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More on Obama and the Plumber
Patterico's Pontifications — ... Today, Jake Tapper at ABC News has an expanded transcript on their discussion. You can click on the link for the full discussion but I was interested in this part: ...

Plumber Joe
Classical Values — Plumber Joe The above video shows the encounter of Plumber Joe Wurzelbacher with Senator Obama on the campaign trail. Joe is not a happy camper. He wants to buy a business. The business makes too much money, over $250,000, and Joe knows his taxes are going up under Obama. Now here is where it gets tricky: Obama said, "My attitude is that if the economy's good for folks from the bottom up, it's gonna be good for everybody. If you've got a plumbing business, you're gonna be better off if you're gonna be better off if you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to ...

Please Help Joe the Plumber
Jon Swift — ... Joe the Plumber (whose real name is Joe Wurzelbacher, which may be unpronounceable but at least sounds more American than Obama) came to the nation’s attention when Obama went traipsing through a suburban Ohio neighborhood whose residents breathed a sigh of relief when they realized he was just a presidential candidate and that they could unlock their doors and didn’t need to dial 911 after all. Joe went up to Obama and said, “I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year. Your new tax plan is going to tax me more, isn't it?" It turns out that ...

Joe the Plumber
Mudville Gazette — ... Let's start from a position of clarity (that likely will be lost in coming days). You might hear or read that Joe is going to be making over $250,000 a year. He won't. This is what Joe told Senator Barack Obama: "I'm getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a year." Joe won't be pocketing that cash - he's concerned Obama wants to take the money he'd use to grow his business, buy tools, hire more employees, repair vehicles etc. and use it elsewhere. So he asked him if that was true: ...

To warn backers against overconfidence, Barack Obama spotlights two words
Top of the Ticket — ... is not often the soul of brevity (he might have been better served, for instance, by ending his chat with the now-famous Joe the Plumber before uttering that "spread the wealth" line). ...

New John McCain ad takes on Barack Obama, Joe Biden and ... George W. Bush
Top of the Ticket — ... McCain follows with another rhetorical question: "And saying we need to 'spread the wealth around?' " That derives, of course, from the now-renowned impromptu policy debate in an Ohio neighborhood between Obama and "Joe the Plumber." ...

Spreading The Wealth
Obsidian Wings — ... Over the weekend, I noticed that the conservative blogs were up in arms about Obama's statement that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." Having seen the actual video, I thought this was pretty silly. But now that John McCain has started misrepresenting what Obama actually said, I thought it might be a good idea to get clear about this. ...

Spreading The Wealth
Political Animal — Spreading The Wealth Over the weekend, I noticed that the conservative blogs were up in arms about Obama's statement that "when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody." Having seen the video, I thought this was pretty silly. But now that John McCain has started misrepresenting what Obama actually said, I thought it might be a good idea to get clear about this. Regrettably, ABC News does not let me embed their video, or even copy the relevant parts of their transcript. The video of Obama's entire conversation, along with the transcript, is ...

McCain: Obama Campaign Has ‘Savaged’ Joe The Plumber
Think Progress — ... Today on Fox News Sunday, McCain said that “Joe the Plumber” was just “the average citizen” asking Obama a question, and he had the right to an answer. (Apparently Obama’s six-minute exchange with Joe was not extensive enough for McCain.) Continuing to hitch his campaign to Joe, McCain claimed the Obama campaign was “savaging” the Ohio citizen. Watch it: ...

Spread the Wealth
Crooked Timber — ... Jake Tapper has a transcript of the whole exchange with Joe the Plumber, in case you haven’t read it yet. Please note two features: the conspicuous lack of anything that sounds anything like Croly. And, perhaps relatedly, the conspicious lack of anything against which Goldberg has an argument, even a bad argument; except that he doesn’t like the conclusion that it would be a good idea to raise taxes on the wealhy. ...

Helen Jones-Kelley’s Flimsy Excuses for Invading Plumber Joe’s Privacy
The Sundries Shack — ... public assistance, appropriate action would be taken. So let’s get this straight. If you live in Ohio and show up in the public eye at all, Ms. Jones-Kelly believes she has the right to go trapising through your confidential public records even though she has no indication whatsoever that youv’e done anything wrong and without reason to believe that you might show up in any of the databases she’s checking. First off, she’s wrong. Wurzelbacher never said that “he had the means”. What he said was , “I’m getting ready to buy a company that makes 250 to 280 thousand dollars a ...

Put your money where your mouth is
The Next Right — ... If the goal of Reich, the president, and the other big spenders in Congress is simply “to create or preserve jobs here in America,” then maybe we can start by reevaluating how we could better spend that money that is already in the budget.  We could certainly consider limiting the salaries of federal employees (as was proposed with corporate executives) and spread the wealth that the federal government is already distributing, rather than printing and/or borrowing ever more money. ...

Obama's Budget: A Handy Guide to Remodeled Priorities
TPM Election Central — ... " for the party in power. In the case of Obama and his Democrats, one priority emerges most clearly from the budget: spreading wealth around for the common good (apologies for the Joe the Plumber reference). ...

SOB Alliance Blogger's Food Stamp Post Leads to Exposure of OH's New Middle-Class (and Above) Entitlement
NewsBusters.org - Exposing Liberal Media Bias — ... before her suspension expired, primarily because of the state record snooping she initiated on Joe the Plumber the day after John McCain's frequent citations of the Northwest Ohioan who had confronted Barack Obama over his taxation proposals a few days earlier. ...

Give an inch, and they try to take it all
Sister Toldjah — ... So the Treasury is acting like it needs more authority to prevent future AIG’s when its own agency was responsible for the doomsday machine part of AIG. Creeping socialism, anyone? Fausta sums it up in a nutshell: The Goal Is to Limit Risk to Broader Economy? Not so. The goal is to seize more elements of the economy. All under the guise of “helping people.” Hmmm. Where’ve we heard that one before?

Obama in Montana
Patterico's Pontifications — ... questioner, an NRA member, called on POTUS for more information about how he’ll pay for health care legislation. Obama acknowledged he might raise taxes, but said he wouldn’t burden the middle class: “We’ve got to get over this notion that you can have something for nothing.” Now which recent Presidential candidate was responsible for nonsense like saying we should spread the wealth around? Oh, yeah. Here’s the second semi-tough question for Obama: ...