10 Things You Should Know About John McCain (But Probably Don’t)
From MoveOn.org. It was really hard not to bold every single word below.
1. John McCain voted against establishing a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Now he says his position has “evolved,” yet he’s continued to oppose key civil rights laws.
2. According to Bloomberg News, McCain is more hawkish than Bush on Iraq, Russia and China. Conservative columnist Pat Buchanan says McCain “will make Cheney look like Gandhi.”
3. His reputation is built on his opposition to torture, but McCain voted against a bill to ban waterboarding, and then applauded President Bush for vetoing that ban.
4. McCain opposes a woman’s right to choose. He said, “I do not support Roe versus Wade. It should be overturned.”
5. The Children’s Defense Fund rated McCain as the worst senator in Congress for children. He voted against the children’s health care bill last year, then defended Bush’s veto of the bill.
6. He’s one of the richest people in a Senate filled with millionaires. The Associated Press reports he and his wife own at least eight homes! Yet McCain says the solution to the housing crisis is for people facing foreclosure to get a “second job” and skip their vacations.
7. Many of McCain’s fellow Republican senators say he’s too reckless to be commander in chief. One Republican senator said: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine. He’s erratic. He’s hotheaded. He loses his temper and he worries me.”
8. McCain talks a lot about taking on special interests, but his campaign manager and top advisers are actually lobbyists. The government watchdog group Public Citizen says McCain has 59 lobbyists raising money for his campaign, more than any of the other presidential candidates.
9. McCain has sought closer ties to the extreme religious right in recent years. The pastor McCain calls his “spiritual guide,” Rod Parsley, believes America’s founding mission is to destroy Islam, which he calls a “false religion.” McCain sought the political support of right-wing preacher John Hagee, who believes Hurricane Katrina was God’s punishment for gay rights and called the Catholic Church “the Antichrist” and a “false cult.”
10. He positions himself as pro-environment, but he scored a 0—yes, zero—from the League of Conservation Voters last year.
October 7th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Ten Things You Should Know About Barack Obama:
From BarackObama.com
1. As a State Senator, Obama passed one of the country’s first racial profiling laws and helped reform a broken death penalty system.
2. In 2002, as the conventional thinking in Washington lined up for war, Obama had the judgment and courage to speak out against the war. He said the war would lead to “an occupation of undetermined length, with undetermined costs and undetermined consequences.” In January 2007, Obama introduced legislation to responsibly end the war in Iraq, with a phased withdrawal of troops engaged in combat operations.
3. “Torture is how you create enemies, not how you defeat them. Torture is how you get bad information, not good intelligence. Torture is how you set back America’s standing in the world, not how you strengthen it.” – Barack Obama
4. Barack Obama understands that abortion is a divisive issue, and respects those who disagree with him. However, he has been a consistent champion of reproductive choice and will make preserving women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a priority as President. He opposes any constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision in that case.
5. After President Bush announced that he planned to veto the children’s health care bill (the same one John McCain voted against), Barack Obama stated, “In the richest nation on Earth we must no longer stand by while 9 million children live without health care. I believe that the millions of Americans who can’t take their children to a doctor when they get sick have the right to affordable health care. When I was a State Senator, I was able to help extend health care coverage to an additional 150,000 parents and their children. The CHIP bill is a commonsense solution to our health care crisis and gets us one step closer where we need to be – quality, affordable health care coverage for every American.” The bill was eventually passed, despite Bush’s veto.
6. In March 2007, Obama urged Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to bring together lenders, consumer advocates, federal regulators and housing agencies for a summit meeting on preserving home ownership. The bill also provides counseling to homeowners and tenants to avoid foreclosures.
7. “The wife of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel plans to endorse Democrat Barack Obama… She said it will be her first endorsement of a Democrat and that perilous world conditions were a factor. ‘The fact is we’re in two wars, two of the longest we’ve ever been in. We’ve run up a third of our nation’s debt in just the past eight years. We’re in the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression,’ she said.” – TIME
8. Obama and Senator Feingold (D-WI) took on both parties and proposed ethics legislation that was described as the “gold standard” for reform. It was because of their leadership that ending subsidized corporate jet travel, mandating disclosure of lobbyists’ bundling of contributions, and enacting strong new restrictions of lobbyist-sponsored trips became part of the final ethics bill that was signed into law. The Washington Post wrote in an editorial, “The final package is the strongest ethics legislation to emerge from Congress yet.”
9. “We turn first to the most recent of these Internet whispering campaigns: a widely forwarded e-mail that says Barack Obama’s church, the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, is anti-American, will only accept black parishioners and tilts toward Africa at the expense of the United States. The e-mail claims Obama is therefore “certainly a racist” and “desires to rule over America while his loyalty is totally vested in a Black Africa.” We’ve had scores of queries about the accuracy of this one. It’s bunk. For one thing, the church welcomes whites, according to a University of Chicago professor of divinity who says he has attended. And while its controversial pastor is a fiery advocate for blacks and liberal causes and a fierce critic of anti-black discrimination, we’ve seen no evidence that he preaches hatred of or discrimination against whites.” – factcheck.org
10. He has received the highest ranking from the League of Conservation Voters of any candidate for president.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/envirossupport/