That is the closest thing to a perfect post I’ve seen. Well done and thank you.

Perhaps the claims of Obama as a socialist are the only way to “alert” people to bad policy ideas (no matter the technical accuracy of the claim).

On the other hand, McCain should have been held to the same standard.

The real “pity” here is that we were faced with an election with two wholly anti-capitalistic candidates. Perhaps, someday, we’ll have a candidate who is not obsessed with controlling some aspect of our lives. The Democrats generally want to control our money and the Republicans often want to control our values. Well, brother, I am not willing to delegate control of either to anyone.

I have an idea… let’s find someone who wants to focus on protecting individual rights (police and courts) and national defense (military)–and that’s it.

We’re a resourceful people–we can do the rest ourselves.

And to say “no one here is promoting the ‘socialist’ meme” — maybe you should review the title of the post. That would probably be enough. Perhaps you’d say it was tongue-in-cheek? Well, then why does Thom say: “does the fact that Sen. Obama voted with Congress’s sole socialist 92% of the time mean that an Obama administration would be socialist? I suppose we needn’t evaluate that syllogism to answer the underlying question. We could simply consider, among other things, Sen. Obama’s [support for certain policies.]” That doesn’t seem tongue-in-cheek to me.

Jeez, I’ll be glad when this election season is over.

All that said, Thom is right that Obama’s platform includes some economically-idiotic proposals. So does McCain’s. Those of you who so emotionally support Obama are seemingly blind to this reality or else utterly consumed with hate for the mere rhetoric of markets (and thus blind to their remarkable merit).

No pressure is required to have me provide the data I gathered, because I gave it to Thom yesterday. Although I’m not inclined to spend my day replying to e-mail requests for the data, I’m happy to have Thom post the data on this web site, and have you proofread the data entry and merge it with whatever other information you have. There’s nothing proprietary about the data–it’s from a government web and takes a couple of hours to get. However, the data I pulled only has Obama’s and Sanders’ votes, and I will respectfully decline your kind invitation to have me pull the additional data necessary for you to make whatever comparisons you want.

Obama has chosen to gauge his competitor by how frequently McCain “votes” with Bush. He cannot properly complain when the same standard is applied to him.

I am not inclined to try to pull additional data to formulate a well-formulated inquiry, because it is not clear to me how I would properly formulate the inquiry. There are a number of problems. Sanders has only been in this office for two years. Obama has missed one-third of the votes. Given McCain has also been campaigning, I am not sanguine about the number of votes that all three participated-in.

Moreover, to make what I would think is a thoughtful comparison, one would have to consider things such as what the votes that all three voted on were about, compared to the universe of all votes. Ultimately a thoughtfully-prepared analysis would, I suspect, be unlikely to be capable of being understood by the folks who are influenced by the advertisements stating that McCain votes with Bush over 90% of the time.

I last evening heard reference on a news show to a report that correlates voting patters for purposes of seeing who is most likely to reach across the aisle–vote in a bipartisan way. I have not endeavored to track down that analyses. But you may be inclined to do so.

Lastly, if the matter is not already moot, I expect that it will be moot in a couple of days. So I’m not inclined to look at the matter further. The interesting part, and creative part, for me, was I had heard all this droning about how frequently McCain voted with Bush, and notwithstanding that prominence, I had not heard anyone try to apply to Obama his own standard. So I did it on a lark.

What’s really disingenuous is that the term “socialist” is being applied to Obama as a slur, and not to McCain. In fact, both have the same notion of redistributing wealth, etc., they only differ on how the slices of the pie are cut. The “socialism” here is nothing more that good old taxation — if you’re forced to pay and have no say in how it is spent (how much influence do you personally have on that), that’s the taking of money from you and giving over to others to redistribute as they see fit.

Despite the woes of the economy, you don’t see either major party candidate offering a plan to pay down the debt. Quite the opposite, both have offered fiscal plans that have this country operating in a deficit. They’re inheriting a country whose current president more than doubled (almost tripled) the national debt during his tenure. Service on that debt alone will cost more than 1/2 the budget, and both candidates plan to make it worse (maybe McCain’s plan calls for more debt, but they are close enough that you can’t really say it’s worse).

Same crap, different sacks.

http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2008/10/30/boll/