Lobotero’s Info Ink

NOw this puts a new turn on the Repub VP stakes.  Romney was my fav to be the VP only because Crist was a bachelor…that is about to change and so has my fav for the VP job.

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist won’t be sleeping alone in the governor’s mansion much longer — he is engaged to a woman he met in New York City last September.

Crist, 51, asked Carole Rome to marry him Thursday morning, giving her a blue sapphire ring surrounded by diamonds.

She said yes.

“What a great way to celebrate America’s birthday,” said Crist, who has been mentioned as a potential running mate for Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

Rome, 38, is the president of her family’s New York-area Halloween costume company. Crist said they met at a dinner where he and friends were discussing fundraising. Crist was briefly married while in college but was divorced in less than a year.

Damn!  The things people will do to get a job.

Barely one month after sealing his victory in the primaries and with four months to go before the general election, the Democratic Party’s presumptive presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has embarked on a campaign swing that has the declared aim of proving his patriotism.

Obama kicked off his patriotism tour—set to run through the July 4th holiday—with a speech entitled “The America We Love,” delivered in Independence, Missouri. The site was chosen not merely for the town’s name, but to establish Obama’s connection with its most famous son—Harry Truman, the Democratic president who ordered atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Obama’s speech, ostensibly a reflection upon patriotism and “American values” in the run-up to July 4th, was a thoroughly reactionary address, in which words were carefully chosen to identify with themes generally associated with the Republican right and, at key points, to deliver a kick in the teeth to sections of left-liberal Democrats who have deluded themselves and sought to generate illusions in others about the real political character of his campaign.

Obama began his speech with a ritualistic reference to the “men of Lexington and Concord … our first patriots,” without a word to acknowledge that the democratic ideals embodied in the American Revolution and the guarantees of democratic rights written into the US Constitution have been subjected to a wholesale repudiation in practice by the current Republican administration in Washington.

Of course, the Democrats and Obama himself are fully complicit in this process. “How do we keep ourselves safe and secure while preserving our liberties?” the Democratic candidate asked rhetorically at one point in the speech. Obama offered no answer, but just the week before he announced his support for a bill legalizing the Bush administration’s domestic spying program, while offering blanket immunity to telecommunications companies that collaborated in the massive illegal warrantless wiretapping operation.

To me it is a little silly for anyone to have to prove their patriotism to anyone.  I guess this makes good copy for the 24 hour news stations.  It is either this or some car chase in Peoria.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain wants the U.S. military to be much larger than current expansion plans envision, an adviser to the Arizona senator said this week.

The Bush administration has begun expanding the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to create a combined strength of around 750,000 active duty troops — a process backed by McCain’s Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

But McCain believes an Army and Marine Corps with a combined strength of up to 900,000 troops is necessary, said Randy Scheunemann, an adviser to the candidate on foreign policy and national security.

The U.S. Army and Marines have been severely strained by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many troops have served multiple tours in the war zones and currently spend only 12 months at home before they deploy again for another year.

As a member of the U.S. Senate’s armed services committee, McCain has built a reputation for scrutinizing the costs of big weapons programs and he has pledged to pursue that approach in the White House if he wins November’s election.

Obama and McCain have a very similar vision for the service to the country.  So if that is one of your guidelines for picking a candidate, then flip coin.

Former Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), a conservative icon who represented the Tarheel State in the Senate for 30 years, died early this morning at the age of 86.

Helms served in the Senate from 1972 to 2002, where he became a leading voice of the right wing of the Republican Party. Nicknamed “Senator No” by his many critics, Helms was a fierce anti-communist whose support for Ronald Reagan in 1976 proved a critical juncture in Reagan’s eventual rise to the Oval Office. To many on the right, it was Helms, not Reagan, who was the true heart of the conservative movement.
But as much as he was lionized by the right, Helms was vilified by the left for his “Old South” racial politics, as well as his open scorn for the press, gays, liberals, and the United Nations. During his 1990 reelection battle with Democrat Harvey Gantt, the black former mayor of Charlotte, his campaign ran an infamous ad that shows a pair of white hands crumpling up a job rejection letter, as the narrator says, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority, because of a racial quota. Is that really fair? Harvey Gantt says it is.”

In the early 1960s, Helms became an on-air commentator for WRAL-TV in Raleigh and began to gain a statewide following. Helms vehemently opposed the civil-rights movement, and he made a frequent target of the University of North Carolina, which he saw as a bastion of liberalism in an otherwise conservative state. “The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that’s thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men’s rights,” Helms said in a 1963 TV editorial.

Slowly, but slowly the “Old South” good old boys, the people that fought against civil rights and such, are slowly dying off.  In a way it is good, maybe then we can put the racial BS behind us and move on to a better country.

This is why I had reserved my support for any candidate before now….they say and do anything to be elected.  Obama has been called the most left person in the senate, but to be elected he is moving to the center….will it work…yes, he will most likely be elected president this Fall.

- Sen. Barack Obama raised the possibility of slowing a promised gradual, 16-month withdrawal from Iraq if he is elected president, saying that Thursday he will consult with military commanders on an upcoming trip to the region and “continue to refine” his proposals.

“My 16-month timeline, if you examine everything I’ve said, was always premised on making sure our troops were safe,” Obama told reporters as his campaign plane landed in North Dakota, a state no Democratic presidential candidate has carried since 1964. “And my guiding approach continues to be that we’ve got to make sure that our troops are safe, and that Iraq is stable. And I’m going to continue to gather information to find out whether those conditions still hold.”

In a second, hastily convened news conference, Obama insisted that his policies have not changed, and that he has “not equivocated” or is not “searching for maneuvering room” on Iraq. Consultations with commanders in the coming weeks will be focused more on the size of U.S. forces needed to train and equip Iraqi military and police units, as well as maintaining a “counterterrorism strike force” to prevent al-Qaeda from making a comeback, he said.

Do not know if anyone has noticed his slow but steady move to the center.  So please people, STOP calling him a progressive…..he is proving that he is NO progressive, but rather a typical politician.

First of all, I would like to wish all my readers a very merry 4th of July….eat lots…drink beer…and do not forget the watermelon..wink…wink….

Somewhere during the course of the evening, I had my 10,000 hit. I would like to thank all those who have helped me reach this goal and all those very intelligent people that have participated in my Info Ink. WordPress has made the experience of writing a blog very enjoyable and would like to thank them for an excellent site.

Thank you for all the support and hopefully it will continue and grow.

McCain flexes his southern strategy, only this one is south of the border…thinking….how many electoral votes are there in Columbia?  This is just a photo-op to show that he has foreign policy experience.  I ask who paid for this trip?  The US taxpayer or the McCain campaign?

Ok now for the coincidence.  Not a single shot was fired in Wednesday’s rescue mission, which snatched from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, the four foreigners who were its greatest bargaining chips.  The Colombian government with the help of US intel agents have come up with a veryt successful plan to free hostages.  All this on the basic eve of a McCain visit.  How fortunate for the candidate.

My problem with it is that I do NOT believe in coincidences in politics–nothing just happens.  Why am I skeptical?  McCain has been linked to a lobbyist that works for the Colombian government and plus this was all too convenient with the dialog that has been had recently questioning McCain’s actual experience to be president.

This event gives McCain a free ride and a PR boom to his campaign.  Coincidence?  I think not!

My monthly feature of scoring how our dynamite US Congress is doing continues. They spent more time in hearings than on anything of substance, but I found a few issues that they weighed in on.

So far in 2008, here is how I see the Congress.

Jan–1 step backwards
Feb–No step–a stand still
Mar–2 steps backwards

Apr–1 step forward

May–3 steps forward

Some far after a slow start in the first of the year, the Congress seems to be moving in the right direction, but will it last?

Here is how I graded the month of June 2008.

1–Paper on the misleading on Iraq–Backward

2–Failure of Global Warming init.–Backward

3–Failure of windfall profit tax–backward

4–Bill to give more visas for fashion models–backward

5–Bill for unemployment extension–Forward

6–Pass of war funds–no step–only because there were provisions in there for the benefits of the vets.

7–Pass the FISA Bill–Backward

The score for the month for our Congress is a total of 4 steps backwards.

May was a good month for the Congress, but they did what they do best–neutralized any good by going in reverse.

Please remind me, why we voted these guys into office in 2006.

This will be the last time that this will reported on in Info Ink, in the last couple of days I have been blasted for my piece on the Clark McCain experience piece, so I decidied to comment one more time.

Stopit! Stop it! Before we go forth please take a moment to flush the emotional BS down the toilet.

I do not think that Wes Clark or myself are impuning McCain’s service to this country–to do so would be political, societal and cultural suicide. Because there is no definitive definition to the word patriotism or national hero, it is purely subjective. To use an obscure concept to say that is experience to be president is absurd. Even McCain has admitted this in past conversations.

As I have said before, a uniform does not make one a patriot, but rather a soldier. The National Hero label is a label and nothing more. To call someone a hero just because they served in the military is to belittle those who have actually done heroic acts.

Few people who have been president have actually had the experie3ncxe to hold the title of president. To get emotional because someone questions another’s experience claim is just dumb and usually comes from those who have no answer to the “real” question of experience.

Try to move past the BS and on to the issues that are most important to the American people. You know those silly issues like the economy, health care, education, war, etc–if we allow the candidates to keep circumventing the issues, then we will have 4 more years of the same BS that we live with today.

America! Get over it! Move on!

Democrat Barack Obama said yesterday that if elected president he would set aside more than $500 million a year in federal funds for religious organizations to help the disadvantaged, sharply expanding a Bush administration program that has strong support from evangelical Christians.

Political analysts said Obama’s proposal appeared to be part of an attempt to shift to the center and recruit moderate, evangelical Christians and mainstream Catholics, two voting blocs that consistently supported Bush and have embraced Republican candidates.

Groups cannot use the money to proselytize those in need, he said, and they cannot refuse to hire someone of a different religion. Federal dollars granted directly to churches, temples, and mosques can only be used on secular programs, Obama said, adding that close monitoring will “ensure that taxpayer dollars only go to those programs that actually work.” The People for the American Way, a liberal public-interest group, issued a statement yesterday applauding Obama for those safeguards, but questioning why he would allow direct government payments to houses of worship, something that “is neither necessary nor appropriate.”

Obama is just becoming the candidate I was waiting him to become.  In the past I have said that I was not yet an Obama supporter and this is why I wait.  Democratic candidates start getting votes because they are left leaning, then as the general approaches they almost always move to the center.  This is just a pandering piece to try and wrangle the religious from the Repubs.