C'mon that not fair. He reads the paper and is trying to be a good citizen. He probably wouldn't mention it except for the fact it is mentioned a gazillion times in the media everyday. The Black vote, Spanish vote, women under 40 vote, the gay vote, people who never had the measles vote. We are so fractionalized it is part of our daily vocabulary. He just discounted and marginalized the black vote. Tsk tsk.
Only other blacks are allowed to notice it and comment on it. The fact that he has 98% of the black vote is apparently just a coincidence.
I agree. McCain frightens me. He is a lethal combination of anger, belligerence and stupidity. Obama also frightens me. No experience or seasoning, terrible judgment in past associations, radical marxist/far left agenda, wife clearly carrying decades of racial anger. About the best that can be said of Obama is that he is a highly skilled manipulator.
That about sums up my opinions also. Screwed either way. I bet this election comes down to the lessor of two evils in the end. Could go either way imo as they both have serious issues as a commander in chief. We always seem to pick the worst possible guys for Prez. Since the 80's anyway.
AAA: "Obama also frightens me. No experience or seasoning" Civil rights lawyer, community organizer, constitutional law teacher, Senator, State Senator, etc. etc. ", terrible judgment in past associations," Guilt by association rears its ugly head. "radical marxist/far left agenda, wife clearly carrying decades of racial anger." Before voting, look up what Marxism means. And give up the racism accusations, they just sound idiotic.
Obama may have made bad judgment with past associates,but his judgment has been much better then McCain, Bush and most other congressmen when it comes to the Important issues this country faces. Obamas judgment was correct on what might be the worse foreign policy mistake this country has ever made Its so funny Bush is now following Obamas advice on major foreign policy issues My first choice was Paul,but since we are down to Obama and Mad Man McCain i want the person who will spend the least amount of tax payers money and cause the least amount of death and injury to US soldiers.with the money McCain will spend continuing The Iraq war and starting a war with Iran and the deaths of American soldiers due to those wars Obama is the clear choice
Mccain 2008 !!!!!!!!!!!!! <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MEc2ot3QGB4&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/MEc2ot3QGB4&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080719/ap_on_re_us/military_scarred_families As wars lengthen, toll on military families mounts By DAVID CRARY, AP National Writer 1 hour, 1 minute ago FORT CAMPBELL, Ky. - Far from the combat zones, the strains and separations of no-end-in-sight wars are taking an ever-growing toll on military families despite the armed services' earnest Divorce lawyers see it in the breakup of youthful marriages as long, multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan fuel alienation and mistrust. Domestic violence experts see it in the scuffles that often precede a soldier's departure or sour a briefly joyous homecoming. Teresa Moss, a counselor at Fort Campbell's Lincoln Elementary School, hears it in the voices of deployed soldiers' children as they meet in groups to share accounts of nightmares, bedwetting and heartache. "They listen to each other. They hear that they aren't the only ones not able to sleep, having their teachers yell at them," Moss said. Even for Army spouses with solid marriages, the repeated separations are an ordeal. "Three deployments in, I still have days when I want to hide under the bed and cry," said Jessica Leonard, who is raising two small children and teaching a "family team building" class to other wives at Fort Campbell. Her husband, Capt. Lance Leonard, is in Iraq. Those classes are among numerous initiatives to support war-strained families. Yet military officials acknowledge that the vast needs outweigh available resources, and critics complain of persistent shortcomings â a dearth of updated data on domestic violence, short shrift for families of National Guard and Reserve members, inadequate support for spouses and children of wounded and traumatized soldiers. If the burden sounds heavier than what families bore in the longest wars of the 20th century â World War II and Vietnam â that's because it is, at least in some ways. What makes today's wars distinctive is the deployment pattern â two, three, sometimes four overseas stints of 12 or 15 months. In the past, that kind of schedule was virtually unheard of. "Its hard to go away, it's hard to come back, and go away and come back again," said Dr. David Benedek, a leading Army psychiatrist. "That is happening on a larger scale than in our previous military endeavors. They're just getting their feet wet with some sort of sense of normalcy, and then they have to go again." Almost in one breath, military officials praise the resiliency that enables most families to endure and acknowledge candidly that the wars expose them to unprecedented stresses and the risk of long-lasting scars. "There's nothing that has prepared many of our families for the length of these deployments," said Rene Robichaux, social work programs manager for the U.S. Army Medical Command. "It's hard to communicate to a family member how stressful the environment is, not just the risk of injury or death, but the austere circumstances, the climate, the living conditions." An array of studies by the Army and outside researchers say that marital strains, risk of child maltreatment and other problems harmful to families worsen as soldiers serve multiple combat tours. For example, a Pentagon-funded study last year concluded that children in some Army families were markedly more vulnerable to abuse and neglect by their mothers when their fathers were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Iraq, the latest survey by Army mental health experts showed that more than 15 percent of married soldiers deployed there were planning a divorce, with the rates for soldiers at the late stages of deployment triple those of recent arrivals. There have been some horrific incidents shattering families of soldiers back from the wars â a former Army paratrooper from Michigan charged with raping and beating his infant daughter; a sergeant from Hawaii's Army National Guard accused of killing his 14-year-old son as the boy tried to save his pregnant mother from a knife attack by the soldier. In one of the saddest cases, a recently divorced airman who served with distinction in Iraq chased his ex-wife out of military housing with a pistol in February before killing his two young children and himself at Oklahoma's Tinker Air Force Base. Tech. Sgt. Dustin Thorson's former wife had sought a protection order against him, saying he threatened to kill the children if she filed for divorce. Officials at Tinker, while confirming that Thorson had been getting mental health care, would not say whether those problems related to his service in Iraq.
IF you think the US markets have problems, look at the value of al Qaeda shares throughout the Muslim world: A high-flying political equity just a few years ago, its stock has tanked. It made the wrong strategic investments and squandered its moral capital. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Osama bin Laden was the darling of the Arab street, seen as the most successful Muslim in centuries. The Saudi royal family paid him protection money, while individual princes handed over cash willingly: Al Qaeda seemed like the greatest thing since the right to abuse multiple wives. Osama appeared on T-shirts and his taped utterances were awaited with fervent excitement. Recruits flocked to al Qaeda not because of "American aggression," but because, after countless failures, it looked like the Arabs had finally produced a winner. What a difference a war makes. Yes, al Qaeda had little or no connection to Saddam Hussein's Iraq - but the terrorists chose to declare that country the main front in their struggle with the Great Satan. Bad investment: Their behavior there was so breathtakingly brutal that they alienated their fellow Muslims in record time. Fighting enthusiastically beside the once-hated Americans, Iraq's Sunni Muslims turned on the terrorists with a vengeance. Al Qaeda's response? It kept on butchering innocent Muslims, Sunni and Shia alike. Iraq exposed al Qaeda as a fraud. Where do Osama & Co. stand today? They're not welcome in a single Arab country. The Saudi royals not only cut off their funding, but cracked down hard within the kingdom. A few countries, such as Yemen, tolerate radicals out in the boonies - but they won't let al Qaeda in. Osama's reps couldn't even get extended-stay rooms in Somalia, beyond the borders of the Arab world. And the Arab in the (dirty) street is chastened. Instead of delivering a triumph, al Qaeda brought disaster, killing far more Arabs through violence and strife than Israel has killed in all its wars. Nobody in the Arab world's buying al Qaeda shares at yesterday's premium - and only a last few suckers are buying at all. Guess what? We won. The partisan hacks who insisted that Iraq was a distraction from fighting al Qaeda have missed the situation's irony: Things are getting worse in Afghanistan and Pakistan not because our attention was elsewhere, but because al Qaeda has been driven from the Arab world, with nowhere else to go. Al Qaeda isn't fighting to revive the Caliphate these days. It's fighting for its life. Unwelcome even in Sudan or Syria, the Islamist fanatics have retreated to remote mountain villages and compounds on the Pakistani side of the Afghan border. That means Afghanistan's going to remain a difficult challenge for years to come - not a mission-impossible, but an aggravating one. But we all need to stand back and consider how much we've achieved: A terrorist organization that less than a decade ago had global appeal and reach has been discredited in the eyes of most of the world's billion-plus Muslims. No one of consequence in the Arab world sees al Qaeda as a winner anymore. Even fundamentalist clerics denounce it. For all of our missteps, Iraq's been worth it. How is it that the media missed this stunning victory? Will they start to admit it after Nov. 4? Yes, al Qaeda remains dangerous. It's a wounded hog still grunting down in the canebrake: More innocent people will be gored - and it's going to take a lot of pig-sticking to finish it off. But I'm proud of one call I made last year: The prediction that the "Sunni flip" in Iraq's Anbar Province marked the high-water mark for al Qaeda. Increasingly, that call looks correct. Democrats make a great fuss over the Bush administration's failure to capture Osama (although they themselves have no idea how to do so). But it now looks like the judgment of history - after the political rancor has settled into the graves of today's demagogues - will be that the administration of George W. Bush defeated al Qaeda. There's plenty of work still to be done. Al Qaeda will behave viciously in its death throes. Other terrorist groups await their turn to appall the world. But the second-greatest irony of our time is that, fumbling all the way, the Bush administration did what it set out to do after 9/11: It exacted vengeance on those who attacked us and toppled their towers - al Qaeda's fantastic dreams of global jihad. So what's the greatest irony? The president's oft-mocked declaration of "Mission Accomplished" wasn't wrong, after all - just premature.