Posts with the tag opinion
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I saw a report on yahoo news recently that John McCain seems to be very irritated in recent interviews. After Sarah Palin becoming a political laughing stock due to the cast of Saturday Night Live, I wouldn't expect him to react any other way. I'm not voting for the man, but I think he's made a couple serious mistakes he should have seen the repurcusions ahead of time from.First of all, choosing a beautiful female VP is going to put much more attention on her every words than someone who has less attractive qualities. I haven't heard much at all about Joe Biden in the past couple weeks, but if Obama had picked a female just as equally as attractive as Palin, as unjust as it sounds, I believe she'd be taking the spotlight just as much. As a nation, and as sad as it is to mention, many of the people cannot look beyond Palin's looks and look at her seriously about politics. I believe McCain should have seen this coming, and would be ready for the news media's onslaught.

On another note, he decided to chum it up with Bush. Surely they are out there, but I haven't met many republicans that feel too confident voting for someone that's a buddy with the guy. In my opinion, I don't think this was such a smart move. When going against someone as articulate as Obama, you've got to be ready for everything.

Today, I'm calling upon every American to support and vote for Senator Barack Obama in this presidential election. As a young American, I want to see a America that everyone that wants a job, can have one. As Americans, we can make history and turn this country back on the right direction!

Senator John McCain and Governor Sarah Palin is not the change that Americans are looking for. Senator Obama's speeches come from his heart and from what he has learned. Governor Palin's 2008 Republican National Convention speech was written by President George W. Bush's speechwriter. If Senator McCain and Governor Palin wants to define ‘change’ as voting with George Bush 90% of the time, that’s their choice.

Each and every time, a new generation has risen up and done what's needed to be done. Today we are called once more - and it is time for our generation to answer that call. Let us be that generation that elect Barack Obama and put America back on track and made it truely great once again.

I've said this from day one of this presidential campaign. I thank Senator McCain for his service for this country but he is not the person that I believe is ready to lead America or even ready to understand the problems that Americans have.

Do we want a President that supports George W. Bush's policies and goals? Do we want a President that opposed creating a federal holiday in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.? Do we want a President that is against funding of sex education?

Do we want a Vice President that hates community organizers? Do we want a Vice President that abuses her powers? Do we want a Vice President that strongly supports development of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?

Senator Obama is not in this race for President just to hold an office, but to gather with you to transform America. Senator Obama wants us to win that next battle - for justice and opportunity. Senator Obama wants to win that next battle - for better schools, and better jobs, and health care for all.

I want a President that favors the concept of equal pay for everyone. I want a President that supports a tax plan which includes an $80 billion tax cut for American poor and middle-class families. I want a President that has strong record of support for clean air. I want a President that understands Americans problems and issues. I want a President that wants healthcare for every American.

I want a Vice President that supports teachers and schools. I want a Vice President that wants funding to find new energy sources other then drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I want a Vice President that favors adding sexual orientation to the criteria for a hate crime. I want a Vice President that is against giving tax cuts for big corporations.

Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, please join me in supporting Barack Obama for President and Joe Biden for Vice President of the United States of America. I may not be able to vote in this election but tose can vote in America can show the world that we want REAL change!

Asher Heimermann is a teenager from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. You can learn more information about Heimermann by visiting his official website at www.AsherHeimermann.com.

NBC should be catching flack for first inviting Kucinich to debate after meeting there criteria then abruptly dis inviting him.
The candidates have been narowed by those that droped out but to those that are still in they should be there.
Where is OUR democratic party at and why doesn`t it stand up and say he oughta be in it!
Write an e mail today to MSNBC or NBC and let them know what ya think! And make them defend there decision ..ask them why?
Even if you dont support Dennis you wouldnt want a future candidate of yours to be treated this way.
We are all democrats arn`t we? then lets stand for whats right!
Humanity has always overproduced. By nature, any species that is able to increase its population overproduces. The bee produces far more honey than it needs, and similarly the social Human produces more than it needs and disposes of this excess through any variety of activities from war to decadent recreation. Our methods of storing energy are more sophisticated and efficient than the laying down of honey; and our society is nearly global, but yet still there is inequity. The vast majority of both affluence and influence lies concentrated in a few hands. The communist revolution destroyed communism, and yet it was destroyed before it started by refusing to acknowledge the fundamental and natural greed that is inherent in Humanity. Nor did the Bolsheviks respect the equally fundamental Human Truth of freedom; laying the ground work for authoritarianism long before Stalin used it to come to power. Despite that, though, there is no need for hunger or homelessness or poverty. We easily have the power to transcend basic need, but a complex tapestry of interconnected social and economic problems stands in the way of sense and reason.   Read More »
Yesterday ( Link ), I posted the first part of my views on the military. We have become an overpriced, ineffectual army for fighting wars in the modern age. We spend nearly as much money on our military as the rest of the world combined.   Read More »
What is the cost of a Human life? When dealing with military issues, this is a very important question. Can a value be put on the lives of our brave men and women in uniform? Our military apparently doesn't think they deserve a few thousand dollars each for body armor. On the other hand, they spend 2.5-4 MILLION USD on a single Abrams Battle Tank which can be utterly destroyed by a $1000 guided missile. $100 Rocket Propelled Grenades can bridge large distances between a transport (either air or land based) and severely damage or destroy the vehicle and kill occupants.   Read More »

In response to this post ( Link ), I wrote a rather lengthy reply (not devoid of hostility) that seemed like it shouldn't go to waste.

I covered a lot of this in another post of mine, but it clearly bears repeating when such ignorance and racism is bearing its head and getting support in a supposedly Democratic and Liberal blog.


It was basically said that letting Mexicans in was going to make America a third world country, and this was my reply:

   Read More »
This country was founded on Liberalism. Freedom was the shining ideal of all Humanity which was to be defended at all costs. Now, freedom and liberty are worthless buzzwords. The idea remains, but the words have been bastardized by pompous and ignorant individuals who have no true appreciation of the term. Our society is devoid of freedom; bonds stronger than any chains ever could be. We are enthralled by an interdependent web of reliance on experts and specialists, each as disposable as the next, but all manipulating the system to their own benefit as Humans must be expected to do.   Read More »
Our schools are terrible. Most everyone knows that, but some don't know how truly bad they are. Some have different opinions on what makes it bad, and many simply do not care. That apathy is rather shocking, considering that it is their own children who are being harmed irrevocably by its failure.

For all my time in the public education system - and I was in about a score of them in three different states - none of them did a very good job. I attended schools in Madison, Wisconsin, supposedly among the best Public Schools in the nation; an inner city school in Dayton, Ohio; and a small town school in North Carolina. There were short periods in my life when I was home-schooled, educated in suspension, and even educated in a psychiatric hospital. I have experienced most aspects of our education system, from the mainstream to the alternative, and as one might gather from reading that lengthy list, it wasn't a smooth sea to sail.   Read More »
In President Bush’s 4th of July speech, he compared the Iraq War to the Revolutionary War, saying that it was another hard war with no end in sight, and that the Iraq War would end in the same way, with glory and that there would be a god outcome. As soon as I read that he said that, I almost had a heart attack, knowing that this filthy bit of slime had the gall to compare the most brave and heroic wars in American history, a fight for independence, to a war where a spineless coward led our troops headlong into disaster, not caring for the effect that it would have on us as long as he got revenge for oil. An event that big in our history does not deserve to be disgraced by being compared to such a stain on our history. Maybe if Bush had actually served his time in the Army, he would show at least a tiny sliver of respect.
Alex Habrock, one of my fellow bloggers at Youthinkleft.com, recently posted about the Scooter Libby case, where he said that republicans think that the lawmakers are above the law. He is, of course, totally correct, and I would like to elaborate. I believe that, since lawmakers are supposed to make laws, so I believe that any lawmaker that breaks the law should receive the harshest punishment that is legal to give. Our leaders are supposed to LEAD us, and when they go astray, they deserve to be punished to the full extent of the law.
Why don’t we kill three birds with one stone, fix both our immigration woes, the bad economy of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico simultaneously, and stop the Mexican sweatshops with one, final motion? America should take initiative and set up an American Union, like the EU. We would be able to have smoother immigration talks, shut down the maquilladoros (sweatshops owned by residents of the U.S., right on the U.S.-Mexico border), and our economy would grow stronger than it ever has been. We need to create stability at home, and unity causes stability.

Look at what has happened with Europe; they formed the EU, and the value of the euro is higher than the dollar, and gaining every day. They are a much greener continent than the U.S., there are much less sweatshops, and the tackle issues with a realism that is unheard of in American government. Plus, it should be even easier for us, since we only have three countries to unite, when the European Union had to bring together twenty-seven.

In addition to the first three reasons, making an American Union would free southern Mexico from the grips of the drug lords, and give the Mexican government a much better chance, with our help, to end the fighting. It would give all of northern America the drugs that it needs from Canada, without congress saying that it would ruin our economy; it would actually help our economy greatly! We would be able to make a more effective checks and balances on the government itself, and keep the power centered and even. It might even bring an end to the embargo of Cuban goods!

I’m going to e-mail this article to my local congressmen, I’m going to send it to the president, and I’m going to start a petition to get this idea to the senate, and I’d greatly appreciate it if you would wait a little while for me to make an online petition.
I recently saw a Code Pink newsletter about the Hutto Center, where the phrase “concentration camp” arose several times. It made me think about how the word is being used today, over sixty years after the fall of Hitler and the Nazis, when millions of Jews, blacks, gypsies, and gays were freed from the places that were stained in the blood of many of my own relatives. I just want to make this clear:

A concentration camp is another word for death camp. It is a place where hundreds or thousands of people are systematically physically and psychologically tortured and killed every day because of their race, religion, or political stance. It is a place devoid of hope, where you receive horrible, unhealthy, rotten food that will sometimes make you die just from eating it. Water and light are scarce; you have to privacy, and no rights. If the people holding you have their way, it will take years for your slow and painful process of death to come to its end.

Thankfully, we live in a country where that does not exist. Even Guantanamo isn’t that bad. So anyone that calls a corrupt and unjust prison a concentration camp is ill-wishing, and their point loses its meaning. Once we start calling our country something that bad, all the justice in the world won’t matter. We will have trapped ourselves in despair, and it’s bad enough with Bush lying, we don’t have to add to it; just call them prisons.

I just wanted to say that.
As the subject of troop withdrawal has become such a hot topic, I have decided to look into the past and see how it was handled in previous wars. Something very interesting and disturbing came to my attention.
During the Cold War, a time that is very much similar to the current American idea of forcing democracy on the Middle-East, the Korean War started. Now, when the country divided into North and South Korea in 1953, the American forces began to leave. Today, over fifty years after troop pullout began, there are still 35,000 of the 480,000 troops that were there at the peak of the war. These troops have been put on an indefinite post in South Korea, just to keep the peace in the unstable area.
If we use the same kind of half-baked troop withdrawal tactic for the Iraq War, there will be no more troops stationed in Iraq by 2027. Now, all of you troops out there shouldn’t start packing just yet, twenty years is may seem like a short time, but it’s really longer than it sounds!
For a while, Bill O’reilly and his ilk have been refuting both arguments about global warming and the dying economy with intelligent and thought-through statements like “today is the coldest day ever in New York City!” or “today the Stock Market hit yet another record high!” well, there is actually a reason for the latter, and it is no way a good thing. According to a report done by NPR, these highs in the Stock Market only prove how poor we are compared to other countries.   Read More »
In 2004, Barack Obama was apparently not thinking about the 2008 presidential race, so, in hindsight, I think that Obama wished that he had never visited a small coal-mining town 300 miles from Chicago. At the time, the 2008 presidential candidate was trying to show that he was not a traditional Democrat while gaining the support of the American coal industry, but it has taken a new shape with the impending election. Many environmentalist groups are saying that Obama doesn’t completely support energy reform.   Read More »
In a recent NPR article, Zainab Salbi, the president of Women for Women International said that, often times, refugee camps will have special areas for rape victims, an area for people whose family has died, and other such areas so as to label refugees for reporters. The dehumanization of refugees (which is kind of reminiscent of the Nazis) does not, in my opinion, end there; that is just the tip of the iceberg.   Read More »
A while ago, I wrote a post on the lethal injection, and spoke to someone through comments, and this is what was said in regard to the death penalty:

“Aryeh says: I also want to say that I am pro death penalty, but only after the Judicial System is fixed, and it isn’t so easy to get on death row.

Brittany says: I would only support the death penalty if there was a guarantee that the person was guilty of a very severe crime, that the punishment was handed out according to that crime and not something arbitrary like race or class, AND if it was literally the only way to prevent that criminal from escaping and committing that crime again. In other words, I’m against the death penalty.”

I found these comments and began to study the judicial system to see where it had gone astray, so that an almost harmless criminal might find himself on death row, and I have to say, the guys who designed this did a pretty bang-up job. The courts are simple, and yet very productive, and amazingly easy to understand for a U.S. system. And they seem to be almost as fair as they can be.   Read More »
I do not know what everyone believes in or does not believe in but there should be a separation from your personnel life and where you work. He however has had both areas of his life blend together. I do understand people losing confidence in him but I believe he or she should of been given a chance at continuing there job. At least, for a time period allowed him to continue his job and see how it will effect him. I know people had mixed reviews about him and the city didn't want a controversy but by doing what they did they created a larger one. My post however is on the newest events. Stanton would like to become a city manager at a new city and is writing a book. The newest events incorporate his latest ideas for progressing his career. He has recently deleted files from his computer and the city wishes to punish him or pursue legal action. Should they pursue? His attorney states he has done nothing wrong but the city thinks different. Do you believe he is being abused and they should just let him move on? Do you think he was wrongly "fired"? Do you believe he was at fault?   Read More »
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