Legion World Forums LEGION COMPANION The Anywhere Machine Dear God let election day be over!

Hey RTVU2,

I don't think you're quoting me. I never said anything about sand or people having to accept something they are morally opposed to. That's not even my style.

Go back and check the posters who typed that, because that is not me speaking.

To clarify, I really don't care if people are black, white, red, yellow, polka dot, striped, handicapped, gay, normal, stinky, clean smelling or whatever. Sometimes if people are stinky, I try to move upwind... but that's my own personal failing . Those things are all traits, not defining characteristics. Words and actions go alot farther to defining a person's character than any physical property I've ever noticed. I'm sure you are quoting someone else but thinking it was me.

As for how you are supposed to feel about something... I'm sorry but I can't tell you how to feel. The only thing I can do is give you hope that in four more years you'll have another chance to do something about it.

As for America becoming more secular and intolerant, I don't have any numbers here in front of me to back up any conclusion. If Kerry would have won the election, would it be right for me to conclude that America is becoming more homosexual? There's alot of people that think America has been steadily moving away from the church for years. I don't know what to think about that, to be honest with you.

Mike - minesurfer

I found the post you're referring to... It was by Rickshaw on page 12, fifth post.

He talks about the silent majority speaking up after feeling like other people's morality was being forced on them. No where did I see him specifically state that he was morally opposed to gays and gay marriage. In fact he pretty much states that who you want to spend your life with is your business.

edit for typo

Sorry about that, so many long posts from everybody and I am getting confused.

Didin't mean to attribute anything that you didin't state yourself. I am done wiht this. I am goig to go home and watch the OC and wait four more years.

Hi STF : I hope none of my comments made it seem like I had a blanket dislike for any or all Americans because that couldn't be further from the truth. I don't even dislike conservatives - just some of their ideologies.

I actually lived in Ohio for a long time and have many friends and family scattered all over the country. Its a country I visit regularly and I know it to be full of many wonderful people. I just wish that some Americans would remember that there are also many other wonderful people around the world who don't deserve to have U.S. bombs falling on them or to see their country remoulded as America II.

Hi minesurfer : I feel bad that it seems like there are about 3 or 4 of us liberals ganging up on you in this thread and you're having to debate all of us on your own as the lone Bush-supporter. When really you should be out there celebrating!

I don't really have much to add to this thread at the moment (other than I think France were perfectly in their right to prevent what they perceived as an illegal invasion - if that were the case) but I will say that its a pleasure debating with someone who doesn't lose their temper or slip into condescending mode (as I regretfully am wont to do sometimes - apologies). Hats off to you minesurfer.

Hi everyone else : Its just four more years. You can make it!

First of all, France's war in Vietnam was to regain control over its former colony which was later occupied by Japan. So of course Vietnamese are going to assert their national sovereignty. They fought off the Japanese during WWII. More power to them for throwing off the yolk of colonialism! And they established a constitution almost identical to that of the US. So why didn't the US help support this fledgling democracy? I don't know, but it fits its track record. They fought to help turn it back into a European colony. Way to go! That led the Vietnamese to the realization that US-style democracy isn't what the US wants in the third world (due to economic interests), and that socialism was the only real viable avenue open to colonized peoples in the third world. The Eastern Bloc offered them more chance of freedom than cooperation with the US (which only got them the likes of Ngo Dinh Diem). Maybe if you understood the real history, you could help prevent a sad chapter in the US's history from being repeated.

Second of all, WWI was a distaster of a war that shouldn't be glorified. It was an imperialist war to the highest degree. An example of capitalism-run-amok. The US stepped in at the last minute just in time to rebuild Europe and make a killing of it. Meanwhile veterans were denied their benefits, the national guard called on them when they protested. Blacks who had fought in the war came home to find the same institutionalized racism that they'd left. And no jobs. Meanwhile the postwar order put in place by the Versailles treaty was one of the biggest factors in Hitler's rise to power.

As for France and the US in the UN... welcome to the international community. The world became a smaller place after the atom was split. The stakes are too high (Yet Bush says he's willing, if not eager, to experiment with the use of tactical nukes preemptively). You're letting emotions and narrowness of perspective rule your judgement. "...slapping away our hand," indeed!

I cheered for France and Germany when they opposed the US' plans for invasion in the UN. I felt more represented by them than I did by my own government. I was glad someone was standing up to Bush's insanity. (not that I think Chirac really represents the people of France, or has an enlightened foreign policy) Turns out that I and the millions of people who protested across the world were right, and the Deulfer report and the 9/11 commision have borne this out in painfully obvious detail. This is what the "global test" Republicans harp about means, but I guess this concept is too complex for Republicans to understand, so they have to lie about "permission slips."

But Bush didn't want international support. He wanted it to fail so that he could come back to Congress, say diplomacy had failed (and convince the easily mislead that the world had turned its back on us, which was especially potent since they mislead Americans into believing that there were ties between Iraq and Al-Qeida) and rush us to war. Anyone who watched saw that. It's the same thing they do with education or social security or medicare. Project for a New American Century. I'd like to be in a new millenium about now. (L*)

Oh not to mention that Osama is splitting his sides laughing at us. Looks like the joke is on us. As a New Yorker who watched 9/11 happen, I feel like I've been betrayed by Bush. He's hijacked 9/11 to excuse every piece of his radical right-wing agenda from attacking Iraq to giving airlines huge cash giveaways, and allowing said airlines to lay off massive amounts of employees anyway. New York is DEAD LAST in the country in per capita Anti-terror spending. Our Republican mayor shut down many of our firehouses. So we have less firemen, what the hell do we do if there's another attack (because Kansas isn't a terrorist target, WE are). Mayor Bloomberg thinks it's smart to slash the city budget and rely on homeland security money for everything, and yet we're getting very little. I wonder if it will get worse if we elect a Democrat mayor and the the Republicans decide to show us the error of our ways. Bush gives lip service to troops and firemen, but he's all talk. Meanwhile people on the other side of the country are using it to justify everything under the sun. People who value the lives of some over others based on where they live are wrong. But I'm not talking about Bush rewarding the red states and punishing the blue states with federal funding (although I could), in this case I'm talking about which country they live in. That includes both bin Laden and George W. Bush. Most New Yorkers don't support using one tragic loss of innocent human lives to justify another.

Okay I HAD to respond. I'll keep responding as long as you keep making factual errors. He bombed those targest in pursuit of OSAMA BIN LADEN, something Bush could never be bothered to do before 9/11 or after the invasion of Iraq.

And let me respond to the G. Gordon Liddy comment in this post so I can be done. He is the highest form of traitor. He may be loyal to the army, but he's an enemy of the people. Interfering with United States elections, especially on behalf of a political campaign, is morally reprehensible. It's a crime against democracy. It's not as bad as staging a military coup, but it's up there.

Okay, I was hoping to find an actual scan of this. This is just a quick mockup, although it's basically accurate, even if the fonts aren't quite right..;.

<font face="Arial">...ldiers[/b]</font s></font f>
<font face="Arial"><font size="3">The hopefuls in the Democrat camp really believed victory in the US election was within their grasp. How did they get it so wrong? They failed to appreciate, says Simon Schama, that their country is now in fact two nations that loathe and fear each other - Godly and Worldly America</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Simon Schama</font s></font f>
<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Friday November 5, 2004</font s></font f>
<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">The Guardian</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">In the wee small hours of November 3 2004, a new country appeared on the map of the modern world: the DSA, the Divided States of America. Oh yes, I know, the obligatory pieties about "healing" have begun; not least from the lips of the noble Loser. This is music to the ears of the Victor of course, who wants nothing better than for us all to Come Together, a position otherwise known as unconditional surrender. Please, fellow curmudgeons and last ditchers, can someone on the losing side just for once not roll over and fall into a warm bath of patriotic platitudes at such moments, but toot the flute of battle instead; yell and holler and snarl just a wee bit? I don't want to heal the wound, I want to scratch the damned thing until it hurts and bleeds - and then maybe we'll have what it takes to get up from the mat. Do we think the far-right Republican candidate Barry Goldwater, in the ashy dawn of his annihilation in 1964, wanted to share? Don't think so. He wanted to win; sometime. And now, by God, he has.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">"We are one nation," the newborn star of Democrats, Senator-elect Barack Obama, exclaimed, even as every salient fact of political life belied him. Well might he invoke Lincoln, for not since the Civil war has the fault line between its two halves been so glaringly clear, nor the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Even territorially (with the exception of Florida, its peninsular finger pointing expectantly at tottering Cuba), the two Americas are topographically coherent and almost contiguous. One of those Americas is a perimeter, lying on the oceans or athwart the fuzzy boundary with the Canadian lakes, and is necessarily porous and outward-looking. The other America, whether montagnard or prairie, is solidly continental and landlocked, its tap roots of obstinate self-belief buried deep beneath the bluegrass and the high corn. It is time we called those two Americas something other than Republican and Democrat, for their mutual alienation and unforgiving contempt is closer to Sunni and Shia, or (in Indian terms) Muslim and Hindu. How about, then, Godly America and Worldly America?</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Worldly America, which of course John Kerry won by a massive landslide, faces, well, the world on its Pacific and Atlantic coasts and freely engages, commercially and culturally, with Asia and Europe in the easy understanding that those continents are a dynamic synthesis of ancient cultures and modern social and economic practices. This truism is unthreatening to Worldly America, not least because so many of its people, in the crowded cities, are themselves products of the old-new ways of Korea, Japan, Ireland or Italy. In Worldly America - in San Francisco, Chicago, San Diego, New York - the foreigner is not an anxiety, but rather a necessity. Its America is polycultural, not Pollyanna.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Godly America, on the other hand, rock-ribbed in Dick Cheney's Wyoming, stretched out just as far as it pleases in Dubya's deeply drilled Texas, turns its back on that dangerous, promiscuous, impure world and proclaims to high heaven the indestructible endurance of the American Difference. If Worldly America is, beyond anything else, a city, a street, and a port, Godly America is, at its heart (the organ whose bidding invariably determines its votes over the cooler instructions of the head), a church, a farm and a barracks; places that are walled, fenced and consecrated. Worldly America is about finding civil ways to share crowded space, from a metro-bus to the planet; Godly America is about making over space in its image. One America makes room, the other America muscles in.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Worldly America is pragmatic, practical, rational and sceptical. In California it passed Proposition 71, funding embryonic stem cell research beyond the restrictions imposed by Bush's federal policy. Godly America is mythic, messianic, conversionary, given to acts of public witness, hence the need - in Utah and Montana and a handful of other states - to poll the voters on amendments to their state constitution defining marriage as a union between the opposite sexes. But then Worldly America is said to feed the carnal vanities; Godly America banishes and punishes them. From time to time Godly America will descend on the fleshpots of Worldly America, from Gotham (it had its citadel-like Convention there after all) to Californication, will shop for T-shirts, take a sniff at the local pagans and then return to base-camp more convinced than ever that a time of Redemption and Repentance must be at hand. But if the stiff-necked transgressors cannot be persuaded, they can be cowed and conquered.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">No wonder so many of us got the election so fabulously wrong even into the early hours of Tuesday evening, when the exit polls were apparently giving John Kerry a two- or three-point lead in both Florida and Ohio. For most of us purblind writers spend our days in Worldly America and think that Godly America is some sort of quaint anachronism, doomed to atrophy and disappear as the hypermodernity of the cyber age overtakes it, in whatever fastness of Kentucky or Montana it might still circle its wagons. The shock for the Worldlies is to discover that Godly America is its modernity; that so far from it withering before the advance of the blog and the zipdrive, it is actually empowered by them. The tenacity with which Godly America insists the theory of evolution is just that - a theory - with no more validity than Creationism, or that Iraqis did, in fact, bring down the twin towers, is not in any way challenged by the digital pathways of the information age. In fact, such articles of faith are expedited and reinforced by them. Holy bloggers bloviate, Pentecostalists ornament their website with a nimbus of trembling electronic radiance and, for all I know, you can download Pastor John Ashcroft singing the Praises of the Lord right to your Godpod.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Nor, it transpires, is the exercise of the franchise a sure-fire way for the Democrats to prevail. The received wisdom in these Worldly parts (subscribed to by yours truly; mea culpa) was that a massively higher turn out would necessarily favour Kerry. P Diddy's "Vote or Die" campaign was credited with getting out young voters en masse who ignored the polls in 2000. We saw a lot of Springsteen and Bon Jovi and ecstatic upturned faces. Who could possibly match their mobilisation, we thought? Answer: Jehovah and his Faithful Servant St Karl the Rove. The biggest story of all in 2004 is the astounding success of the Republicans in shipping millions of white evangelicals to the polls who had also stayed at home four years earlier. We thought we were fired up with righteous indignation - against the deceits of the propaganda campaign for the Iraq war, against the gross inequities of the tax cuts - but our fire was just hot air compared to the jihad launched by the Godlies against the infamy of a tax rollback, of merely presuming to diss the Dear Leader in a time of war. And the battalions of Christian soldiers made the telling difference in the few critical places where Godly and Worldly America do actually rub shoulders (or at least share a state), Ohio above all.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">By the lights of the psephology manuals, Ohio ought to have been a natural for the Democrats: ageing industrial cities such as Akron and Dayton, with big concentrations of minorities, suffering prolonged economic pain from out sourced industries. Cleveland and Cincinnati are classic cities of the Worldly plain: half-decayed, incompletely revived; great art museums, a rock'n'roll hall of fame, a terrific symphony orchestra. But drive a bit and you're in deep Zion, where the Holsteins graze by billboards urging the sinful to return to the bosom of the Almighty, the church of Friday night high school football shouts its hosannas at the touchdowns, and Support Our Troops signs grow as thick as the rutabaga. At first sight there's not much distance between this world and western Pennsylvania, but were the state line to be marked in 20ft-high electrified fences the frontier between the two Americas couldn't be sharper. The voters of the "Buckeye State" cities did care about their jobs; they did listen when Kerry told them the rich had done disproportionately nicely from Bush's tax cut. But they were also listening when their preachers (both black and white) fulminated against the uncleanliness of Sodom and the murder of the unborn. In the end, those whose most serious anxieties were the state of the economy and the Mess-o-potamia were outvoted by those who told exit pollers their greatest concern in 2004 was "moral values".</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Faith-driven politics may even have had a hand in delivering Florida to Bush by a surprising margin, since it seems possible that Jewish voters there who voted for "my son the vice-president" Joe Lieberman (not to mention Hadassah, oy what nachas) in 2000, actually switched sides as a result of the president's support for Ariel Sharon. It wasn't that the Kerry campaign didn't notice the confessional effect. It was just that they didn't know what to do about it. Making the candidate over as some sort of altar boy (notwithstanding directives from Rome instructing the faithful on the abhorrence of his position on abortion) would have been about as persuasive as kitting him out with gun, camouflage and dead Canada geese; a laboriously transparent exercise in damning insincerity.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">In Godly America the politics of impassioned conviction inevitably trumped the politics of logical argument. On CNN a fuming James Carville wondered out loud how a candidate declared by the voting public to have decisively won at least two of the three televised debates could have still been defeated. But the "victory" in those debates was one of body language rather than reasoned discourse. It registered more deeply with the public that the president looked hunched and peevish than that he had been called by Kerry on the irrelevance of the war in Iraq to the threat of terror. And since the insight was one of appearance not essence, it could just as easily be replaced by countless photo-ops of the president restored to soundbite affability. The charge that Bush and his second war had actually made America less, not more safe, and had created, not flushed out, nests of terror, simply failed to register with the majority of those who put that issue at the top of their concerns.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Why? Because, the president had "acted", meaning he had killed at least some Middle Eastern bad dudes in response to 9/11. That they might be the wrong ones, in the wrong place - as Kerry said over and over - was simply too complicated a truth to master. Forget the quiz in political geography, the electorate was saying (for the popular commitment to altruistic democratic reconstruction on the Tigris is, whatever the White House orthodoxy, less than Wolfowitzian), it's all sand and towelheads anyway, right? Just smash "them" (as one ardent Bush supporter put it on talk radio the other morning) "like a ripe cantaloupe". Who them? Who gives a shit? Just make the testosterone tingle all the way to the polls. Thus it was that the war veteran found himself demonised as vacillating compromiser, the Osama Candidate, while a pair of draft-dodgers who had sacrificed more than eleven hundred young men and women to a quixotic levantine makeover, and one which I prophesy will be ignominiously wound up by next summer (the isolationists in the administration having routed the neocons), got off scot free, lionised as the Fathers of Our Troops.</font s></font f>

<font face="Geneva"><font size="2">Well, the autumn leaves have, just this week, fallen from the trees up here in the Hudson Valley and the scales from the eyes of us deluded worldlies. If there is to be any sort of serious political future for the Democrats, they have to do far more than merely trade on the shortcomings of the incumbents - and there will be opportunities galore in the witching years ahead (a military mire, a fiscal China syndrome and, hullo, right before inauguration, a visit from al-Qaida). The real challenge is to voice an alternative social gospel to the political liturgy of the Godlies; one that redefines patriotism as an American community, not just a collection of wealth-seeking individuals; one that refuses to play a zero-sum game between freedom and justice; one in which, as the last populist president put it just a week ago, thought and hope are not mutually exclusive. You want moral values? So do we, but let them come from the street, not the pulpit. And if a fresh beginning must be made - and it must - let it not begin with a healing, but with a fight.</font s></font f>

Interfering with a United States election? Please... CNN Link to Watergate info

They broke in and tapped some phones to keep track of what the other side was doing. It was all about knowing strategy. It happened in June. Elections are in what month? At best you could call it dirty politics (which both sides take part in). At worse you call it felony breaking and entering and that's what he did time for. Traitor status based on election tampering is just not supportable by the facts. If it was, I'm sure he'd have been charged with it.

Clinton going after Osama with those missiles... well you believe what you want to believe, but you'll never convince me that the timing of those strikes wasn't meant to be a smoke screen for the testimony given later that day. How many opportunities did Clinton have to go after Osama before that day? Nope, the "Clinton was going after Osama" defense is only part of the story. If you don't want to see the other side of it, then there ain't much I can say.

Hi Blacula:

I don't feel like I'm being ganged up on... but then I was prepared for it when I started talking in this thread. I'm glad things have remained civil too. It's a credit to this Board, the Founders, and the posters here. I've learned alot through these discussions. I find it interesting to hear other people's ideas, especially from other countries.

I think I'm going to take a few days off from this thread though as I really do have to get some work done . I think I'm going to hit some of the "quicker" threads for awhile.

Best to you.

I just wanted to say thanks to minesurfer for actually reading, comprehending, and relating what I said about the silent majority. It seems that most people still don't even though its right there in white on screen.

The majority feels that a distinct minority is trying to FORCE them to not just ignore or not care about gay marriage, but to accept and embrace it. Even though it goes against their personal beliefs. They feel that gays are now trying to co-opt their religions, their churchs, their system of faith.

You CANNOT argue against this, because that is what they FEEL. You may not see it that way, but your point of view on it is irrelevant to THEM.

You may see it as being a much more forgiving, tolerant, better society if you make those inroads into religious faiths, churchs, etc... and YOU may be RIGHT, because that is how YOU feel. And their point of view is irrelevant to YOU.

That is all i was saying.

So how is this any different from Bush trying to force his faith based intatives through goverment. Aren't we being force to accept his personal beliefs of faith? Last time I checked we are not all white anglo-saxon protestants here.

That is what I am trying to ask here. I just dont understand why we can't just accept our differences and move on. I hear what you are trying to say. I just don't understand how it can be.

Maybe you don't. I don't know. I will say that i have seen willful misunderstanding on BOTH sides of the arguements.

Maybe this will help.

People...are.

Each one is different, and believe their own beliefs. It isn't good or bad, people just believe as they believe, find comfort in what they find comfort in, etc...yada yada yada.

On the conservative side, i tend to see people that approach things in a very realistic, basic way. This doesn't mean that they don't understand the complex, its just that they see the complex as an excuse for paralysis. You can have endless committie's debating until eternity and nothing will get done. They believe in picking a direction and going, and trying to fix things as they go. But they think at least they have started the journey. The problem is that they don't tend to stop and think while they are doing at times, and others get lost in the shuffle.

On the liberal side, i have seen people...and here is where i may draw some heat, but please understand, this is just an observation in the most general of terms...basically wallow in woes. Yes, i happen to agree that quite a lot of what happens isn't fair, it isn't right. But the...what appears to me at times anyway...stubborn denial of what is as opposed to what you would like...doesn't help. It gets perceived as being weak and a bit dramatic. That probably isn't fair, but that is the perception that conservatives get.

You may not understand HOW it can be, but it is. Its that simple. What is...is. You have to get to the point where you aren't bogged down with the "how can this be in a civilized world?", or "how can they not understand we didn't choose this, its how we are?!" and get on with YOUR journey.

I will say that i have seen just as much prejudice from the left here as i have seen from the right. If you are christian, you are automatically fundamentalist and therefore bigoted. How is that any different from what you decry? And quite a few christians really need to unclench. Honestly. Get over some of the BS and realize that sexual preference or proclivity amoung adults not under duress is their business, not yours.

Maybe this has seemed harsh. Most likely. But hopefully you will see that i wasn't trying to be cruel, just open and honest, and you can glean some insight from it.

Hopefully.

I can agree with you on some points. I do think conservatives and Bush especially don't really think about the broader scope of things and how one simple action can have some many different ramifications. Then I do think liberals have a tendency to over think things to the point where it is too late to really do anything.

However how can I go on my journey or even start it when there are a very vocal few people who don't want me too? And those vocal people get all the moderates to agree on them by preying on their fears. But what exactly is there to be afraid of? That is what gets me. I realize that there are degrees of conservatism and liberalism. I realize that not all Christians are fundamentalists. And I know all conservatives don't agree with Bush. But it just gets me when I watch or read TV or the news and some conservative religious group is just sprouting all this hate. Not being raised in a church and knowing what I know from friends and readings, how can they say they have love in their heart for everyone yet come down on anyone that doesn’t agree with them? It seems to me to be hypocritical. My friend went home and visited his step-dad at Sunday school. He was awestruck to see a project that kids had just finished. It was called “What God Hates.” He was dumbfounded on how the Sunday school teacher could endorse and even think of this project because God was supposed to never hate and only love. One the list was that he hated gays.

Maybe i can help with this. "God only loves" is a fallacy. What far too many people seem to slide right past is that he loves everyone, gays included, but does hate some of the actions that they take. And it has to be a truly tough pill to swallow that your entire life, no matter how fine a person you are, is currently defined by your sexual proclivity, and that doesn't fit with what someone wrote down in a book hundreds of years ago. But it is what it is.

Understand, i tended to read the bible under my own understanding. I don't follow any religion, yet the judeo/christian most closely hits what i believe, as it was written to be, not what it has been turned into.

As for those that use the religion as a weapon, they aren't real christians. They like to think they are, but they forget a basic rule when they hate like that..."love thy neighbor". God says "love the sinner, hate the sin." And it has to hurt that your apparantly largest defining characteristic to others is deemed a sin by them, but that is where they fail in their faith.

It's like dining in high society if you are someone that has only led a poorer, casual life. Table manners are meant to put people at ease, that was their basic function and reason. Somewhere along the line, snobs turned that into a weapon to try and make others feel inferior. Who really gives a crap which fork is used, as long as your guests feel comfortable enough to eat and be at ease. At least, thats how i see it.

I know, not everyone is like that. There is a range of reaction, both good and bad. But, the best response is just living. And if the religion you subscribe to has proscriptions against homosexuality...there are reportedly millions of gay people in america alone. What is to stop you from starting your own version? Of finding fellowship with someone that believes like you?

If that seems harsh or callow, im sorry. It is reality as i see it. Maybe in time it will change. Then again, maybe it will get worse. There are millions more hetero than homo sexuals. You aren't going to outvote them. You simply don't have the numbers. That doesn't mean you go away or quit, just that you do what you can, and learn to accept that some people have distorted senses of love and compasion.

And if you don't have enough to form your own church in a place where you live, and it is that important to you, then realistically, the answer is to find a city that CAN support one and be there.

Everyone has to make hard choices in life. It simply is. I don't want to drive three hours a day just to take my wife back and forth to work. But right now i have certain limitations that force this. I am working to change it, and that means a move. It's not fair or right. It simply is.

Thats the only way i know to say it. But speaking as a straight male with a conservative bent, i do truly wish you the best. Take some comfort in the fact that the widely held belief that all christians are fundamentalist bigots ...isn't true. Some of us...i would guess a quiet majority of us, believe in live and let live. You just have to remember that the squeaky wheel gets the oil.

Matthew 5:38-42

Sure, we'll give Matthew the old "eye for an eye" treatment for not posting here in so long.

Just got pointed at this. My god...

Certainly makes one wonder, Reboot.

www.blackboxvoting.org

www.votergate.tv

There will be an attempt to use the Freedom of Information Act (a concept so basic and central to democracy, yet always resisted in practice by the government)to obtain the records from the voting machines. I think Nader might also do something in New Hampshire, since it is within his rights as a candidate.

By the way, I've been to Cuba, and Fidel Castro has a mandate. A lot more of a mandate than Bush, who is quick to mention he got the highest amount of votes of any presidential candidate ever, but fails to mention that Kerry got the second highest amount of any presidential candidate ever. If Bush can't be honest and trust the American people to make INFORMED rational decisions (note I didn't say CHOICES), how are we supposed to trust him? Transparency became a thing of the past soon after the first day of the Bush presidency, and now he's even trying to impose a standard one-question limit on White House reporters.

BTW Bush won on national security. How is that a mandate to gut social security? My whole generation has been betrayed, and those who don't feel that way now will learn the hard way unfortunately.

Gut social security? C'mon, quit the rhetoric.

He wants to let people control 2%. Thats .002 of THEIR money. Its not yours. Its not mine. Its not the Dems. Its not the Repubs. Its not even the governments. It belongs to each individual that pays that money in.

And just investing in a simple Dow or Nasdaq fund is gonna generate approximately 14%, instead of the 3 to 5 that the government does. And the ones it is designed to work for are people that have come of age in the market and know how to invest it for a better modest income. Sorry, but 14 percent is a heckuva lot better than 3 to 5, which barely covers average yearly inflation.

Stop watching the scare tactics and actually investigate what is being said. Here in SC, Inez Tennenbaum tried to scare the hell outta people about jim demints 23% sales tax. She repeatedly made out like it is to be put on top of allll the taxes people already pay.

What it was was a system that would remove income taxes, remove Fica, etc..., stop the horrific abuses perpetrated by some irs officials, and make the system work for people instead of being used as a weapon to take their life's work, homes, ruin their credit and future. And don't tell me it doesn't happen, my parents were ruined by them when i was a kid.

Try doing a little digging that isn't based on proving some crazy conspiricy theory. I don't agree with demint on a lot of things, but anything that pays the bills for America, and doesn't break the average working man that cant afford the lawyers to fight the mega powerful irs is a great thing in my opinion.

But if you are gonna look at everything as nothing more than an attempt to break the little man, we are gonna miss out on opportunities to actually help them. Stop letting others do your thinking for you. Investigate and do it yourself.

Learn the basics of money, the monetary system, and the way it is impacted by government. Quit relying on others to tell you what to think.

Uh oh, the exit polling was wrong! Just like the last two elections? Dan, Peter, and Tom didn't get to influence the election again....Ohhh, woe is the world.

Yup, just like Bush didn't really win 2000, only the times, the washington post i believe it was, along with two or three other big media outlets against bush then went down and did their own recount, and bush won every time.

Now, if i really wanted to run to the conspiracy theory, i would have to wonder about those machines that were cut own and had about 1,400 votes already on them for Democratic candidates, wouldn't i?

Hmmmm, i want to say that aliens from the planet whackjob have secretly been influencing the minds of democratic officials with their mind altering rays from the planet pluto for the last thirty years. Their secret purpose, global nuclear war that would kill everyone, leaving bodies everywhere for them to come down and eat. Ho'boy, is thet a good'un er whut?

Look, the exit polls were wrong because certain members of the polling groups wanted to skew it. They picked more Kerry-likely voters than Bush-likely voters. Go back and look at the internal questions and numbers from groups like gallop and zagby without your personal bias on. The numbers match up with the election.

An i'm glad to see that reboot understands that Bush and his crew never stop thinking about the way enemies would like to hurt the US, and ways to prevent them.

I mean, that is what Bush was talking about in Reboots sig.

Bush ****ed up. That may be what he was TRYING to say, but that's not what he DID say.

And on your "magic 2%", take a look at how all the UK "personal pensions" crashed and burned in the mid-90s...

Oh my gosh, you mean Bush misspoke? Why that must be a first for anyone on earth, ever, right?

See, thats why it is so hard to take your side seriously on those types of things. A simple mis-speak from someone known to NOT be a polished public speaker is used as a 100% perfect indictment. Rather than being an effective tool, it just comes across as spiteful, silly, and ...and here's a magic bullet for you...MEAN.

As for those in england or wherever, the simple fact is that the US stock market has trended upwards at a steady rate over the last forty years. Did it have dips? Yes. Did it have huge gains? Yes. But, if you invested long term, forgot the stupid get rich quick scheming, and just left it solidly invested, YOU GAINED MUCH MORE THAN THE US GOVERNMENT MAKES, THAT IS A FACT!

Again, i ask you to actually study US ecomonics, monetary systems, etc... and have a realistic picture of what is happening, not just skewed reporting to validate what you "feel".