Hoot Gibson

Soros contributed $250,000 to the inaugural fund. Obama has not posted the names of the so-called individuals who donated less than $200, the aggregate of which totaled more than $200 million. The Obama campaign also disabled credit card security to avoid detecting fraudulent donor name and address information. The truth is, nobody really knows who donated that $200 million and nobody ever will. Sunlight is the best remedy for political corruption. I agree that the donations are not the problem, which is why I favor scrapping all campaign finance regulations but requiring full disclosure of every donation, including those under $200. Otherwise, there is nothing to prevent one individual or even a foreign government from funnelling large donations to candidates using multiple bogus names and addresses.

Obama would not have been the first to hold the inauguration indoors and he would not have been the last.

And the hypocrisy of the criticism of Bush for the cost of the 2005 inauguration vs. the same media's fawning over Obama and his 2009 extravaganza matters to me. The Obama inauguration received 35 times as much coverage as the 2005 inauguration. Most of the Obama coverage was positive and much of the Bush coverage was negative. The security costs for Obama attending 1 or 100 balls would be quite different. The bigger the private celebrations, the bigger the bill to taxpayers to provide security to those events. Why do private donations made to host inaugural events not bother you? Do you not favor campaign finance laws that limit individual contributions? I think that all donations by American citizens to public servants and political candidates, whether for a campaign or a birthday party, should be legal regardless of size as long as the source of the donations is promptly made public. However, I do not understand how one can be bothered by one type of donation and not by the other. People make large political donations to buy influence, regardless of whether the donation is made before or after an election.

The Tariff of Abominations was revised actually revised in 1832, not 1833 as I stated in my previous post.

Students attending public schools have no right to be educated by a homeshooling parent because they do nothing to support that parent's household. The same cannot be said of parents who homeschool their children. Their children have the right to an education in a public school, if they so choose, and that education includes the extracurricular activities sponsored by the school with tax dollars. IMO, it is petty for the people who run public schools to deny the opportunity for homeschoolers to participate on school sponsored teams. As I said in a previous thread, schools should welcome the opportunity to provide a positive public school experience to home schooled children. Doing so benefits the community as a whole, whether or not the parents decide that the public school is not so bad after all as a result of that experience.

Great points. I would also add that I am puzzled why our "campaign finance reform" laws prohibit individual contributions to political candidates but do not address unlimited contributions for elected public officials to throw huge parties that require tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being spent for security. Is President Obama going to be less appreciative and less inclined to grant favorable access to Mr. Soros because he donated $250,000 toward the party fund than had Mr. Soros made the same contribution for the campaign? The parallels between this country's elite ruling class and those of ancient Rome are becoming more apparent all the time. What's next, the Obama Fiesta Bowl? Maybe he can find private funding to have a stadium display his name in lights.

...and the Bush bashing tangent continues only the bashing has been escalated to include the evil Republicans. Rather than responding in this thread, I will respectfully decline But thanks for the offer just the same!

Here is a thought for those who maintain that nothing could have been done to have scaled back the size of the inaugural festivities. What if Obama had announced a couple of months ago that the inauguration would be held in the Capitol Rotunda? What if Obama had announced his intention of attending only five inaugural balls instead of ten? Would the cost to the taxpayers have been reduced?

This will also be my final Lincoln post. The Tariff of Abominations was revised in 1833 to diffuse an earlier stand-off with South Carolina. The northern states insistence on high import tariffs were a legitimate concern for the South and an area where further compromise should have been placed on the table. Fostering prosperity in the South through lower tariffs might have been a big enough carrot to have forestalled or prevented armed conflict, IMO. As the southern states moved away from the economy of an agricultural colony, slavery would have become an increasingly expensive proposition. The North's attempts to protect its own markets from European exports through tariffs did nothing to weaken the South's reliance on slavery. Nor did it help diversify the southern economy, which might have created more internal resistance to slavery in the South.

Slavery has ended in all but a few Muslim countries. Where else did ending slavery require the sacrifice of more than 600,000 lives? The application of emerging technology to agriculture would have eventually made the reliance of slavery in agriculture economically unfeasible. That would have made ending the institution through political means much easier. Again, I am not saying that Lincoln could have done anything better but if he only did what any other reasonable person would have done and 600,000 Americans died, then what qualifies him to be placed at the top of a "greatest president" list?

That is too bad. Not surprising but disappointing just the same.

Schools exist to make the student better - not vice-versa and the responsible parents should be free to decide what education is appropriate for their children, not the state. Funding formulas can be changed, if necessary, to accommodate homeschoolers but replacing a couple of team members with homeschooled kids who are good enough to make the cut will cost little or nothing more.

What you say is true, but there were other issues that pushed the southern states to the brink of war and I believe that they had some very valid grievances. I just question whether abolishing slavery a few years early was worth the death of more than 600,000 Americans, when slavery would have died a peaceful death a few years later anyway - and without the residual hatred from a bloody civil war. I am not saying that Lincoln did not do as well as any president would have under the same circumstances but I am not convinced that more than a few presidents would have done equally as well.

Another Obama thread turned into a Bush-bashing thread? Your guy is worse than my guy, nah nah nah nah nah! :lol: Bush is no longer president and he is ineligible for another term. Better get used to playing defense for a change.

What economic concessions did Lincoln offer, either during his campaign or after taking office, to the South to keep the country united? The southern states had good reason to suspect that Lincoln would act aggressive toward them after his election. The bolded text is exactly why I do not place Lincoln higher on my list. Not only did Lincoln do nothing to prevent the escalation of the war, the war itself was badly mismanaged and cost far more lives than it might have. Lincoln was courageous and made more difficult decisions than any other president has ever made - but civil war in any country is the result of failure, not success.

White people in some areas are equally guilty of embracing the hillbilly stereotype.

I would put Washington second to Jefferson on my all time list. I would rank Lincoln lower than most people because I question whether he did all he could to keep the nation united without engaging in the most bloody war of our history. Slavery ended in nearly every country in the world without a bloody civil war. Why was civil war unavoidable for the US? Like PepRock, I would rank Polk high on my list. His ranking has been negatively impacted by today's extreme political correctness atmosphere. Manifest destiny reflected the will of the people in Polk's day and nobody can deny that he was extremely successful in delivering the results that Americans wanted.

No surprise at all. I never made any claim that the numbers had any bearing on the next four years of economic performance. What the numbers may reflect however, is the pessimism on Wall Street that a change in presidents will have any positive impact on the economy. It may simply be a coincidence that the market plunged more on the day that Obama took the oath of office than it had in any previous inauguration day - or it may not be a coincidence. Great illustration of creating a straw man and then knocking him down, BTW. :lol:

I see that we now have a precise and statistically sound calculation of the cost of both the 2005 and 2009 inaugurations. :lol: Of course, we both know that precision and accuracy are quite different, eh? There are attendance estimates floating around from 800,000 to 3 million and none of them have the type of statistical validity to justify the type of calculation that you did above. Your calculation may be accurate within a margin of error of plus or minus 50 or 100 percent but it is certainly a far cry from the authoritative final word. BTW, you could inflate your numbers further by correcting the cost of the Bush inauguration. That cost was at least $57 million. I corrected the number that you cited in another post that you apparently did not read. The cost of security was apparently not included in the $40 million and according to the AP, the cost of security for the event was more than $17 million. The bottom line is that in this economy, Obama should have shown some more leadership and scaled back the size of his coronation. He missed a golden opportunity to show the kind of shared sacrifice that liberals are so fond of talking about where Republicans are concerned. Obama missed a chance to walk the walk.

Welcome to my fan club. If you can recruit a friend, membership will double! :lol: Seriously, I appreciate the kind words. It is great to see some other conservative BGP members taking a more active interest in this forum.

:thumb: Great start!

No, then we can just debate the scores of publicly available Linux distros. :lol: I like Mint, a variant of Ubuntu, myself. It is free, has a beautiful interface, and I have never been infected with a virus running Linux. I currently run Mint on one desktop and Windows XP Pro on another. At this moment, I am configuring a used IBM Thinkpad that just arrived and also uses XP Pro. On Friday, I should be getting a Toshiba Satellite that runs XP Home. I will be running on Firefox 3 on all of the Windows machines, as well as the Linux box. But what I would really like to be running at home is Leopard...

After re-reading the posts, I see that isn't related at all, so just consider my comment as additional trivia concerning the Dow, FWIW. :idunno::isurrender: (My misguided response did give me a reason to use two of the new smilies.)

Since the creation of the Dow Jones Index in 1884, the index has never dropped as sharply on the day of a president's inauguration as it did yesterday.

If the private sector believes that Obama will follow through on all of his spending plans, and many people do, then Wall Street's economic expectations are exactly where they should be. In fact, I believe they may be a bit too optimistic.