I congratulate him for the win, but the emphasis of his words last night and his tone made it sound like he was trying to sound like MLK. Do you agree??

Singer Wyclef files to run for Haiti’s presidency
Singer Wyclef Jean officially announced his bid to be president of Haiti to a roaring crowd of supporters on Thursday, thrusting himself into a contentious race to lead an impoverished country reeling from a devastating earthquake.

Read more on AP via Yahoo! News

I, personally, think that he deserved it. He gives AWESOME speeches, he’s very inspirational, and he’s making history ! Plus, he gave his money that he got from winning the Award to charity, which was very kind of him. But give your reason to why you think he did or didn’t deserve it !

President-Elect Barack Obama Victory Speech (Full Video)

US to attend Hiroshima memorial for first time
Sixty-five years after a mushroom cloud rose over Hiroshima, the United States will for the first time send an envoy this Friday to commemorate the bombing that rang in the nuclear age.

Read more on AFP via Yahoo! News

Obama’s speech at Chrysler plant in Detroit
President Barack Obama visited the Chrysler Jefferson North Assembly Plant in Detroit this afternoon.

Read more on Detroit Free Press

Pet insurance takes a bite out of bills for some; others dogged by denials
A look at how pet insurance works and what it covers. Plus, tips for buying pet insurance.

Read more on Seattle Times

Travel Q&A: Mexican rental car insurance not optional
Liability is not included as part of insurance coverage provided by U.S. credit cards. Renting a car in Mexico requires purchasing separate liability insurance.

Read more on Contra Costa Times

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of ‘Free’ Health Care
Every new ‘right’ the U.S. government has promised has turned into a massively expensive failure, yet the media continue to cheer supporters of tax-funded programs.

Americans are obsessed with rights. We always have been.

But the concept of rights our forefathers laid out in the Declaration of Independence has changed dramatically. Those rights – life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – were acknowledged to come from the Almighty, given equally to all people. Today’s rights come from Almighty Government.

Health care is the newest “right.” From presidential candidates’ universal plans to the return of HillaryCare to Michael Moore’s movie “Sicko,” it’s all over the media.

Calling it a “right” is an emotional argument advanced by those who want others to pay for their health care. They bring out the children and ask whether anyone can deny them the “basic human right” of health care – but don’t bother with the evidence showing how health care in this country would be harmed by government control.

A look at other modern “rights” might give us a clue about how well a new system would work. These rights started out as privileges, among them education and a paid retirement.

Now education is not only considered a right, it’s a mandate. How well has it worked? American students attend school at least until their teen years, but 15-year-olds ranked 24th out of 29 countries in aptitude for “real-life math problems,” according to The Washington Post. Literacy surveys suggest one in five American adults is functionally illiterate. And taxpayers keep shelling out money to fund the system.

Americans also cherish the right to retire – but we expect to be supported in our old age. Younger workers and employers are forced to support retirees, funding another right.

And how well has that worked? The poorly designed, outdated Social Security system is disintegrating rapidly as the number of retirees balloons. But once you’ve established a right, it’s difficult to take it away. The government, which promises such rights, must go to its sugar daddy – taxpayers – to keep the rights coming.

We’re already well on our way toward the health care right/mandate. Want to be more like Canada? It’s not that far off. Cato’s Michael Cannon has pointed out that third parties in America pay 86 cents of every dollar of our health care – about the same as Canada’s socialized system.

What we – or rather, those third parties – pay for health care is already determined by the government as well. Emory University medical professor Robert Swerlick has noted that “the pricing of medical care in this country is either directly or indirectly dictated by Medicare.” This market meddling even causes doctor shortages, he says, in needed areas of specialty.

Prescription drugs are already considered a right, thanks to political moves like the Medicare drug benefit and massive media support. A Business & Media Institute study found broadcast journalists treating prescription drugs as though they grew on trees. Overall, the coverage supported the idea that medications should magically be available to everyone at far lower costs.

Of course, the magic behind new “rights” is your money.

Cannon and fellow Cato expert Michael Tanner explained problems with tax-funded care in their book “Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It.” If health care is guaranteed to everyone, how much does everyone get? Who decides who receives what, and how would the care be administered? What happens if everyone wants the most expensive treatment available?

“With the wide variety of medical tests and treatments that consumers may claim as their right, someone at some point must decide where the right to health care ends, lest the nation be bankrupted,” they wrote.

We’re well on our way toward that as well. Our “rights” to Social Security and Medicare devour about 40 percent of the federal budget. State and local property tax revenue, which normally funds education, mushroomed about 35 percent between 2000 and 2005, according to the Tax Foundation. We can’t afford any more “rights” like that.

But the left says tax-funded care is right for the children. Meanwhile, what becomes of them? They’re growing up in an America where the “rights” mentality is deeply ingrained, and the media continue to feed them with it.

When the children come of age, perhaps they’ll want the right to a job. They won’t remember that France already tested that idea for us, and it led to high unemployment and rioting. Perhaps they’ll guarantee Disney vacations for all families and force childless Americans to pay for it. “The pursuit of” will conveniently fade away as they look to government to guarantee happiness.

They will know less and less of a true right – liberty – and have no idea where it comes from.

Jack Cashill writes:

From a classical perspective, Palin’s is the more compelling narrative. The obstacles that she must overcome to fulfill her destiny are many, varied, and real. Raised in the frozen outback by a schoolteacher father and a school secretary mom, Palin accomplishes nothing without a good deal of work, often under difficult physical circumstances.

Palin takes a semester or two off to pay for college. She works at a diner over the summer. She enters the Miss Alaska contest to help pay tuition and is awarded second runner-up and “Miss Congeniality.” She interns during other summers to become a sports reporter.

After college, Palin joins fiancé Todd on his Bristol Bay salmon boat. During slow salmon runs, she works “messy, obscure seafood jobs” until she can find a job as sports reporter, and even then she keeps returning to Bristol Bay when the salmon are in season.

Throughout this period, despite the hard work and harsh environment, Palin never loses her sense of wonder about the spectacular natural theater in which she is so very much at home. When asked about the state’s best attributes during a Miss Alaska pageant, Palin responds, “its beauty and everything that the great Alaska outdoors has to offer.” Prophetically, she also plugs the state’s “potential in drilling for oil,” which, even then, “Outsiders don’t understand.”

Back in Hawaii, either through his grandparents’ connections or by dint of affirmative action, Obama spends grades five through twelve at Hawaii’s poshest prep school. Like Palin, he plays basketball, but while she is leading her school to the state championship, he is a second stringer on a team whose wins and losses go unremarked. The only scores Obama shares are the imagined racial ones that need to be settled, a working out of his “pervasive sense of grievance and animosity against [his] mother’s race.”

In his recent book Barack and Michelle, Chistopher Andersen quotes a black friend who rejected Obama’s claimed reason for being benched in a particular game.

No, Barry, it’s not because you’re black. It’s because you missed two shots in a row.

Obama admits to “marginal report cards” in prep school, but his underperformance does not diminish his dreams. He hits the mainland in the late 1970s with the “diversity” movement in full flower. Diversity’s rationale is that people of varied cultures enrich the educational experience. Obama’s upbringing, however, has been thoroughly white and elitist. The diversity bean-counters couldn’t care less. His skin color improves their “metrics.” Obama will ride this pony far.

After two druggy, uninspired years at Occidental College, Obama transfers to the Ivy League — Columbia, to be precise. In Dreams, Obama dedicates one half of a sentence to a summer job on a construction site. Otherwise, he is silent on how his tuition might have been paid for. As to his grades and SAT scores, it would be easier to pry North Korea’s nuclear secrets out of Kim Jong-Il.

i have a packet to do for my government class and i’m struggling really bad…here are the questions, if you can help at all, please do, because its due tomorrow. Thanks!

1. Obama’s personal strengths:

2. Obama’s personal weaknesses:

3. Obama’s background, biography, narrative, or story strengths:

4. Obama’s background, biography, narrative, or story weaknesses:

5. Obama’s policy strengths:

6. Obama’s policy weaknesses:

7. Constituencies that support Obama:

8. Constituencies that don’t yet support:

9. Primary states won:

10. primary states lost:

11. Overall strengths:

12. Overall weaknesses:

13. What attributes will you look for in a vice presidential candidate to mitigate your candidates weaknesses?

thanks again for any help!

Why do people not stick to the facts and judge on hearsay? I am not an Obama supporter, but guess what? I don’t support his health care plan–I believe that it still would leave too many Americans in misery….but I did do my homework. Please go to the link provided here:

http://www.keepandshare.com/htm/biographies/barack_obama/C01_barack_obama_biography.php

What I liked about this one is that politics are kept out—only the facts.
What are your thoughts? And please, no hate rantings, just be factual…Thank you!!!