Obama NY Speech on the Economy Transcript 3-27-08

Read the entire transcript of Barack Obama's New York speech on the economy given today. Below is an excerpt of that speech:

But the American experiment has worked in large part because we guided the market's invisible hand with a higher principle. A free market was never meant to be a free license to take whatever you can get, however you can get it. That's why we've put in place rules of the road: to make competition fair and open, and honest. We've done this not to stifle but rather to advance prosperity and liberty. As I said at Nasdaq last September, the core of our economic success is the fundamental truth that each American does better when all Americans do better; that the well-being of American business (OOTC:ARBU) , its capital markets and its American people are aligned. I think that all of us here today would acknowledge that we've lost some of that sense of shared prosperity. Now, this loss has not happened by accident. It's because of decisions made in board rooms, on trading floors and in Washington. Under Republican and Democratic administrations, we've failed to guard against practices that all too often rewarded financial manipulation instead of productivity and sound business practice. We let the special interests put their thumbs on the economic scales. The result has been a distorted market that creates bubbles instead of steady, sustainable growth; a market that favors Wall Street over Main Street, but ends up hurting both. Nor is this trend new. The concentrations of economic power and the failures of our political system to protect the American economy and American consumers from its worst excesses have been a staple of our past: most famously in the 1920s, when such excesses ultimately plunged the country into the Great Depression. That is when government stepped in to create a series of regulatory structures, from FDIC to the Glass-Steagall Act, to serve as a corrective, to protect the American people and American business.

John McCain Speech Transcript on Foreign Policy 3-26-08

Read the entire transcript of McCain's speech on foreign policy given yesterday. Here are some excerpts below:

• I am an idealist, and I believe it is possible in our time to make the world we live in another, better, more peaceful place, where our interests and those of our allies are more secure, and American ideals that are transforming the world, the principles of free people and free markets, advance even farther than they have. But I am, from hard experience and the judgment it informs, a realistic idealist. I know we must work very hard and very creatively to build new foundations for a stable and enduring peace.
• The developments of science and technology have brought us untold prosperity, eradicated disease, and reduced the suffering of millions. We have a chance in our lifetime to raise the world to a new standard of human existence. Yet these same technologies have produced grave new risks, arming a few zealots with the ability to murder millions of innocents, and producing a global industrialization that can in time threaten our planet.
• To meet this challenge requires understanding the world we live in, and the central role the United States must play in shaping it for the future. The United States must lead in the 21st century, just as in Truman's day. But leadership today means something different than it did in the years after World War II, when Europe and the other democracies were still recovering from the devastation of war and the United States was the only democratic superpower. Today we are not alone. There is the powerful collective voice of the European Union, and there are the great nations of India and Japan, Australia and Brazil, South Korea and South Africa, Turkey and Israel, to name just a few of the leading democracies. There are also the increasingly powerful nations of China and Russia that wield great influence in the international system.
• America must be a model citizen if we want others to look to us as a model. How we behave at home affects how we are perceived abroad. We must fight the terrorists and at the same time defend the rights that are the foundation of our society. We can't torture or treat inhumanely suspected terrorists we have captured. I believe we should close Guantanamo and work with our allies to forge a new international understanding on the disposition of dangerous detainees under our control.
• Relations with our southern neighbors must be governed by mutual respect, not by an imperial impulse or by anti-American demagoguery. The promise of North, Central, and South American life is too great for that. I believe the Americas can and must be the model for a new 21st century relationship between North and South. Ours can be the first completely democratic hemisphere, where trade is free across all borders, where the rule of law and the power of free markets advance the security and prosperity of all.
• China and the United States are not destined to be adversaries. We have numerous overlapping interests and hope to see our relationship evolve in a manner that benefits both countries and, in turn, the Asia-Pacific region and the world. But until China moves toward political liberalization, our relationship will be based on periodically shared interests rather than the bedrock of shared values.
• We learned through the tragic experience of September 11 that passive defense alone cannot protect us. We must protect our borders. But we must also have an aggressive strategy of confronting and rooting out the terrorists wherever they seek to operate, and deny them bases in failed or failing states. Today al Qaeda and other terrorist networks operate across the globe, seeking out opportunities in Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and in the Middle East.

Hillary Clinton's Positive Ratings Hit New Low

How can you argue that you will win in the Fall if your positive ratings keep dropping? That is the case with Hillary Clinton. All her lies and attacks on Obama are guaranteeing she will not win against John McCain in a general election:

U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton's positive rating has dropped to a new low of 37 percent in an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released on Wednesday.

According to the poll, the New York senator's positive rating slid 8 percentage points in two weeks and she had a negative rating of 48 percent in a week where she admitted making a mistake in claiming she had come under sniper fire during a 1996 trip to Bosnia.

Clinton's Democratic rival, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, also saw a slight dip in his positive rating, to 49 percent from 51 percent, the poll found.

[...]The survey was taken after Obama gave a speech last week on race in America and rejected racially charged remarks by his pastor in Chicago of two decades, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

NBC said 32 percent of respondents said Obama "sufficiently addressed the issue" and 26 percent said he needed to say more about the Wright controversy.

More than half of those surveyed -- 55 percent -- said they were "disturbed" by the videos of Wright that were widely circulated on television and the Internet, the poll found.

In head-to-head matchups, Obama and Clinton were even at 45 percent. In general election matchups, Obama led McCain by 44 percent to 42 percent and McCain led Clinton by 46 percent to 44 percent.

When asked which candidate could unite the country if elected, 60 percent said Obama, 58 percent said McCain and 46 percent said Clinton.

I wonder if those numbers have anything to do with her habit of lying, like her husband:

This is the woman who insisted for more than a decade that she was named after the late, great mountain-climber Sir Edmund Hillary — never mind that she was born six years before he scaled Mt.
Everest in 1953.

This is the woman who told "Dateline NBC" that daughter Chelsea was on a jog in New York City when the jihadists struck on 9/11 — never mind that Chelsea later wrote a magazine essay revealing that she watched the attacks on television from a friend's apartment.

This is the woman who claimed to have "helped start" the federal Children's Health Insurance Program — never mind that the program's original sponsors noted that Sen. Clinton fought the initial bill and had no role in writing the legislation.

This is the woman (echoed by her husband and daughter) who bragged that she was the "first" to call the disaster in Darfur "genocide" — never mind that several other senators had done so in 2004, while her first press statement referring to Darfur as "genocide" wasn't until March 2006.

This is the woman who claimed to have organized "instrumental" meetings in Belfast and baldly asserted that she "helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland" — never mind that key negotiators dismissed her as "totally invisible," "cheerleading" and "a wee bit silly."

So Hillary and her supporters have now taken to lashing out against the Speaker of the House for looking out for the Democratic Party--unlike Ms.Clinton:

Top fundraisers for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign upbraided House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) yesterday for suggesting that Democratic superdelegates should back the candidate with the most pledged delegates and urged her to respect the right of those delegates to back whomever they choose at the end of the primary season.

The criticism represented the latest effort by Clinton's campaign and its allies to beat back talk that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has amassed enough of a lead in pledged delegates that she will not be able to overtake him, and arguments that a continuation of the conflict between the two candidates will hurt the party in November.