#397242 - 10/07/0412:47 PM
Re: Political Discussion: One Thread Only!
John from Madison CT
OffshoreFishingGear.com
Registered: 06/28/02
Posts: 15915
Loc: Old Saybrook (formerly Madison...
Quote:
I'm sorry to hear about the past struggles of your family. Growing up having parents with commie ideals must have been tough.
I would love to have you tell my parents to their face that they have Commie ideals. Both would rip your face off.
When you've had family members be tortured and die at the hands of Communists, you wouldn't make light of it.
Do me a favor, if we ever meet in person, please tell me to my face that my parents have "Commie" ideals.
Quote:
I cannot afford to give money to the poor because even making just shy of six figures my wife and I have all we can do just to keep our own boat floating. I don't have 3 or 4 or 5 extravagent, expensive homes, 6 cars, take several expensive vacations each year, own all kinds of luxury items, pay people to clean my home and cook for me, send my kids to expensive private schools, (my daughters are both paying for their own college educations, I help out with books, living expenses etc) and on and on ; we may not be struggling pay check to pay check, but we are definitely living month to month, and are extended just about to the limit of our incomes. And like I said, I aint livin' large, just comfortably. And that speaks volumes about how difficult it must be to make it on half or a fourth of what we make, and that, or less, is what the vast majority of our peers make. Again, 70% of the folks around me aren't doing as well as I am.
Boo-Hoo.....I'm crying for you. Please tell me what country of the world offers more opportunity than the U.S.?????
99% of the world would love to live as do our so-called "poor" people in America. Shall I tell you how many people have color TV's? 2nd cars?
Do you know that the Bush administration has created more Home ownership than EVER before in history.
#397243 - 10/07/0412:49 PM
Re: Political Discussion: One Thread Only!
Anonymous
Unregistered
JFM,
I'm not offended, per se, I simply feel that you are wrong, and have misunderstood my opinion of "wealth" ownership. We already share our "wealth" with the government, in order to finance our govt. and it's programming, thru income and other taxes. If what you suggest, in it's purest form, were true, we would pay NO taxes whatsover! Since that is clearly not the case, why not structure the taxes we pay to get the most bang for our buck and help those who truly need it, instead of further subsidizing those who already have more than everyone else?
That's all I am suggesting, not that anyones' "wealth" belongs to the "State". You are way off base and twisting my words. I am merely drawing an analogy between taxes paid and "dues" for belonging to, participating in, and benefitting from, our system. I'm not suggesting anything here that we are not already doing.
#397244 - 10/07/0401:01 PM
Re: Political Discussion: One Thread Only!
Anonymous
Unregistered
JFM and Spunfisher,
Easy guys, lets not make or take this personally!
JFM, In all fairness, I can understand your feeling insulted by that remark, in all fairness Spun, that was a little rough, to say the least.
Lets keep this civil, calling each other traitors and communists is one thing, lets leave our families out of this, esp. where they may have suffered a great deal overseas. Obviously JFM's parents do NOT subscribe to communist ideals, which is why they left and came to the US.
Everyone breathe and relax, breathe and relax...
PEACE!!
Our passions run high, so we tend to look to score points, I am as guilty as anyone, but lets remember that we are ultimately all on the same side, and want the same things, we just see different ways to reach the same goal.
I think Spun and JFM both love this country and are both well meaning, loyal, and patriotic Americans. Let's not ruin a good discussion with uncalled for barbs and personal attacks.
Originally posted by Kevin B: stop tax loopholes, go after offshoring corps,expand the IRS enforcement of tax non-payment offenders, cut spending , and cut taxes. Put Social security fund under a quasi group and out of the control of congress.
Heinz - as in John Heinz Kerry - can be considered an offshore corporation.
Militant Bluefish Jihadist
"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people," "It's just very, very sad" - Donald Trump 2011
"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it." - JAMES M. INHOFE
"Most meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded." - WILLIAM GRAY
"The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span those hours spent in fishing" - Babylonian proverb
The next time you want to wring your hands about taxes and the wealthy, ask John Edwards and John Kerry what they pay in taxes.
For instance in 5 years, Edwards earned something like 26 million as an attorney. He paid himself the most meager of 6 figure salaries, and dumped the rest into corporate dividends. He IS the corporation. The tax he paid on the "income" is a mere pittance. This is just one loophole that the IRS is looking into fixing.
Militant Bluefish Jihadist
"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people," "It's just very, very sad" - Donald Trump 2011
"With all of the hysteria, all of the fear, all of the phony science, could it be that man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it." - JAMES M. INHOFE
"Most meteorological research is funded by the federal government. And boy, if you want to get federal funding, you better not come out and say human-induced global warming is a hoax because you stand the chance of not getting funded." - WILLIAM GRAY
"The gods do not deduct from man's allotted span those hours spent in fishing" - Babylonian proverb
#397247 - 10/07/0401:20 PM
Re: Political Discussion: One Thread Only!
Anonymous
Unregistered
Quote:
Originally posted by Mitch P.: ...
Forgetting which candidate I like, what’s more important is that I feel our very freedom is at stake. If people are willing to kill thousands of innocent lives on our soil, we’ve got to take action to protect ourselves, our freedom, and our way of live.
...To liken the U.S. to the old Soviet Union is an unfathomable thought to me. I’m not sure who or what, besides your dislike for Bush or the war in Iraq, would make you say that. But forgetting my own thoughts. Let’s look at the facts. Which of the two countries are people pouring over the border to get into every day? Case closed.
No Mitch, the case is not closed.
I agree with you, America is still the best place to live. We still have our freedom. Immigrants are still poring in. But what you are describing is a STATIC picture.
I want you to look at not where we are now but where we are (and have been) going for the last four years.
From more freedom to less freedom, from more prosperity for everybody to more prosperity for the upper class (which includes myself now), from international cooperation to Imperial hubris. Just reread the recent posts from Spun and Nu2salt. Can't you see that?
You are ready to surrender your FREEDOM to the Bushies in exchange for SECURITY. They are trying to scare you with the bogey man of TERRORISM, so they can take your civil rights.
That is the same scare tactic the Communists employed: don't question the Soviet State and it will protect you against the Nuclear Imperialist United States. And if you disagree, you are a traitor. Ever heard of Sakharov?
"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security."
I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our 21-year-olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-Day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.
But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.
He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn. He is satisfied during the course of a speech written for him to look solemn for a moment and speak of the brave young Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country.
But you study him, you look into his eyes and know he dissembles an emotion which he does not feel in the depths of his being because he has no capacity for it. He does not feel a personal responsibility for the 1,000 dead young men and women who wanted to be what they could be.
They come to his desk not as youngsters with mothers and fathers or wives and children who will suffer to the end of their days a terribly torn fabric of familial relationships and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life . . . they come to his desk as a political liability, which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq.
How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice.
He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to.
Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -- to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends.
A war will do that as well as anything. You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the 40 percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills - it is amazing for how many people in this country this president does not feel.
But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest 1 percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we breathe for the sake of our economy, and that he is decreasing the quality of air in coal mines to save the coal miners' jobs, and that he is depriving workers of their time-and-a-half benefits for overtime because this is actually a way to honor them by raising them into the professional class.
And this litany of lies he will versify with reverences for God and the flag and democracy, when just what he and his party are doing to our democracy is choking the life out of it.
But there is one more terribly sad thing about all of this. I remember the millions of people here and around the world who marched against the war. It was extraordinary, that spontaneous aroused oversoul of alarm and protest that transcended national borders. Why did it happen? After all, this was not the only war anyone had ever seen coming. There are little wars all over he world most of the time.
But the cry of protest was the appalled understanding of millions of people that America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war.
The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, is his characteristic trouble.
Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail. How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.
The novelist E.L. Doctorow has a house in Sag Harbor.
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