Mocking Education at the RNC

I couldn’t believe my ears yesterday when Abel Maldonado, a Republican state senator of CA, mocked Barack Obama’s education. He invoked his hard-working father, who has just a fourth grade education.

Among the speech lines receiving the most applause: “My father knows more about economics than Senator Obama does with his degrees from all those fancy schools.” (Mercury News)

Was Abel Maldonado criticizing Obama for attending College and receiving an advanced degree? Would he prefer our nation’s leaders drop out of school and do manual labor?

I take his point, that his father has learned a lot about economics by running his own small business. That’s admirable and enviable in today’s economy. But why wasn’t Maldonado a bit concerned about bragging about his father’s skill at managing the family budget considering his state, California, is currently without a state budget and its public schools are facing a budget crisis?

And why wasn’t Maldonado, hand-picked by Bush to appeal to Latino voters, concerned that lauding his uneducated father’s story when Latinos in his state drop out at a staggering 30%?

I know this is politics and they’re trying to win an election, but imagine if Maldonado had stood up and talked about the need for a quality education so that Latinos from working class backgrounds, like himself, could share in the American Dream, which he claims to be living. How much of that dream is available to Californians with a fourth-grade education?

 

Troops Donate Six Times More Money to Obama

OpenSecrets.org, which tracks money in U.S. politics, reports that contributions from deployed troops are six times greater for Obama than they are for McCain.

During World War II, soldiers crouching in foxholes penned letters assuring their sweethearts that they’d be home soon. Now, between firefights in the Iraqi desert, some infantrymen have been sending a different kind of mail stateside: two or three hundred dollars — or whatever they can spare — towards a presidential election that could very well determine just how soon they come home.

Though McCain touts his reputation with military personnel, this popularity is not reflected by campaign donations.

Army Specialist Jay Navas contributed $250 while deployed in Iraq, but it wasn’t over the Internet. “It took some effort to get that check. I had my mom send me my checkbook and I walked to the post office in Camp Liberty in Baghdad with an envelope addressed to Barack Obama in Chicago, Illinois,” he said. “He was right on Iraq long when others were jumping into the sea like lemmings, and that’s hard to do. We’re soldiers and we respect courage.”

Navas anecdotally confirmed that soldiers are often conservative but that many are making an exception in the presidential race. “Most of my friends are conservative Republicans and they say, ‘I’m voting for Barack.’ McCain does not have a lock on the military vote, that’s for sure,” he said. “We’ll complete our duty — I’m deploying next year — because it’s a commitment I made to the nation, not to a president. But we all know that Iraq was a big mistake.”

Despite the fact that “money talks,” McCain will continue to lie and say that he has support from all the veterans groups. He consistently disregards facts for whatever is convenient at the moment. He may continue to brag about the success of the surge, saying that Obama’s judgment on Iraq was faulty despite the fact that he did not support the war in the first place. Perhaps the troops also know that Obama supported the new GI bill, while McCain did not.

It has nothing to do with cameras or basketball. I think they just want to come home.

UPDATE: Contrast the post above with this one, from ThinkProgress, noting that top CEOs donate more to McCain 10:1.  Which candidate has your best interests in mind — the one  the troops favor or the one the CEOs of big corporations favor?  Which is more likely to have your financial interests in mind?