Mr. Obama’s favorability is the highest for a presidential candidate running for a first term in the last 28 years of Times/CBS polls. Mrs. Palin’s negative rating is the highest for a vice-presidential candidate as measured by The Times and CBS News. Even Dan Quayle, with whom Mrs. Palin is often compared because of her age and inexperience on the national scene, was not viewed as negatively in the 1988 campaign.Noted without comment.
What was once a regional food economy is now national and increasingly global in scope — thanks again to fossil fuel. Cheap energy — for trucking food as well as pumping water — is the reason New York City now gets its produce from California rather than from the “Garden State” next door, as it did before the advent of Interstate highways and national trucking networks. More recently, cheap energy has underwritten a globalized food economy in which it makes (or rather, made) economic sense to catch salmon in Alaska, ship it to China to be filleted and then ship the fillets back to California to be eaten; or one in which California and Mexico can profitably swap tomatoes back and forth across the border; or Denmark and the United States can trade sugar cookies across the Atlantic. About that particular swap the economist Herman Daly once quipped, “Exchanging recipes would surely be more efficient.”
That's bad news for players like JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America that have largely sidestepped—and even benefited from—the mortgage mess but have major credit-card operations.Bank of America was just profiled as one of the smart ones, and I said to myself "At least we have a few big banks that aren't on the verge of collapse." Sigh.
I was raised by my grandmother and am from a military family. Everyone is a Republican. I was the first to go to college and am finishing up my graduate degree. ...
I am currently in a relationship with a black man in what John McCain would describe as the "real Virginia." My family, after three years, are just now becoming comfortable, if you want to call it that, with my boyfriend. They claim that he isn't like all of the other *****.
Before my grandmother died, she left me with a note that she didn't want me to open until she died. I opened that letter. My grandmother — who has never referred to blacks appropriately — had [early] voted for Obama. She called him a "socialist" in her letter but she voted for him because she said that maybe the values that her parents instilled in her, which was to hate anyone that didn't look like her, would not be passed on if people saw Obama in office.
It was especially touching given my current relationship, and I honestly believe that there are many others out there just like my grandmother.
Over in Indiana, PA and Northern Cambria, PA, volunteers fielded complaints of a massive wave of ugly robocalls both paid for by John McCain's campaign and those paid for by third parties. The third party call was interactive, and purported to be from Barack Obama himself. The call starts out reasonably, and then "Obama" asks what the listener thinks is the most important issue. Whatever the response, "Obama" then launches into a profane and crazed tirade using "n***er" and other shock language.
From what we've seen, this IS the McCain ground campaign. Robocalls count as "touches" on voters, as do direct mail pieces such as this one. As David Plouffe said in today's fundraising letter to supporters, "These tactics are all that the McCain campaign and their allies have left."
I want to give every American a $5,000 refundable tax credit. They can take it anywhere, across state lines. Why not? Don't we go across state lines when we purchase other things in America?My question is, when he says I can cross state lines, does that mean I can go to Canada?
