United Liberty

There’s been some criticism leveled at Obama for his pick of Rahm Emanuel as his Chief of Staff:

House Republicans are said to hate Mr. Emanuel for his partisanship, and on Wednesday, the former Florida congressman Joe Scarborough said on his cable television show that Mr. Obama’s enlistment of Mr. Emanuel amounted to “politics as usual” when the president-elect had promised conciliation.

My fellow freedom lovers,

I’m an individualist. As such, I always love to see people breaking stereotypes. Whether it’s black people starting a rock band or middle aged women wearing baseball hats backwards, it’s always great to see people working things out for themselves instead of mindlessly following the orders of the collective.

MSNBC has an article that focuses on two voters: Edwin “Mac” McAdoo (who I swear I saw on an Amtrak train), a working class guy (supposedly the back bone of the Democratic Party) who is supporting John McCain, and Phil Teller, a businessman (supposedly the back bone of the Republican Party) who is supporting Barack Obama.

A little over a year ago, I watched my first presidential primary debate of the 2008 election season. My wife was pregnant, my job was hectic, and I spent a lot of my free time following sports. One year later, a lot has changed. My daughter just turned one, family life is now more hectic than the job, and I watch C-SPAN about forty times as much as I watch ESPN.

As election day is dawning upon us, emotions are running high, particularly among those entrapped in the major political party of their choice, urging those of us who cannot abide either of the major party nominees to pick the “lesser of evils”.  The reason given depends on which side of the divide from which it comes.  I’ve been hearing, or expect to hear, from my Obama-supporting friends, “You MUST vote for Obama, because we cannot have eight more years of Bush”.

This makes me so mad.  How can someone who claims to fight so fervently against pork barrel projects say he will approve yet another bailout?  Ridiculous.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday the struggling U.S. auto industry could not be allowed to fail, and if elected president he would do “whatever I think needs to be done” to save it.

“I would do whatever I think needs to be done to help out the auto industry. We need to keep this industry alive,” said McCain, who is trailing Democratic challenger Barack Obama in the polls ahead of Tuesday’s election.

We are on the eve of a historic election. We most likely will have the first African American president. Things are pretty exciting, and to add to this excitement is podcaster Dan Carlin, who hosts the podcasts Common Sense with Dan Carlin and Hardcore History.

The election is about a week away. Who’s going to win the presidency and why?

For a while now we have heard the McCain campaign trying to foment some type of backlash against Obama for promising to take public funding and his subsequent rejection after he found out he could raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The tactic was nothing more than the throwing of a dart while blindfolded and it has yielded little to no benefits. This widely held assumption was confirmed by recent gallop polling with a near  super majority of participants not even knowing who took or rejected what funding. But the polling did have some great data that delved deeper into the policy issues as opposed to the election issues.

When I first heard about Bob Barr’s Libertarian Party run, I actually looked at his past as a Republican congressman as a positive. Most people don’t join independent parties first crack out of the box, and I certainly didn’t. I found myself defending him against attacks that he was a “neo-con” or a pol seeking to advance a dying career.

That began to change as I heard more from him. The various news appearances he made were filled with canned rhetoric. He sounded like the stereotypical politician. It was hard to really tell if he believed what he was saying, or if he had just decided to leach onto the movement started by Ron Paul’s candidacy.