Fuck its silent in here.......

[Slaky]

How about that Jeremiah Wright? He hates America. And Obama was friends with him!

[R-V]

Obama takes questions from House GOP members. I wonder where they hid his teleprompter LOLZ!

Edited to add link to the video. I think McCain proposed a form of Prime Ministers Questions during the campaign. I'm all for doing this again.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/218836

[BH]

Obama takes questions from House GOP members. I wonder where they hid his teleprompter LOLZ!

Edited to add link to the video. I think McCain proposed a form of Prime Ministers Questions during the campaign. I'm all for doing this again.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/218836

He touched a lot of people. The president is black.

[Eli]

The president is black.

Yeah, but for about an hour during his SOTU, I almost forgot that.

[JD]

The president is black.

Yeah, but for about an hour during his SOTU, I almost forgot that.

Almost?  That was close.  Never forget.

[Gilgamesh]

Obama takes questions from House GOP members. I wonder where they hid his teleprompter LOLZ!

Edited to add link to the video. I think McCain proposed a form of Prime Ministers Questions during the campaign. I'm all for doing this again.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/218836

He touched a lot of people. The president is black.

Fuck, that was amazing.  That should happen every month.  I guess the Republicans didn't want the cameras in there until the end? 

I could see why.

[CubFaninHydePark]

Don't let anybody say Obama isn't serious about reaching out to and communicating with the vast majority of the Republican Party and its base:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2010/01/professor_obama_presidents_sta.php

[Slaky]

Don't let anybody say Obama isn't serious about reaching out to and communicating with the vast majority of the Republican Party and its base:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2010/01/professor_obama_presidents_sta.php

4th lower since FDR? What did FDR do for this country? NOTHIN!

[ChuckD]

I read somewhere that he turned off the AVS checking of credit card donations (checks donor's name, address, etc. against the credit card company's records) or something, which could have led to such behavior... but I never saw anything that established that such behavior was in fact occurring.  It may well have, but that's a serious allegation which requires some backup.

Name isn't checked by AVS. Only the address, zip, and the CVV on the back are checked. Seriously, though: responding to MikeC, morph? Hasn't Andre Bauer taught you anything about feeding stray animals?

Go fuck your OWN FACE, man.

Pedant'd for accurate quoting purposes.

And the fact that AVS doesn't check the name (which is my mistake in stating that it does) doesn't change the fact that turning off AVS is still not a good idea unless you're trying to enable bad behavior.

So, I'm thinking about this; and I can't figure out how turning off AVS enables bad behavior.

All that AVS does is match the address given when paying by credit card to the actual billing address of the credit card holder.  For example, when a small business owner buys a printer from a large IT reseller and pays by credit card, that IT reseller will run an AVS check to make sure there is no fraud in the use of the credit card.  It won't check anything else.  So, if the reseller puts the charge through, ships the product, and then the credit card comes back declined because of a mismatched address, the reseller will not get paid by the bank.

In a campaign sense, all that means is that that donations won't be collected by the campaign.  Since Obama's campaign was rolling in the dough, I'm guessing this didn't really concern them.  The trade-off was faster donation processing for not having the most accurate info and risking not getting paid from he bank/credit card company.

Having AVS turned on wouldn't keep people who aren't supposed to be donating from donating.  As long as the billing address supplied matched the billing address of the credit card, the payment/donation would go through.

So, maybe I'm missing something, but why is this now all of a sudden an issue?

It's fucking not - but Mike C posted something about it. So here we are.

Meh, it was something that got some play on the right-leaning blogs during the campaign.  Nothing "all of a sudden" about it, except that MikeC brought it up.  We're way past that now, and I really don't know if anything substantive was even there anyway.

The point I was hinting at with regard to the lack of AVS checking is this: It would only result in bad behavior if people were stealing credit cards and using them to make donations. This seems highly improbable to me, since the ROI on political donations is retardedly low (to say nothing about adding the risk of incarceration in to the equation).

Here's why (I think) it doesn't matter. If you were so-inclined during the '08 Election, you could go to ten different Wal-Marts wearing your finest Groucho Marx disguise, pick up a $4,600 prepaid Visa card (pay cash, natch) with a bogus name/address at each of these fine establishments, and donate ten times the legal limit to John McCain or Mike Huckabee or (lol) Fred Thompson. All of it would be untraceable, and all of it would have passed the muster of the AVS check.

Oh, why hello there.

[MAD]

Don't let anybody say Obama isn't serious about reaching out to and communicating with the vast majority of the Republican Party and its base:

http://blog.lib.umn.edu/cspg/smartpolitics/2010/01/professor_obama_presidents_sta.php

4th lower since FDR? What did FDR do for this country? NOTHIN!

He produced large "workforces" of assholes leaning on their shovels. /right-wing argument/imagery from the 1930's.

[thehawk]

Obama takes questions from House GOP members. I wonder where they hid his teleprompter LOLZ!

Edited to add link to the video. I think McCain proposed a form of Prime Ministers Questions during the campaign. I'm all for doing this again.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/218836

He touched a lot of people. The president is black.

Fuck, that was amazing.  That should happen every month.  I guess the Republicans didn't want the cameras in there until the end? 

I could see why.

Just read the transcript, this was pretty cool.  This was actually a better format than the English Parliament's PMQT, as every other question in that format is a softball question from the PM's own party.  I hope we see a little more of this, would help both sides realize the other size is human.

[Brownie]

Obama takes questions from House GOP members. I wonder where they hid his teleprompter LOLZ!

Edited to add link to the video. I think McCain proposed a form of Prime Ministers Questions during the campaign. I'm all for doing this again.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/218836

He touched a lot of people. The president is black.

Fuck, that was amazing.  That should happen every month.  I guess the Republicans didn't want the cameras in there until the end? 

I could see why.

Just read the transcript, this was pretty cool.  This was actually a better format than the English Parliament's PMQT, as every other question in that format is a softball question from the PM's own party.  I hope we see a little more of this, would help both sides realize the other size is human.

This. And I don't see why Republicans wouldn't have wanted cameras in the room.

[R-V]

Jobs credit analysis:

http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/blog/_archives/2010/1/29/4442032.html

[R-V]

DPD. A wonky explanation of why the "just pass a simple bill" suggestions are unrealistic.

http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/no-such-thing-as-simple-health-reform/

[JD]

You guys know this is a CUBS messageboard, right?