I don't know, I mean I can understand your desire to want to change your mother's mind but do you really think that anything you do or say will change her mind? There comes a time when you have to accept that people you are close to will have different political opinions.

I think do what you can to show her why she should vote for Obama but honestly, if she is dead set on voting McCain I doubt there is anything that you will be able to do to convince her otherwise.

I can see your point. All is fair in love and politics. Good luck D:

Thank you ♥ :D

http://www.kskirby.net/mccain.html (huge list!)

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/flipflops (another huge list!)

http://thepoliticalcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2008/10/pro-mccain-you-cant-trust-black-man-how.html (this is just disgusting)

Good luck with this. For me, it'd be difficult to reconcile actually working in a job like hers and still voting for someone like, well, McCain. I read Rolling Stone magazine, and while they don't make it any big secret that they hate the Republican party, the most recent issue as a lengthy article refuting the image of McCain as an honorable war vet/presidential candidate/person. It makes him seem fairly distasteful, if nothing else.

I know, right? My GF has a subscription, and I didn't realize how awesome it was until recently. Now I'm the first one hugging it just out of the mailbox.

Okay, financial fun.

The current financial market issues can be traced back to the first Reagan administration, in which the prevailing conservative mindset was to deregulate as many markets as possible. The theory is that free markets are more efficient than regulated markets. Telephones, airlines, financial markets, power, etc were all deregulated starting in the 1980s until today.

The problem with that idea is that yes, in a perfect world, that idea is great, but we don't live in a perfect world. More to the point, we live in a world where people cheat and where people are stupid. Fraud is fraud, fine, but then there's removing the incentive to avoid risk from the market (e.g. prosecution). We got a taste of what happens when people cheat and take stupid risks back in the 1980s with the Savings and Loan problem. Now, 20 years later and nearly 30 years after the Reagan reforms began, we're reaping the fruits of deregulation.

See, the point about regulating the market isn't to make it less *free* so much as it is to make it more *fair.* The Glass-Steagall Act was passed in the 1930s for a reason--so that when you put your money into some kind of investment product, you knew what you were getting, and you knew that the companies would have to explain to you in fairly simple terms its value once purchased. It was repealed by the Republican-led Congress as "damaging to markets." That isn't the only piece of legislation they did...you can go check every single one.

As far as what this has to do with McCain, check his record. Of all the financial market deregulation legislation passed in the 20 years since 1987, he voted "yes" on almost every single one of them. In other words, he is a dyed-in-the-wool subscriber to the market theory that led us to the trouble we're in today. Past performance doesn't indicate future results, but if that's been his philosophy for the last 20 years, chances are he's not going to change it once in the White House. Do you really, really want to vote for him, knowing that his policy decisions over 20 years are what helped lead us to the morass we're in now?

But wait, there's more. This is a man who freely admits that he's hot-tempered, is well-known for a hot temper, freely admits that he makes spur-of-the-moment decisions, and is well-known for making spur-of-the-moment decisions and following through on them regardless of whether they're good decisions or not. Put that in terms of foreign policy...do we really want a president who'll make an ill-thought-out, boneheaded decision regarding something important (like relationships with Russia) and keep doing it, even though it's getting us into more trouble? Or he gets a 3am phone call regarding something important overseas, and blows a verbal barrage at the Prime Minister of Japan? Probably not.

And there's still more. McCain, in the last few weeks, has been relentlessly attacking Obama's character, while Obama is busy telling the people what he plans to do in office. McCain is trying to win votes based on fearmongering (and yes, racism) because he knows he's in trouble policy-wise. That tells you a lot about a man's character, that he's willing to resort to near-slander and mental manipulation because he's not able to do what he wants otherwise.

And perhaps the icing on the cake for me is the relentless anti-intellectualism shown by the whole republican party lately. As in, "Who are these pointed-headed intellectuals to tell us what to do?" They're trying to market their prickly, crabby leader as the kind of guy you'd want to have a beer with on Sunday, and convince us that he'll be a good president because he's a nice guy. Fine. I don't know about you, but if I've got a major medical problem and I need surgery, yeah, I'd like my doctor to have a good bedside manner, but it's far, far, far more important to me that she be smart as a whip and good at what she does--and not afraid to be smart and good at what she does.

Feel free to show your momma this, and I encourage you to look up his voting decisions regarding financial markets AND to look at how often he's actually voted against his own party (despite the blathering he does about being a "maverick").

I just saw this and thought of you.