that might have made bomb-grade plutonium before the site was destroyed in an Israeli air strike. The United States and Western allies have criticized Iran and Syria in the IAEA debate, accusing both of stonewalling U.N. investigators and demanding unfettered cooperation. ElBaradei said his job was complicated by loopholes in the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), which permits states to develop nuclear fuel enrichment technology even though this can yield material for civilian energy purposes as well as to make atom bombs, depending on how the process is configured. He said the seven known nuclear weapons powers were setting a bad example to non-nuclear-armed states by clinging to doomsday arsenals as the pillar of their security instead of dismantling them according to NPT commitments. "How can I go with a straight face to the non-nuclear weapons states and tell them these weapons are no good for you, when the nuclear weapons states continue to modernize and say we absolutely need nuclear weapons?" said ElBaradei. "So we are seeing a new phenomenon of proliferation of sensitive fuel-cycle activity. Whether you do it for economic or science reasons ... or as an insurance policy (against attack), you come very close to becoming a nuclear weapons state."

	LeePButler Opines   OpinionEditorials.com Archive page      Liberals Pander For Sympathy Instead Of Being Positive  Lee P. Butler “Hope is making a comeback, and let me tell you, for the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country. Not just because Barack is doing well, but because I think people are hungry for change,” stated Michelle Obama recently. At first it seemed as though the Obama family just hadn’t adjusted to being in the national spotlight and as such simply didn’t realize in that unforgiving glare every nuance of what they say will be highlighted and held against them politically. Liberal Democrats are notorious for pandering to their constituency groups where there is no universal policy statement but a cut-and-paste platform of rhetoric that is tied specifically to a certain cause or group or area of the country and the campaign speeches they give change from day to day based on who they are addressing. As a quick aside here, liberals and their media counterparts charge Conservative Republicans with ‘pandering’ to certain groups yet never show that the message of their ideological principle never changes from one place to the next… it’s always the same, group to group, city to city, state to state. But then more information started to trickle out about the things the Obamas have been saying, some of which goes back to their college years and suddenly it became clear that they know exactly what it is they are saying and are not concerned about it being highlighted for everyone to see. When Michelle Obama made that statement… and repeated it on the campaign trail… she was not concerned about any negative impact it may have had on her husband’s campaign because she was doing little more than reiterating a belief that all liberals have pontificated over time. Which is history doesn’t matter to them. All that matters to liberals is the here and now. Every day for liberals starts anew with no past baggage and no historical precedent to follow. When Mrs. Obama said ‘for the first time in my adult life’ she literally meant ‘starting today’. In liberal speak you’ve heard this same sentiment expressed many times before, but most people aren’t focused enough on the political realm to catch it. The way liberals have expressed it in the past is, ‘what have you done for me lately?’ Commentators have challenged her contention by supplying a laundry list of historical events that have literally changed mankind and directed them to a better way of life, but none of that matters because it didn’t directly affect her… in her world view… and is now in the past so it has become inconsequential. A perfect example of this was presented by Mrs. Obama in her senior thesis at Princeton University where she wrote, "My experiences at Princeton have made me far more aware of my 'blackness' than ever before. I have found that at Princeton, no matter how liberal and open-minded some of my white professors and classmates try to be toward me, I sometimes feel like a visitor on campus; as if I really don't belong. Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second." Sounds eerily similar to ‘for the first time in my adult life’ doesn’t it? This is classic pandering. Here is an African-American female who has been afforded an opportunity that only a select number of human beings have had the honor of accomplishing and instead of recognizing that profound feat and what it meant to have been able to do it, she has to pander out of what one can only register as guilt. This is exclusive to liberals, folks. Hillary Clinton is doing it now saying, “A lot of women project their own feelings and their lives on to me, and they see how hard this is. It's hard. It's hard being a woman out there.” Michelle Obama admits that her ‘white’ professors and classmates were ‘liberal and open-minded’ towards her and Hillary Clinton admits that she is the first female to win a presidential primary, yet both of these liberals claim to not see the positive accomplishment in their endeavor and use the occasions to do nothing more than pander to the masses for some sort of misguided sympathy. You’ve never heard my choice for presidential candidate and the most powerful woman in the world who just happens to be African-American, Condoleezza Rice, crying about the heavy and undue burden placed on her as Provost for Stanford University or as the U.S. Secretary of State. An accomplishment Michelle Obama should have been ‘proud’ of but then it didn’t have anything to do with her, so it doesn’t count in the Obama world view. In Secretary Rice’s 2006 Commencement speech at Boston College she destroyed the pandering attitudes of Obama and Clinton. “The fourth responsibility of the educated person is to be optimistic. Too often, cynicism can be the fellow traveler of learning and I understand why. History is full of much cruelty and suffering and darkness and it can be hard sometimes to believe that a brighter future is indeed dawning. But for all of our past failings, for all of our current problems, more people now enjoy lives of hope and opportunity than ever before in all of human history. This progress has been the concerted effort not of cynics but of visionaries and optimists, of impatient patriots who dealt with our world as it was, but who never ever accepted that they were powerless to change that world for the better.” At what point are liberals in this country going to stop playing the violin strings of negativity and defeatism as a method of pandering for sympathy and embrace the power of being positive and accept that their lives in America are more beneficial and plentiful than mankind has ever been allowed? Columns I've produced that made recent Quill Pen Ten Lists  The Quill Pen Ten - December 27, 2004 - January 3, 2005 The Quill Pen Ten -  February 15, 2005 - February 21, 2005   The Quill Pen Ten - March 29, 2005 - April 4, 2005  The Quill Pen Ten - April 12, 2005 - April 18, 2005 The Quill Pen Ten - May 10, 2005 - May 16, 2005 The Quill Pen Ten - June 14, 2005 - June 20, 2005  The Quill Pen Ten- July 12, 2005 - July 18, 2005  The Quill Pen Ten - August 9, 2005 - August 15, 2005  The Quill Pen Ten - September 27, 2005 - October 3, 2005 The Quill Pen Ten - October 25, 2005 - October 31, 2005   The Quill Pen Ten - January 5, 2006 - January 11, 2005 The Quill Pen Ten - April 6, 2006 - April 12, 2006  The Quill Pen Ten - April 20, 2006 - April 26, 2006 The Quill Pen Ten - May 4, 2006 - May 10, 2006  The Quill Pen Ten - May 18, 2006 - May 24, 2006 The Quill Pen Ten - June 8, 2006 - June 14, 2006  redstate Newsback.com Leaves

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