Working for Truth, Justice, and the American Way
In the previous few posts we have discovered that John and Cindy McCain have ten mansions. They live high and wide. Cindy treats her “poor” relations just like the fictional J.R. Ewing treated his “poor” relations in episodes of the old TV soap opera “Dallas.” Worse, she denies they exist.
With this background in mind take a look at this video from DemRapidResponse and tell me who is an elitist.
If you listened to NPR the other day your answer would be “NO — Cindy McCain is an only child.” That’s what was reported on NPR and that is what Cindy says generally.
The truth is different. You see Cindy has an older half sister named Kathleen Hensley Portalski. According to NPR’s Ted Robbins Kathleen’s father, Jim Hensley, divorced her mother to marry Cindy’s mother way back in 1945. While Mr. Hensley lived he helped pay for the educations of Kathleen’s children and for a decade gave Kathleen and her husband $10,000 gifts (standard estate tax planning practice.) He provided his grandchildren with credit cards to help them get started in life.
Upon his death Hensley left Kathleen $10,000. Cindy got everything else–about $100,000,000. Apparently Cindy didn’t get enough because she immediately, without warning, and to the embarrassment of one of Hensley’s granddaughters stopped the credit cards.
NPR’s Robbins reports:
The Portalskis live in a modest home in central Phoenix. Kathleen is retired, as is her husband. (Their son) Nicholas Portalski is a firefighter and emergency medical technician looking for work.
Oh, yes, they are Democrats.
If Cindy (Ten Mansions) McCain can treat her own sister so badly, what makes you think she and John give a darn about the rest of us?
Worsethanbush.org is a website sponsored by the Change To Win Truth Squad labor group. What is the Change To Win Truth Squad? According to the website they are “9 workers traveling across 10 states to spread the truth about what a John McCain presidency would mean for working Americans and the entire nation.” Sponsored by seven unions representing 6 million workers The Truth Squad is currently demonstrating in Nevada. It is scheduled to come to Missouri soon.
Give the website a look. You will be glad you did.
It looks like labor has had enough and is on the move.
Do we really want a disconnected elitist like John McCain in charge of our government? Who do you think he would help? Us or his super-rich friends?
Give this video from Bravnewfilms a look.
Here are the youtube notes:
The REAL John McCain is a multi-millionaire who owns ten luxurious homes. The REAL John McCain backs President Bush’s tax cuts for big corporations. The REAL John McCain empathizes only with the interests of our nation’s wealthy minority, not its money-strapped majority. But far too many are buying into McCain’s deceit, so we created this video to educate the public about the REAL McCain.
I wil say this, I would love to own any of his ten mansions. Wouldn’t you?
Here is a memo the Obama campaign released today. If McCain doesn’t have a “woman problem” now, he will after women find out his real positions on issues vitally important to most women.
MEMORANDUM
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Dana Singiser, Senior Advisor for the Women’s Vote
DATE: August 18, 2008
RE: Does McCain have a Woman Problem?
In early June, the McCain campaign bragged about its intense effort to win over women voters.[1] There’s a good reason why.
Women have out-voted men in every election since 1964. In just the past two presidential election cycles, women have made up a growing majority of the electorate, making up 52% of the vote in 2000 (69.2 million voters), and 54% in 2004 (75.6 million voters). This percentage was dwarfed in the 2008 Democratic primaries with the women’s vote hitting at least 59% in 14 states.[2] The high water mark was in Georgia where a whopping 63% of the voters were women. During the Democratic National Convention next week we will mark Women’s Equality Day, the anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Eighty eight years after the right of American women to vote was written into our Constitution, the women’s vote will make the difference in this election.
Despite his campaign’s outreach efforts, McCain’s attempt to bridge the gender gap has fallen flat. He fares worse among women than any presidential candidate since Bob Dole in 1996. In the August 13 Pew Poll, Obama holds a 51-38 lead among women over McCain. In the August Time Magazine poll, Obama leads 49-39. McCain’s share of the women’s vote is considerably below the 48% George W. Bush won in 2004 or the 43% he earned in 2000. Indeed, if McCain dips even a little, he is at risk of falling below Bob Dole’s 38% share of women’s vote in 1996, which is the lowest share of any major part candidate in the last 36 years. More than half the female electorate (53%) holds mostly positive views of Obama, while only 37% feel mostly favorable toward McCain.
Ultimately, the reason McCain cannot close the gender gap is twofold:
1) Women voters don’t trust McCain because of his extreme positions on the key issues they care about. Obama leads McCain by ten points (42% vs. 32%) when it comes to which candidate women trust more.
2) Women want change from the last 8 years of neglect for America’s middle class families and women’s economic security.
Given the remarkable contrasts between the candidates on the issues women care about, there is an even greater opportunity for Senator Obama’s support among women to grow. Senator Barack Obama offers clear support for the challenges facing women and families. As president, he will expand opportunities for working women raising families and help make life affordable for stay-at-home moms. He will stand up for a woman’s right to choose and for affordable birth control. He will prioritize economic security for all women by ensuring that women receive equal pay for equal work and protecting Social Security. With the growth of the women’s vote, momentum is on Senator Obama’s side.
Below is a brief look at some of these issues that matter to women voters and why they increasingly believe that John McCain is not on their side:
Equal Pay: In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Ledbetter decision, 77% of women believe the next President should address the issue of providing women with the legal protections they need to get equal pay.
– McCain has opposed legislation to provide more effective remedies to victims of discrimination in the payment of wages on the basis of sex. In addition, McCain opposed legislation to overturn the Ledbetter decision.
– Obama believes that women receiving 77 cents for every dollar a man earns is unacceptable, and has supported equal pay laws in the Illinois State Senate and the U.S. Senate, including federal legislation to ensure that women facing the same pay discrimination that Lilly Ledbetter faced can be made whole.
McCain in his own words: On why women are underpaid: “They need the education and training, particularly since more and more women are heads of their households, as much or more than anybody else.”In fact, 35% more women graduate from four-year colleges than men.
In rationalizing his opposition to an equal pay law: “It opens us up to lawsuits. I want to find clones of Alito and Roberts,” McCain said, the very justices that rejected Lilly Ledbetter’s pay discrimination claim. And just this weekend, during the Saddleback Presidential Candidates Forum, he was asked which existing Supreme Court Justices he would not have nominated to the court. Among the justices named by McCain was Ruth Bader Ginsburg - the justice who wrote the dissent siding with Lilly Ledbetter and working women who might suffer pay discrimination.
Health Care Costs: Only 27% of women are very confident that they will be able to afford health care for themselves and their families. Health care premiums have doubled in the last seven years and women, who are often in charge of the family checkbook, have felt the squeeze of skyrocketing health care costs. Because women are more likely to be in minimum wage or part time jobs, or be dependent on a spouse’s health care plan which can be lost in divorce, there is a disproportionate number of women who are uninsured or in danger of losing their coverage. There are 21.5 million uninsured women in this country, and women are more likely than men to delay or not get medical care because of high costs.
– McCain’s health care plan “isn’t expected to make a major dent in the number of uninsured Americans,” and he would - for the first time in our nation’s history - tax health care benefits.
– Obama believes that every American should have access to quality health care, and that drug and insurance companies should pay their fair share. Barack Obama is committed to signing universal health legislation by the end of his first term in office that ensures all Americans - including the 21.5 uninsured women - have high-quality, affordable health care coverage. His plan will also improve health care quality for the 25 million “underinsured” Americans - those whose nominal health coverage does not insure them against catastrophic health costs and who are nearly as likely to go without medical care as the uninsured. Expanding coverage for uninsured and underinsured is particularly important for women, who are disproportionately represented. In total, 45 percent of women in 2007 were uninsured or underinsured, compared to 40 percent of men. Woman-owned small businesses grow at twice the rate of all businesses, and Barack Obama will create a Small Business Health Tax Credit to provide small businesses with a refundable tax credit of up to 50 percent on premiums they pay on behalf of their employees. And he certainly believes that the current 3 million children without health care should be covered.
McCain in his own words: McCain said President Bush’s veto of legislation to expand SCHIP, a program designed to ensure that low-income children have quality health care, was the “right call.”
Women’s Reproductive Rights: 62% of women believe that Roe v. Wade established a constitutional right. In fact, 14% more of independent women support Barack Obama after hearing about McCain and Obama’s positions on choice, and McCain’s support among Republican pro-choice women drops by 9% after hearing these positions.
– McCain is pro-life, and has bragged about consistently receiving a zero rating from NARAL throughout his 25-year voting record.
– Obama strongly supports a woman’s right to choose as established in Roe v. Wade, and has received a 100% rating and the endorsements of NARAL and Planned Parenthood.
McCain in his own words: “I have a 25-year pro-life record in the Congress, in the Senate. And as president of the United States, I will be a pro-life president. And this presidency will have pro-life policies. That’s my commitment. That’s my commitment to you.”
Access to Contraception and other Family Planning Services: 61% of women strongly support putting more emphasis on reducing unintended pregnancies, including access to birth control and other family planning services.
– McCain has repeatedly voted against funding for family planning, accessibility of contraceptives for women, and ensuring that sex education is scientifically accurate.
– Obama believes that women should have access to affordable family planning and believes that our children should have access to comprehensive age-appropriate sex education.
McCain in his own words: Following his women’s ambassador Carly Fiorina discussing whether insurance companies should cover Viagra but not birth control, McCain ducked a question about whether he supports health insurance to cover birth control: “The normally voluble Senator John McCain found himself at a loss for words Wednesday when he was asked aboard his campaign bus on its way to Portsmouth, Ohio, whether he thought it was fair that some health insurance companies covered Viagra but not birth control. ‘I don’t usually duck an issue,’ he said, ‘but I’ll try to get back to you.’” He never did.
Economic /Retirement Security: 75% of women believe there is a long way to go for their families to have the economic security to afford their current needs and plan for retirement.
– McCain supports extending the Bush tax cuts for the super-rich and said he supports Bush’s plan for privatizing Social Security.
– Obama believes that our nation’s seniors deserve security in retirement. In 2006, 45 million working women - sixty-one percent of women in the workforce - lacked any employer sponsored retirement plan. As a result, the typical female worker near retirement has only half the retirement savings of her male counterpart. Obama plans to give a $1000 tax credit for working families, which would benefit 150 million workers. Obama opposes the privatization of Social Security and would eliminate all income tax for our seniors earning less than $50,000 a year. His Automatic Workplace Pension program will offer working women left out of the retirement savings system an easy, automatic and productive way to build wealth for retirement.
McCain in his own words: McCain himself admits to not understanding the economy: “The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.”As far as Social Security is concerned, McCain plans to follow President Bush’s lead on privatization: “As part of Social Security reform, I believe that private savings accounts are a part of it — along the lines that President Bush proposed.” In fact, McCain told the Wall Street Journal, “I’m totally in favor of personal savings accounts. . . I campaigned in support of President Bush’s proposal and I campaigned with him. . .” To make matters worse, McCain’s campaign says he would consider raising the retirement age and reducing cost of living adjustments as options for reducing the growth in benefits expected over the coming decades.
On August 26, 2008, the Census Bureau will release its annual report on poverty, household income, and health insurance coverage. The report examines the state of the 2007 economy. Everybody agrees that 2007 was the peak and last year of the current Bush expansion. Jared Bernstein predicts that compared to 2000, the peak and last year of the Clinton business cycle:
–a larger share of the population will be poor;
–real median household income will be lower;
–there will be millions more people without health coverage.
John McCain wants to continue to the failed Bush policies that are destroying the American middle class. Barack Obama wants to give tax relief to the middle class, to dramatically reduce the number of uninsured and to grow American jobs.
IT IS TIME FOR A CHANGE.
Here is the Obama campaign’s fact check response to “Taxman,” McCain’s latest attack ad. As usual the McCain campaign simply lies.
Imagine the life of a hard working single mom with a reasonable job working for a company whose business has slowed. She used to routinely earn extra from overtime, but overtime has been eliminated. Her ex-husband can only be described as a deadbeat. Back when she was earning overtime she bought a modest house with an adjustable rate mortgage. Although her mortgage had a low introductory interest rate, the rate has adjusted and her house payment has gone up. Real estate values in her neighborhood are in decline. Suddenly she doesn’t have enough equity to refinance.
I don’t have to imagine that hardworking single mom. Earlier this week my paralegal and I worked for hours to help one such woman. Try as we might we couldn’t come up with a plan to keep her and her child in their modest home. She and her child are going to lose their home. When your income is declining, and your house payment and other normal expenses are going up at some point remaining in your home is not an option.
As a young man I was told by my father that the promise of America was that if you worked hard, did things the right way and were responsible you would be able to buy your own home, your kids would receive a good education, you would receive the best health care and life would generally be good. I shared the same promise with my children. For most of my life that promise seemed fulfilled, but that promise is fading fast.
As rapacious and irresponsible Republican policies continue to bleed millions of hardworking American families of their futures, I am encountering more and more people who are in financial trouble even though they work hard, are responsible and do things the right way.
I have lost a lot of sleep this week worrying about that hardworking single mom and the millions of others just like her. For her American dream has become a nightmare. You see, I have four adult children struggling to achieve the American dream their dad told them about. I need to know my children can achieve the American dream if they work hard, are responsible and do things the right way. We need to work together to achieve a real renewal of the American dream. We need change. Millions upon millions of Americans need hope.
Ask what he thought about the Jerome Corsi smear of Barack Obama, John McCain responded by saying that you “gotta keep your sense of humor” before being whisked away by his lobbyist/advisers.
Hey John, watch “McCain - Unfit To Lead (final version)? How is your sense of humor now?
The funny thing is that the video’s facts are actually supported by real sources.
This is not an official ad, but it makes a great point.
“Approval Ratings: The Public v. McCain” provided by CartwrightDale.