Change.gov - The Official Web Site of the The U.S. Presidential Transition   www.change.gov

http://my.barackobama.com/michelle

Senator Barack Obama is a happily married family man who is honest, capable, charismatic & eloquent.  It's been less than a week since we opened our Oregon Campaign for Change state headquarters in Portland, and staff and volunteers all over the state are already working hard to grow our movement.
Democrats in Oregon are energized, united, and ready to work for change up and down the ticket.  This weekend we're organizing a big voter registration push across the state, and we need your help to reach new voters and bring new voices into the political process.
Join us for a voter registration canvass this weekend:
http://or.barackobama.com/ORcanvass
Together, we've built this movement across the country one person at a time. Supporters in all 50 states have reached out to their friends, neighbors, and coworkers to share their story and work for the change we need.
Face-to-face contact is the most effective way to bring new supporters into our movement. Join us this weekend and reach out to your fellow Oregonians.
No prior experience is necessary to get involved. Our staff will give you everything you need.
Join us this weekend for a voter registration canvass:
http://or.barackobama.com/ORcanvass

He is an intelligent, spiritually-centered man and a thoughtful and inspiring speaker.  This graduate
of Harvard and Columbia universities has experience as an attorney and a US Senator.  He intends to
greatly increase spending on Healthcare and Education and will pay for these programs by lowering taxes
on the middle class while requiring fortune 500 corporations & the rich to finally pay their fair share.

John Sidney McCain III is an adulterer who dumped his hospitalized wife of twenty years to marry his girlfriend.  He has a hair-trigger temper and foul mouth.  He attended the US War College and was at the bottom of his his class at the US Naval academy.  He has been a beer distributor, senator, and representative.  He will decrease spending on the Arts and Space Exploration and does not plan to increase spending on Healthcare.  In spite of deficits, he would reduce corporate tax rates hoping their ever-increasing riches would somehow trickle back down to the working people who created them.
 Some working people feel they have already been tricked and "trickled on" for quite long enough.
www.writingresource.info/mccainupdate.html   www.projectvotesmart.org

Peter Drier

Americans are used to voting for presidential candidates with backgrounds as lawyers, military officers, farmers, businessmen, and career politicians, but this is the first time we've been asked to vote for someone who has been a community organizer. Of course, Barack Obama has also been a lawyer, a law professor, and an elected official, but throughout this campaign he has frequently referred to the three years he spent as a community organizer in Chicago in the mid-1980s as "the best education I ever had."

This experience has influenced his presidential campaign. It may also tell us something about how, if elected, he'll govern. But, perhaps most important, there has not been a candidate since Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy who has inspired so many young people to become involved in public service and grassroots activism.

Through his constant references to his own organizing experience, and his persistent praise for organizers at every campaign stop, Obama is helping recruit a new wave of idealistic young Americans who want to bring about change.

...Whether or not he wins the race for the White House, Obama, through his own example, has already dramatically increased the visibility of grassroots organizing as a career path, as well as a way to give ordinary people a sense of their own collective power to improve their lives and bring about social change.

...After his election in 1960, President John Kennedy encouraged baby boomers to ask what they could do for their country. At the time, JFK meant joining the Peace Corps and the VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) program. He could not have anticipated the wave of protest and activism--around civil rights, Vietnam, and later feminism and the environment--that animated the sixties and seventies.

President Lyndon Johnson was initially no ally of the civil rights movement. However, the willingness of activists to put their bodies on the line against fists and fire hoses, along with their efforts to register voters against overwhelming opposition, pricked Americans' conscience. LBJ recognized that the nation's mood was changing. The civil rights activism transformed Johnson from a reluctant advocate to a powerful ally. LBJ's "Great Society" program--although criticized as too tame by United Auto Workers leader Walter Reuther and other progressives--provided some community organizing positions with anti-poverty agencies, job training groups, and legal services organizations in urban and rural areas. Many of today's veteran activists got their first taste of grassroots organizing in the anti-poverty, civil rights, and farmworker movements.

Now comes Obama, a one-time organizer, who consistently reminds Americans of the importance of grassroots organizing. If he's elected president, he knows that he will have to find a balance between working inside the Beltway and encouraging Americans to organize and mobilize. He understands that his ability to reform health care, tackle global warming, and restore job security and decent wages will depend, in large measure, on whether he can use his bully pulpit to mobilize public opinion and encourage Americans to battle powerful corporate interests and members of Congress who resist change.

For example, talking about the need to forge a new energy policy, Obama explained, "I know how hard it will be to bring about change. Exxon Mobil made $11 billion this past quarter. They don't want to give up their profits easily." Another major test will be whether he can help push the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA)--a significant reform of America's outdated and business-oriented labor laws--through Congress against almost unified business opposition. If passed, EFCA will help trigger a new wave of organizing that will require enlisting thousands of young organizers into the labor movement.

If Obama wins the White House, progressives within his inner circle will look for opportunities to encourage his organizing instincts to shape how he governs the nation, whom he appoints to key positions, and which policies to prioritize. Meanwhile, a new generation of volunteer activists and paid organizers will be looking to join President Obama's progressive crusade to change America. But if it appears that he is veering too far to the political center, they will--inspired in part by Obama's own example, and perhaps with his covert support--mobilize to push him (and Congress) to live up to his progressive promise.

 

Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics, and director of the Urban & Environmental Policy program, at Occidental College. He is coauthor of Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century and The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City. He writes regularly for the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, and American Prospect. From 1984-92 he served as senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, and currently serves on the boards of several organizations, including the LA Alliance for a New Economy , the Liberty Hill Foundation, the National Housing Institute, and the Southern CA Assn for Nonprofit Housing.

Obama on Oil prices: 
Sen. Barack Obama has promised to begin an immediate, gradual withdrawal of US combat troops from Iraq if he is elected president. According to Ismael Hussein-Zadeh, a professor of economics at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, this very act would help stop the crippling increases in energy and food prices.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008 
 The professor blames the US war on Iraq and Afghanistan for driving the prices of crude oil in his article titled, “Worried About the Price of Gas? End US Wars.”

"The current oil price hikes started with the beginning of the Bush administration’s wars against Iraq and Afghanistan.” Hussein Zadeh said.

“Oil prices have gone from the mid $20 range in the fall of 2002 to $127 yesterday (it’s now at $135 plus per barrel)—a rise of $100/barrel in just over five years,” he said.

Hussein-Zadeh attributes those increases mainly to the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to the threats of war against Iran. “Soon after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq the price of oil began to escalate in tandem with the escalation of war and political turbulence in the Middle East . . . Anytime there is a renewed US military threat against Iran, fuel prices move up several notches.”

Hussein Zadeh also blames the US military campaign in Iraq and Afghanistan for the fall of the dollar since, he notes, the war has been costing the US government $200 billion a year, all in borrowed funds.

There is no other choice as far as Hussein-Zadeh is concerned. “The political-implications of this discussion are clear: to bring down the prices of fuel and food requires bringing home the troops. By lowering the energy costs of production and transportation this will help save our own and many other economies from the plagues of inflation and stagnation. It will bring relief to hundreds of millions worldwide who are burdened by crippling energy bills and the crushing costs of feeding their families.”

Obama wants to invest $150 billion over the next 10 years to establish a green energy sector; create a national low-carbon fuel standard to ensure that the fuel is more efficient, and invest in clean energies like solar, wind and biodiesel.

This will create up to 5 million new green energy jobs.

Obama's plan for relief includes putting a windfall profits tax on oil companies, using the proceeds to help Pennsylvania families pay their heating and cooling bills. He also wants to increase transparency in the way prices are set, "so we can make sure that energy companies aren't bending the rules," according to his campaign.

"Immediate steps we need to take to provide working Americans with relief. A broad-based, middle class tax cut, to help offset the rising cost of gas and food. A foreclosure prevention fund, to help stabilize the housing market. A health care plan that lowers costs and gives those without health insurance the same kind of coverage members of Congress have. A commitment to retirement security that stabilizes Social Security, and provides workers a means to increase savings. And a plan to crack down on unfair and sometimes deceptive lending in the credit card and housing markets, to help families climb out of crippling debt, and stay out of debt in the first place."

Obama has a plan, and McCain is not able to come up with one...
His only plan is to let transnational economic cartels do whatever they choose
and to let the American middle class shrink while he provides tax breaks for the rich.
His plan is to continue the Bush legacy...  war, deficits, death, destruction, and dishonor.