Articles of Interest...

Oh, I didn't say he got there by logical processes.

Marxism is usually an indication of not understanding how things truly work. Things that truly work well.

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klmmicro said:

Actually, a lot of people knew his agenda and spoke out about it during the campaign. The mainstream press ignored anything that could have put a bad light on their messiah's image, but the truth was (and still is) out there.

A lot of his supporters DO (and did) want socialism. It means that they can have a free ride that pays them even better...

This guy is going to be a one term man. His inexperience is screaming out and friends of mine who are democrats are even shaking their heads. They thought they hated America, but realized that living in a third world craphole would be much worse. They are voting independent next time around.

As for the republicans, what a bunch of spineless trash! They did their best to not ask any of the hard questions when they were in front of the cameras. They had kid gloves on and it sure looks like they threw the election. John McCain? He was the crappiest candidate they could have fielded...a guaranteed loss who had been locked out in the primaries (for all intents and purposes).

The press showed their true leanings this election and are paying a price for it now. The harder to the left the political world rolls, the more people seem to seek right of center information outlets.

I just hope there is an America left by the next election.

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That is all true. An impartial media would have helped. Unfortunately, we are fighting a number of cultural factors that color the debate. Most of the schools/colleges in the US promote a liberal agenda. How do we fix that?

chicoles said:

That is all true. An impartial media would have helped. Unfortunately, we are fighting a number of cultural factors that color the debate. Most of the schools/colleges in the US promote a liberal agenda. How do we fix that?

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Well, I sent my daughter to a private school. That was the only way I could figure out how to do it on short order.

On the larger scale and longer term, we elect the political will for vouchers to charter schools. I cannot think of any other way to do it.

You are right about the battle. Both of my kids have been threatened by teachers for stating their right of center views. My youngest spent a week in the principals office after telling a teacher the truth...the guy was attempting political indoctrination and my daughter called him on it. I had a ball talking with the school staff over that one!

Home or charter schools are the only way I can see. If we can gain enough control over the K-12, we can get rid of the leftist/progressive/socialist/(insert any other radical name descriptor here) agenda from the classroom.

tipsgnob said:

a LOT of us are proud to be considered liberals.

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and I do not have a problem with that at all., as long as it does not start affecting others. Your point of view is special to you. I am proud of many of my stances, of my heritage and such. I do not try to indoctrinate other peoples children into my points of view though.

A LOT of us are proud to be considered conservatives.

tipsgnob said:

a LOT of us are proud to be considered liberals.

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Hi, tips ...

I for one would really be interested in your definition of the term "liberal." Come on ... tell us what you're so "proud" of. Thanks ...

Vi

tipsgnob said:

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These traits are seldom what one actually sees in those proclaiming to be liberals. The modern liberal movement (on a whole) has been assumed by special interest. Most people I run into that make the claim of being a liberal are the narrowest minded people I have ever encountered. Most carry many "anti" viewpoints, which is neither generous or free from prejudicial thought/actions.

Not aiming this at you at all, BTW. Just stating a fairly common observation made by my group of friends and I.

I have some friends that are true liberals, and I have no problem with them. They are not constantly on a war path that they are told is the latest issue. They think for themselves. They seem to be in the minority.

Tips ...

Liberal:

1. "One who is generous" ... with other people's money.

2. "Greater freedom in political or religious matters"... The Fairness Doctrine to enable the stifling of conservative free speech. The removal of anything pertaining to religion in the public square.

3. "One free from prejudice or narrow thinking" ... Quotas based upon race. Suppression of speech through hate speech regulations and laws.

Conservative:

One who desires/promotes a smaller central government, power to the states, honest money, individual liberty, free minds and free markets.

Anything else, tips?

Vi

tipsgnob said:

a LOT of us are proud to be considered liberals.

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I am saying it is important to ask why you are a liberal. If you say it is because Rush Limbaugh is fat then how are we advancing the dialogue.

klmmicro said:

Well, I sent my daughter to a private school. That was the only way I could figure out how to do it on short order.

On the larger scale and longer term, we elect the political will for vouchers to charter schools. I cannot think of any other way to do it.

You are right about the battle. Both of my kids have been threatened by teachers for stating their right of center views. My youngest spent a week in the principals office after telling a teacher the truth...the guy was attempting political indoctrination and my daughter called him on it. I had a ball talking with the school staff over that one!

Home or charter schools are the only way I can see. If we can gain enough control over the K-12, we can get rid of the leftist/progressive/socialist/(insert any other radical name descriptor here) agenda from the classroom.

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But we pay a lot for the schools here in Cali. Why should they not work for us also.

When i was a kid one of the first political books I read was Buckley's "God and Man at Yale" He complains about liberal, anti religion teachers and textbooks at Yale. We are now facing the problems assiciated with a biased educational system. (he wrote this in 194

The media bias, the edu system, and the entertainment/Hollywood know it alls...WTF

A liberal is an ever changing definition. It becomes meaningless. That's a problem.


Harry Truman believed himself to be a liberal, but by todays standards he would not be a liberal at all.

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chicoles said:

I am saying it is important to ask why you are a liberal. If you say it is because Rush Limbaugh is fat then how are we advancing the dialogue.

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who is rush limbaugh?

I'm starting to see a pattern here with a large post total (8,000 in under a year??) and ignorant statements (no offense to long time members of RIU and the informed).
It just seems to me whenever a political discussion is taking place the ones who have EXCESSIVE posts and comments never make a valid point and truely are mistaken. I think this tells me you have your hands full sitting at a computer screen all day discussing how to grow herb and not researching information pertaining to the world around you. While your knowledge on cultivation is quite helpful to someone like myself who still has questions this does not give you a clear perspective of how the world works.
I found for myself at least that when I use such an enlightening and healing plant, it allows me to think more clearly and ask more questions and seek more answers. Apparently for some it just makes you run off at the mouth and only post definitions of what a liberal is. I will leave now before I say too much

stringtheory said:

I'm starting to see a pattern here with a large post total (8,000 in under a year??) and ignorant statements (no offense to long time members of RIU and the informed).
It just seems to me whenever a political discussion is taking place the ones who have EXCESSIVE posts and comments never make a valid point and truely are mistaken. I think this tells me you have your hands full sitting at a computer screen all day discussing how to grow herb and not researching information pertaining to the world around you. While your knowledge on cultivation is quite helpful to someone like myself who still has questions this does not give you a clear perspective of how the world works.
I found for myself at least that when I use such an enlightening and healing plant, it allows me to think more clearly and ask more questions and seek more answers. Apparently for some it just makes you run off at the mouth and only post definitions of what a liberal is. I will leave now before I say too much

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thanks for your opinion.

This is why you don't let Governments run businesses... read on ..... lawdy.

An Offer Banks Can Refuse

A deal with Dick Durbin could come back to haunt them.

As we went to press last night, Arizona Senator Jon Kyl still had enough votes to defeat a plan allowing judges to break mortgage contracts. So-called cramdown legislation, allowing bankruptcy judges to change the terms on some mortgages, has never gained political traction. But bank lobbyists are threatening to snatch away Mr. Kyl's looming victory.
Cramdown would be terrible for banks and the rule of law, but in the current crisis banks also favor an expansion of the FDIC's line of Treasury credit to $500 billion from $30 billion. That extra credit might ease the FDIC's proposed deposit-insurance fee increase for banks, as well as assist its toxic-asset purchase plan. We're told that Senate assistant majority leader Dick Durbin is telling banks that if they want that extra credit-line for the FDIC, they'd best sign on to cramdown. A spokesman for Mr. Durbin denies threatening banks, but we also know he refuses to give the FDIC credit increase a stand-alone vote.
Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit has already rolled over on cramdown -- not coincidentally after Citi became the largest recipient of federal assistance. Now we hear the politicians are leaning on J.P. Morgan Chase and CEO Jamie Dimon. A Morgan spokesman declined comment, which isn't a good sign.
Banks aren't popular on Capitol Hill or anywhere else these days, and they should be wary of alienating the few allies they have. Cramdown looked like a sure thing only a few weeks ago, but it has stalled thanks to Mr. Kyl's principled stand and coalition building. If the banks cut a deal with Mr. Durbin now, they may live to regret it when they look for friends to save them from Barney Frank and Chris Dodd on re-regulation.


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Obama's Gitmo

• By WILLIAM McGurn
  

Helen Thomas: Why is the president blocking habeas corpus from prisoners at Bagram? I thought he taught constitutional law. And these prisoners have been there . . .
Robert Gibbs: You're incorrect that he taught on constitutional law.
You know we live in interesting times when Helen Thomas is going after Barack Obama. Miss Thomas was asking the White House press secretary last week why detainees at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan should not have the same right to challenge their detention in federal court that last year's Supreme Court ruling in Boumediene v. Bush gave to Guantanamo's detainees. All Mr. Gibbs could do was interrupt and correct the doyenne of the White House press corps about Mr. Obama's class as a law professor.
Getty ImagesBagram Air Base in Afghanistan.



The precipitate cause of Miss Thomas's question was a ruling earlier this month by federal district Judge John Bates. Judge Bates says that last year's Supreme Court ruling on Gitmo does apply to Bagram. The administration has appealed, saying that giving detainees such rights could lead to protracted litigation, disclosure of intelligence secrets and harm to American security. The wonderful irony is that, at least on the logic, everyone is right.
Start with Judge Bates. The judge is surely correct when he says the detainees brought in to Bagram from outside the country are "virtually identical" to those held at Guantanamo. He's also correct in asserting that the Supreme Court ruled the way it did out of concern "that the Executive could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain an individual" at Bagram.
But President Obama's appeal is also right. Though most headlines from the past few days have focused on the release of Justice Department memos on CIA interrogation, the president's embrace of the Bush position on Bagram is far more striking. Mr. Gibbs became tongue-tied while trying to explain that stand. But the Justice Department brief is absolutely correct in asserting that "there are many legitimate reasons, having nothing to do with the intent to evade judicial review, why the military might detain an individual in Bagram."
Finally, critics like Miss Thomas also have it right. In a long and thorough post called "Obama and habeas corpus -- then and now," Glenn Greenwald, a former constitutional law litigator who blogs at Salon.com, exposes the gaping contradiction between past Obama rhetoric on the inviolability of the right to habeas corpus and the new Obama reality. He also quotes Mr. Obama's reaction to Boumediene as a "rejection of the Bush administration's attempt to create a legal black hole at Guantanamo."
Manifestly, Mr. Greenwald believes that "black hole" is simply moving to Bagram. "I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law," he writes. "But these actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good."
How can all these people be right? The answer is that each is responding to a different contradiction raised by the president's Guantanamo policy. In an impassioned 2006 speech on the Senate floor on the right to habeas corpus, Mr. Obama declared, "I do not want to hear that this is a new world and we face a new kind of enemy." During the campaign, his language implied that all we needed to settle the detainee issue once and for all was to shut down Gitmo.
As president, he is finding out that this very much is a new world, that we do face a new enemy, and that the problems posed by Guantanamo have less to do with the place than the people we detain there.
Put simply, the U.S. needs the ability to detain people we know to be dangerous without the evidence that might stand up in a federal criminal court. Because we can't say when this war will end, moreover, we also need to be able to detain them indefinitely. This is what makes the war on terror different, and why our policies will never fit neatly into a legal approach that is either purely criminal or purely military.
The good news is that Mr. Obama is smart enough to know that the relative obscurity of Bagram, not to mention the approval he has received on Guantanamo, enables him to do the right thing here without, as Mr. Greenwald notes, worrying too much that he will be called to account for a substantive about-face.
The bad news is that we seem to have reached the point where our best hope for sensible war policy now depends largely on presidential cynicism.


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http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409

FDR Prolonged Depression...

Great article on GM....people are so easily fooled...

GM Is Becoming a Royal Debacle

• By HOLMAN W. JENKINS, JR.

It's good to be the king -- until you start tripping over your own robe.
So King Barack the Mild is finding as he tries to dictate the terms of what amounts to an out-of-court bankruptcy for Chrysler and GM. He wants Chrysler's secured lenders to give up their right to nearly full recovery in a bankruptcy in return for 15 cents on the dollar. They'd be crazy to do so, of course, except that these banks also happen to be beholden to the administration for TARP money.
Ismael Roldan


Wasn't TARP supposed to be about restoring a healthy banking system? Isn't that a tad inconsistent with banks just voluntarily relinquishing valuable claims on borrowers? Don't ask.
Kingly prerogative also conflicts with kingly prerogative in the case of GM's unsecured creditors, who are the sticking point in agreeing to a turnaround plan by the drop-dead date of June 1. His retainer, Steven Rattner, has delivered word that the king's pleasure is that these unsecured creditors give up 100% of their claims in return for GM stock.
It may also be the king's pleasure, he advised, to convert at some point the government's own $13 billion in bailout loans into GM stock.
There's just one problem: Why on earth would GM's creditors -- who include not just bondholders but the UAW's health-care trust -- want any part of this deal?
They've already seen that the rights and privileges of shareholders are not worth diddly when the king is throwing his prerogatives around. He dispensed with the services of GM chief Rick Wagoner, though the king owned not a single share of GM stock at the time. His minions communicated the king's pleasure that GM consider discontinuing its GMC brand, maker of pickups and SUVs that offendeth the royal eye -- though these vehicles earn GM's fattest profit margins.
His minions haven't asked GM to give up the Chevy Volt, even after determining it will be a profitless black hole, because of the king's fondness for green.
No wonder the king's mediation of 40 years of stalemated labor and business issues in the auto sector isn't going so well. There's a reason royal discretion has long been outmoded as a way to run an economy: Things just work better if a realm's subjects are left to resolve their own disputes and interests through the impersonal mechanism of the markets and the law.
His current bailout strategy amounts to asking thousands of bondholders and GM retirees to buy stock in a GM that the king's own policies mean they'd be loony to buy. Add the fact that passenger cars and trucks in the U.S. are a trivial source of greenhouse gases in any case -- they could all become carbonless and it would be irrelevant in the face of China's and India's coal use. King Barack has only been on his throne for three months. His policies already have devolved into savage incoherence.
But let's face it, the king is also somewhat lacking in the lion-heartedness department.
He's on record saying that the only sensible way to reduce fossil-fuel dependence is to put a price on it, as with cap and trade. Then why not have the courage of his convictions and do away with the proven ineffectualness and perversity of trying to regulate automotive fuel mileage directly?
He could release GM, Chrysler and Ford to make those cars, and only those cars, consumers would reward with profits (including fuel-efficient cars they might suddenly find desirable if Mr. Obama moves ahead with plans to tax carbon emissions).
He wouldn't be foolishly trying to rewrite GM's labor contracts and splitting negotiating hairs with its lenders. GM -- along with Chrysler and Ford -- might not avoid a trip through the bankruptcy courts. But either way, they'd be better able to meet their obligations to creditors, including UAW retirees, if allowed to focus on making cars the public actually wants to buy.
King Barack could take a leaf from St. Jimmy the Simple, who faced a collapse of the railroad industry. He signed the Staggers deregulation law, returning power to the industry itself to decide what services to provide and which customers to chase. What had previously been an industrial basket case, halfway nationalized already, fixed itself almost overnight.
He might consult with the Sage of Omaha, who has become a fan of the rail business. What would make Sir Warren similarly enthused about investing in GM? The answer, we're guessing, is not more cars like the Chevy Volt. The banks get all the attention, but they have the power to earn their way out of trouble. Not GM, the way things are going. St. Warren could do the king a real service by warning him off a path with Detroit that could end up blighting all the years of his reign.


The Govt. knows best... it's okay though....it's not their money they are wasting.


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