Dear Rita, Have you any idea how easy it would have been to draw a line of association between Kennedy and the Mafia? In fact it has been done, but it didn’t disqualify him from the presidency, thank goodness. The Reverend Wright was invited into the White House to give his blessings to the President for goodness sake! Sure, you choose your pastor and you choose your friends; but not all of us use the same calculating process to vet our associates for as far back as you are demanding of our candidates. Come on now, have you even done the math? If each of 100 close associates has another hundred close associates then you would have a pool of 10,000 people to chose a single person from who could disqualify a man for the presidency by association. For a politician it’s not even a hundred close associates, its thousands; a thousand associates of a thousand associates is a round million people in the pool you are drawing from to disqualify a man by association. You have to assess the man not his associates. I know of another man who was called a drunkard and a sinner because of his associations. He saved the world that we live in today even if we set his divinity aside for the sake of argument. It is hard for us to think like born leaders, and leadership is a real quality which I have observed at work even in classrooms where I have taught. It would never occurr to a man like Obama to leave a group where things were going wrong, a follower would, a born leader, never. It is in the nature of the leader to effect change not to abandon his people. In every collection of people, in every society, there are people who represent the forces of integration as well as those who represent the forces of divisivness. It is easy for me to see which of you contributors think in divisive ways and those who think in terms of a cohesive society. A congregation is not just a pastor and a church is not just a flock of sheep following the pastor blindly, it is a community. Pastors come and go, communities last forever. If my pastor were to get up and make similar outrageous statements I’d just wonder what the hell got into him that morning. If he continued I’d begin to think something might have to be done about him, but I would NEVER contemplate leaving my church and its community because I was offended by the pastor. NO, he would have to leave first! Even so, four remarks no matter how outrageous pulled together over 20 years would hardly be sufficient for me to make a case against him, unless I had the kind of resources that the compiler had, of course. Most detractors are acting, out of ignorance I presume, as though this congregation was similar to a cult where the pastor has not only followers but power over his congregation. Let’s get real. It is usually the case that a pastor has less power over the minds of his congregation than a party leader has over his constituency. Most of them put me to sleep anyhow.

I sure hope I am never judged by my friends ;-) I do not agree with many of them on their thoughts and ideas, but they allow me to voice my opinions and do not judge me either. if we must judge people by their associations, should we judge McCain for seeking and getting the endorsement of John Hagee the pastor that said “the catholic church is the great whore”? and “God punished all Katrina victims because of the gays”???? I am neither a Catholic or a Gay, but am still extremely offended by these remarks as we all should be if we are not too numb from all the crap that the media, especially the right wing media, feeds us on a daily basis, but does not want us to see the pictures of the coffins of the poor sons and daughters, husbands and wives that were sent to fight a war for oil?

ladyj, and the amount of money they are raising and spending on these campaigns is obscene - especially in light of all of the hurting people out there in this economy. I am glad money is being raised from the people - but $40 million in one month and $55 million in another month - wasteful and obscene.

Seems to me that the country, including the middle-class were doing a lot better under the liberality of a Democratic regime than under Conservative rule. What do you suppose is the basis for this so called consumer confidence? Money, in the hands of the consumers, that’s all. I heard Peter Peterson of the Blackstone Group talking to Charlie Rose about all this money he has that he doesn’t need! Tax cuts to the wealthy puts a little money into circulation for further investment, which makes the economy appear vibrant for a while, with a few more jobs, but entitlements aside, I don’t regard health and education as entitlements but wise investments in the human resources of the nation. With a few taps of these same computer keys I can send all of my meagre pension funds overseas to buy some other foreign currency that is appreciating against the dollar. That’s where the tax cuts for the rich could more easily go than a similar amount in the hands of the middle-class worker like myself. Economists need to talk not only of consumer confidence, because the latter soon translates into loss of investor confidence, and we’ve already reached that stage which invites CAPITAL FLIGHT, with the fall of the dollar. After Katrina, Kenye West, bluntly said “Bush doesn’t care anything about black people.” He could just as easily have substituted poor and middle-class, in place of “black.” The lack of enabling legislation for the poor and middle class is what is impoverishing the nation, and allowing the Chinese dragon to take larger and larger gulps of our corporate resources. America is the only modern developed nation that hasn’t caught on yet that some govrnment expenditure is actually investment which yield actual returns in taxes. This, apparently, because of a perverse mean spiritedness that hurts everyone. See the math. If a government spends 30 thousand dollars to enable someone to achieve an undergraduate degree, that person will eventually pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in taxation over the rest of his working life. Where’s the loss? Take health, we spend about 15% more of our GDP on health than any other nation in the world, yet 46 other nations have as much as 10 years on us in terms of average longevity and more than 20 have better infant mortality figures. If we add 10 years to the productive and the consuming life of every American do you know what that does to our GDP, which is the basis for the wealth of the nation? And remember, that just sitting at home the average older American consumes probably more than the average worker, because he is wealthier and as he ages much needier. Ten more years of life for every citizen increases production and consumption by better than 13%, think of that! That would have been about 1.75 trillion dollars in 2007. The five year Iraq war to date has cost 1.2 trillion. Funding health care would more than pay for itself if it were tied to measures that increased the average life span of Americans by just a few years. No one seems to notice this.