The Democrat Thread

[Rex Kickass]

not.

 

Well, I like them, but I don't think I like them like them.

 

See ya in study hall!

[Rex Kickass]

Plaintiff has demonstrated it is entitled to the relief sought on behalf of its members, a judicial declaration that the don't ask, don't tell act violates the Fifth and First Amendments, and a permanent injunction barring its enforcement.

- US District Judge Virginia Phillips

 

A federal judge threw out Don't Ask Don't Tell yesterday, in a suit brought by the Log Cabin Republicans! no less.

[StrangeSox]

- US District Judge Virginia Phillips

 

A federal judge threw out Don't Ask Don't Tell yesterday, in a suit brought by the Log Cabin Republicans! no less.

 

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010...itutional-.html

 

You now have Obama fighting Republicans to keep gays out of the military. Awesome.

[bmags]

And you state this as though it's somewhere other than New York City, where 2 blocks of land covers enough space for tens of thousands of people to live and work.

 

 

You know for me it always kind of goes back to my original thoughts on this whole thing, which was that 2 blocks is pretty far in a city. Entire neighborhoods can change in two blocks, it can go from good to bad in two blocks, nothing is related in 2 blocks. My friend just visited new york and went to go see where this was built and basically said the same thing. He walked 20 minutes to get there but he's hefty.

[Rex Kickass]

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2010...itutional-.html

 

You now have Obama fighting Republicans to keep gays out of the military. Awesome.

 

Sort of a double edged sword. His job is to defend existing laws, even when he works to have them repealed.

[Balta1701]

Sort of a double edged sword. His job is to defend existing laws, even when he works to have them repealed.

On the other hand, there's no good reason for them to continue defending this crap and trying to continue expanding it.

[Jenksismyhero]

You know for me it always kind of goes back to my original thoughts on this whole thing, which was that 2 blocks is pretty far in a city. Entire neighborhoods can change in two blocks, it can go from good to bad in two blocks, nothing is related in 2 blocks. My friend just visited new york and went to go see where this was built and basically said the same thing. He walked 20 minutes to get there but he's hefty.

 

It is, but I dunno how people can just ignore that the attack caused havoc, chaos and destruction beyond the plot lines of the WTC (and if I remember right from my time there, the WTC site itself is bigger than 2 blocks). It was tens of blocks, not one. So while I agree typically 2 blocks is a long distance, in this scenario, it's really not.

[NorthSideSox72]

Sharon Angle agrees to on-air debate with Harry Reid, station schedules event with Reid campaign, then Angle campaign calls back and says nevermind. She really does appear to be pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

 

 

[Balta1701]

Sharon Angle agrees to on-air debate with Harry Reid, station schedules event with Reid campaign, then Angle campaign calls back and says nevermind. She really does appear to be pulling defeat from the jaws of victory.

You really think that Angle unscripted and on stage next to Harry Reid is a wise move?

[NorthSideSox72]

You really think that Angle unscripted and on stage next to Harry Reid is a wise move?

No, but I also think that saying you will, then backing out, is equally dumb.

 

[Balta1701]

No, but I also think that saying you will, then backing out, is equally dumb.

Obviously...but the mistake wasn't backing out, it was originally saying that you would. Backing out with that candidate is 100% the right move; you take less damage from backing out than you do from having her make Jan Brewer look prepared and informed.

[Cknolls]

From what I can tell, the arguments boil down to:

 

Constitution vs. Emotional Uprise

 

Am I wrong? Am I missing something on either side?

 

Quran burning? Or Muslim community Center? I thought you switched topics.

[bigruss]

Quran burning? Or Muslim community Center? I thought you switched topics.

Hmm? I never talked about the Quran burning on here.

[Balta1701]

FTW.

"I think I've been pretty clear on my position here. And that is: This country stands for the proposition that all men and women are created equal, that they have certain inalienable rights, and one of those inalienable rights is to practice their religion freely."

 

"What that means," he continued, "is that if you could build a church on a site, you could build a synagogue on a site, if you could build a Hindu temple on a site, then you should be able to build a mosque on the site."

 

"We've got millions of Muslim Americans, our fellow citizens in this country," Obama said. "They're going to school with our kids. They're our neighbors. They're our friends. They're our coworkers. And when we start acting as if their religion is somehow offensive, what are we saying to them?"

 

He continued that there are also Muslims fighting in Afghanistan: "They're out there putting their lives on the line for us, and we've got to make sure that we are crystal clear for our sakes and their sakes -- they are Americans, and we honor their service. And part of honoring their service is that we don't differentiate between them and us. It's just us."

[BigSqwert]

FTW.

 

[Steve9347]

FTW.

I really do love that man.

[lostfan]

9-11: Always Remember (To Vote For Me)

[StrangeSox]

Good article on the idiocy/racism of the D'Souza/Gingrich crap over the weekend.

 

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_se...aces_birtherism

[bmags]

Good article on the idiocy/racism of the D'Souza/Gingrich crap over the weekend.

 

http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/adam_se...aces_birtherism

 

I was just going to talk about this. I am going to post a comment from Ta-Nehisi Coates blog, but I don't know how to link to a comment so I'll just link you to the main article here

 

edit: the first paragraph is a question posed to Baiskeli by Ta-Nahesi. Baiskeli had identified himself as a native Kenyan earlier in the thread. What follows is his response.

 

Baiskeli [Moderator] 10 hours ago in reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates

 

 

So let me ask, not knowing much Kenyan history, does the comparison even make sense? Not from the perspective of Obama, but from the perspective of Kenyan history?

 

 

 

No, but mainly because once you dig under the surface of D'Souza's article there is not a coherent argument (good or bad) to be found. It seems like his modus operandi is to pick together a mish-mash of concepts and words that neo-conservatives and fellow travellers hate and try and mash them together. What his argument obscures is the true horror of Colonialism and how being anti-colonial was to be on the side of good vs evil. There is so much wrong there that my response is going to be all over the place because one cannot address the lies and inaccuracies contained without writing a thesis length paper.

 

Even his definition of anti-colonialists is wrong. Anti-colonialists oppose Colonialism, pure and simple. It's possible that the term he was grasping for is anti-imperialism and/or neo-colonialism. One can be anti-colonialist without believing in neo-colonialism. Given what Colonialism was, I cannot think of any moral being who wouldn't be against it (* see my description below)

 

As regards Kenya, yes, IMHO neo-colonialism is at play, but it is a huge leap to read a specific paper written in 1965 that dealt specifically with Kenya, that was a response to another paper and essentially state that Obama senior thought this about Kenya in 1965 therefore his son thinks this about the U.S in 2010. The U.S is not Kenya, the U.S is not Britain.

 

 

Don't read past this unless you want a huge mish-mash of unfocused facts. Maybe later when I'm not at work I'll post something more coherent. I've also linked to the actual article that D'Souza mentions.

 

*

Yes, Kwame Nkrumah espoused an anti-colonialist view point, as did people of my parent's generation and as I do, but that is because our countries were colonialized.

 

Not to go too deep into it, but Colonialism was horrible. In Kenya, blacks were forced off their lands (there is a reason the most agriculturally productive part of Kenya was called 'The White Highlands'), subjected to harsh rules (pass laws, head taxes, enforced segregation, concentration camps etc), and during the Emergency, an estimated 70,000 - 200,000 blacks were killed (torture, malnutrition disease in concentration camps etc). I could tell you my parent's stories and my relatives stories, but that would take too much time.

 

A good book on this is

Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya - Caroline Elkins

 

And just because D'Souza is Indian does not mean he has the first clue about African Colonialism. There are some similarities between African and Indian colonization but given the fact that the British had a racial hierarchy (whites, indian and then blacks at the bottom) means there are things the British did in Africa that they never would even have considered doing in India.

 

Suffice it to say Colonialism was truly evil.

 

Essentially Britain treated Kenya and Kenyan people as possessions to be exploited by any means possible. The only reason that Britain let Kenya go is that after WW2 Kenya begun being a net drain due to the Mau Mau uprising (whose core group was formed by African WW2 veterans who has been conscripted into WW2 on Britain's side and learned military skills and lost their awe of the white man once they saw that he too could be killed just like any man). And even then, they handed the country to people they knew who would be friendly to their interests (Jomo Kenyatta etc).

 

At independence, most of the wealth and the land in Kenya was in white hands. The Kenyan govt, over the next few years, took ruinious loans from Britain to buy back the land from those same British land owners. Keep in mind that this is land that had been previously stolen from us. In addition, a huge part of the Kenyan economy has been (and is still) foreign owned leading to a huge outflow of capital.

 

 

Now regarding Obama senior, I don't know much about him, and what little I know makes me think he was a major dick. But, here is the actual article that D'Souza is quoting

 

Problems Facing Our Socialism Barak H. Obama

http://kwani.org/main/problems-facing-our-...-barak-h-obama/

 

Anyone familiar with Kenya would understand what Obama Sr is talking about. It is not a Socialism position paper but a critique of a short-sited sessional paper put out by the Kenyan govt that didn't address most of the problems facing Kenya (and ironically they were never addressed, and the writer of that sessional paper is the current Kenyan president). Keep in mind this was written 2 years after Kenya's independence. Kenya would be vastly different (better) if his thoughs and ideas were heeded.

 

The failure to address the questions in his article have led Kenya to its current situation of massive inequality between rich and poor and massive foreign ownership of key sectors of the Kenyan economy.

 

and another great commenter:

 

Cynic [Moderator] 10 hours ago in reply to Ta-Nehisi Coates

D'Souza is wrong in multiple ways. Not only is it absurd to suggest that Obama's views mirror his father's, it's also silly to suggest that his father was a doctrinaire post-colonialist. And it's really absurd to decontextualize the policies that his father advocated, as if newly independent Kenya bore any relation to the United States.

 

In fact, although his father's career had its twists and turns, he was something of a westernizing and technocratic moderate, within the context of his time and place. That's what D'Souza utterly misses here. Kenya had a wealthy elite, many of whom actually had expropriated their wealth from a population they had ruled against its will. That wasn't metaphor; it didn't rely on Marxian abstractions about the alienation of labor. It was manifest fact. I don't see how you can write about Kenya in that period without noting that single salient fact. And it drove a range of responses, from outright violence and revolt to efforts by some members of that elite to cling to their power and privilege. If Obama's father had little sympathy for the old elite, he nevertheless eschewed the more radical and violent solutions. His paper was an attempt to chart a middle path, to find a means of remediation that could avoid violence, preserve the rule of law, and chart a better future for the mass of suffering people. I don't happen to agree with very much of it. But to hold it up as an example of radicalism is to miss the context in which it was produced; to equate Kenya of that period with the modern United States is to lose all perspective; and to impute these views to his son is to defy all the available evidence.

Edited September 14, 2010 by bmags

[StrangeSox]

Mitch McConnell with the comment today that the top tax bracket were those hit hardest by the recession.

 

How do Republicans win elections? Seriously.

 

eta: also, I have to laugh at Fox's "news" coverage of this. The entire segment is just Republican talking points about how bad the Democrats are and how they hate rich people (but they're not really rich, anyway!) and how the good Republicans are fighting for Americans.

Edited September 14, 2010 by StrangeSox

[Balta1701]

.@ladygaga There is a vote on #DADT next week. Anyone qualified to serve this country should be allowed to do so http://bit.ly/9ucdIj #nvsen

That's Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's office, leaving a twitter message for one "Lady Gaga."

[lostfan]

Mitch McConnell with the comment today that the top tax bracket were those hit hardest by the recession.

 

How do Republicans win elections? Seriously.

 

eta: also, I have to laugh at Fox's "news" coverage of this. The entire segment is just Republican talking points about how bad the Democrats are and how they hate rich people (but they're not really rich, anyway!) and how the good Republicans are fighting for Americans.

lol that's so bad that it's almost f***ing funny. I don't know where to start. So a guy with a net worth of 85 million, he might only have 73 million to his name right now (and gradually recovering it since the stock market bottomed out)!

 

Oh but the millions of people who got laid off in the lower tax brackets, yeah they don't have it as bad as those rich people.

[Balta1701]

lol that's so bad that it's almost f***ing funny. I don't know where to start. So a guy with a net worth of 85 million, he might only have 73 million to his name right now (and gradually recovering it since the stock market bottomed out)!

 

Oh but the millions of people who got laid off in the lower tax brackets, yeah they don't have it as bad as those rich people.

Get used to that thinking. It underlies basically all of our tax policies and has for years.

[NorthSideSox72]

Get used to that thinking. It underlies basically all of our tax policies and has for years.

Federal taxes are progressive in this country, with the exception of the SS cap. So I'm not sure where you are getting the idea that if underlines "all of our tax policies".

 

[lostfan]

Get used to that thinking. It underlies basically all of our tax policies and has for years.

Ever read "The Big Con"? This type of thinking has only been mainstream for about 30 or so years. Pretty easy to debunk most of it with simple charts and graphs but that doesn't really matter.

Edited September 14, 2010 by lostfan