"Come you masters of war You that build all the guns You that build the death planes You that build the big bombs You that hide behind walls You that hide behind desks I just want you to know I can see through your masks
You that never done nothin' But build to destroy You play with my world Like it's your little toy You put a gun in my hand And you hide from my eyes And you turn and run ****her When the fast bullets fly
Like Judas of old You lie and deceive A world war can be won You want me to believe But I see through your eyes And I see through your brain Like I see through the water That runs down my drain
You fasten the triggers For the others to fire Then you set back and watch When the death count gets higher You hide in your mansion As young people's blood Flows out of their bodies And is buried in the mud
You've thrown the worst fear That can ever be hurled Fear to bring children Into the world For threatening my baby Unborn and unnamed You ain't worth the blood That runs in your veins
How much do I know To talk out of turn You might say that I'm young You might say I'm unlearned But there's one thing I know Though I'm younger than you Even Jesus would never Forgive what you do
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
And I hope that you die And your death'll come soon I will follow your casket In the pale afternoon And I'll watch while you're lowered Down to your deathbed And I'll stand o'er your grave 'Til I'm sure that you're dead"
-Bob Dylan/"Masters Of War"
I am a proud heart-bleeding tree-hugging latte-sipping urban-dwelling elitist progressive liberal.
You are so dumb Davdah. Thanks for doing the "community service". Hillary will CRUSH your corrupted candidate with blood on their hands. And if you think Dems are split, and won't vote for Hillary if she is nominated, you're wrong. You're forgetting the fact that Democrats are intelligent people unlike narrow minded red neck village dweller Republicans. You're also forgetting that more than half your party hates Mc Cain. Even the i.diot Rush Limbough said he will vote for Hillary if Mc Cain is elected.
So much for your dead brain Davdah, 4now, and PUSC.
I am a proud heart-bleeding tree-hugging latte-sipping urban-dwelling elitist progressive liberal.
Besides, that's irrelevant since most conservatists won't be voting for Mc Cain at all, instead they will cast so called suicide votes. Mc Cain came in THIRD PLACE among conservatists behind Huckabee and Romney.
LMAO. Poor i.diots.
I am a proud heart-bleeding tree-hugging latte-sipping urban-dwelling elitist progressive liberal.
Typical Dem. when confronted with the truth you resort to name calling.
Earlier you said the Reps tax more. But the figures directly from the IRS web site paint a different story. Do Americans want to give away more of their money or keep it? Maybe you don't care since you married wealthy but for the average person or even the rich who earned it they do care.
Vote Republican and this country will still be worth sneaking into.
Posts: 3723 | Location: San Antonio TX | Registered: 06-08-2007
And one last thing. You're delusional if you think you've ever had one good president from the Republican Party. All you've had were killers and crooks. Don't make that mistake, R. Reagan would never approve any of these clowns, and in fact, he was never really a true Republican. I always think of him as a Democrat, and back then he was one.
I am a proud heart-bleeding tree-hugging latte-sipping urban-dwelling elitist progressive liberal.
Thats laughable. Reagan was the model Republican. Instead of making ignorant exclamations do a little reading first. Your making your party out to be a bunch of craizies
Vote Republican and this country will still be worth sneaking into.
Posts: 3723 | Location: San Antonio TX | Registered: 06-08-2007
Originally posted by iperson: You are so dumb Davdah. Thanks for doing the "community service". Hillary will CRUSH your corrupted candidate with blood on their hands. And if you think Dems are split, and won't vote for Hillary if she is nominated, you're wrong. You're forgetting the fact that Democrats are intelligent people unlike narrow minded red neck village dweller Republicans. You're also forgetting that more than half your party hates Mc Cain. Even the i.diot Rush Limbough said he will vote for Hillary if Mc Cain is elected.
So much for your dead brain Davdah, 4now, and PUSC.
My dead brain seems to recall a certain speech by one Hillary CLinton a while back where she said something about a village and its occupants. She seemed to like the idea of the village mentality.
Originally posted by iperson: Gross National Debt:
$9,220,616,005,415
Iraq War Cost:
$462,562,705,741
Not counting the incurring costs right now, and future till the end of the year, plus the costs paid to recover WWs. Will surpass a trillion dollars easily.
Oh boy. The first number is totla cumulative national debt including the IOU's from the Social Security "Trust Fund" of the last 150 years or so. The second number is totally bogus, comes from the War Resister's league, and is based on assumptions no independent economist would even endorse. Since 1938 the Democrats have held the White house for 35 years, the Republicans for 34. Over that time the national debt has increased at an average annual rate of 8.7%. In years Democrats were in the White House there was an average increase of 8.3%. In years the Republicans ran the White House the debt increased an average 9.7% per year. So, both parties spend a lot of money despite the political rhetoric by both parties. The Republicans call the Democrats the tax and spend party. The Democrats call the Republians the borrow and spend party. Yet both do borrow and both do spend. But take a look at US national debt as a percentage of GDP. US National Debt by Presidential Term, Percentage of GDP,1976-2008
YOu are also confusing yourself between federal budget deficit and US national debt. It is true that President Clinton did balance the budget, but with the help of a Republican congress to boot. Did not do so in his first years of office when the Democratic party held both the Executive and Legislative branches, 1993-1994. The last President to do so was in 1974 when Nixon was President. And the last time before that was a guy named Andrew Jackson.
Originally posted by iperson: Yes, today is a historic day overall. I should have known you would misconstrue that Davdah, and I wouldn't expect anything more after you or PUSC. I said: in conversation about politics, about the future of this country, YES, you are just a republican to me. If we talk about other issues, on another unrelated forum, then you are a regular citizen.
And I don't expect you PUSC to vote for Obama because you agree with him on the issues. You are only voting to spite Hillary Clinton. Oh well.
With all due respect IP, you are acting insipid and opiate. It was also you who said you will be proud to see Obama for president if Hilary did not win nomination. Yet your above posts criticizes anyone, one who either votes Democrat or Republican, who does not vote for Hilary. In the psychological field, they call this obsessive-compulsive disorder.
You are free to express your opinion, agreeing or disagreeing with anyone who posts their opinion as well. You are not here to condescend anyone's opinion. That would be communist, would it not? It could also be against the rules set forth by the web admin.
this is not a playground where you can bully anyone to think like you do. Posters here, Democratic, Republcian, and Independent, know a lot about how the political system here works, their perceptions, and their insights.
By Clarence Page Tribune Media Services cpage@tribune.com
Immigration has burned among the hottest of the hot-button issues in the current presidential race. Yet in their first big one-on-one debate, Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama left little daylight between them in showing unity on the issue.
And, guess what? They didn't leave much daylight between themselves and Arizona Sen. John McCain, the Republican frontrunner, either.
Obama even mentioned at one point, "I worked with John McCain" on immigration, "although he may not admit it now."
No, probably not. McCain has been pilloried too much already by some in his own party's right wing for cosponsoring last year's failed attempt to pass a comprehensive immigration plan.
Even former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who described McCain's immigration proposals as "reasonable" as recently as late 2005, has since denounced the bill as "amnesty" for illegals.
Romney appears to have been listening to his party's angry wing chattering away on talk radio and cable television about "hordes," "floods" and "tsunamis" of "invading" immigrants "taking our jobs."
Yet you don't have to be an agent of the angry right to feel agitated about the nation's broken immigration policy. The anxious left feels it, too.
You could hear some of those anxieties in the question that a Minnesota woman submitted to Clinton and Obama in their Los Angeles debate on the negative economic impact of immigration on black workers.
"How do you propose," she asked, "to address the high unemployment rates and declining wages in the African-American community that are related to the flood of immigrant labor?"
Good question. She also received two good answers, which is more than we could say about a lot of the hasty responses in the crowded earlier debates.
Both candidates cautioned against "scapegoating" immigrants for urban unemployment left behind by the loss of jobs to structural economic shifts.
It is not just blacks, Obama pointed out, who are experiencing such job pressures.
He recalled the rainbow of races, ethnicity and troubles in which he worked as a community organizer among laid-off steelworkers on Chicago's far south side.
The cause of that problem, he pointed out, is not immigrants taking jobs but employers taking jobs away and moving them overseas.
We need to get control of our borders, he said, but we also need "crack down on those employers who are taking advantage of the situation, hiring folks who cannot complain about workers conditions, who aren't getting the minimum wage sometimes or aren't getting overtime."
He also called for a classic Democratic recipe of education funding, infrastructure investment and tax incentives for the poor and middle class.
Clinton told a poignant anecdote of her own. She described a black man she met in Atlanta who used to work construction jobs, he said. He told her how it seems like the only people who get those jobs now are "people who are here without documentation."
To "bring our country together," both candidates called for the sort of comprehensive immigration reform that McCain has promoted.
Illegals should have to pay a fine, pay back taxes over time, try to learn English ("And we have to help you do that," Clinton said, "because we've cut back on so many of those services") and then wait their turn for citizenship behind those who have gone through the proper legal channel.
The only sharp difference between Clinton and Obama on immigration came with the granting of driver's licenses to illegal workers. Obama maintained that granting them licenses would reduce other problems, like hit-and-runs by illegal drivers who fear deportation. Clinton, who had sounded like a waffler on the issue during an earlier debate, firmly argued against granting licenses to illegals, but defended her support for her state's governor's opposing position out of personal loyalty to him.
Beyond that, they differ from Republicans more than from each other. With that, it is ironic that McCain's campaign has gathered momentum in recent weeks despite conservative opposition to his reasonable middle-of-the-road immigration prescriptions.
Should he win his party's nomination, we might just see immigration recede as a hot-button issue in this presidential race.
Romney and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee also have shown an encouraging capacity for reason on this issue. If Romney or Huckabee were to be nominated, their past pursuits of reasonable compromise could reemerge as they try to woo independent swing voters away from the Democratic nominee.
Perhaps then we can move as a nation to something we used to be pretty good at reaching, a reasonable compromise on a problem that sharply divides us as it seems to be running out of control.
Instead of a ticket to the White house, immigration phobia was a primary failure
February 07, 2008 - Jonathan S. Tobin, Executive Editor
This is not a good week to be Lou Dobbs. After spending the last few years beating the drums for a nationwide political insurrection, CNN's favorite alarmist must face up to the fact that voters have rejected his polemics in which global trade and immigration are the twin evils threatening America.
Indeed, the failure of supporters of his views to gain control of either major party was enough for poor Lou to want to dump cold water on the entire spectacle that has transfixed Americans in a red-hot primary season. This past weekend, as that certainty left Dobbs fulminating, many of us who have looked on his jeremiads with increasing dismay are merely answering: "Amen!"
Though Super Tuesday primary votes were still uncounted as this piece went to press, there appeared to be little doubt that Mitt Romney, the last of the viable presidential candidates who thought a Dobbsian attack on illegal immigration was the ticket to success, would end the day with his candidacy crippled as Sen. John McCain appeared ready to secure the nomination.
'Liberal' Heresy Along with the last two Democrats standing -- Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton -- McCain had specifically opposed the anti-immigration hysteria that has become one of the major issues of the year, if not the decade. As a co-sponsor of a sane, if ultimately doomed, attempt to reform the current unworkable immigration legal system, McCain's candidacy was widely pronounced dead in the water last year specifically because he had gone "liberal" on immigration.
That he was joined in this heresy by other noted "left-wingers" such as President Bush and editors of the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, did not deter the solons of the airwaves of talk radio or the wilder members of the pundit class, such as the execrable Anne Coulter (who claims she will "campaign" for Hillary Clinton to demonstrate her disdain for McCain) from labeling him a traitor to his party for suggesting that 12 million people who were currently here without permission could not just be deported, and that the only economically rational and humane answer was to offer this population a path to citizenship.
Though it is true that McCain has wandered off the GOP reservation at times (most lamentably, with his campaign finance reform scheme that was passed by Congress, but which has done nothing to help the problem it sought to solve while undermining free-speech rights), immigration was something different. To what seemed to be the majority of the Republican electorate, the charge of offering "amnesty" for illegals was supposed to be a third rail offense in 2008. This was the year that nativism was going to triumph.
That was, at any rate, exactly what Romney and Rudy Giuliani, whom national polls showed as the leading Republican candidate for most of 2007, figured. Although both of these men were defenders of immigration rights when they were, respectively, governor of Massachusetts and mayor of New York City, as candidates, they morphed into snarling, Dobbs-like advocates of alarm about the danger allegedly posed to the nation by millions of hard-working, poorly paid busboys and maids who were discussed as if they were the moral equivalent of Al Qaeda.
But carrying on about immigration was not enough to save Giuliani's candidacy when it started to head south in the fall. Nor did it do much for the moribund effort of Fred Thompson, who also figured to benefit from McCain's collapse.
McCain eventually acknowledged that the Congress and the people had rejected his reform bill, and there seemed no point in beating a dead horse. He did embrace a stance of more border security, which had always been part of his scheme. But there was no doubt that the charge of "amnesty" hung over him.
And yet here we are in February with McCain the all-but-crowned king of a party that supposedly was as unlikely to nominate an immigration-reform advocate as they would one who supported *** marriage.
What happened?
First, although there is no denying that the anti-immigrant backlash had strength, it was never as big as its authors pretended it was. Even among voters in Republican primaries, illegal immigration simply wasn't the magic bullet that Romney thought it was. His CEO style of leadership predicated on exploiting popular tastes (even if it meant changing his own positions) turned out to be too clever by half.
Hispanic voters -- not all of whom are Democrats, and many of whom share the Republican frame of reference about national security and social values -- also realized that the anti-alien stance was a thinly-disguised attempt to intimidate Latinos. In a state such as Florida, that factor hurt Romney.
More to the point, no matter how popular it might have become, immigration-bashing could never compete with other more traditional issues. For some on the right, Mike Huckabee's bigoted stance as the "Christian candidate" on abortion trumped Romney's anti-amnesty rants.
As for making illegals a national security issue, common sense won out. Running as the man who championed the troop surge in Iraq when most Republicans were running for cover, McCain was able to explain why the fight with Islamism -- and not Central Americans who want to fill low-income jobs in this country -- was how we needed to define national security.
A Little Bit of Luck Like any successful candidate, McCain had his share of luck. Most of it centered on the tactical mistakes made by his opponents. But one also cannot underestimate the justified reluctance of all his rivals but Romney to personally take on a man whose five-plus years in the Hanoi Hilton renders him permanently invulnerable to assaults on his character.
Yet the fact remains that if revulsion against illegal immigration, and the nativist groundswell lying beneath it, were as much the will of the people as some believe,
Add to del.icio.us
- so what is the difference between federal budget deficit and US national debt? 
