Oct 03 2008
Palin Last Night
People had low expectations for Gov. Sarah Palin’s performance last night. We were fed interview clips for the last two weeks showing her appearing to be unable to answer the interviewers’ questions. Actually these were snippets from the Charles Gibson and Katie Couric interviews. Each interview was 30 minutes or more in length. The media carefully chose what they wanted to present to you. In her remarks on TV last night Governor Palin looked at you through the TV camera and said it is nice to be able to address the American people directly, not filtered through the media.
That’s why we were all so surprised that she did so well. She performed normally.
In her answers about the Israeli-Palestinian problem she mentioned that she and McCain supported a two state solution, including an Israeli capitol in Jerusalem. Biden and all commentators I heard last night and today missed the significance. The Arab world considers Jerusalem to be their city even though it is in Israel. This has been a major point of contention. The Arabs want Telavive to be the Israeli capitol. It still will be a point of contention forever but she stated her courageous view.
The accountants listening to Biden’s comments must have been in heaven. He threw out one number after another. It reminded me of the late Senator Everett Dirksen commenting when he was in the Senate: “a billion here a billion there, pretty soon you’re talking big money”. I couldn’t keep up with all of the statistics being tossed around. Since Biden was wrong on many other remarks he probably invented a few of them too. Biden is known for making inaccurate statements. Last week he cited Franklin D Roosevelt’s speech on TV in 1929. TV wasn’t available until the late 1940’s and Roosevelt wasn’t president in 1929.
After the debate I watched Karl Rove evaluate it. He said he identified 10 outright lies and 4 that were debatable. Sometimes under stress people make mistakes but in the instances of lies he said Biden knew better.
Some of Biden’s erroneous statements here
Biden’s comments about McCain taxing health care were resonant with me. McCain wants to decrease taxes on healthcare. When I was in college I did tax returns for a small local accounting firm to help with my expenses. I was an accounting major. On those tax returns you could deduct the insurance premiums people paid for health insurance. People bought the insurance through employer or union sponsored plans but as today in most cases you had to pay out of your paycheck for a portion. Some also bought insurance on their own directly through an insurance company. Medical costs weren’t so high back then so many people didn’t buy private insurance. We showed how much they paid on their tax return (we usually got the information from their check stubs). It reduced their taxable income hence making their taxes less and the insurance easier to pay for.
Since lawsuits continually cause insurance premiums to increase, they are even more painful today.
Thomas Sowell on the bailout
In the original bailout bill in congress last week there was a provision to give millions of dollars to ACORN, a group supported by Sheila Jackson-Lee. Here is an article by Ken Blackwell about ACORN. Ken used to be Secretary of State of Ohio. ACORN
