Kevin's Watch

Cail wrote:I'm not sure that it's that big of a deal BC. Again, did Bill Clinton pay out of pocket to take Hillary and Chelsea around when he was POTUS? The woman's got a basketball team worth of kids, why is it inappropriate that they travel with her?

Joe had thought about running in '04, but Jill was against it. The Bidens' daughter, Ashley, born in 1981, was still in college and she herself was still working on her doctorate, and in her gut, it just didn't feel like the right time. (As she told Vogue magazine recently, she expressed her opposition one day when a whole bunch of political folks had gathered in the Biden living room to encourage Joe to run. She'd been sunning in a bikini, and she scrawled the word "NO" across her stomach and then walked through the gathering.)

In 2000, Democrat Al Gore took heat for changing his clothing hues. And in 2006, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was ribbed for two hair styling sessions that cost about $3,000.

Then, there was Democrat John Edwards’ $400 hair cuts in 2007 and Republican McCain’s $520 black leather Ferragamo shoes this year.

A review of similar records for the campaign of Democrat Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee turned up no similar spending.

But all the spending by other candidates pales in comparison to the GOP outlay for the Alaska governor whose expensive, designer outfits have been the topic of fashion pages and magazines.

Vain wrote:Again.Bananas.Monkeys

I can only imagine the snide comments...

It's one of those doomed if you do and doomed if you don't things.

I'd rather be asking questions around Biden's so-called 'rhetorical flourish' when he warned that Obama would have to deal with a generated international crisis in the first 6 months of his presidency.

"We're gonna find ourselves in real trouble when we get elected. This is gonna be really hard. This is gonna be really, really, really hard. We're gonna have the largest systemic deficit in modern - not modern - in the history of the world. Literally. Literally. We're gonna find ourselves inheriting a debt, yearly debt this year, that may approach three-quarters of a trillion dollars. You hear me? We left this guy with a $232 billion surplus. At a minimum when we take office - God willing - we're gonna have a $450 billion deficit. And the way the economy is tanking the way it is now it may be as high as $750 billion."

"28 states are in serious trouble and they're about to contribute to the economic downward spiral because what are they doing? Cutting services, laying people off as they lose their tax base. So there are going to be a lot of tough decisions Barack's gonna have to make, a lot of tough decisions, including on foreign policy."

"And here's the point I want to make. Mark my words. Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We're about to elect a brilliant 47-year old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don't remember anything else I said. Watch, we're gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy. And he's gonna have to make some really tough - I don't know what the decision's gonna be, but I promise you it will occur. As a student of history and having served with seven presidents, I guarantee you it's gonna happen. I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate. And he's gonna need help. And the kind of help he's gonna need is, he's gonna need you, not financially to help him, we're gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it's not gonna be apparent initially, it's not gonna be apparent that we're right. Because all these decisions, all these decisions, once they're made if they work, then they weren't viewed as a crisis. If they don't work, it's viewed as you didn't make the right decision, a little bit like how we hesitated so long dealing with Bosnia and dealing with Kosovo, and consequently 200,000 people lost their lives that maybe didn't have to lose lives. It's how we made a mistake in Iraq. We made a mistake in Somalia. So there's gonna be some tough decisions. They may emanate from the Middle East. They may emanate from the sub-continent. They may emanate from Russia's newly-emboldened position because they're floating in a sea of oil."

Plissken wrote:Personally, I think that's a pretty accurate and honest assessment of the situation. And those are two qualities I've been missing in my Administration for quite a while now.