CALLING ALL DEMOCRATS

[JHAM357]

poor democrats have been voting democrat for 60 yrs and they are still poor.

bush may have made some bad decisions but atleast when under pressure didnt just tell the american people " i know we are in some bad times and my plan of action is...well... i am present" i dont think i want a president that lets people make up his mind becuase he (obama) cant do it for himself.

[.270]

say what you want about bush, but they don't sell any novelty cigars because of him. Lark.

[EBB]

I personally am very excited about the prospect of Sarah Palin as VP. Haven't much cared for McCain for years because he has been way too ready to reach across the aisle. I think when "concensus" is reached it's a really bad thing for all of us.

Palin's reported lack of experience is a real plus in my mind. It's not a lack of experience but different experience she brings to the table. Far too many elected officials go to Washington with good intentions but then fall prey to the methodologies of Government as they work their way up into leadership roles. I want someone who remembers the values and beliefs of the "fly over Country". That is where I live, and I am tired of people who don't understand those values telling me how to live my life or making choices for me! I think Sarah Palin is close enough to those issues to help. I think there are ways to utilize the natural resources of this great land and improving the economy without destroying it. I think Washington is too far away to make local decisions that are best made at the local level. I would hope that the influence of a Governor so close to the land could bring about the understanding that it is possible to save "The Last Best Places" in this country without sacrificing "The Last Best People". Chicago and Delaware aren't going to get this done for me.

EBB

[TwoGuns]

Here is an interesting article on BO from Fox.

 

Long, but worth the read.

 

 

Obama and Ayers

Pushed Radicalism

On Schools

By STANLEY KURTZArticle

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Despite having authored two autobiographies, Barack Obama has never written about his most important executive experience. From 1995 to 1999, he led an education foundation called the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), and remained on the board until 2001. The group poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists.

 

 

AP

Bill Ayers.

The CAC was the brainchild of Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground in the 1960s. Among other feats, Mr. Ayers and his cohorts bombed the Pentagon, and he has never expressed regret for his actions. Barack Obama's first run for the Illinois State Senate was launched at a 1995 gathering at Mr. Ayers's home.

 

The Obama campaign has struggled to downplay that association. Last April, Sen. Obama dismissed Mr. Ayers as just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood," and "not somebody who I exchange ideas with on a regular basis." Yet documents in the CAC archives make clear that Mr. Ayers and Mr. Obama were partners in the CAC. Those archives are housed in the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago and I've recently spent days looking through them.

 

The Chicago Annenberg Challenge was created ostensibly to improve Chicago's public schools. The funding came from a national education initiative by Ambassador Walter Annenberg. In early 1995, Mr. Obama was appointed the first chairman of the board, which handled fiscal matters. Mr. Ayers co-chaired the foundation's other key body, the "Collaborative," which shaped education policy.

 

The CAC's basic functioning has long been known, because its annual reports, evaluations and some board minutes were public. But the Daley archive contains additional board minutes, the Collaborative minutes, and documentation on the groups that CAC funded and rejected. The Daley archives show that Mr. Obama and Mr. Ayers worked as a team to advance the CAC agenda.

 

One unsettled question is how Mr. Obama, a former community organizer fresh out of law school, could vault to the top of a new foundation? In response to my questions, the Obama campaign issued a statement saying that Mr. Ayers had nothing to do with Obama's "recruitment" to the board. The statement says Deborah Leff and Patricia Albjerg Graham (presidents of other foundations) recruited him. Yet the archives show that, along with Ms. Leff and Ms. Graham, Mr. Ayers was one of a working group of five who assembled the initial board in 1994. Mr. Ayers founded CAC and was its guiding spirit. No one would have been appointed the CAC chairman without his approval.

 

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

 

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

 

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn).

 

Mr. Obama once conducted "leadership training" seminars with Acorn, and Acorn members also served as volunteers in Mr. Obama's early campaigns. External partners like the South Shore African Village Collaborative and the Dual Language Exchange focused more on political consciousness, Afrocentricity and bilingualism than traditional education. CAC's in-house evaluators comprehensively studied the effects of its grants on the test scores of Chicago public-school students. They found no evidence of educational improvement.

 

CAC also funded programs designed to promote "leadership" among parents. Ostensibly this was to enable parents to advocate on behalf of their children's education. In practice, it meant funding Mr. Obama's alma mater, the Developing Communities Project, to recruit parents to its overall political agenda. CAC records show that board member Arnold Weber was concerned that parents "organized" by community groups might be viewed by school principals "as a political threat." Mr. Obama arranged meetings with the Collaborative to smooth out Mr. Weber's objections.

 

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative.

 

The Obama campaign notes that Mr. Ayers attended only six board meetings, and stresses that the Collaborative lost its "operational role" at CAC after the first year. Yet the Collaborative was demoted to a strictly advisory role largely because of ethical concerns, since the projects of Collaborative members were receiving grants. CAC's own evaluators noted that project accountability was hampered by the board's reluctance to break away from grant decisions made in 1995. So even after Mr. Ayers's formal sway declined, the board largely adhered to the grant program he had put in place.

 

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

 

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

 

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

 

[Non-Typical Solutions]

Lark, just out of curiosity.....who do they sell novelty cigars because of?????

[TAM]

Lark, just out of curiosity.....who do they sell novelty cigars because of?????

 

Does the story of Slick Willy and Ms. Lewinsky come to mind? Hopefully that will jog your memory... I'd sure hate to have to go into details.

[DesertBull]

There is a better solution.

 

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/mission/

 

Statement of Principles

Americans inherit from their ancestors a glorious tradition of freedom and resistance to oppression. Our country has long been admired by the rest of the world for her great example of liberty and prosperity – a light shining in the darkness of tyranny.

 

But many Americans today are frustrated. The political choices they are offered give them no real choice at all. For all their talk of “change,” neither major political party as presently constituted challenges the status quo in any serious way. Neither treats the Constitution with anything but contempt. Neither offers any kind of change in monetary policy. Neither wants to make the reductions in government that our crushing debt burden demands. Neither talks about bringing American troops home not just from Iraq but from around the world. Our country is going bankrupt, and none of these sensible proposals are even on the table.

 

This destructive bipartisan consensus has suffocated American political life for many years. Anyone who tries to ask fundamental questions instead of cosmetic ones is ridiculed or ignored.

 

That is why the Campaign for Liberty was established: to highlight the neglected but common-sense principles we champion and reinsert them into the American political conversation.

 

The U.S. Constitution is at the heart of what the Campaign for Liberty stands for, since the very least we can demand of our government is fidelity to its own governing document. Claims that our Constitution was meant to be a “living document” that judges may interpret as they please are fraudulent, incompatible with republican government, and without foundation in the constitutional text or the thinking of the Framers. Thomas Jefferson spoke of binding our rulers down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution, and we are proud to follow in his distinguished lineage.

 

With our Founding Fathers, we also believe in a noninterventionist foreign policy. Inspired by the old Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party, we are convinced that the American people cannot remain free and prosperous with 700 military bases around the world, troops in 130 countries, and a steady diet of war propaganda. Our military overstretch is undermining our national defense and bankrupting our country.

 

We believe that the free market, reviled by people who do not understand it, is the most just and humane economic system and the greatest engine of prosperity the world has ever known.

 

We believe with Ludwig von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and F.A. Hayek that central banking distorts economic decisionmaking and misleads entrepreneurs into making unsound investments. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banks’ interference with interest rates sets the stage for economic downturns. And the central bank’s ability to create money out of thin air transfers wealth from the most vulnerable to those with political pull, since it is the latter who receive the new money before the price increases it brings in its wake have yet occurred. For economic and moral reasons, therefore, we join the great twentieth-century economists in opposing the Federal Reserve System, which has reduced the value of the dollar by 95 percent since it began in 1913.

 

We oppose the dehumanizing assumption that all issues that divide us must be settled at the federal level and forced on every American community, whether by activist judges, a power-hungry executive, or a meddling Congress. We believe in the humane alternative of local self-government, as called for in our Constitution.

We oppose the transfer of American sovereignty to supranational organizations in which the American people possess no elected representatives. Such compromises of our country’s independence run counter to the principles of the American Revolution, which was fought on behalf of self-government and local control. Most of these organizations have a terrible track record even on their own terms: how much poverty have the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund actually alleviated, for example? The peoples of the world can interact with each other just fine in the absence of bureaucratic intermediaries that undermine their sovereignty.

 

We believe that freedom is an indivisible whole, and that it includes not only economic liberty but civil liberties and privacy rights as well, all of which are historic rights that our civilization has cherished from time immemorial.

 

Our stances on other issues can be deduced from these general principles.

 

Our country is ailing. That is the bad news. The good news is that the remedy is so simple and attractive: a return to the principles our Founders taught us. Respect for the Constitution, the rule of law, individual liberty, sound money, and a noninterventionist foreign policy constitute the foundation of the Campaign for Liberty.

 

Will you join us?

[TAM]

That all sounds real good, but unfortuneatly no one from this party is on the ticket! I only get one vote and I want to make it count.

[DesertBull]

He's a Republican.

 

A vote for McCain counts if you call continuing the status quo of big money and special interest controlling DC "counting".

[TAM]

I know who Ron Paul is and I know he's a Republican. He ran a valiant campain in the primarys and brought Americas attention to many good ideas. Perhaps his stance and ideals will gain some momentum from this campaign and He or someone with his ideals will fare better next time. The fact is that he is out of this election and I will vote for the person on the ticket that I have the most in common with.

 

I didn't vote for McCain in the primarys, so he's not my first choice either. In fact I can't even say he was my second choice. The fact still remains that at this point in the election a vote for anyone other than a McCain is a vote for BO!

 

I agree that America needs a paradigm shift in government, but that really needs to happen in the primarys first.

[GodIsGood]

I wish I had 'nuff cash to bug out of this mess!

 

Anyone who is dumb 'nuff to WANT to be President is suspect in my mind! At least McCain's motivation is that of a SERVANT. He is old, ugly and wore out - but he genuinely LOVES AMERICA, and like Reagan, he will surround himself with the best experts to guide us through what could very well be our darkest days.

 

Remember this my friends - as we scurry about trying to figure a way to deal with the corruption and greed which has come home to roost, countries like N Korea are restarting their nukes, Taliban is on the march in Afganistan, Russia is overflying Alaskan territories and taunting allies, Russia rolls their tanks into Georgia like the olden days, Russia illegally plants flags and lays claims to north pole territories that have become exposed due to global warming and are now ripe for oil and natural gas drilling, Iran is laying low waiting to strike like a snake - ALL LINING UP TO SCREW US AND OUR ALLIES INTO THE GROUND BECAUSE WE ARE MYOPICALLY FOCUSED ON OUR OWN ECONOMIC CRISIS! Our pants are at our ankles and REAL disaster from enemies abroad is not just possible - but durn likely!!!

 

Do you REALLY want a rookie senator backed by media, celeb's and poisoned koolaid-guzzling sheeple who were easily impressed all across the country handling our darkest days economically and keeping our enemies at bay??? I have said from the git-go the guy is the Anti-Christ from the Left Behind series, and I am not convinced he isnt the ultimate Islamic "plant" ready to screw us into oblivion! From all he's done, all he's not done, the people who he has hung out with, the spiritual leaders who have molded his beliefs... Barak Obama does not love America. He LOVES WHAT AMERICA MIGHT DO FOR HIM - THAT IS, HE GOES INTO THE HISTORY BOOKS AS THE FIRST PERSON OF COLOR TO HOLD THE MOST IMPORTANT OFFICE IN THE WORLD.

[DesertBull]

I will vote for the person on the ticket that I have the most in common with.

 

Me too

 

[.270]

redneck, where in the heck have you been that past 12 years? that is too funny. i figgerd everbuddy woulda got that one. don't they have radios or tv's or newspapers on the mountain anymore? i think i still have o' few of them cigars. maybe i'll send ya one. Lark.

[Non-Typical Solutions]

Just kind of live in my own world I guess.....sorry, little dense in some areas and if you have been keeping tabs on the other thread......a bigot to boot

[Coues 'n' Sheep]

Got give a shout out to Lark.... Thanks for your educated posts in this thread.... Your politics is almost identical to mine!

 

 

To write in a vote is supporting Obama... whether you want to do that or not!