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January 30th, 2008 at 5:57 pm
I’ll be fair. I don’t think Clinton is a Reagan Democrat (in the strict sense of that term). But I do think she’s more so than either Obama or Edwards, in that she’s a member of that centrist neoliberal leadership that has disappointed us, both in principle and electorally, for decades.
January 30th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
When Barack Obama was in the Illinois Senate, there were a number of scandals about innocent men sent to death row. In a several cases, it was the old “beat a confession out of him” problem.
So he sponsored a bill that required that the police videotape police-station confessions. Everyone was against it - the police union, the police chiefs, the Mayor of Chicago, the Republicans, and his fellow Democrats, who were cowed because the Republicans were against.
Obama then proceeded to talk each and every one of those groups, one by one, into supporting the bill. When it came to a vote, it passed the Senate unanimously, passed the House, was signed by the governor, and is now the law of the land. In Chicago.
This tells me two things about Obama: first, that he is concerned about things like police corruption and false convictions; second, that he takes a responsible approach, finding nuts-and-bolts solutions instead of demonizing people and driving wedge issues; and third, that he can work with people outside of his base an his allies to make important things happen.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Yeah well good luck guys. Nader is talking about jumping in and I’m irritated to no end we didn’t play it smarter and nominate someone extremely electable this time. I hate feeling like I’m on a run away train!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
January 30th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
While Lynne’s use of the term “Commander-in-Chief” was in context, I have been noticing its overuse recently–as though it is synonymous with President. In fact, I think Donald Rumsfeld did us a disservice by making the point that only the President should be call “Commander-in-Chief.” Before that comment we had lots of “Commanders-in-Chief” out in the military–well, a dozen or so. I think the title is just one of the functions of the President and even in this Post-9/11 period, while it is important, it is not and should not be all consuming. As for Hillary as President, I leave that to Lynne to expound upon.
Regards — Cliff
January 30th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
After watching the Republican debate this evening, I came away with 3 thoughts:
1) McCain and Romney quibble on non-issues, and neither appear very presidential.
2) The Media does us all a disservice by focusing on non-issues that apparently picque the debate, but are of little value.
3) Congressman Paul appears to have the best handle on the structural problems in our Government, but is given little attention by the moderator.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:50 am
The C-in-C title was not of Rumsfeld’s making. Per Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, “The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States”. It’s not the only duty of the President to be sure, but especially in the post 9/11 world the public has to be comfortable that a candidate will keep us safe. If a candidate cannot clear that hurdle then it really doesn’t matter what else he or she has to say - nothing else will even register with the public.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:02 am
Oh Christopher, as EPMD would say: “You gots to chill.” I’m tired of this war already.
January 31st, 2008 at 12:57 pm
No one has been a WORSE C-i-C than G. W. Bush. Either Clinton or Obama would be a welcome change, despite my hesitations about Clinton.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:00 pm
Christopher,
“Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces” carries a different connotation from “Commander in Chief” period. Ron Paul made a good point about this last night, and it’s a nasty little verbal tick that has wormed its way into our lexicon a lot more since 2001.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:08 pm
“No one has been a WORSE C-i-C than G. W. Bush”
Two words- Jimmy Carter.
No gas lines under W’s watch.
Peter this war will go on for as long as we are alive OR until Islamic radical fundamentalists stop wanting to kill us because we’re not Islamic radical fundamentalists. I’m betting the former and let’s be clear I’m not happy about it. Be it in “the Iraq” as Miss Teen South Carolina would call it or some where else we’ll always be at odds with the IRF’s in the world.
I’m also bracing for the inevitable “I’m surprised how grass roots Hillary has gotten and I’m excited about how on message she’s become” post on the board after she gets the nomination.
January 31st, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Lynne said “I respect what Senator Kennedy has done for just-folks”
She should have said “Look at what Senator Kennedy has done TO folks. He has constantly stolen their wealth from them, while holding onthis own wealth. It is hypocritcal of him to tax the working man to support the so-called poor. I will support taxes for support of the poor after he has given away his millions to charity. Let him put his money where his mouth is.
January 31st, 2008 at 2:11 pm
“I will support taxes for support of the poor after he has given away his millions to charity.”
I am against charity as a rule. If there is an area that we, as a society, need to address, then we all need to pitch in. Addressing such needs by relying on those who volunteer charity effectively punishes good people and rewards those who would skirt such responsibility.
January 31st, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Sorry, on Charity, I disagree.
There are times in your life where your priority MUST be family first (parents) and/or the sick and ill within your family, then community and others.
Later, if those priorities subside, then you can choose which of society’s ills that your feel are of most need.. according to your own morals and values.
There are those who spend their entire lives raising a mentally ill child, or who take care of their elderly parents. They should not be forced to give away resources that they dearly need to give to causes that they are personally offended by or just cannot afford to give to.
Agreeably, there are those who do not take responsibilty for others.
Then again, because of what I have witnessed via foster care, local charities and the Salvation Army, I know there are many who give incredible amounts and seek no acknowledgement (a value in and of itself).
I prefer the world where people give freely to help solve a problem in common cause to the one where others take from you to give to a cause that may not be of value to you.
January 31st, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Hey, MR. GOP Foot soldier. I don’t think just saying “Jimmy Carter” is an argument. You can’t actually believe “W” is a better anything, well maybe better at DWI, which Carter has no practice at. And to Mr. Pubis, how much of that Haliburton money as Cheney given to charity. J.C., if you people still can’t see the light after 7 years I’m afraid you simply never will.
Soldier, ten hut, go clean the latrines!
January 31st, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Oh, here come all the grumpy GOPers talking about how unfair it is to have a progressive taxation system…
January 31st, 2008 at 5:26 pm
Peter,
I beg to differ envoking Carter’s name should bring back enough sour memories for me to not have to keep typing. But like I said no gas lines under W’s watch. I can only say this I’ve only had seven years to “not see the light”. You’ve had over 20 and you still think that bleepin’ peanut farmer was a better president. Who’s bs’ing who here.
Nice DWI pot shot too. You don’t see me playing the if Hillary can’t have some control in her own family’s house how can she run the country card do you!?! Wait I guess I just did….
I love how a thread about Obama and Hillary still degenerates to Bush bashing. At least after 1/20/09 people like Pete, Jon Leibowitz, and Keith Olbermann will have to get inventive about blaming the world’s woes on someone.
January 31st, 2008 at 10:43 pm
Hahaha, good point GOP, they will have some trouble knocking the Prez, because after seven years of this guy’s garbage there’s no way in heck there are enough people like you left to win this one buddy.
January 31st, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Haha good point Peter!
Hey GOP, the problem is you people ACTUALLY think it’s about killing one group of brown people thousands of miles away and stopping another group of brown people from wading across the Rio Grande to look for a better life. In reality those two “issues” won’t win you a thing, ESPECIALLY with the sides you take on them. The real issue is what we can do for people of all colors right here in the U.S.A.
I can hear the crickets chirping now at McCain (hopefully) or Romney’s (Please God no) election night “party.”
February 1st, 2008 at 8:56 am
There ya go, a couple typical liberal attempts to change the subject…
“progessive taxation” “brown people”
Those didn’t come from GOP. And although I understand where Lynne was coming from (and I didn’t take the bait), I am offended that LiL would allow someone to come on and call “you people” racists.
Remember.. the left is convinced that the war is about oil. How can it now be about race? Did the oil story not take?
February 1st, 2008 at 8:57 am
Sorry, I read that wrong.. its immigration that you are “reframing” as racism.. I get it..
As Emily Lutella would say:
“Never Mind”
February 1st, 2008 at 9:23 am
Oh for crying out loud, of course you never come right out and SAY it’s racist, but throw on 96.9 or some other ya-hoo GOP mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging talk show on the radio and see how long it takes one of these guys to give you a reason to hate some group of brown people. That whole party is just one issue after another of raw hatred cloaked in some sort of “just cause.” Sadly, people seem to like to get angry and all it takes is some jerk on the radio gto get you little “footsoldiers” all riled up.
Whatever. I don’t even know why I bother sometimes.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:19 am
“…peanut farmer was a better president.”
Oh I dunno… this might shed some light on that argument.
Then of course there is also the polling,… not to mention the unnecessary war death count. But no worries, I’m sure rivers in Egypt are great this time of year.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:31 am
Next time you want to call me racist, I think I have the right to ask you how many asians, hispanic and black people you have chosen to take into your home…
How many times have you tried to cook puerto rican food, or bought the right (culturally appropriate) clothes, watched the various movies, listen to the variety of music, dealt with the different cultural attitudes towards family and government..
Im so sick of hearing the people who want to talk the talk, but never walk the walk… and then call me racist.
The illegal immigration issue to me is one of sovereignty, security, resources, law and fairness.
If there’s any “hatred” out there, I tend to see it more in the Democrat side than the other (can anyone ever refer to the Bush administration without using the term “regime” or some other negaive, hate-filled attack?)
February 1st, 2008 at 10:35 am
Shawn… on Charity:
Certainly balancing your own priorities against a charitable need is an advantage to a private charity system. In practice, though, we tend to underfund societal needs in this method in aggregate because of self-interest bias.
So when we are talking about who should chip-in to address a group need and who shouldn’t (or really… what are the levels of monetary ‘effort’ that we should expect from individuals as a policy), we are just quibbling about the details in how to make tax policy fair. Of course tax policy should take fairness into account and part of that is considering the institutional needs. The main difference here is that for the sake of making sure that the whole society equips itself to address societal needs, the ‘fairest’ way to do that is through a tax policy, lest we rely on charity with the effect being the punishment of those with good intentions and the rewarding of those who would let self-interest bias skirt their societal contribution to addressing societal problems.
Of course the details matter… that what drafting good, fair, policy is about. But if its our problem, then it should be addressed by all of us. The best way to ensure fairness of how individual contributions in addressing the problem is to design the details to make them fair, not to give up and depend on the less fair method of charity.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:46 am
No gas lines under W’s watch.
No planes crashing into buildings on Jimmy’s.
February 1st, 2008 at 10:48 am
The Racism thing aside. With regard to ‘hate-filled’ attacks on Bush.
Call me crazy but I don’t have any problem hating someone who #*^%s on the Constitution and the Separation of powers, undermining the very mechanisms that define our democracy. The patronizing way that they decided to fool us into a war rather than allow a civic debate on whatever merits there were for the idea further demonstrates the contempt the administration holds for the American People. Getting elected by violating their espoused Federalist principals of state judicial sovereignty further demonstrates a willingness to forgo principals in favor of power. The guy should have been impeached years ago and he still gets away with doing more damage to our government than any blue cocktail dress ever could just highlights the injustice of it all. Polling indicates I’m not alone in these sentiments. Hate? Yeah, I can see where that comes from.
February 1st, 2008 at 12:38 pm
Joe,
You can blame Clinton for that one- he had TWO chances to take OBL out and chose not to. I would actually say that 9/11 is the fault of Bush 1 and Clinton as under their watch these IRF started to get their act together enough to pull that off. Had someone steped up done something years ago it could have been avoided, but hey let’s blame the guy that was in office for only 8 months!
February 1st, 2008 at 1:19 pm
“he had TWO chances to take OBL out and chose not to” - oh here we go, that meme again…debunked, of course. Not only that, when Clinton DID order an attack on an al Quada training camp, Republicans said he was “wagging the dog” to take political pressure of himself. Nice one, Newtists.
Clinton’s administration was the only one to actually stop real terrorist plots before they happened. Because he listened to Richard Clark and other experts, unlike Shrub the Lesser. (Yes, I use names, because I find it hard to use the term “president” for this guy.) No, Clinton himself didn’t arrest terrorists, but he emphasized it in the last part of his term as the threat got more evident. He also at the very end of his term handed over a warning to Bush to MAKE SURE HE PAID THE HELL ATTENTION to it. Bush didn’t, and maybe 9/11 couldn’t have been prevented in 8 months of a new president’s term, but MAYBE it could have.
Do we have to go over this history 20 times 7 years later? This is all old known facts, folks.
February 1st, 2008 at 3:26 pm
Again, I love how the thread about the Dems two candidates has gone into Bush bashing- I guess one silver lining of a Dem presidency is that none of you will have anything to complain about anymore?
What will you do with all that free time? I mean feminists can’t complain about the glass ceiling as a woman will have effectively shattered it. OR Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton can’t race hustle and extort people out of millions because one of their own will be the leader of the free world.
“Clinton’s administration was the only one to actually stop real terrorist plots before they happened.” Do you really believe that? Honestly? Because we all know that our government no matter who’s the sitting president tells us everything right?
Just because it’s not all over CNN or Fox News doesn’t mean stuff isn’t happening right now that none of us will ever know about.
As far as my “meme” goes I’ll choose to believe my sources and you can believe yours.
“maybe 9/11 couldn’t have been prevented in 8 months of a new president’s term, but MAYBE it could have.” NOTHING could have prevented that. The warning signs were there- look at the 1993 bombing. But we had our heads in the sand. We ALL (politicans and citizens alike) had our heads so far up our collective asses (”that could nver happen here.”) I’m surprised it took as long as it did for us to get our wake up call. This stuff has been going on all over the world for decades and just seven years after 9/11 most people piss and moan at the airport for the “inconveinence” of having to take our shoes and belts off. I know people FROM NYC who do it. You’d think they’d be a little more understanding? Nah. Terrorism is a fact of life folks, stuff is going to keep happening. I can only hope that whomever is elected in November makes sure that over the next four years at least under their watch our heads don’t go back in the sand wishing the IRF’s can sit down and “hug it out bitch.”
February 1st, 2008 at 4:34 pm
Of course you can, Footsoldier. As we’ve all learned by now, you can blame anything on Bill Clinton.
John Ashcroft reassigning dozens of FBI agents from counter-terror to the dirty-movie patrol? Clinton’s fault.
Bush demoting the Director of Counter-Terrorism from a cabinet position to sub-cabinet level? Clinton’s fault.
The President of the United States telling the CIA staffer who read him the August 6th Presidential Daily Brief “OK, you’ve covered your ass now,” and then going on vacation? Totally Clinton’s fault.
Downgrading terrorism as an issue to spend more time on great power jousting with China? That was Bill Clinton’s fault, too.
You can’t blame Bush for all of this - fighting terrorism is hard. You know what makes it a little bit easier? Trying. Like Clinton did, and like Bush didn’t.
February 1st, 2008 at 5:16 pm
Joe, I guess your right. All those dead AQ terrorists are all fake. Those death photos I’ve seen on the news- fake.
Those guys shooting at my family in Iraq and Afghanistan- fake.
The photos I’ve seen from my friends and family of dead guys they killed over there- also fake.
Right Joe, we haven’t fought terrorism at all in the last seven years.
February 1st, 2008 at 9:40 pm
I dunno… it seems to me that an administration that really wanted to curb terrorism might want to rethink things when policies actually create more of them Sisyphus anyone?
February 1st, 2008 at 11:51 pm
GOP Foot Soldier:
If you go back in history the democratic party has really never supported any one at war time. (Check out the approval ratings at war times on dems) What I have never understood is W’s reason for going into Iraq? (Not wmd’s, or civil rights so what was it?) I have voted Republican and I would like to Bash Bush like everyone else here for his ineffectiveness on the war against terrorism. I know people that have been over in Iraq and they say “If you could see what was going on there everone would understand why we are there” But we have never been told that we went there for civil rights reasons. What happened to 9/11? I also relunctantly watched the documentary by Michael Moore and I became a beleiver that Bush and Family are much too entwined in oil.
February 2nd, 2008 at 9:40 am
As a born and raised resident of Mass for over 40 years, I don’t give a rat’s behind what the Kennedys have to say or who they support. Give me a break!
I laughed my ass off at Ted’s speech about how important “change” is!!! This coming from someone who has been in the senate since the Mezazoic era.
Park the bus, Ted.
ps. I like Obama, I just like Hillary better.
February 2nd, 2008 at 4:34 pm
I wouldn’t want to argue against my actual points, either. You clearly can’t keep up.
Right Joe, we haven’t fought terrorism at all in the last seven years.
We’ve fought terrorist a lot in the past six years. Just not in the past seven. There was almost a whole year there that it was off the White House’s radar, because it just wasn’t that important to them.
Maybe if they’d listened to the outgoing adminstration who told them to make terrorism their top priority, things could have been different. But we’ll never know, because they didn’t.