Usa Thread

[Flashermac]

 

Would have been a good time to be studying racism.

 

 

[Bangkoktraveler]

Representative Gabrielle Giffords gets to watch her husband return to space today as the Commander of the Endeavor.

 

Proud moment in 'American' history.

[allistar]

Would have been a good time to be studying racism.

 

Assuming you could take a neutral position, as sthe sixties was a very polarizing decade.

[Bangkoktraveler]

Space shuttle didn't launch.

 

 

[Bangkoktraveler]

Obama still met with Congress woman Giffords. Her husband is to be the comander of this mission.

[robaus]

LP,

 

>>explain how the repubs had condi rice and colin powell in high office long before the dems had their token black man to make them look saintly?....imo both would have made good presidents and wouldn't have had their nationality questioned, they're americans born a bred.

.. as far as I'm concerned race, colour, religion should not even enter into the debate about suitability for high office. Your use of the words "token black" and "they're americans born a bred" implies that colour and ethnicity obviously matters to you

 

HH,

 

>>As for the posters on this board, I don’t think you’ll find that any have made “racist†remarks.

... oh yes, they have.. many times... we've had many a stoush over it too. Take some of LP's remarks above for starters.

 

>>Actually, it‘s all quite moot: there is nothing “racist†about the sign.

... crikey any grade 9 media student could deconstruct the racism. You tell me why the HUSSEIN, Obama's middle name, is highlighted. We never hear of Louise Palin and Sidney McCain, do we?.. In case the reader is dopey enough not to get the message "Jihad 08" is added, implying Obama is an Islamic terrorist.

 

If you're still in doubt about the Tea Party's racist credentials have a look at these signs and racist slogans from their September 2010 rally.

 

Here's the youtube of the rally..

 

Impeach the Muslim Marxist.

Obama's Plan White Slavery

"What’s the difference between the zoo and the White House? The zoo has an African [lion] and the White House has a lyin’ African!â€

“Cap Congress and trade Obama back to Kenya!â€

"Stand idle while some Kenyan tries to destroy America? Homey don't play dat!!!"

"Impeach Osama Obama AKA Hussein"

"Obama Bin-Lyin".

 

I personally don't give a hoot about US politics. Well, actually I do because the GFC caused directly by Bushit and his cronies affected the value of my property downunder and in Thailand, although he was a godsend in helping me to short the Aussie stock market... thanks. I personally think Obama is doing an excellent job. That's irrelevant. It’s the racist attacks I object to.

 

All this stemmed from my comment about Trump and the birthers' preoccupation with Obama's birth certificate, which I still am sure was racially motivated. Their whole conspiracy theory was ludicrous.

 

 

[robaus]

Here's a ripper article about the state of play in US politics.

 

Donals Trump's lunacy reveals core truth about Republicans

 

"Since the election of Barack Obama, the Republican Party has proved that one of its central intellectual arguments was right all along. It has long claimed that evolution is a myth believed in only by whiny liberals – and it turns out it was on to something. Every six months, the party venerates a new hero, and each time it is somebody further back on the evolutionary scale.

 

 

Sarah Palin told cheering rallies that her message to the world was: "We'll put a boot in your ass, it's the American way!" – but that wasn't enough. So the party found Michele Bachmann, who said darkly it was an "interesting coincidence" that swine flu only breaks out under Democratic presidents, claims the message of The Lion King is "I'm better at what I do because I'm gay", and argues "there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows carbon dioxide is a harmful gas."

 

That wasn't enough. I half-expected the next contender to be a lung-fish draped in the Stars and Stripes. But it wasn't anything so sophisticated. Enter stage (far) right Donald Trump, the bewigged billionaire who has filled America with phallic symbols and plastered his name across more surfaces than the average Central Asian dictator. CNN's polling suggests he is the most popular candidate among Republican voters. It's not hard to see why. Trump is every trend in Republican politics over the past 35 years taken to its logical conclusion. He is the Republican id, finally entirely unleashed from all restraint and all reality.

 

The first trend is towards naked imperialism. On Libya, he says: "I would go in and take the oil... I would take the oil and stop this baby stuff." On Iraq, he says: "We stay there, and we take the oil... In the old days, when you have a war and you win, that nation's yours." It is a view that the world is essentially America's property, inconveniently inhabited by foreigners squatting over oil-fields. Trump says America needs to "stop what's going on in the world. The world is just destroying our country. These other countries are sapping our strength." The US must have full spectrum dominance. In this respect, he is simply an honest George W Bush.

 

The second trend is towards dog-whistle prejudice – pitched just high enough for frightened white Republicans to hear it. Trump made it a central issue to suggest that Obama wasn't born in America (and therefore was occupying the White House illegally), even though this conspiracy theory had long since been proven to be as credible as the people who claim Paul McCartney was killed in 1969 and replaced with an imposter. Trump said nobody "ever comes forward" to say they knew Obama as a child in Hawaii. When lots of people pointed out they knew Obama as a child, Trump ridiculed the idea that they could remember that far back. Then he said he'd "heard" the birth certificate said Obama was Muslim. When it was released saying no such thing, Trump said: "I'm very proud of myself."

 

The Republican primary voters heard the message right: the black guy is foreign. He's not one of us. Trump answered these charges by saying: "I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

 

The third trend is towards raw worship of wealth as an end in itself – and exempting them from all social responsibility. Trump is wealthy because his father left him a large business, and since then companies with his name on them have crashed into bankruptcy four times. In 1990, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston studied the Trump accounts and claimed that while Trump claimed to be worth $1.4bn, he actually owed $600m more than he owned and you and I were worth more than him. His current wealth is not known, but he claims he is worth more than $2.7bn.

 

Johnston says that in fact most of Trump's apparent fortune comes from "stiffing his creditors" and from government subsidies and favours for his projects – which followed large donations to the campaigns of both parties, sometimes in the very same contest. Trump denies these charges and presents himself as an entrepreneur "of genius".

 

Yet for the Republican Party, the accumulation of money is proof in itself of virtue, however it was acquired. The richest 1 per cent pay for the party's campaigns, and the party in turn serves their interests entirely. The most glaring example is that they have simply exempted many of the rich from taxes. Johnston studied four of Trump's recent tax returns, and found he legally paid no taxes in two of them. In America today, a janitor can pay more income tax than Donald Trump – and the Republicans regard that not as a source of shame, but of pride.

 

How are these tax exemptions for the super-rich paid for? Here's one example. The Republican budget that just passed through the Senate slashed funding to help premature babies to survive. The rich riot while the poor shrivel. Trump offers the ultimate symbol of this: he won't even shake hands with any ordinary Americans out on the stump, because "you catch all sorts of things" from them. Yes: the Republican front-runner is a billionaire who literally won't touch the poor or middle class.

 

The fourth trend is to insist that any fact inconvenient to your world view simply doesn't exist, or can be overcome by pure willpower. Soon, the US will have to extend its debt ceiling – the amount of money the government is allowed to borrow – or it will default on its debt. Virtually every economist in the world says this would cause another global economic crash. Trump snaps back: "What do economists know? Most of them aren't very smart." Confront the Republicans with any long-term social or economic problem, and they have one response: it would go away if only we insisted on our assumptions more aggressively.

 

This denial of reality runs deep. So Trump says "it's so easy" to deal with rising oil prices. He says he would call in Opec, the cartel of oil-producing nations, as if they were contestants on his show The Apprentice, and declare: "I'm going to look them in the eye and say, 'Fellows, you've had your fun. Your fun is over.' "

 

It's the same, he says, with China. He will order them to stop manipulating their currency. When he was informed that the Chinese had some leverage over the US, he snapped: "They have some of our debt. Big deal. It's a very small number relative to the world, ok?" This is what the Republican core vote wants to be told. The writer Matthew Yglesias calls it "the Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics". It's named after the Marvel comics superhero the Green Lantern, who can only use his superpowers when he "overcomes fear" and shows confidence – and then he can do anything. This is Trump's view. The whiny world simply needs to be bullied into submission by a more assertive America – or the world can be fired and he'll find a better one.

 

Trump probably won't become the Republican nominee, but not because most Republicans reject his premisses. No: it will be because he states these arguments too crudely for mass public consumption. He takes the whispered dogmas of the Reagan, Bush and Tea Party years and shrieks them through a megaphone. The nominee will share similar ideas, but express them more subtly. In case you think these ideas are marginal to the party, remember - it has united behind the budget plan of Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan. It's simple: it halves taxes on the richest 1 percent and ends all taxes on corporate income, dividends, and inheritance. It pays for it by slashing spending on food stamps, healthcare for the poor and the elderly, and basic services. It aims to return the US to the spending levels of the 1920s – and while Ryan frames it as a response to the deficit, it would actually increase it according to the independent Center for Budget and Policy Priorities. Ryan says "the reason I got involved in public service" was because he read the writings of Ayn Rand, which describe the poor as "parasites" who must "perish", and are best summarized by the title of one of her books: 'The Virtue of Selfishness.'

 

The tragedy is that Obama needs serious opposition – but not from this direction. In reality, he is funded by similar destructive corporate interests, and has only been a few notches closer to sanity than these people. But faced with such overt lunacy, he seems like he is serving the bottom 99 per cent of Americans much more than he really is.

 

The Republican Party today isn't even dominated by market fundamentalism. This is a crude Nietzscheanism, dedicated to exalting the rich as an overclass and dismissing the rest. So who should be the Republican nominee? I hear the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were considering running – but they are facing primary challenges from the Tea Party for being way too mild-mannered."

 

[Bangkoktraveler]

...... but Sarah Palin is serious opposition. All the dumwit Democrats are still trying to figure out what is the capital city of Africa.

 

Why even the dumbest Republican knows that answer.

[Steve]

"What’s the difference between the zoo and the White House? The zoo has an African [lion] and the White House has a lyin’ African!â€

 

Even I laughed out loud when I read this one. Its pretty good actualy. Its a racist statement but its still damn funny and I have to admire the creativity.

 

The kids had a joke for the black and Puerto Rican students at the HS in the 'burbs outside Philly we got sent to. I stil laugh when I think about however at the time had I heard it someone would have gotten a chin check

 

"when we graduate we're going to spend 4 years at Penn State and they are going to spend 4 years at the State Pen"

[cavanami]

 

THIS IS HOW YOU FIX CONGRESS!

 

Congressional Reform Act of 2011

 

1. Term Limits. 12 years only, one of the possible options below..

 

A. Two Six-year Senate terms

B. Six Two-year House terms

C. One Six-year Senate term and three Two-Year House terms

 

 

2. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they are out of office.

 

 

3. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security.

 

All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people.

 

 

4. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

 

 

5. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

 

 

6. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

 

 

7. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

 

 

8. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 10-1-11

 

 

The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts for themselves.

 

 

Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so ours should serve their term(s), then go home and back to work.

 

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S. ) to receive the message. Maybe it is time..