What did Biden Say Now?

[Gaspar]

quote:Originally posted by Conan71

quote:Originally posted by guido911

quote:

I used to think Biden was just another pandering liberal, but he really doesn't engage in the same degree of dishonesty as the others.  He simply speaks from the hip about what he's thinking.  Flow of consciousness kind of stuff.  I don't think he has the capacity to edit himself, for better or worse. We need to be sensitive to that.  

To be overly critical of Biden is really cruel.

Oh get over yourself GAS. The guy's running for vice president of the free world, not secretary of his elementary school student council. If he is elected VP, do you want him speaking as a representative of this country to the prime minister of India with the chance that this comes out?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sM19YOqs7hU

BTW, you make it sound as if he has some sort of disability or medical condition when he runs off at the mouth that should cause us to treat him as if he is a member of a protected class. If that's the case, should he even be a candidate for VP? After all, we would not want to exacerbate his disability.

Guido, knock it off!!!

Biden is a "special needs" candidate.

You should be more PC in your characterizations of him.

Personally, I'm ashamed of myself calling him a dumbass pick. Thanks for setting me straight Gaspar. []

Thanks Conan.  I just feel like Joe only hurts himself, and there's no need for us to pile on like a bunch of pirañas.

He's Obama's special little guy. [:I]

And Guido, I'm not worried, I think the rest of the world understands Joe's capacity for comprehension just fine.

[guido911]

There is not going to be a group hug on this, is there?

[Gaspar]

quote:Originally posted by guido911

There is not going to be a group hug on this, is there?

No, but Biden deserves our support. []

He can't help the way he is.

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by guido911

There is not going to be a group hug on this, is there?

No just a group grope on Nov. 5 when the Dims try and figure out how they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I guess when Joe can't copy someone else's idea or work, he just invents something which sounds impressive.

[guido911]

Throwing gaspar a bone, maybe he is on to something:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/24/slate-political-reporter-joe-biden-gaffe-proof

[USRufnex]

quote:Originally posted by iplaw

One aspect of finances that I really don't understand from the "Average Joe" ticket of Obama/Biden is the collective lack of charitable giving from these people.

They don't mind you being forced into giving your money to the federal government, but when it comes to voluntary charitable giving these guys hide under the table.

This seems to be a common theme amongst liberals in general, but most notably those who are rabid about raising taxes.

Lie.

[Conan71]

quote:Originally posted by guido911

Throwing gaspar a bone, maybe he is on to something:

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/p-j-gladnick/2008/09/24/slate-political-reporter-joe-biden-gaffe-proof

Phil Hartman would have been the perfect guy to play Biden.

RIP Phil.

[FOTD]

Use Clawbacks to Fund Wall Street Bailouts      
By Michael Thomas    

http://thejournal.epluribusmedia.net/index.php/op-ed/44-general%20op-ed/173-use-clawbacks-to-fund-wall-street-bailouts


Since the early seventies, the billionaire plutocrats and the Wall Street Masters of the Universe have succeeded in capturing essentially all of the gains in productivity and GDP that the economy has created, converting them into their personal wealth. The era of nine-digit corporate compensation and ten-digit hedge fund manager earnings has resulted in the greatest economic inequality since the Gilded Age. The individuals occupying the top one percent of our economy earned 21.8 percent of the nation's income (2005) and, according to The Nation, hold $16.8 trillion in wealth, $2 trillion more than the lower 90 percent of Americans combined, so I will refer to these plutocrats and Masters as the One Percenters.

The golden days of the One Percenters were made possible by relentless deregulation of the financial markets and the economy beginning in the seventies and by "starving the beast" of government through enormous tax cuts on the earnings and wealth of One Percenters, which rendered increasingly ineffective any residual government oversight of the economy. During the same period, economic security for the middle and working classes has been subject to ferocious erosion, with job security, pension security and assured upward mobility distant memories of better days, lost to the dynamics of the global marketplace and the vagaries of Wall Street. The result is that median real income for the rest of us is at essentially the same level as in the early seventies and has fallen during the Bush Administration.



Now comes the Great Wall Street Meltdown. The same balance sheets from which One Percenters have been skimming the nation's wealth with fewer and fewer regulators looking over their shoulders have somehow been rendered indeterminate, incapable of even determining whether they are in balance. And so now they run to the government and the taxpayers and the little guys, whose real incomes have been frozen for nigh onto forty years, to bail their balance sheets out.

The One Percenters want bailed out to the tune of $700 billion to $1 trillion, which will be added directly to the federal deficit, already bloated by the $1 trillion off-budget Iraq war borrowing and the cost of the rest of the workaday Bush mismanagement and corruption. Already we are being told that the next president will have no money left over after the bailout to fund any other programs, like health care, education, alternative energy development, or rebuilding the nation's infrastructure. So we, the little guys, must forego the badly needed repairs to our tattered national well-being so the One Percenters can straighten out their balance sheets?

In the venture capital world, which prides itself on being a dog-eat-dog red meat capitalist world, there is a mechanism, with the suitably gruesome name of "clawback", to deal with circumstances akin to these, where the active investors, in this case the One Percenters, have themselves fed fully at the trough during the good days but in a downturn are unable to meet the investment expectations of those whose resources funded their earlier feasts. During the bursting of the dot.com bubble, clawbacks made numerous ugly appearances at VC firms when "sure-thing" dot.com business plans failed to "monetize" their flaky business plans. When a VC company's portfolio of dot.com companies was revealed to be duds, the investors in the VC company had the right, and did in fact exercise the right, to clawback, i.e., be refunded a portion of, their investments from general partners, requiring the general partners to forego their management fees for the current year, and even give back previous years' annual bonuses (!) if necessary, to meet the clawback obligations from their own pockets.

In the Great Wall Street Bailout, the One Percenters have been taking their shares of the profits for years through hedge fund management fees, exorbitant executive compensation, self-dealing stock-option plans, huge year-end bonuses and other ingenious ways of wealth extraction far too clever for the likes of me to be aware of. Clawbacks should be used now to fund the Great Wall Street Bailout of 2008. The bailout should be funded by clawbacks from the winnings of the One Percenters in the casino games they have rigged in recent years on the conveniently unregulated Wall Street. They should be made to disgorge the losses of the injured parties out of their own pockets just like VC general partners.

In particular, the executives of any firm receiving Great Wall Street Bailout proceeds from the government should be subject to clawback of executive incomes, management fees or stock options for the prior seven years, to the extent necessary to fund that company's bailout. A more generalized form of clawback would be to tax retroactively the types of firms receiving bailouts or the types of financial activities engendering bailouts in amounts sufficient to fund the bailout program. More general than that would be a retroactive clawback tax on One Percenters as a whole in amounts sufficient to fund the bailout program.

Middle class taxpayers should not be made to pay a single dime of the cost of these bailouts. And, the clawbacks should be sufficient to assure that the deficit is not increased one penny by the bailouts so that the urgently needed repairs to our nation's physical and social infrastructure can be made by the next president."



The devil heard Biden say this last week. That is to say a high additional tax on the top 1%. FOTDs not sure that is precisely a "clawback" but it is in the ball park. The sound of the word clawbacks sounds like it fits the devilish ways of Wall Street.

[Gaspar]

Mr. Biden is discussing his helicopter being forced down over Afghanistan again.  I bet that was very scary for him.  He couldn't have possibly understood what was going on around him with everyone speaking so fast and stuff.

He still thinks it was terrorists that made the snow storm that forced his helicopter down.

Poor guy, someone needs to help him to understand that terrorists don't control the weather. . .

Global Warming Climate Change does.

I think he can recycle this one to use for a Global Warming Climate Change speech.  

He's Obama's special little guy!

[iplaw]

quote:Originally posted by USRufnex

quote:Originally posted by iplaw

One aspect of finances that I really don't understand from the "Average Joe" ticket of Obama/Biden is the collective lack of charitable giving from these people.

They don't mind you being forced into giving your money to the federal government, but when it comes to voluntary charitable giving these guys hide under the table.

This seems to be a common theme amongst liberals in general, but most notably those who are rabid about raising taxes.

Lie.

What are you 5?

[USRufnex]

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/hbc-90002519

John McCain's Charitable Contributions

By Ken Silverstein

His kids' private schools are prime beneficiaries

The charitable contributions of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have received a fair amount of press scrutiny. The same is not true of John McCain, which is somewhat surprising since he is essentially the sole donor to the John and Cindy McCain Foundation, and his wife is its chairman and president.

Between 2001 and 2006, McCain contributed roughly $950,000 to the foundation. That accounted for all of its listed income other than for $100 that came from an anonymous donor. During that same period, the McCain foundation made contributions of roughly $1.6 million. More than $500,000 went to his kids' private schools, most of which was donated when his children were attending those institutions. So McCain apparently received major tax deductions for supporting elite schools attended by his children.

McCain has net assets of between $20 million and $32 million, making him the seventh wealthiest member of the Senate. His wealth is tied to Cindy Hensley McCain, his second wife and heiress to Hensley & Co., a major Anheuser-Busch distributor.

McCain has four children with Cindy, all of whom attended prep schools in Arizona. Meghan McCain, McCain's eldest child from his current marriage, went to Xavier College Preparatory. McCain's foundation has given about $50,000 to the school, mostly during Meghan's years there. Donations to Xavier have dropped off since Meghan graduated (in 2003 or 2004) and went on to Columbia University. For 2006, the foundation cut Xavier a check for just $250.

McCain has two sons, Jim, who is now a private in the Marines, and Jack, who is attending the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Both previously attended Brophy College Prep in Phoenix, which received at least $267,000 from the senator's foundation during the years that his sons were there.

The McCain foundation also donated money–roughly $128,000–to Christ Lutheran School, which the McCain's 15-year-old adopted daughter, Bridget, and their son Jim both attended. In 2001, the foundation also donated $41,667 to the Phoenix Country Day School, another elite prep school where both Meghan and Jack had been students.

Collectively, McCain's kids' private schools rank as the largest recipient of his foundation's money. The largest individual recipient is the U.S. Naval Academy Foundation, which received $210,000 in both 2001 and 2002. That money was earmarked for conferences that "bring together key military officers and civilian academics responsible for ethics education and character developments."

The McCain Foundation also has given large amounts to medical causes of various kinds, with a focus on craniofacial research, and the Halo Trust, a landmine-clearing organization. Small amounts have gone to the Valley Youth Theatre ($200) in Phoenix; Cool our Troops ($500), which provides Misty Mates to troops in Iraq; the Child Crisis Center in Phoenix ($250), which provides emergency shelter and programs for abused kids; and the American Cancer Society's Neighborhood Cancer Program ($50).

Between 2001 and 2002, the foundation contributed $4,000 to Shannon Ulrich for "special needs education." I'm not sure where Ullrich attended school at the time but she seems to have later attended Bryn Mawr and now works for McCain's presidential campaign.

I contacted McCain's campaign to ask about the foundation's contributions. A campaign spokesman, who asked to speak anonymously, said the foundation is funded nearly entirely by proceeds from McCain's book sales. "These are schools that did great things for the McCains' kids and they felt it was appropriate to support them," this person said.

It's impossible to know how much McCain has saved in taxes through his foundation's donations since he has thus far refused to release his tax returns (and won't commit to releasing them after formally becoming the nominee either). There's nothing illegal or improper about the foundation's contributions, but it's not exactly the pattern of giving you'd expect from someone who has cultivated an anti-elitist image.

[Conan71]

Lie?

Fact:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/09/biden-releases.html

(click to see spreadsheet)

Biden Releases 10 Years of Tax Returns
Joe Biden today released ten years of his personal income tax returns, drawing further attention to the tax issues raised by Sarah Palin's tax problems associated with her per diem reimbursements while governor of Alaska.

I wonder, though, if the move might backfire because the returns show that the Bidens have been amazingly tight-fisted when it comes to their charitable giving.  Despite income ranging from $210,432 - $321,379 over the ten-year period, the Bidens have given only $120 - $995 per year to charity, which amounts to 0.06% - 0.31% of their income:


It is jarring that a couple earning over $200,000 per year would give as little as $2 per week to charity.  This giving compares very unfavorably to John McCain, whose tax returns show that he gave 27.3% - 28.6% of his income to charity in 2006-2007.  During the same period, the Obamas' tax returns show that they gave 5.8% - 6.1% of their income to charity.

Perhaps the Obama-Biden campaign needs a new slogan:  "Change You Can Believe In (As Long As Someone Else Pays For It)"

Update: Independent Sector reports that 89% of American households contribute to charity, with an average contribution of $1,620 -- 3.1% of income.  

IRS statistics reveal that the average taxpayer with AGI over $200,000 makes over $20,000 of charitable contributions:

$15,000-$30,000 AGI:  $1,916 average charitable deduction
$30,000-$50,000 AGI:  $2,158 average charitable deduction
$50,000-$100,000 AGI:  $2,703 average charitable deduction
$100,000-$200,000 AGI:  $4,057 average charitable deduction
$200,000 or more of AGI:  $20,434 average charitable deduction

Biden is a tightass when it comes to charity.  I make less than Biden and give more than he does.

[guido911]

Another Biden Gem:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bq-eeWow_WU

[USRufnex]

Yeah, Conan, since you give more to "charity" than Joe Biden, maybe you're more qualified to be VP.... [}:)]

More character assassination from McCain/Palin....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ManvViFZ4l4

[iplaw]

quote:Originally posted by Conan71

Lie?

Fact:

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2008/09/biden-releases.html

(click to see spreadsheet)

Biden Releases 10 Years of Tax Returns
Joe Biden today released ten years of his personal income tax returns, drawing further attention to the tax issues raised by Sarah Palin's tax problems associated with her per diem reimbursements while governor of Alaska.

I wonder, though, if the move might backfire because the returns show that the Bidens have been amazingly tight-fisted when it comes to their charitable giving.  Despite income ranging from $210,432 - $321,379 over the ten-year period, the Bidens have given only $120 - $995 per year to charity, which amounts to 0.06% - 0.31% of their income:


It is jarring that a couple earning over $200,000 per year would give as little as $2 per week to charity.  This giving compares very unfavorably to John McCain, whose tax returns show that he gave 27.3% - 28.6% of his income to charity in 2006-2007.  During the same period, the Obamas' tax returns show that they gave 5.8% - 6.1% of their income to charity.

Perhaps the Obama-Biden campaign needs a new slogan:  "Change You Can Believe In (As Long As Someone Else Pays For It)"

Update: Independent Sector reports that 89% of American households contribute to charity, with an average contribution of $1,620 -- 3.1% of income.  

IRS statistics reveal that the average taxpayer with AGI over $200,000 makes over $20,000 of charitable contributions:

$15,000-$30,000 AGI:  $1,916 average charitable deduction
$30,000-$50,000 AGI:  $2,158 average charitable deduction
$50,000-$100,000 AGI:  $2,703 average charitable deduction
$100,000-$200,000 AGI:  $4,057 average charitable deduction
$200,000 or more of AGI:  $20,434 average charitable deduction

Biden is a tightass when it comes to charity.  I make less than Biden and give more than he does.

Let me explain something to you.  When Ruff-rider says that something is a "lie" you can bet that it's truth.

Why does it matter what he thinks anyways?  The guy plays a sport were you aren't allowed to use your hands, and faking injuries and acting like a drama queen is considered "cool"...