Whoa... OUR Governor is going to run as VP?!?!?!

[SewingDiva]

I personally believe that breaking the two party system will really require getting citizens to vote in every election. Yes, that means PAYING ATTENTION by and voting in the small local elections at your town and state level: selectman, country commissioners, clerk of probate - all of the "boring" elections that actually impact our daily lives in an immediate way.

I vote in every election; everything from Town Meeting to Sate Rep/State Senate right on up to the congressional level and of course the presidential race. Yes – it’s a pain, yes it’s inconvenient – but we need to stop complaining and DO IT. Do I “like” spending 2 evenings sitting in Town Meeting until midnight wading through 40 warrants that need a vote after a hard day at work when I could be at home on BYC? No, but do I feel good after I vote? YES.

Casting a vote once very four years for President will never change anything - by the time a candidate gets to that level, they are so far removed form most of us that our vote is just lost in the mix and is mere fodder for analysis by political "pundits.".

Voters in this country need get up off their duffs, read the newspaper, and watch the news instead of the Food Network or Sports Center and they need to VOTE in every local election.

Then we will see some change.

~Phyllis

 

[deerman]

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Thank you. And here's an option for you ladies and gents.... Don't have sex if you're not in the postion to care for (or adopted out) a child!

You know what I'm wondering... How Obama is going to lower taxes while giving more things out for free. How does that work, anyway? If you want all these "things", you have to pay for them. That's how life goes!

Thats a easy one, cut the tax but tax you from another Area. Like good old Bill Clinton said he would not tax people making under 50,000. First thing he did was put a tax on gas. Guess people making under 50,000 dont need gas.
Any tax they can hide , by taxing company thats going to pass it to us.
What good does it do to cut Income Tax. Then make you pay more tax on goods you buy.

I say NO MORE TAXES!!!

 

[Rosalind]

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Actually, that's been disproven. I think it was Warren Buffett and a couple of other very wealthy people who sent a public letter to Congress asking to please amend the tax codes so that they would pay a greater proportion of taxes than their own low-paid secretaries. Oh yeah, here it is.

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Eh...to a certain extent, but that only goes so far. Have you seen the educational systems in India and China? Most of my colleagues are Asians. There are very wealthy parts of Asia that have fabulous schools, and really poor parts that have one-room school houses where they have to fight off wild dogs in class (not kidding, life is rough in rural India). I don't think you would want a Chinese or Indian school system; from what my colleagues tell me, their systems run largely on how well your parents can bribe the admissions committees. I agree with previous posters that parental attitudes about learning and education make a HUGE difference. And I would add that society's attitudes about what belongs in a schoolroom and what does not also make a HUGE difference: China and India are handing us our behinds on a platter in science and tech, and they definitely teach their children with an eye towards modern economics. Nor do they give out long summer holidays or let the kids go home after six or seven hours, as we do here.

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Um, I am going to point out the obvious problem with this statement, and I apologize if I embarrass you: Clearly the people in the US who do not have computers and so forth...aren't here. We've got poor people who are not poor by choice. You come visit, we'll go to downtown Boston and you can meet 'em in the soup kitchens. Heck, we'll go to the train station I pass through on my way to work, you can meet 'em. They sleep on park benches and obviously do not eat much of anything, you can tell, nor can they afford showers. They exist, they are just not here on this board, yanno?

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Not really. If you read a lot of early Colonial history from the primary sources (William Bradford, de Vaca, Bartolome de las Casas, original ships' logs of Columbus, etc.) it becomes clear that we have pretty much always been the land of whining for a free lunch. Or free whale oil and piracy, anyway, funded by royalty. It's only revisionist historians in the 19th century who decided we needed a more romantic history of Great Heroes, type of thing. Personally I think the real stories about cannibalism and boozing and piracy are exciting and romantic on their own, but apparently that's just me.

It may help you to think of it this way: In Haiti, DR, other countries including both Third World and also China, India etc., when inequality between the very wealthy and very poor became readily apparent and reached an extreme, they had very very bloody and nasty revolutions, in which many people were killed. This is also bad for business. Many of the New Deal and Great Society reforms enacted by FDR and LBJ were not done so out of some soft-hearted notion of charity; if you read their letters and memoirs, they were not great morality/ethics worriers, they were not some Tolstoy-ish do-gooders. They realized that if the disparities were too great and too obvious, that there would be a bloody revolution with heads on pikestaffs here in the US, and the social movements of the time (unions for FDR--which in his time were violent gangs rather than the mild-mannered lawyers you see today, and anti-racist activists for LBJ) seemed to be signs that such violence would be easy enough to precipitate. So they devised several ways in which money could be moved around to maintain a middle class and keep angry poor people an extreme minority. Now that those programs are breaking down, you see more angry people and also more disenfranchised people who truly are splintering away from federalism. This is bad for business and bad for society too. I will say that my Chinese colleagues think we still have a better safety zone than, say, Beijing: our ultra-wealthy citizens are not readily visible, we rarely see them in person, flaunting their money. When the disparity is more visible, it's harder to take and causes more bad feeling. I would suggest to you that moving money around to ensure that few people are poor and even fewer are angry and anti-federalist is in the interest of keeping a society peaceable, lawful and growing economically.

 

[deerman]

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What's really sad is you see a moral equivalence there

Carefull breaking those eggs with live embryos. Thats being cruel to animales. You can go to jail for that. Guess its ok if the hen wants to break them.

 

[Rosalind]

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Thank you!

I am just going to say one more thing before shutting up, I promise: What you consider an unborn baby depends 100% on what you consider to be human. Lots of things which are technically, scientifically, biologically human, with complex tissue structures and a high degree of independence in tissue culture dishes, would not be considered human by 99% of pro-lifers. Lots of creatures with more awareness, complexity, and neural development than a third trimester fetus are also not considered the moral equivalents of humans, even though they are capable of rationality. So, what we consider to be a human worthy of human rights is in fact a question of religion more than anything else. That's fine, you can believe in any religion you want in this country, we're very free about that. If you want to believe that a baby gets its soul at the moment of conception or at the moment of quickening or when the temporal lobe develops significant activity in the cortex, that's fine. What you can't do is force your religion on other people.

There are many, many instances where children are not blessings but curses to their parents. The news reports, morgues and medical pathology textbooks are full of them. The one thing that I find in common with many pro-lifers I know is that they cannot truly empathize with a situation that is foreign to them, they cannot truly imagine what it is like to be in a position where they would feel differently than they do now. They say things like, "only a monster could do XYZ!" when in fact ordinary people do these things daily. When they personally do XYZ themselves, they insist that somehow their personal experience is different from that of everyone else's when in fact it's not a bit different at all; many abortion providers remark on the whole "my abortion is morally just, but her abortion is because she's a bad person" phenomenon. There are lots of reasons why they might have an inability to empathize, but that seems to be a common theme. And that's fine too, you don't ever have to empathize with another person if you don't want to, it's a free country. All you have to understand is that other people don't feel the same way as you. Praise the lord, everyone is different and it'd be a funny old world if we were all alike.

 

[revelu]

I think she is a brilliant choice for V.P. and will now vote for McCain because of her-- I was and am a Ron Paul supporter/believer and she will uphold the constitution and true conservative values as he would-- I wasn't going to vote this year at all because the choice between the two men is so dismal and uncompelling-- the excitement is back!

 

[Oblio13]

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Hardly. A quick Google search turns up literal thousands of statistics from reliable sources such as "The top 1% of wage earners pay ten times more taxes that the bottom 50%". Do you really believe that if you won the lottery, you'd pay less taxes than you do now?!

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Nobody - nobody- in America is forced to starve to death or even to go without medical care or housing. Some do anyway, but that's a whole different subject.

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I would suggest to you that you are completely free to "move around" YOUR money. I work long and hard for my wages, and I'd like the same freedom of choice about what to do with them.

 

[SundownWaterfowl]

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Your right!

 

[bluey]

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Your right!

I'm also with you on this one Oblio...

If America was such a horrible place, why aren't there lines to get on boats to leave it?...

We are the most "enabling" country in the world, that's why....

 

[swampducks]

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Just a thought on this (and forgive me if someone has already mentioned it, I'm still reading all the posts in this thread, one by one) But this universal healthcare is just the thing the democrats (Hillary comes to mind, especially) are pushing. To pay for government mandated insurance the money has to come from somewhere and the only way to do that without increasing the deficit is to raise taxes, or else everyone will have to pay for it out of pocket.

Of course, I suppose if the whole country is stuck with this kind of plan there won't be anywhere for the doctors to run except out of the country.

Hey, maybe they can go to Canada and help fix their universal healthcare system!

sd - btw, I used to live in MA, I know all about their political shenanigans