The Baumgarten Report

NORTHWOOD, OH – Forget Joe the Plumber and support for John McCain. The guys who run the local Toledo area plumber’s union hall like Barack Obama.

Local 50 business manager Tom Joseph says most of the guys his union represents make $60,000-$100,000 or more a year. Certainly not the $250,000 they’d have to make in order to be affected by Obama’s tax increases.

Speaking on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com, Joseph said if any of them did make $250,000 or more a year they should pay more in taxes.

His union is actively supporting Obama. Busy getting out the vote.

Joseph thinks he and his union are far more representative of plumbers here in Ohio, and elsewhere in the nation.

The issue, he says, is not Joe the Plumber, who is being used, Joseph argues, to divert attention from the unseemly packages the former heads of Wall Street firms that have crashed are getting.

The polls put Obama and McCain at a statistical dead heat in key state Ohio. Joseph recognizes this. But believes the Buckeye State will go for the Democrat.

Significant, if correct, because never in history has a Republican been elected president without carrying Ohio.

BEXLEY, OH – Harvey Wasserman, senior editor of freepress.org and author of four books about election fraud during the 2004 presidential tally is concerned about a repeat this year. Only this year, he says, there are more eyes on the process than four years ago.

Wasserman was my guest today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com.

He says there will be no recount ever of the 2004 election. That’s because, despite new federal law to the contrary, documentation about that election has been destroyed.

The epicenter of the dispute over the 2004 election was here in Ohio. Wasserman is convinced the election was stolen. But now, he says, it will never be proven.

He agrees with me that, when all the votes are counted and reported, no matter who the winner, it is injurious to the process for election officials to conduct themselves in questionable fashion. And that the American people have the right to wake up on November 5 convinced that the person declared winner truly did win the election.

Next stop, Toledo, home of “Joe The Plumber” to gauge voter sentiment. Join in that conversation at 5 PM New York time tomorrow, Tuesday October 21 by CLICKING HERE.

YOUNGSTOWN, OH – Politics dominates discourse in Ohio, a key swing state in this year’s presidential election.

At Rotellis Restaurant, first time voters Michele and Rebekah don’t agree on who they’ll vote for. But they do agree that they’re going to vote.

“I was really excited to vote,” Michele said of her opportunity to cast a ballot for Hillary Clinton in the primary.

“Me too,” added Rebekah, whose primary vote went for Ron Paul.

Michele isn’t certain who she will vote for, even though all of her peers, including her boyfriend, say they’ll vote for Barack Obama.

“I was for Hillary but now I’m undecided,” she says.

“I don’t like either of them.”

She says the negative campaigning is turning her off to both candidates.

“They bash each other all the time,” she says. “I don’t like negative people in general.”

Rebekah is also undecided. But she knows she will not vote for Obama.

“I just think he has a lot of empty promises,” she explains.

“He says a lot of vague things.”

What of Obama’s mantra of change?

“Change is inevitable,” says Rebekah. “It will happen anyway, on its own.”

Rebekah, whose brother is in the Army, is also disturbed by what she perceives as Obama’s lack of support for the military.

“My brother’s going there, to Iraq,” she says. Obama’s lack of military experience, she says, “has me worried.” She likes, however, McCain’s record of military service, which, she says, would serve the country well if he is elected president.

Carol, the restaurant manager, however, is solidly for Obama.

She likes that he was “very calm” during the last debate, never losing his composure. She says she found McCain’s demeanor off setting.

That’s the form. What about the substance?

“I don’t think either of them is telling the truth,” Carol says.

“I think both of them say what they think we want to hear.”

We’ll keep focused on Ohio for the next two days. News Talk Online will be live from Columbus on Monday and from Toledo on Tuesday at 5 PM New York time. CLICK HERE to join in the conversation.

The global economic crisis and the cost of distributing food are combining to send many people to food pantries for the first time.

That according to World Hunger Year co-founder and president Bill Ayres, my guest today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com.

Locally grown food, Ayres says, by medium sized farms, can help obviate some of the problem. So can home and community gardens.

Ayres says programs to feed the hungry vary from community to community and nation to nation. But he says the problem is increasing, both domestically and globally.

Goldenseal

RED BANK, NJ – One in three or one in four homeless people in the United States, depending on whose figures one cites is a veteran.

While the government has programs designed to help them, many men and women returning to civilian life find it difficult finding and accessing services.

A number of organizations have been established to help them through their problems. Among them, VetWork, located in New Jersey.

New Jersey also has a very vibrant music scene and community. Two musicians, the lead singers of the band Goldenseal, have made it their mission to use their music to raise money to help VetWork help veterans.

They are donating proceeds from their CD, which includes the great single, Streets Of America, a song written by Goldenseal’s Joe Hughes, to VetWork.

Hughes and fellow Goldenseal musician Danny Rongo were my guests today on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com. They performed Streets and two other songs live from the Downtown Cafe in Red Bank, NJ.

Hughes and Rongo were joined by VetWork President Joe Arata, who described the problems many veterans have transitioning back into civilian life.

Arata believes that those who join the armed services of the United States are bright and well trained. While in the military they must master sophisticated weaponry and are generally of good moral character. They are, Arata believes, well qualified for work in the civilian sector. They just, he says, need to be presented with opportunities.

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Photo credit: Gary Baumgarten

Richard Garriott, whose father was a U.S. astronaut, today blasted off aboard a Soyuz TMA spacecraft from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan en route to the International Space Station.

Garriott, who was a guest on News Talk Online on Paltalk.com. got a seat on the Soyuz through Space Adentures, the only private company that provides human space missions. He is now officially part of the Expedition 18 crew, which includes NASA astronaut Michael Fincke and Russian cosmonaut Yuri Lonchakov.

In preparation for his spaceflight, Garriott, son of NASA astronaut Owen Garriott, completed a cosmonaut-training program at the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center located in Star City, Russia. Garriott now is the world’s first second-generation astronaut.

Space Adventures became world renowned in 2001 with the launch of client Dennis Tito, the world’s first privately funded spaceflight participant. Since then, the company has launched four other individuals to space.

Garriott is not just going along for the ride. He will participate in a wide range of activities, including communicating with students associated with the Challenger Center for Space Education via a NASA-sponsored teleconference and conducting two science experiments designed by primary and secondary students from the United Kingdom in partnership with the British National Space Center.

He will also perform a series of experiments that will study the physical impact of spaceflight on astronauts. Garriott will observe the reaction of the eyes to low and high pressure in a microgravity environment; the effects of spaceflight on the human immune system; and astronauts’ sleep/wake patterns and sleep characteristics.

Perhaps of greatest interest, Garriott will photograph a number of ecologically significant places on Earth. These photographs will be compared to shots taken 35 years ago by his father while in space. Together, Garriott and The Nature Conservancy will review the images to document how the Earth has changed in one generation.

A number of other experiments are also on his agenda.