finknottle

When was this? He has politely marginalized them, and said some vague generalities about there being radicals on both sides who take things too far, but I don't remember him ever visibly 'thumbing his nose' at the movement ala Clinton and Sister Soulja. I mean, that's the knock on him - never confronting his his own party. Did I miss it?

You don't think a thesis on the future of US-Russian relations by a candidate for the presidency of the US would provide a unique 'un-spun' opportunity to see how he views foreign policy? Stick with sound bites and campaign press releases then.

I'm not criticizing the basic facts, but it is a puff-piece. It is spun to make his story more compelling. Saying that being elected president of the law review is a greater honor than, say, graduting first from Harvard Law is a bit dubious. The piece also suggests that he was made an editor on the strength of his grades. That's not the full story, as best I understand it. Students decide whether they want to participate - it's an extracurricular activity. Of those that nominate themselves, the current members vote on them. Obviously grades are the most important factor, but they are not the only factor. What the article doesn't tell you - and in fact leads you to believe otherwise - was that race was an important advantage in getting elected an editor. The original story (published in the NYT) recounted how the members of the law school review had been actively agitating for more minorities on the faculty and more minorities in visible student positions. In particular, they publically called for more minorities on the Review. I those days, as long as Obama was at Harvard Law and wasn't a drooling idiot, it's a pretty safe bet he would be elected if he wanted to join. As it was, Harvard Law had significantly greater minority representation than law schools nationwide. (And I think greater than the population as a whole, but I don't remember for sure.) An analogous issue arises with being elected president. The other editors choose among themselves, were very motivated to elect a woman or a minority, and I'd be willing to bet that their deciding criteria had nothing to do with grades and everything to do with personality and likability. Btw, my issue with all of this has nothing to do with his grades or how much of his success was an artifact of affirmative action. I really don't think it matters, what matters is where you are now. Rather, I am indignant at the media's complicity in building him up as a great scholar without any investigation (the same willfull ignorance which led us to believe that Bush was drunken boozer and Kerry a serious scholar, while in fact Kerry's grades at Yale were lower than Bush's), and the curious position of celebrating the first African-American president while steadfastly refusing any discussion of what should be a timely topic, affirmative action. How is it that in three presidential debates it never occured to anyone to ask him his plans for affirmative action? More, less, stay the course, or what?

Sorry, alumni status is not transferable. Dad having attended Harvard doesn't get you transferred into Columbia. It doesn't even get you transferred into Harvard unless he is a contributor or you have the grades. Occidental may be a fine school, but Obama never made deans list while he was there. Transferring to an Ivy League school is much harder than getting in in the first place (students who attend from start to finish as much more likely to begome regular contributors as alumni, and that's ultimately what it's all about), and average grades don't cut it. My conclusions about his Occidental career are primarily based on the Occindental FAX on Obama: http://www.oxy.edu/x7992.xml I believe that most schools publish the Dean's list and other honors (but it is possible Occidental doesn't). And if Occidental is such a fine school, it raises the question of how he got in with B- grades in High School (I'm less confident about that claim. It is repeated a lot, but I have never seen the source.) And here's a summary of the rest of what is known about his grades: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_were_Barack...ades_in_college Note that this link estimates Obama as having finished in the top 10% at Harvard based on getting Magna Cum Laude. We discussed this in another thread, the upshot of which is that the 10% percentile that it corresponds to is for today (according to a University spokesman), and it has changed over time - they have not said what it was then. For decades elite schools have been trying to reel in the dramatic grade inflation that occured in the 70's - I believe more like 20% received that distinction back then. (My guesstimate was based on google searching Harvard Magna Cum Laudes of the period and comparing the number of individuals that came up with the size of thje graduating classes. It's a weak guess, but it's all we have.)

Nobody is hiding McCain's grades and where he finished at the Academy. It's out there, and he has addressed it. The leg up he received by being the son of an admiral is also out there, and frequent fodder for radio call-in shows. But Obama? I for one would like to know how somebody who spends two years at Occidental without ever making Deans list or visibily participating in school organizations can successfully transfer to Columbia. Columbia may be looked down upon by the likes of Harvard, Dartmouth and Princeton, but even they will grudgingly conceed that Columbia is a little more selective than that. Let's face it - the country is full of 4.0's who would like to transfer into the Ivy League. They don't get in. Obama isn't the son of an alumni. The likely explanation, I'm sorry to say, is affirmative action. But we can't discuss that. Nor, apparently, do we want to discuss his grades at Columbia, or his grades at Harvard. We just want to note that he was president of the Law Review and suggest that he was a stellar student and finished first in his law school. The law review is a student run organization which elects its editors and which openly was agitating for greater minority representation at the time. Obama as the great scholar might be more compelling if we actually knew his grades or class standing. And then comes the hyped "Professor at Chicago." Pretty impressive for someone who has never published a paper on law, not even in the Law Review whose purpose is, ironically, to publish papers by the students. If you know anything about academia, you know how difficult it is to get hired as a professor even at the smallest SUNY school when you have no publications. At Chicago, it is impossible - I'm willing to bet that there is not a single unpublished scholar on the faculty. I came into this election cycle not assuming that Obama's meteoric educational history was the product of successive steps of affirmative action, but the more I look at his history and the stubborn refusal of his campaign to release any details, the more I conclude otherwise.

Have you been following this election? Where there's smoke there's fire, and where there isn't we'll make some (but only if you are McCain). Or do you think the attacks on McCain's wife (her ~1990 addiction to prescription drugs following spinal surgery) were warranted while an investigation of Obama's admitted drug use was not?

That's fine. But by what logic do you give a significant advance to a 30 year old who has never been published - not even an academic paper, let alone as an author of a book - on a topic on which they are not a recognized researcher? If you think it's easy, try making the rounds of the publishing houses.

Btw, since when has writing a book before you had accomplished anything ever been an issue? Obama got a hefty advance for his autobiography while he was still in law school. On what basis do we laugh at Joe but say Obama's podium was deserved?

Yeah, right. He would have been attacked and ostracized regardless.

Wow. They won't release Obama's client list as a lawyer, his community work with the Annenberg Foundation, or even his college grades and his thesis on US-Russia relations, yet you guys are going on about the VP candidates medical records.

My point in listing it is not to judge importance, but simply to provide benchmarks for comparing budgets. Remember, the issue is bloat and inefficiency in organizations. We provide three times as much money to education and training at the Federal level than NASA. Do you see three times the output? Regardless of whether you think NASA's missions are worth doing in the first place (and I agree about privatization of space), you have to admit that they actually get a lot done with their money in comparison to other agencies.

Pass the Kool Aid? Regardless of what you predict will happen economically, if you think it inconceivable that Bush will be blamed for any economic downsides and that Obama will get a pass from the media then you have already been chugging it for a year now! My prediction is so likely that it borders on the irrelevant.

I move in mainstream but politically-active circles. I have never heard my Republican friends say anything about Obama being a Muslim, a terrorist etc. They are not idiots. Generally, they say nothing about Obama personally, and among themselves only talk about the economic policies and what's happened to the media. They are too cowed to talk politics in public. On the other hand, I hear my Democrat firends saying things in mixed company like "Bush and Cheney are war criminals" and "Republicans are racists who are planning on rigging the election" all the time. Literally, the leftwing fringe crap comes out all the time, it's been mainstreamed. (I think the Daley show and other comedy shows are the primary reason for this.)

Well, we still have a long way to go before we reach the traditional unemployment levels of the European economies we aspire to. But with Obama I'm confident we'll get there.

Prediction: the economy will go into a long-term flatline from Obama policies, yet he will get a free pass. Bush will be blamed for anything that goes amiss, rather like Clinton was blamed for anything that went wrong during the Bush Administration. The difference will be that the media has a vested interest in deflecting any blame from the One.

You mean Bush-Pelosi.

No, Retard. I made it clear that I think bloat and inefficiency goes hand in hand with all large organizations, and I'm simply calling out the hypocracy of those saying the DOD can do what it does efficiently on half the budget while ignoring the likewise bloated programs for social services. You are the one defending $100 billion a year for education and training, and said that you see $100 billion a year in impact. So what is it exactly that you see?

BS. Acting heroically in the heat of battle, while a great thing, is not as hard as refusing release from a prison where you've been tortured for years. One you do without thinking, the other is all about thought. And it is the harder of the two. It's not unusual at all to instinctively overcome fear - jumping on a grenade, say - while the adreneline is flowing and do things that would paralyze us normally. Take away the sights and sounds of battle, and ask the same man in calmer surroundings to kill himself to save an acquantance, and you'll probably get a different response.

Less than half - but they are avid radio listeners. Surveys have consistently shown over time, and regardless of the administration, race, income, etc, Republicans tend to be happier than Democrats. http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1005/republicans-happier

Care to elaborate? The Dept of Education alone gets over $56 billion dollars - this in a country in which education is funded locally. That's 50% more than the budget of Homeland Security, twice the budget of the Department of Energy, and more than three times NASA's budget. Tell me - what do you think they are doing that is in line with what they are spending? What do we have to show for the $56 billion dollars?

The issue is whether the DOD is deserving of being singled out as being bloated and inefficient, and if it stands out from the social programs. I'm all for Education. But - absent this thread - if I asked you how much the Federal Government spent on education and training programs in comparison to overall military spending, would you really guess one sixth? Would you say we spent as much on that as we do in Iraq and Afghanistan? Do you see enough impact around you that you would guess we spend $100 billion dollars a year? Maybe they should have their budget cut in half to 'get efficient.' No, wait a minute - I heard President Obama two days ago promising a surge in federal spending to support the hiring of new teachers...

Ben and Jerry are playing you like a puppet, as a cursory glance at the budget will show. You know you can wiki it, right? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_United_S..._federal_budget The Social Security Adminstration gets more of the budget than the DOD (not counting supplimental Iraq funding - they are about equal if you include it). Are you saying they are a lean, mean bureaucratic machine? Medicare and Medicade gets more too - is that a model of efficiency? Unemployment and Welfare is almost half of the DOD budget. Surely there is waste there. Or how about the nearly 100 billion sopent on education and training, one sixth of the military budget? We don't seem to be getting much bang for the buck there. All of these programs have terrible waste and inefficiency, and as a ratio of their budget the non-defense spending scandals have been worse. DOD at least has an army of accounts (itself waste) fighting the problem, the others do not have the same spotlight and eager press attention. Funny how we so readily recognize that bureacracies lead to waste and call for cutting the budgets dramnatically when it's military spending, but god forbid we should expect the social programs to get rid of their waste. No, let's expand them instead.

One fraud which has the enthusiastic backing of a fraudulant fillibuster-proof gang of incompetents in Congress, versus a fraud and a fraudulant Congress in opposition who will at least call each others bluff. I'll take the latter any day.

His most meaningfull work wasn't when he was pounding the pavement in the 80's, but when he bacame a community mover-and-shaker in the 90's. He was on the board of directors of at least six community organizations (including the period with Ayers and the Annenberg Challenge) until 2002. He was also a state legislator representing the south side of Chicago from 1997 to 2004, and so presumably still had some interest in the community he was working for.

Under those circumstances, it wouldn't make my head explode. AS LONG AS I GOT THE SAME DEAL AS EVERYBODY ELSE! As the uncle said in Dr. Zhivago, "I'm one of the people too!" Meanwhile, I'll just sit here and wait for the next $500 stimulus check. You know, the ones that are not handouts, but are supposed to stimulate the economy through consumer spending? Apparently, I don't spend as good as somebody on welfare, because I didn't get one last time and I doubt I'll get one this time, even though I'm paying for them. Maybe I should promise to buy beer and lottery tickets instead of books and kitchen products?