Obama '08?

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

Makes one wonder how their brains were washed with MAC-lotion. Doesn't make much common sense to fight against taxes for the rich while "they/we/children" get caught up in the middle of trying to make this country work - for all of us! An interesting survey would be how many conservatives have lost their jobs and homes while their brethren fights against taxes for the rich.

the "why are they doing that " factor of this has had me baffled for a long time. even when it's pointed out that they're getting uhh, rear ended, i usually get back some kind of boiler plate "you liberals ..." answer wile they simultaneously hand mr. gotrocks a large, flesh colored rubber thing.

and ya know what? i'm almost to the point where i just don't care about them anymore. it's like, ****, if you guys can't figure out that you're being used, and you won't listen because you've become so immersed in special interest propaganda that uses hatred of liberal anything,...... well... what can i say?

the funny thing is, the "liberal" agenda stuff that i do support, if it comes to pass it won't do a damn thing for me. ms.dtom and i already have outstanding health care. gay marriage? nope, nothing there for me personally. right to reproductive choice? nope, not me, and we have always used contraception.

i back these things because i want nothing but good for people. that doesn't mean i see myself as some sort of Father Therence, or something, i'm much too naughty for that ( Very Happy

), but i do believe in something that was instilled in me as a young conservativelet; the common good.

it used to be a very american value.

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@DontTreadOnMe,

"It used to be the American value," but that disappeared after George W Bush took over in the white house; he changed "everything."

"I'm a uniter, not a divider." Go figure!

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

"It used to be the American value," but that disappeared after George W Bush took over in the white house; he changed "everything."

"I'm a uniter, not a divider." Go figure!

ooh, man.. there's one i'm really dying to post, but it's too raunchy even for me! Very Happy

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@DontTreadOnMe,

And yet you support the very things that have produced anything but the common good in America--failing schools, increased crime, absentee fathers/single mothers that is the single most prevalent cause of child poverty, encouragement of a permanent underclass that has become almost unemployable, etc. etc. etc. while sneering at those traditional values that have proved their worth over the years. Yes some beliefs/practices of the past were terrible, cruel, unconscionable and needed to be corrected and most of those things have been. Certainly all new values aren't bad, but it seems that the Left wants to also retain all new ugliness that has developed while throwing the baby out with the bathwater regarding anything that was good from the past.

None of this affects me but it does affect my kids and their generation and the generations following them. I would like to think they will live in a world as good or better than what I had. Right now they don't. For the first time the current generation does not expect to prosper more than the last, and that is simply because the individual is losing his freedoms and ability to direct his own destiny.

I was raised to believe that good intentions that produce unintended bad consequences are not something to repeat, and that is something I think all of us who want the common good should take to heart.

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You have to admire O's energy. He is now accelerating the fuel standards for autos.

Fuel Efficiency in the Fast Lane
By Daniel Politi
Posted Tuesday, May 19, 2009, at 6:54 AM ET
All the papers lead with news that President Obama will announce new standards for automobile emissions and increase fuel-efficiency targets. The new regulations will mark the first time that the government will set rules on automobile emissions and combine it with fuel-economy standards. The rules would require new cars and light trucks sold in the United States to average 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016, four years earlier than required under federal law that was passed in 2007. The Wall Street Journal declares that the move "would accelerate the largest government-mandated transformation of vehicles on the American road since the late 1970s and early 1980s." The Los Angeles Times calls it a "potentially pivotal shift in the battle over global warming" as well as "a vindication of California's long battle to toughen standards."

The Washington Post reports that the new rules came as a result of negotiations between the administration, California, and the auto industry that have been going on "since the first days of the administration." Everyone characterizes this as a win for all the parties involved. California has long asked for a waiver to set its own emissions standards but has now agreed to accept the federal limits, which amounts to pretty much what it wanted except the automakers have more time to adjust. For their part, the automakers get the national standard they have long been craving and will be dropping their legal challenges against California. The new standard, coupled with other requirements Congress passed in 2007, would increase the cost of an average car by $1,300. The New York Times states that the new standard "will create a car and light truck fleet in the United States that is almost 40 percent cleaner and more fuel-efficient by 2016 than it is today." The administration says the new regulation will reduce U.S. oil consumption by 5 percent a year. USA Today points out that if the new rules push automakers to build smaller cars, "highway safety could decline" since they're less safe in crashes.

1 Reply

@Advocate,

Yawn................ Same story told by a different story teller.

How come every administration who announces these things, give the manufacturers 7 to 10 years to do what is already neing done in Japan and Korea?

Apparently we have slow and stupid engineers.

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@Foxfyre,

Quote:

For the first time the current generation does not expect to prosper more than the last, and that is simply because the individual is losing his freedoms and ability to direct his own destiny.

Interesting observation, have you ever considered studying history? And no I don't mean your personal history, I mean actual history as it applies to the planet earth and the people thereof.

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@Woiyo9,

You are absolutely correct. It is much too modest, and probably far below the future accomplishments of the foreign makers.

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@Woiyo9,

How about slow and stupid management?

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@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

And yet you support the very things that have produced anything but the common good in America....

foxy, i am so frustrated with you...

like most of your political persuasion, you want to castigate the concept of a public school system as the problem. the problems really lay in the system being under funded because, once again, some in this country are offended by the thought that they should have to pay taxes.

thanks for creating a self fulfilling prophecy of educational failure.

and why? because you would rather worry about whether or not the nation's kids are being taught by liberals. of course they're taught by liberals, you guys have made it exceedingly clear that no real conservative would ever be caught dead in one of those dens of un-american, un-traditional and most importantly, un-christian activity.

and you can take it for what it's worth, but i have seen and experienced personally what a caring and dedicated public school teacher can instill in students who would otherwise go down some very bad roads.

the worst part is, you guys haven't provided an alternative to public education that would prepare young minds for the great challenges that await them. the only thing i ever hear offered in response is "school vouchers", "home school" and "traditional values" nonsense.

whoo-hoo. i've read the bible a few times, and i don't recall seeing one thing on how to repair a space telescope. or how to build one. or how to write computer code. for a bunch of people that spend so much time wringing their hands about children, it's unfathomable how that gets reconciled with this complete abdication of educational responsibility.

i'm one of those people that believes that smarter is better for america. but what do i hear coming back from the far right? "burn the books!". "liberal teachers are brainwashing your kids!". "burn the brainwashing, evolution crap books!"

and that's what creates the kind of people that believe it when some obstreperous lunatic tells them that a simple digital to analog converter box for your t.v. is really a "brainwashing box" to turn you into a mindless liberal zombie.

and how in the world you come to the conclusion that all of this failure is due to someone taking your freedoms is absolutely confusticating.

1 Reply

@cicerone imposter,

cicerone imposter wrote:

How about slow and stupid management?

further neutered by demands for bigger and faster profits.

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@DontTreadOnMe,

And you are presuming all sorts of things about me that you cannot support with ANYTHING I've ever posted or inferred. The problem with American eduation is absolutely NOT underfunding as some of our least funded schools in the country are producing the highest test scores/quality of education while the most funded are doing the worst. Homeschooled kids, funded by nobody but their parents who still pay taxes to school everybody else's kids, are overall achieving more than any other group. We have poured $10 trillion into the war on poverty and the poor are still with us and are more intractably poor than ever before. In 2003 Jay P. Green wrote: " . . . according to the U.S. Department of Education, public schools spent $8,830 per child nationwide during the 2000-1 school year. This is up from $4,626 thirty years earlier, using 2000-1 dollars. . .To put this $8,830 spent per student in perspective, the median household in the U.S. earned $42,151 . . . ." Europe spends about 70% of what we do while the USA lags well behind Europe in the results we get from our education system. Oh, and that $8,830 doesn't include capital expenditures.

These are the realities that those promoting your argument will never acknowledge and certainly probably rarely if ever check out for themselves or they just blow it off.

Then you come back with a totally non sequitur reference to religion which I never made. And you make accusations about those on the right that you can't support. I'm guessing that you could not accurately define 'modern American conservatism' even now and that you don't have a clue what classical liberalism is all about.

You see me as a fanatical ideologue and I see you as so brain washed in wrongheaded liberal theology that you won't or can't or don't want to see anything else. You are wrong about me. I am probably wrong about you. But I like you DTOM and I don't want to quarrel with you.

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@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

But I like you DTOM and I don't want to quarrel with you.

which is why my post originally started out with; "foxy, i am so frustrated with you, i can't even respond to your post. " obviously i worked up the juice for it. i did mean to put a disclaimer in my post that not everything i said was about you specifically. so, sorry for that.

but i will say this and let it go; considering that my mother was a teacher (in her second career), one aunt was a teacher, one cousin was a teacher, my wife and sister in law both work in edu administration, i have some idea of how things work in public education.

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

Quote:

Homeschooled kids, funded by nobody but their parents who still pay taxes to school everybody else's kids, are overall achieving more than any other group.

So if we accept your argument then it would mean that if all kids stayed home they would do better in school.

Amazing, isn't it Fox? Why did we ever create public schools in the first place if parents were doing better than schools ever could?

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@Foxfyre,

Quote:

We have poured $10 trillion into the war on poverty and the poor are still with us and are more intractably poor than ever before.

You have been repeatedly shown that is not true but you continue to pretend that the number in poverty has not been reduced.

Please provide some support for your statement Fox. Simply because you say it doesn't make it true. The US Census bureau lists poverty as being about half what it was prior to the war on poverty.

Poverty rate for families
1959 ..... 18.5
2007...... 9.8

Table 13
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/histpov/famindex.html

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@DontTreadOnMe,

DontTreadOnMe wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
But I like you DTOM and I don't want to quarrel with you.

which is why my post originally started out with; "foxy, i am so frustrated with you, i can't even respond to your post. " obviously i worked up the juice for it. i did mean to put a disclaimer in my post that not everything i said was about you specifically. so, sorry for that.

but i will say this and let it go; considering that my mother was a teacher (in her second career), one aunt was a teacher, one cousin was a teacher, my wife and sister in law both work in edu administration, i have some idea of how things work in public education.

I also come from a long line of educators--my sister was a career teacher, her husband a career teacher, coach, principal, and superintendent of schools, I have other relatives who teach or have taught preschool, kindergarten, and everything else through college. I have at times been drafted as substitute teacher before certification was required for that, and as mentor for certain extra curricular school activities and have done a bit of college guest lecturing. I have served on a school board. And I have a nephew who was homeschooled from kindergarten through highschool and is now a 4.0 student in college preparing for a career working with youth and -- boasting a bit -- was the recent national collegiate calf roping champion.

So I'm not exactly speaking from a vacuum here either.

1 Reply

@Foxfyre,

Quote:

We have poured $10 trillion into the war on poverty and the poor are still with us and are more intractably poor than ever before.

There are less of them, though, percentage-wise. Don't you remember going through this earlier?

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

With that much money spent, they should all be living in mansions and being sported around in stretch limos. Government spending is not the answer to these things and if people would just stop and really examine the results of past efforts to spend ourselves prosperous, we might stop trying to do that. As I said, Obama has recently given me a glimmer of hope that he might just be willing to acknowledge that a bit. But after the recent take over and muscling of the auto industry without any effort to deal with the real problems that crippled it in the first place, I'm discouraged again today. But hope springs eternal. . . .

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@Foxfyre,

Foxfyre wrote:

With that much money spent, they should all be living in mansions and being sported around in stretch limos. Government spending is not the answer to these things and if people would just stop and really examine the results of past efforts to spend ourselves prosperous, we might stop trying to do that. As I said, Obama has recently given me a glimmer of hope that he might just be willing to acknowledge that a bit. But after the recent take over and muscling of the auto industry without any effort to deal with the real problems that crippled it in the first place, I'm discouraged again today. But hope springs eternal. . . .

But you admit that the percentage of poor in America has in fact dropped, not risen, as you seem to have claimed above?

I'll remind you that the government didn't take over the car industry; some car companies failed and came crawling to the government for help. Perhaps you forgot the fact that these businesses would have been bloodily liquidated in the middle of a bad credit crisis, without government intervention. Whatever deal they were offered by the government, they should be thankful for; there would be hundreds of thousands, if not millions, out of jobs if it wasn't for the largess of the American people.

Cycloptichorn

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@Cycloptichorn,

There are less of them?

Sure, if you lower the bar.

1 Reply

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