October 29, 2008

Dear Democrats:

This morning at approximately 7:10 a.m. I did something I have never done before in my life.  As a conservative leaning Independent (who has voted in elections at every level since the latter 1980’s) I cast a straight Democrat vote.  This marks the first time I have voted for a Democrat for president as well as casting a straight ticket ballot. 

Democrats, I want to thank you for allowing me the privilege of sharing my thoughts and giving commentary on yours during this historic political season.  However, I owe each of you a heartfelt apology. 

During the primary season I penned words that were driven by unchecked heated emotions and for that I am sorry.  I stated at one point I would “never vote for Hillary Clinton.”  These words were wrong on many levels.  The truth is Mrs. Clintons is to be commended for all of her many virtues.  Although I passionately supported (support) Barrack Obama, I now know I would have cast my vote for Senator Clinton if she were the Democratic Parties presidential nominee. 

Once again, I apologize for my offensive words.  As a guest on this blog I owed each of you Democrats more respect.       

Goodbye and God bless.

http://www.wearethatone.org/

Senator Obama and DNC please checkout the story below and if all the details are accurate PLEASE, PLEASE, turn it into a national ad.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2008_10/015130.php

A HISTORIC TICKET.... Now that Sarah Palin has been found to have abused her powers, violated state ethics, and lied about it, I did a little digging and found an interesting historical footnote.

The McCain/Palin ticket is the first in American history in which both candidates were found to have violated ethics standards before a national election.

McCain, of course, was admonished by Senate Ethics Committee "for exercising 'poor judgment' for intervening" with federal regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, as part of the infamous Keating Five scandal.

And now McCain's running mate has also been found to have violated state ethics laws and abused the powers of her office, as part of the "Troopergate" scandal.

The nation has had 102 major-party tickets covering 51 presidential elections over more than two centuries. And we've NEVER HAD A TICKET IN WHICH BOTH CANDIDATES ON THE SAME TICKET WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR ETHICS VIOLATIONS BEFORE A NATIONAL ELECTION.  McCain/Palin is the first.

It makes the whole "reform" pitch a little more difficult, doesn't it?

http://www.salon.com/ent/video_dog/politics/2008/10/10/blumenthal_chryson/index.html?source=video&aim=/ent/video_dog/politics

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/coverstory/make_believe_maverick_the_real_john_mccain

Rolling Stone - MAKE-BELIEVE MAVERICK

A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23316955/the_doubletalk_express/

Rolling Stone - The Double-Talk Express FROM TAX CUTS TO TORTURE, JOHN MCCAIN HAS FLIP-FLOPPED ON A HOST OF ISSUES - INCLUDING HIS OWN IMMIGRATION BILL  

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http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/23318320/mad_dog_palin

THE SCARIEST THING ABOUT JOHN MCCAIN'S RUNNING MATE ISN'T HOW UNQUALIFIED SHE IS - IT'S WHAT HER CANDIDACY SAYS ABOUT AMERICA

http://www.michiganmessenger.com/4076/lose-your-house-lose-your-vote

After reading the article take action!  Please.  I have already contacted the Michigan Democratic Party, the ACLU, the Urban League in Flint, Michigan, and the NAACP.  However radio and tv stations (especially those that target Hispanic and African-Americans since the two groups have been hit the hardest by foreclosures) should be contacted as well.

We will win on November 4, if we remain focused, strong, active, and united.

Obama/Biden '08  

I cannot do everything, but still I can do something; and because I cannot do everything I will not refuse to do the something I can do." 

Edward Everett Hale

Within each of us there is a reservoir of power to make a significant impact on the outcome of this historic and tremendously important presidential election.  I hope each of us will dig deep into our souls and find the courage (perhaps we never fully realized before now that we possess) and say:

I WILL “DO THE SOMETHING I CAN DO.”  

EXCLUSIVE: Cindy McCain's Half Sister: "I'm Voting for Barack Obama"

THURSDAY AUGUST 28, 2008

Cindy McCain's half sister is planning on voting for Barack Obama, she tells Usmagazine.com.

"I'm not voting for McCain," Kathleen Hensley Portalski tells Us.

"I have a different political standpoint.

"I'm voting for Obama," the Phoenix resident says.

"I think his proposals to improve the country are more positive and I'm not a big war believer."

Portalski, 65, and the potential first lady, 54, have the same father: Jim Hensley, the founder of the beer distributor Hensley and Co. that Cindy McCain now chairs.

 In an interview with NPR News' All Things Considered last week, Portalski said she felt "like a non-person" after Cindy McCain described herself as an "only child."

Portalski's mother is Hensley's first wife; Cindy McCain's mother, Marguerite Hensley, also had another daughter from her first marriage.

"She's kinda cool, standoffish," Portalski tells Us of her half sister.

Portalski also doesn't expect Cindy McCain to make an effort to reconcile their relationship.

"She never has, and I doubt that she ever will," she tells Us.

Portalski's son Nathan, a 45-year-old aerospace machinist, is ALSO BACKING OBAMA.

"I wouldn't vote for John McCain if he was a Democrat," he tells Us.  "I would not vote at all before I'd vote for him. 

"I QUESTION WHETHER CINDY IS SOMEONE I'D WANT TO SEE IN THE WHITE HOUSE AS FIRST LADY," he adds.

http://www.usmagazine.com/news/cindy-mccains-half-sister-im-voting-for-obama

I HOPE OBAMA/BIDEN TEAM PUT THEM IN A NATIONAL AD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

Thanks Democrats for allowing me to share my thoughts on your blog.

This Independent, is FIRED-UP and will continue to work towards helping your nominee and his running mate win in November.  A win for them is a win for our GREAT COUNTRY 

Pleasant dreams to all.  We WILL DEFEAT McBUSH!!!!!!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93708729

by Ted Robbins All Things Considered, August 18, 2008

Last Tuesday, NPR broadcast a story about Cindy McCain's business and charity work.

In it, Ted Robbins described McCain as the only child of Jim Hensley, a wealthy Arizona businessman.

The next morning, NPR received an e-mail from Nicholas Portalski of Phoenix, who heard the story with his mother.

We were listening to the piece about Cindy McCain on NPR, All Things Considered, and it just struck us very hard," Portalski said. His mother, Kathleen Hensley Portalski, is also Hensley's daughter.

The Portalski family is accustomed to hearing Cindy McCain described as Hensley's only child.

She's been described that way by news organizations from The New Yorker and The New York Times to Newsweek and ABC.

McCain herself routinely uses the phrase "only child," as she did on CNN last month. "I grew up with my dad" she said then.

"I'm an only child. My father was a cowboy, and he really loved me very much, but I think he wanted a son occasionally."

McCain's father was also a businessman - and twice a father. "I'm upset" Kathleen Portalski says. "I'm angry. It makes me feel like a nonperson, kind of."

Who Is Kathleen Hensley Portalski?

Documents show Kathleen Anne Hensley was born to Jim and Mary Jeanne Hensley on Feb. 23, 1943.

They had been married for six years when Kathleen was born.

Jim Hensley was a bombardier on a B-17, flying over Europe during World War II.

He was injured and sent to a facility in West Virginia to recuperate. During that time, while still married to Mary Jeanne, Hensley met another woman — Marguerite Smith.

Jim divorced Mary Jeanne and married Marguerite in 1945.

Cindy Lou Hensley was born nine years later, in 1954.

She may have grown up as an only child, but so did her half sister, Kathleen, who was raised by a single parent.

Portalski says she did see her father and her half sister from time to time. "I saw him a few times a year" she says. "I saw him at Christmas and birthdays, and he provided money for school clothes, and he called occasionally."

Jim Hensley also provided credit cards and college tuition for his grandchildren, as well as $10,000 gifts to Kathleen and her husband, Stanley Portalski. That lasted a decade, they say.

By then, Jim Hensley had built Hensley and Co. into one of the largest beer distributorships in the country.

He was worth tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. Sole Inheritor To Hensley's Estate When Hensley died in 2000, his will named not only Portalski but also a daughter of his wife Marguerite from her earlier marriage.

So, Cindy McCain may be the only product of Jim and Marguerite's marriage, but she is not the only child of either. She was, however, the sole inheritor of his considerable estate.

Kathleen Portalski was left $10,000, and her children were left nothing.

It's a fact Nicholas Portalski says his sister discovered the hard way. "What she found in town - on the day of or the day before or the day after his funeral - was that the credit card didn't work anymore" Nick says.

The Portalskis live in a modest home in central Phoenix. Kathleen is retired, as is her husband. Nicholas Portalski is a firefighter and emergency medical technician looking for work.

They say it would have been nice if they were left some of the Hensley fortune.

They also say they are Democrats, but Nicholas Portalski says he had another reason for coming forward. "The fact that we don't exist" he says. "The fact that we've never been recognized, and then Cindy has to put such a fine point on it by saying something that's not true.

Recently, again and again. It's just very, very hurtful." Kathleen Portalski says she'd like an acknowledgment and an apology.

NPR asked the McCain campaign - specifically, Cindy McCain - to comment or respond. Neither replied.

Kathleen Hensley Portalski displays newspaper clippings of her father in World War II, as well as snapshots of herself as a child with her father.

Portalski is shown with her late father, Jim Hensley, who also was Cindy McCain's father.

There are some famous buses out there. The Rosa Parks’ bus—and the seat she refused to give up to a white man in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala.—is in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich. Ken Kesey’s famous psychedelic pranksters’ bus, “Further,” sits in an Oregon farm field. And who knows where the Who’s “Magic Bus” finally ended up.

Now we can add to the list of famous buses—or in this case, perhaps infamous—The Bush Legacy Bus. It’s a museum on wheels describing the George W. Bush legacy—eight years of failed and flawed conservative polices that have dragged down our nation. It’s coming to a town near you soon.

The bus is a project of Americans United for Change (AUC) and it rolled out of the garage today for its first stop—our AFL-CIO building here in Washington, D.C.—on a 150-city tour through Election Day. It returns tomorrow for the tour’s official kickoff and is open to visitors until 1:30 p.m., then it heads for a stop in Dayton, Ohio, on Wednesday.

Inside the bus, interactive, multimedia exhibits present a multitude of facts on the trail of destruction Bush is leaving behind on health care, the economy, workers’ rights, education, the environment and the war in Iraq.

Running along the floor of the bus is the eight-year Bush time line. Here’s a tiny sample.

The exhibit on the war in Iraq highlights Bush’s misleading and ever-shifting justifications for launching the conflict and his failed strategies in carrying out the war. The combat boots, dog tags and family pictures of Sgt. Patrick McCafferty are preserved in a glass case. His family donated the items of McCafferty, who enlisted immediately after Sept. 11 and was killed in combat in September 2004.

The bio-diesel bus’s itinerary includes both the Democratic and Republican conventions, hometowns of the senators and representatives who have been Bush’s ardent supporters and other towns and cites around the country.

The road map isn’t finalized, but it’s a good bet there will be a stop or two in Arizona, home of Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who has backed Bush 100 percent so far in 2008. Says AUC President Brad Woodhouse:

This bus is not about bashing Bush, it is about holding him and everyone in Congress, including McCain, who voted for his agenda 90 percent of the time or more, accountable for the war, the economy, the health care mess, etc.

http://blog.aflcio.org/2008/06/23/bush-legacy-bus-rolling-across-the-nation/

                                       VISIT THE BUSH LEGACY TOUR WEBSITE:

http://presidentbushlegacy.com/bushlegacy

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The Bush administration has launched a "significant escalation" of covert operations in Iran, sending U.S. commandos to spy on the country's nuclear facilities and undermine the Islamic republic's government, journalist Seymour Hersh said Sunday.

White House, CIA and State Department officials declined comment on Hersh's report, which appears in this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Hersh told CNN's "Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer" that Congress has authorized up to $400 million to fund the secret campaign, which involves U.S. special operations troops and Iranian dissidents.

President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have rejected findings from U.S. intelligence agencies that Iran has halted a clandestine effort to build a nuclear bomb and "do not want to leave Iran in place with a nuclear program," Hersh said.

"They believe that their mission is to make sure that before they get out of office next year, either Iran is attacked or it stops its weapons program," Hersh said.

The new article, "Preparing the Battlefield," is the latest in a series of articles accusing the Bush administration of preparing for war with Iran. He based the report on accounts from current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources.

"As usual with his quarterly pieces, we'll decline to comment," White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe told CNN.

"The CIA, as a rule, does not comment on allegations regarding covert operations," CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano said.

Ryan Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Baghdad, denied U.S. raids were being launched from Iraq, where American commanders believe Iran is stoking sectarian warfare and fomenting attacks on U.S. troops.

"I can tell you flatly that U.S. forces are not operating across the Iraqi border into Iran, in the south or anywhere else," Crocker said.

Hersh said U.S. efforts were staged from Afghanistan, which also shares a border with Iran.

He said the program resulted in "a dramatic increase in kinetic events and chaos" inside Iran, including attacks by Kurdish separatists in the country's north and a May attack on a mosque in Shiraz that killed 13 people.

The United States has said it is trying to isolate Iran diplomatically in order to get it to come clean about its nuclear ambitions. But Bush has said "all options" are open in dealing with the issue.

Iran insists its nuclear program is aimed at providing civilian electric power, and refuses to comply with U.N. Security Council demands that it halt uranium enrichment work.

U.N. nuclear inspectors say Tehran held back critical information that could determine whether it is trying to make nuclear weapons.

Israel, which is believed to have its own nuclear arsenal, conducted a military exercise in the eastern Mediterranean in early June involving dozens of warplanes and aerial tankers.

The distance involved in the exercise was roughly the same as would be involved in a possible strike on the Iranian nuclear fuel plant at Natanz, Iran, a U.S. military official said.

In 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Iran's parliament speaker, Ali Larijani, warned other countries against moves that would "cost them heavily." In comments that appeared in the semi-official Mehr news agency Sunday, an Iranian general said his troops were digging more than 320,000 graves to bury troops from any invading force with "the respect they deserve."

"Under the law of war and armed conflict, necessary preparations must be made for the burial of soldiers of aggressor nations," said Maj. Gen. Mirfaisal Baqerzadeh, an Iranian officer in charge of identifying soldiers missing in action.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/meast/06/29/us.iran/index.html

MyFoxOrlando reports:

The Orlando Police Department found dozens of city owned vehicles vandalized Saturday.

The vandal or vandals appear to have political intentions; most of the vehicles were spray painted with anti Obama sayings, with 'Obama' misspelled several times. Some of their vehicles had their gas caps removed.

Officials said that gas caps were removed from several of the vehicles and they aren't sure if gas was stolen or if something could have been added to the tanks that will damage the engines.

More details from WFTV Orlando:

Phrases including "Obmama smokes crack" and others phrases with racial slurs were written in blue spray paint on the white city cars and trucks.

Other vehicles appeared to have had their gas tanks tampered with.

Along with the paint, hundreds of business cards were left on windshields.

The cards contain criticism of Obama on one side, and support for Hillary Clinton and her family on the other side.

The same cards were left on channel nine vehicles in Daytona Beach several weeks ago.

The vandalism happened the same night the Obama campaign kicked off its Florida organization with parties across the state.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/29/anti-obama-vandalism-city_n_109834.html

Phoenix Journal

PHOENIX — When the men of the Phoenix Country Club saw their feeding ways in peril, they did not tarry. Some sent nasty e-mail messages, hectored players on the fairway and, for good measure, urinated on a fellow club member’s pecan tree.

The targets of their ire were the women, and some men, who have dared to speak up against the club’s policy of forbidding women in the men’s grill room, a center of power dining in Phoenix.

Barbara Van Sittert, one of those women, said her husband, Logan, 73, has been heckled while playing golf and once found his locker defaced.

“They hooted and hollered at him and called his wife a whore,” said Mrs. Van Sittert, 72, a petite, quiet woman with an elegant white bob. “It was not warm and fuzzy.”

Charges of sexism against private golf clubs are not uncommon; the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where the Masters is held each year, does not permit women to be members.

But here in Arizona, where the governor, secretary of state, chief justice and Senate minority leader are women, it has rankled more than a few women that nonmember men have more rights than paying female members at the Phoenix Country Club, a century-old fixture in the city’s social and business life where it costs tens of thousands of dollars a year to belong.

Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, is not a member of the club, but Dennis Burke, her chief of staff, is. Mr. Burke has publicly opposed the separated dining rooms, and in an interview called them “indefensible.” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, does not belong to the club but has spoken there. (The McCain presidential campaign declined to comment on the separate dining rooms.) According to a 2007 club directory, Mr. McCain’s son, Andrew, is a member, along with scores of other notable Phoenix residents, including the rocker Alice Cooper.

TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/28/us/28countryclub.html?partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

GOODNIGHT ALL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press Writer  June 28, 2008

According to the officials, three active-duty Army brigade combat teams, one Army National Guard brigade and two Marine regimental combat teams are being notified that they are being sent to Iraq in early 2009. Officials would not release the specific units involved because the soldiers and Marines and their families have not all been told.

Overall, there are about 146,000 forces in Iraq, and that number is expected to dip to about 142,000 by mid-July when that last unit is all out. That total is at least 7,000 more than the number of troops in Iraq before the buildup began early last year.

Petraeus told Congress in May that he is likely to recommend further troop reductions in Iraq, but he did not provide any details. If he decides in the fall that fewer brigades will be needed in Iraq during the next year, there is the chance that brigades could simply be directed to the war in Afghanistan instead.

There is a broad consensus that more troops are needed in Afghanistan, to both train the security forces and fight the insurgents. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and President Bush, earlier this year, told NATO allies that they would increase troop levels in Afghanistan in 2009 in response to the growing violence.

Newsweek is set to publish a highly embarrassing report on Sen. John McCain, revealing that the McCains have failed to pay taxes on their beach-front condo in La Jolla, California, for the last four years and are currently in default, The Huffington Post has learned.

Under California law, once a residential property is in default for five years, it can be sold at a tax sale to recover the unpaid taxes for the taxpayers.

The McCains own at least seven homes through a variety of trusts and corporations controlled by Cindy McCain.

McCain campaign scrambling... Developing...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/28/mccains-failed-to-pay-tax_n_109785.html

SEVEN HOMES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  MOST AMERICANS ARE TRYING TO HOLD ON TO THEIR ONE AND ONLY HOME. 

WOW, AND THE REPUBLICANS SAY SENATOR OBAMA IS OUT OF TOUCH WITH THE AVERAGE AMERICAN! 

The false rumor that Barack Obama is a Muslim spread quickly and widely throughout the internet. Obama has launched a website, FightTheSmears.com, to help combat this falsehood, along with others that crop up on the internet. The Washington Post today has an extensive article detailing how the rumor first appeared. An Obama supporter and scholar, Danielle Allen, received an email calling Obama a Muslim, and having met the Senator while working as a dean at the University of Chicago, and knowing the claim to be baseless, she was determined to discover how it started and how one could stop it.

The e-mail landed in Danielle Allen's queue one winter morning as she was studying in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, the renowned haven for some of the nation's most brilliant minds. The missive began: "THIS DEFINITELY WARRANTS LOOKING INTO."

Laid out before Allen, a razor-sharp, 36-year-old political theorist, was what purported to be a biographical sketch of Barack Obama that has become one of the most effective -- and baseless -- Internet attacks of the 2008 presidential season. The anonymous chain e-mail makes the false claim that Obama is concealing a radical Islamic background. By the time it reached Allen on Jan. 11, 2008, it had spread with viral efficiency for more than a year...

...As an Obama supporter -- she had met the senator while she worked as a dean at the University of Chicago -- it made her angry. And curious.

"I started thinking, 'How does one stop it?' "

The man Allen found who takes credit for the first posting of an article falsely asserting Obama is a Muslim is a man named Andy Martin.

Martin, a former political opponent of Obama's, is the publisher of an Internet newspaper who sends e-mails to his mailing list almost daily. He said in an interview that he first began questioning Obama's religious background after hearing his famous keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. In an Aug. 10, 2004, article, which he posted on Web sites and e-mailed to bloggers, he said that Obama had concealed his Muslim heritage. "I feel sad having to expose Barack Obama," Martin wrote in an accompanying press release, "but the man is a complete fraud. The truth is going to surprise, and disappoint, and outrage many people who were drawn to him. He has lied to the American people, and he has sought to misrepresent his own heritage." Martin's article did not suggest an association between Obama and radical Islam.

Martin was trying to launch a Senate bid against Obama when he says he first ran the Democrat's name by a contact in London. "They said he must be a Muslim. That was interesting to me because it was an angle that nobody had covered. We started looking. As a candidate you learn how to harness the Internet. You end up really learning how to work the street. I sort of picked this story up as a sideline." Martin said the primary basis for his belief was simple -- Obama's father was a Muslim. In a defamation lawsuit he filed against the New York Times and others several months ago, Martin says that Obama "eventually became a Christian" but that "as a matter of Islamic law began life as a Muslim" due to his father's religion.

Sources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/06/28/false-obama-muslim-rumor_n_109740.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062703781_pf.html