Showing posts with label Voter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voter. Show all posts

Friday, October 11, 2013

DeMOCKracy



Oh! what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice to deceive!
A Palmer too! No wonder why
I felt rebuked beneath his eye
-Sir Walter Scott


While skimming over the Drudge Report I noticed that the radical right wings, Limbough and Coulter had their knickers in a twist again and have turned up the whining, bashing, bitching, moaning and groaning volume

From Coulter:
DEMOCRATS TO AMERICA: WE OWN THE GOVERNMENT!

From Limbough:

Obama Approval Down To 37% and Republicans Still Think They Are Losing?  
I have long since stopped expected these two shock jocks ( and many others ) to be silent. They earn their substantial incomes by propagating fear and partisan maliciousness. You don't kill the goose that lay's the golden egg. You keep feeding it.

But I question why so many listen to them.

The reality is, in partisan politics no-one wins, and the voters are always the losers all the way around.

The government had  over 3 years to write, re-write and settle the healthcare bill and end the debate on the contents.  If they could not do that in the allocated time frame what are we tax payers paying for?

I want a refund!

Many issues will thwart peaceful resolve. As a Christian I am pro-life. But as a Christian I understand that the United States is a democratic republic and not a theocracy.
If one is pro-life in a democratic republic it's time to roll your sleeves up, foster children who would otherwise be aborted and save a life, one at a time. We should also not impede government programs established to help babies and children.
God assures us that nothing is impossible. We should lead by example..

And we should expect our elected officials to do the same.

We watch candidates jump from the Republican platform, to the Democratic platform. Changing horses mid-stream; first running as one and then the other, their voting records reflecting muddy belief's or no substantial convictions to "prove" that they are right wing or left wing outside of campaign promises.

I am always amazed at how many candidates suddenly become "Christian" when they are running for office. If anyone truly believes that G.W.Bush is a Christian they need psychiatric care.. "You will know them by their fruit."
Scripture say's nothing about "nuts."

Mitt Romney ran in the last Presidential election and I kept hearing Christians say, "He reflects our ideals and Biblical standards."
He was pro-choice and part of the Affordable Care Act - the part everyone is disagreeing on - was written under his governorship.

If this level of partisan discourse in the government continues, we are the ones who will suffer the consequences.
“An irony of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) is that one of its key provisions, the individual insurance mandate, has conservative origins. In Congress, the requirement that individuals to purchase health insurance first emerged in Republican health care reform bills introduced in 1993 as alternatives to the Clinton plan. The mandate was also a prominent feature of the Massachusetts plan passed under Governor Mitt Romney in 2006. According to Romney, ‘we got the idea of an individual mandate from [Newt Gingrich], and [Newt] got it from the Heritage Foundation.’”


http://wallstcheatsheet.com/stocks/the-irony-of-obamacare-republicans-thought-of-it-first.html/?a=viewall
http://www.kenbenoit.net/pdfs/NDATAD2013/PolicyIdeas2013TextasData.pdf

But despite the Republican involvement in writing the bill, the rhetoric has continued, and, like the black plague, it has spread at an alarming rate.

Oct 2008: "You'll never get elected and pass healthcare."
Nov 2008: "We'll never let you pass healthcare."
Jan 2009: "We're gonna shut you down every time you try to pass healthcare."
July 2009: "We'll fight to death every attempt you make to pass healthcare."
Dec 2009: "We will destroy you if you even consider passing healthcare."
March 2010: "We can't believe you just passed healthcare."
April 2010: "We are going to overturn healthcare."
Sept 2010: "We are going to repeal healthcare."
Jan 2011: "We are going to destroy healthcare."
Feb 2012: "We're gonna elect a candidate who'll revoke healthcare NOW."
June 2012: "We'll go to the Supreme Court, and they will overturn healthcare."
Aug 2012: "American people will never re-elect you - they don't want healthcare."
Oct 2012: "We can't wait to win the election and explode healthcare."
Nov 2012: "We can't believe you got re-elected and we can't repeal healthcare."
Feb 2013: "We're still going to vote to obliterate healthcare."
June 2013: "We can't believe the Supreme Court just upheld healthcare."
July 2013: "We're going to vote like 44 more times to erase healthcare."
Sept 2013: "We are going to leverage a government shutdown into de-funding, destroying, obliterating, overturning, repealing, dismantling, erasing, and ripping apart healthcare."
Oct 2013: "WHY AREN'T YOU NEGOTIATING???"


We scream for individual freedom. Yet we expect the government to legislate morality when it comes to gay marriage and things we don't agree with.

What happened to individual freedom? It is a double edged sward, it cannot cater to one ideal. Freedom is freedom to make choices others may not agree with.

We say we want honesty, yet devour twisted truth with relish. 

A few weeks ago I got into a heated debate with a woman in Florida about Muslims.  She is convinced that they are going to take over America because of something Coulter wrote. The conversation was not directed at "radicals" or "terrorists'.. but "all" Muslims. So it was her opinion that we should ban Muslims. Make them all leave the United States.
She continued on to say:
Neither Communism nor Islam belong in America. They are enemies of a Republic.
Before the dust settled I was anti-American, an enemy of the state and a horrible Christian. But the facts still remained.

Muslims have been in the USA since Columbus arrived. They have fought in every U.S. war since the revolutionary war. Census records show nearly 300 men with surnames from Muslim areas fought in the Civil War. Muslims were incredibly active in the anti-slavery movement, So much so that President Andrew Johnson praising a Tunisian Muslim, Gen. Otman Hashem, for his anti-slavery humanitarianism. Charles Sumner, senator from Massachusetts, described Islam's position on the just treatment of slaves and preference toward emancipation as "words worthy of adoption."

A
nd they DO belong in the USA because ones faith is protected under the First Amendment.  If people do not want other religions they must get rid of the Constitution and Bill Of Rights.


If someone become a Muslim they have to leave the USA. How ludicrous is that?

Despite the argument that ensued, I do not believe that Sharia Law belongs in the west, because I truly believe in one law for all - none excluded. I believe that all civilized nations in the western world should have a form of Universal Healthcare.. the fact that the US is the only country that doesn't silently speaks volumes. I do not know if the Affordable Care Act is the right one. I believe that we should fire ALL members of Congress. Get rid of them all. If they cannot put together a suitable bill that satisfies the majority in over 3 years they have made a mockery of democratic process. More important, people should stop listening to the shock jocks who earn an incredible amount of money raising the volume.. making their followers believe that they have "insider information" and a higher IQ than their fan club. 
 




People like Limbough, Coulter -  ( and there are plenty on the left wing the same ) are predators preying on our frailties.  More important, on our ignorance. 

No one should tell you what to believe. 


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

The British Are Not Coming!


There once was a country called Britain,
Run by corrupt politicians,
The people said "What?"
"Let's be rid of the lot!"
And rose up in revolution.

In August 2013 we watched an historic event, one that most Americans may have missed or failed to see the significance of.

President Obama wanted to take military action against the Syrian government, and Prime Minister Cameron agreed. But the British public, those who pay the wages of the elected officials in Parliament, had a totally different idea.

Already much older and wiser after Iraq and Afghanistan they, by a unanimous informal poll .. said, "No thank you." And everyone knew that they meant it.


The British Parliament & The House Of Lords debated.. the Church of England become involved. 

What was missed in all the newspapers and editorials on "this side of the pond"  was that, the British people had spoken.  With a 200 year history of allowing their government to invade other nations against the will of the people.. the citizens said, "enough."

There was political wrangling a plenty after the vote. The war horses felt betrayed, one cabinet member said  "We might as well turn all our embassies into car showrooms.” There was suggestions that the British had turned isolationist.  

But Conservative backbencher Douglas Carswell summed it up perfectly when he said:  "These figures show that the wisdom of the British people is superior to that of the Whitehall elite."

In times when we often wonder if the elected officials ever hear our voices, or would ever represent those who voted for them, the British people showed us how Democratic process works when the people stand up and say, "No, thank you!"

Perhaps practicing saying "no" is a valuable lesson in today's world.  

 


 




In the Lords Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, is speaking now.

He says he has some experience in the region, "partly from this role that I have".

International law is based on the Christian theory of just war, he says.

He says he agrees that there is just as much risk in inaction as in action. But there are intermediate steps between being in barracks and opening fire. Just war theory says you should only go to war when all alternatives have been tried, because at that point the consequences are out of your hands.

Military intervention would be "deeply unjust" if it diminished the prospects of peace and reconciliation in Syria. (Speaking in the Lords, he implied strongly that it would have this effect.)


Here are some more extracts from George Galloway's speech earlier. I've taken the quotes from the Press Association. (By Galloway standards, it was relatively low-octane, but it was still one of the highlights of the debate.)

The Syrian rebels definitely had sarin gas because they were caught with it by the Turkish government as referred to by the former government minister opposite [David Davis - see 6.37pm].

The truth is this - the Syrian rebels have got plenty of access to sarin. It's not rocket science - a group of Shinto-obscurantists in Japan, living on Mount Fuji, poisoned the Tokyo underground with sarin gas less than 20 years ago. You don't have to be Einstein to have your hands on sarin gas or the means to distribute it ...

Only 11% of the public, according to the Daily Telegraph this morning, support Britain becoming involved in a war in Syria. Can ever a British government have imagined sending its men and women to war with the support of just 11% in public opinion?

First, that there is no compelling evidence, to use the leader of the opposition's words, that the Assad regime is responsible for this crime yet. Not that they are not bad enough to do it. Everybody knows they are bad enough to do it. The question is, are they mad enough to do it?

To launch a chemical weapons attack in Damascus on the very day that a United Nations chemical weapons inspection team arrives in Damascus must be a new definition of madness. And of course if he is that mad, how mad is he going to be once we've launched a blizzard of Tomahawk cruise missiles upon his country?







Now the military..



In the Lords Lord Dannatt, the former head of the army (and at one time an adviser to David Cameron) has said that servicemen and women should not be forced to fight a campaign without public support.

It's been very interesting this week what has been happening in our country. The drums of war were banging very loudly two or three days ago. The people didn't like it. The dialogue, the debate has changed. In the House of Commons the debate has been considering a different motion to the one that was probably intended. Looking for more time, looking for a second debate, looking for second vote.

The drum beat has got quieter and that's really, really important. And why I say it's really important is because the people who have to carry out the military actions that we might or might not require are the soldiers, sailors and airmen of our armed forces. And they are not some kind of elite that are kept in a box that are just wheeled out when needed. They are citizens like you and me. And they are citizens who absolutely have to know that what they are being asked to do is what the country wants them to do, what the country believes is right.

We don't govern by consensus but we are a democracy, and the people have a very important voice in this and I'm delighted that the drumbeat and the drums have become more muffled.

And as far as intervention in Syria is concerned I do not support intervention in any shape or form at this time. Circumstances might change.

What a HUGE victory for democratic process that day was..

Twitter was going wild



JamesLyons @MirrorJames

Rolled over by Ed M and defeated anyway. Cameron's taunts of 'weak, weak, weak' against Lab leader must be ringing in his ears.
4:34 PM - 29 Aug 2013


James Forsyth @JGForsyth

Cameron accepts defeat, it's all off. Huge humiliation for the PM. No10 expected to win this vote


Daniel Hannan ✔ @DanHannanMEP

Dignified, decent, democratic response by the PM. A truly stunning shift in power from executive to legislature.


Mark D'Arcy @DArcyTiP

Wow! Parliament has taken war powers. No PM can now launch military action without MPs consent. V big constitutional moment.


Paul Goodman @PaulGoodmanCH

1) With some 30 Labour MPs absent, it was Tory ones that sunk Cameron this evening. Wounding blow to his authority.

2) Breach with America finally comes when a Conservative Prime Minister is in Downing Street - and one on good terms with President.

3) Big implications for British foreign policy: is it now in effect isolationist?


James Forsyth @JGForsyth

Result today a huge embarrassment to Cameron. Up until this vote, he’d had a very good summer. Politics is now turned upside down
4:37 PM - 29 Aug 2013


Owen Jones @OwenJones84

Worth pointing out how historic this is. British has been subservient to US foreign policy since Suez in 1956. A big moment.
4:38 PM - 29 Aug 2013


Philip Cowley @philipjcowley

Not seen division lists, but that gvt rebellion must be bigger than the one that brought down Chamberlain in 1940.

The British were OUT. The people had spoken!