I need help turning a Republican voter

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Monday October 13, 2008 · 6:07 PM PDT

2008/10/13 · 18:07

I have a friend who grew up in small town Texas, and like many of similar upbringing, he has always voted Republican. Even though he leans a little left on some social issues (he is pro-gay rights, pro-privacy, etc.), he is extremely conservative fiscally, almost out into Goldwater/Paul territory. We have always enjoyed debating politics with each other, but I've noticed a real change in his tenor in the past week. I think he has reached the point where he's starting to really think about voting for Obama, and he just needs me to push him over the edge. And I think I was getting close until this morning's WSJ op-ed piece that makes a lot of claims about Obama's tax plan. More after this...

Futzy

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Thursday September 18, 2008 · 1:37 PM PDT

2008/09/18 · 13:37

I suppose things like this shouldn't surprise me anymore, but yet, I was shocked today when I saw this courtesy of the NY Sun:

The Securities and Exchange Commission can blame itself for the current crisis. That is the allegation being made by a former SEC official, Lee Pickard, who says a rule change in 2004 led to the failure of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch.

The SEC allowed five firms — the three that have collapsed plus Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley — to more than double the leverage they were allowed to keep on their balance sheets and remove discounts that had been applied to the assets they had been required to keep to protect them from defaults.

Futzy

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Friday September 12, 2008 · 6:31 PM PDT

2008/09/12 · 18:31

Let me get the pleasantries out of the way quickly. I've been lurking here for a few months now, really enjoy the quality of writing and discussion here, finally decided it was time to quit splashing around in the shallow end and jump in. So here goes with my first diary.

My wife and I were having a discussion the other day about the current state of affairs in the US, and something really jumped out at me. There were a lot of parallels to the old story of the tortoise and the hare. In the past, however, we were usually the tortoise, but these days, we seem to be the hare. Follow me over the fold to see if this analogy is going to hold up to more scrutiny.

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I need help turning a Republican voter

An ex-SEC official says the SEC is to blame

The tortoise and the hare - an allegory