Barack Obama and Giving Peace a Chance

Technology, Innovation and Creating Jobs
Obama will encourage the deployment of the most modern communications infrastructure to reduce the costs of health care, help solve our energy crisis, create new jobs, and fuel our economic growth.

Support Job Creation: Barack Obama believes we need to double federal funding for basic research and make the research and development tax credit permanent to help create high-paying, secure jobs. Obama will also make long-term investments in education, training, and workforce development so that Americans can leverage our strengths - our ingenuity and entrepreneurialism - to create new high-wage jobs and prosper in a world economy.

Invest in U.S. Manufacturing: The Obama comprehensive energy independence and climate change plan will invest in America's highly-skilled manufacturing workforce and manufacturing centers to ensure that American workers have the skills and tools they need to pioneer the first wave of green technologies that will be in high demand throughout the world. Obama will also provide assistance to the domestic auto industry to ensure that new fuel-efficient vehicles are built by American workers.

Create New Job Training Programs for Clean Technologies: The Obama plan will increase funding for federal workforce training programs and direct these programs to incorporate green technologies training, such as advanced manufacturing and weatherization training, into their efforts to help Americans find and retain stable, high-paying jobs. Obama will also create an energy-focused youth jobs program to invest in disconnected and disadvantaged youth.

Boost the Renewable Energy Sector and Create New Jobs: The Obama plan will create new federal policies, and expand existing ones, that have been proven to create new American jobs. Obama will create a federal Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) that will require 25 percent of American electricity be derived from renewable sources by 2025, which has the potential to create hundreds of thousands of new jobs on its own. Obama will also extend the Production Tax Credit, a credit used successfully by American farmers and investors to increase renewable energy production and create new local jobs.

Deploy Next-Generation Broadband: Obama believes we can get broadband to every community in America through a combination of reform of the Universal Service Fund, better use of the nation's wireless spectrum, promotion of next-generation facilities, technologies and applications, and new tax and loan incentives.

Protect the Openness of the Internet: Obama supports the basic principle that network providers should not be allowed to charge fees to privilege the content or applications of some web sites and Internet applications over others. This principle will ensure that the new competitors, especially small or nonprofit speakers, have the same opportunity as big companies to innovate and reach large audiences.

Invest in Rural Areas: Obama will invest in rural small businesses and fight to expand high-speed Internet access. He will improve rural schools and attract more doctors to rural areas.

And Obama would make it just as easy to sign up for a union as it is to sign up for the Democratic Party or Daily Kos by getting the Employee Free Choice Act passed. The right to join a union should be just as much of a right in this country as the right to free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom of assembly.

Obama will strengthen the ability of workers to organize unions. He will fight for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act. Obama will ensure that his labor appointees support workers' rights and will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers. Obama will also increase the minimum wage and index it to inflation to ensure it rises every year.

Ensure Freedom to Unionize: Obama believes that workers should have the freedom to choose whether to join a union without harassment or intimidation from their employers. Obama cosponsored and is strong advocate for the Employee Free Choice Act, a bipartisan effort to assure that workers can exercise their right to organize. He will continue to fight for EFCA's passage and sign it into law.

Fight Attacks on Workers' Right to Organize: Obama has fought the Bush National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) efforts to strip workers of their right to organize. He is a cosponsor of legislation to overturn the NLRB's "Kentucky River" decisions classifying hundreds of thousands of nurses, construction, and professional workers as "supervisors" who are not protected by federal labor laws.

Protect Striking Workers: Obama supports the right of workers to bargain collectively and strike if necessary. He will work to ban the permanent replacement of striking workers, so workers can stand up for themselves without worrying about losing their livelihoods.

Raise the Minimum Wage: Barack Obama will raise the minimum wage, index it to inflation and increase the Earned Income Tax Credit to make sure that full-time workers earn a living wage that allows them to raise their families and pay for basic needs.

An Obama administration would focus on the things that matter. Instead of focusing on all of the things that divide us, he would focus on the things that unite us. We all share the same collective struggle for better lives for ourselves and our children and the same collective desire to make this a better place for our grandchildren.

Our forefathers were the Flower Children. They were the ones who refused to go to Vietnam to bleed and die for a war that had no just cause. Instead, they insisted on equality for all and proclaimed a better way of life for all of us, one based on brotherhood instead of segregation. While our forefathers went to Woodstock, we go to Obama rallies and work for his election and expose the lies of the right in the process. Our forefathers refused to accept that there were Scary Brown People that we all had to be afraid of; we echoed the words of Muhammad Ali, who echoed the words of Achilles when he famously said, "No Vietcong ever did me harm!"

We extend the hand of friendship to all peoples of the world, including the people of Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, and Syria, just like our forefathers did to the people of Russia and China. We seek a country which promotes peace and goodwill among all people, reconciliation between countries and peoples at war, and active diplomatic engagement in all conflicts until such conflicts are settled once and for all. As Jimmy Carter brought together Israel and Egypt, we seek to bring together Israel and Palestine as well as the warring factions of Darfur, Congo, Afghanistan, North and South Korea, China and Tibet, and anywhere else that is torn by strife and discord.

Rice puts lipstick on pig in Iraq visit:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, making a surprise stop in Baghdad on Sunday, praised the Iraqi government’s decision to take on Shiite militia members in Basra and in Baghdad and painted an upbeat picture of the Iraqi government’s progress toward unifying the country.

Ms. Rice, who visited the Iraqi capital on her way to a conference in Kuwait of Iraq’s neighbors, said that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s government "has made a choice to pursue militias and is willing to bear the consequences."

Conceding that it had been "a long five years," Ms. Rice said that Iraq had made "significant progress, remarkable progress," however fragile, and she quoted the Iraqi president, Jalal Talabani, who said that the country was experiencing "a political spring."

As rockets or mortars crashed into the fortified Green Zone, Ms. Rice met with Mr. Maliki, Mr. Talabani and other government leaders, then spoke briefly at the United States Embassy and dedicated a plaque there to commemorate two embassy employees killed in rocket attacks on the zone.

And the news report directly contradicts Rice's assessment, noting that rockets and mortars were falling into the Green Zone as the talks in question were taking place. This song sums it perfectly:

Russert forgets that truth sometimes has a bias:

On Meet the Press, Tim Russert asserted that "many Democrats fear Republicans in the fall will string together an ad which shows," among other things, "[Sen.] Barack Obama with his hands clasped in front of him rather than holding his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance." However, the photo to which Russert was apparently referring appeared in Time magazine with a caption indicating it was taken during the national anthem, not the Pledge of Allegiance.

It is really interesting how John McCain and the Republicans will focus so much on the issues that don't matter at the expense of the issues that do. The American Public is getting sick and tired of non-issues like this; they want to know what Obama and McCain will do about gas prices, putting this country back to work, getting out of Iraq, and ending our dependence on foreign oil. We are here to make it so that politics matters at the local level once again.

In the coming years and decades, everything will become open and transparent:

Total transformation.
That's what I see for life in America by the middle of this century.
Total transformation of our political system, total transformation of our socio-economic structure, total transformation of our personal relationships, and total transformation of our relationship with the sublime and powerful energy of the Universe that some of us call God.
Now I know that this is easy to say, and perhaps even expected in a book such as this, but let me tell you why I believe that it is actually going to happen.
I don't think there is any way we can stop it.
Not that we would want to, but if we did want to, I'm not sure we could.
The systems and the infrastructures have already been put into place to support such a transformation-and, indeed, to render it virtually inevitable. Chief among these is the marriage between cosmology and technology which I have observed over the last decade.
Cosmology (the way we look at things, the conceptual constructions of our society) and technology (the way we functionalize what we are looking at) have met at the crossroads of human experience, and become one. Our technology is our cosmology. Our cosmology is our technology.
This marriage has already given birth to a new state of being, which can now only grow in the years ahead, playing a larger and larger role in the way we experience life on our planet.
I call this new characteristic of our society "instaparency."
"Instant."
That is the first word that come to my mind when I think about what life will be like in America 50 years from now. Life will be instant. Instant awareness. Instant communication. Instant decisions. Everything instant.
The second word I think of is "transparent." Life will be transparent. Transparent social interchange, transparent financial and business dealings, transparent political processes. Everything transparent.

And Obama is the perfect candidate to help transform our government from a culture of secrecy to a culture of openness. He has already been one of the leaders in the Senate for openness in government. See the Obama plan to transform our government into one that is open and transparent.

Shine the Light on Federal Contracts, Tax Breaks and Earmarks
Create a Public "Contracts and Influence" Database: As president, Obama will create a "contracts and influence" database that will disclose how much federal contractors spend on lobbying, and what contracts they are getting and how well they complete them.

Expose Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients — or tax earmarks — are also publicly available on the Internet in an easily searchable format.

End Abuse of No-Bid Contracts: Barack Obama will end abuse of no-bid contracts by requiring that nearly all contract orders over $25,000 be competitively awarded.

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and comment on the White House website for five days.

Shine Light on Earmarks and Pork Barrel Spending: Obama's Transparency and Integrity in Earmarks Act will shed light on all earmarks by disclosing the name of the legislator who asked for each earmark, along with a written justification, 72 hours before they can be approved by the full Senate.

Bring Americans Back into their Government
Hold 21st Century Fireside Chats: Obama will bring democracy and policy directly to the people by requiring his Cabinet officials to have periodic national broadband townhall meetings to discuss issues before their agencies.

Make White House Communications Public: Obama will amend executive orders to ensure that communications about regulatory policymaking between persons outside government and all White House staff are disclosed to the public.

Conduct Regulatory Agency Business in Public: Obama will require his appointees who lead the executive branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet these debates.

Release Presidential Records: Obama will nullify the Bush attempts to make the timely release of presidential records more difficult.

FAIR has more on the debate debacle; it is important to note that they were just as unfair to Hillary Clinton as they were to Barack Obama:

Stephanopoulos' first question to Clinton, though, was clearly pitched from the right:

"Can you make an absolute, read-my-lips pledge that there will be no tax increases of any kind for anyone earning under $200,000 a year? And if the economy is as weak a year from now as it is today, will you persist in your plans to roll back President Bush's tax cuts for wealthier Americans?"

The assumption would seem to be that there's something economically or politically dangerous about raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy. Charles Gibson picked up on that theme, pressing Obama about his plan to raise capital gains tax rates to levels of the early 1990s—a position that struck Gibson as bizarre, since lowering these taxes increases government revenue:

"In each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?"

This question rests on two false assumptions. The capital gains tax is paid by a small percentage of the population. As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out (3/16/06), "The wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers enjoyed 90 percent of the capital gains eligible for this special tax break." Gibson's reference to the 100 million Americans who own stock is irrelevant, since this tax is applied to the sales of stocks and real estate—not the act of having a retirement account.

John McCain nearly loses his temper on This Week over healthcare:

Stephanopoulos, noting Edwards' recent comments about McCain in The Wall Street Journal, said, "Her point is why shouldn't every American be able to get the kind of healthcare that members of Congress get and members of the military get?"

A smiling McCain said, "It's a cheap shot but I did have a period of time where I didn't have very good healthcare, I had it from another government. Look, I know what it's like not to have healthcare." McCain was referring to the five-and-a-half years he spent as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

OK, McSame has haven't had health care every single day of his life, but he has since he returned from Vietnam.

Health Policy and Market blog has some good details that Georgie didn't ask McSame about today:

McCain would end the current personal income exemption for employer provided health insurance and replace it with an individual tax credit for those who have health insurance. But there are tens of millions who are not covered today and do not have access to an  and therefore don't have a personal exemption that can be reshuffled into a personal tax credit.

But here's the problem:

There are tens of millions who are not covered today and do not have access to an employer contribution for health insurance and therefore don't have a personal exemption that can be reshuffled into a personal tax credit. But what will the source of his funding be for those who today don't have the benefit of the employer exemption but would be eligible for the tax credits? Moving the tax benefit of health insurance from the workplace to the individual as McCain does will likely encourage employers to drop their health programs and instead just give the health benefit contribution they were making to the worker in the form of wages.

Back to the ABC interview, McCain went on in the to say that "with all due respect to Mrs. Edwards," the Democrats want the government to make our health care decisions and that's how his plan differs from theirs. He says families need to make their own health decisions.  When asked about the tax credit not being enough to get good coverage, arrogantly he said, "well, the $5000K tax credit my plan would give families may not be enough, but it's better than what they got now.   They can go across state lines and get cheaper insurance."

The choice is clear -- John McCain would actually take away health insurance from people who already have it. Barack Obama would create a universal healthcare system that would cover every American. Imagine if the billions of taxpayer dollars that were going down the black hole of Halliburton, never to return, were instead to go to cover every man, woman, and child in America -- if you can imagine that, then Obama is the man for the job.