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| SFReader Forums > The Real World > World Events > Congress hits low | Forum Quick Jump
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nathan
Sage
      
Date Joined Mar 2006
Total Posts : 2175
| Posted 7/26/2007 12:42 PM (GMT -5) |   | |
WASHINGTON -- In the eyes of the public, Congress is doing even worse than the president.
Public satisfaction with the job lawmakers are doing has fallen 11 points since May, to 24 percent, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. That's lower than for President Bush, who hasn't fared well lately, either.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Congress_AP_Poll.html
***
I wonder how this will shake out for 08. A concentration on how Bush hurts the GOP maybe misleading as DNC controlled Congress and Senate are viewed even worse than the screw up king from Cross Plains.
As bad as Bush maybe for Repubs Harry Reid and Nancy P maybe even more of an albatross for DNC canidates.
In this environment it would seem a "non-traditional" or "D.C. outsider" canidate may fit the bill.
Who that would be escapes me but if dems are banking on Bush disastisfaction to get them the White House they maybe ignoring an elephant in the room.
VIEW IMAGE
"Writing the wet dreams of teenage boys" - Lindsey Llyod, Tangent Reviews
Tarantino himself has been forward and unapologetic about his influences. In a 1994 interview with Empire magazine, he said, "I steal from every single movie ever made. If people don't like that, then tough tills, don't go and see it, all right? I steal from everything. Great artists steal, they don't do homages." | | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 7/26/2007 2:28 PM (GMT -5) | | Throw all the scoundles out sounds great to me too.
I'm feeling very betrayed. I voted for the republicans and they didn't even try. None of the things they said they were for were even attempted. And I expected the legislative branch leadership to work closer with and watch out for the president, I expected them to agressively promote their agenda. Instead they did neither. It was the Contract with America all over again, only this time they had all the cards and just refused to put them on the table.
I don't like the Democrats agenda-- I don't want to live in the world as they envision it. But at least they push for their agenda. they are wrong on a lot of things-- wrong in their precepts, but they try to act. The republicans have to go back to square one and decide who they are and what they believe. The religous conservative/ fiscal conservative alliance is over. I'm a fiscal conservative-- I don't oppose gay marraige, I oppose marraige being in the tax code at all. I want complete seperation of church and state, equality before the law and the government out of as much of my buisness as is humanly possible.
So many hot issues lately are so much hot air to me-- I don't agree with any party across the board on so many social issues-- Health Care, Immigration, Gay Rights, Abortion, Minimum Wage, Racial Profiling, Property Rights vis Economic development, so many issues. I can't be the only one in this boat.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html | | Back to Top | | |
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MichaelEhart
Sage
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 2352
| Posted 7/26/2007 3:13 PM (GMT -5) | | |
Part of the issue among Democrats is the perception that they haven't done enough. This will change; Reid has decided to go to the mat on this with the Republicans, who are on track to a record number of filibusters, precisely to cause this perception. Remember, Harry has only a one vote majority, and that one vote is Joe Lieberman, who caucases with the Dems but votes with the R's. The way the rules are set up in the senate, if one party wants to block everything, the other side needs a 60 vote majority. By not allowing the "gentleman's filibuster" Reid will force them to actually lose some sleep and been seen as obstructing everything. As things stand now, all that it takes is a simple headcount and the annoucement that they will filibuster and the vote for cloture is blocked. Which the Republicans have done on everything so far, hoping to foster the perception that the dems are presiding over a do-nothing congress. Note-- the only thing not subject to filibuster is budgetary bills. Look for some interesting fireworks there, soon.
The dems have only been in for 6 months, and thier own party is mad at them for not being able to undo the previous 6 years. Classic Democratic circular firing squad.
Congress always has lousy approval ratings-- the conventional wisdom is usually that everybody hates congress, except their own representative.
We are a long ways from Nov. 2008. Polls at this point are only useful to help candidates to raise money, which at this point is the only real indicator of where each party stands. The Republicans are in trouble--- they have traditionally relied on swamping the Dems with ads, mailers, and in the last decade, technology. All of this takes money, and instead of outraising the Dems 2-1 or 3-1 as they traditionally have, the Dems are seriously ahead in fundraising, both at the presidential candidates' level, where both Hillary and Obama have each out-raised the three Republican leaders combined, and at the congressional level, where instead of the usual extreme dominance, the Republicans trail significantly.
Here is the latest Rasmussen poll, which is a more apples-to-apples comparison with the "Who do you trust more" question:
|
Issue |
Dem |
GOP |
Net Dem Advtg. |
|
Nat'l Security |
42% |
40% |
+2 |
|
Taxes |
43% |
41% |
+2 |
|
Education |
41% |
37% |
+4 |
|
Abortion |
42% |
37% |
+5 |
|
Immigration |
40% |
30% |
+10 |
|
Economy |
47% |
38% |
+9 |
|
War in Iraq |
47% |
35% |
+12 |
|
Soc. Security |
47% |
34% |
+13 |
|
Ethics & Corruption |
38% |
25% |
+13 |
|
Healthcare |
50% |
33% |
+17 |
Ten of ten. Never before. Note national security, taxes, war in Iraq, and immigration are reversed from 2 years ago.
We are a well-educated and free-thinking bunch here, regardless of our political orientation. Most people simply don't know what's going on in Washington, and don't start paying attention until after Labor Day of the election year.
Read me in 2007!
"The View From the Shotglass Floor" Ray Gun Revival, Feb 2007
"Voice of the Spoiler" The Sword Review, June 2007
"Servant of the Manthycore" The Sword Review, July 2007
"Darkling I Listen; and for Many a Time" Fear and Trembling, coming soon!
"Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" The Sword Review, August 2007
"Six Zombies Doing That Mick Jagger Strut" Damned in Dixie, Summer 2007
"Nothing But Our Tears" The Sword Review, September 2007
"Night of Shadows, Night of Knives" Magic and Mechanica, Fall 2007
"The Scarlet Colored Beast" The Sword Review, October 2007
"The Stars by Law, Forbidden" Unparalleled Journeys II, November 2007
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 7/26/2007 4:05 PM (GMT -5) | | I still want what I want, and nobody is talking about doing much of any of it.
I want a secure border with mexico, even if it means my own kids can once again work steady in the landscaping and Janitorial service fields.
I want companies who hire illegal workers fined to the point of collasp, and I want Unions with Illegals on their rolls to face the same treatments. I want legal aliens on the welfare rolls to be given a time limit to move off, or face deportation.
I want security people at the airports looking for muslim men between the ages of 18 and 50, and subjecting such to extra scrutiny. I don't want another young blonde woman with an underwired bra strip searched until one actually becomes associated with a threat.
I want "The war on terror" defined, goals established, strategy pursued and heads taken. I want a US government representitive to state out loud that what muslim people choose to import from our culture-- Dallas, Dynasty, Baywatch, Internet porn, women drivers, or what have you, is up to them. If their own culture is threatened by these things, they need to stop buying them.
I want someone to suggest a plan to revitalise our domestic manufacturing base. China may have a near infinite supply of slave labor, but we've out performed slave labor before. And the chinese can't even feed themselves, we still have openings in all sectors. Time to do something to brings us back into the game.
I want all people to be equal under the law everywhere in the US. That means any two people being able to enter a contractual partnership with tax and guardianship benifits currently assumed only by marrage. It also means stupid little things like women being able to go topless without reprisal anywhere a man can, whites and orientals being able to qualify at state schools with the same scores as blacks and hispanics. Equal before our own government in all things.
I want a divorced father to have the same ability to get the courts and state agencies to enforce his visitation rights as a divorced mother can to collect her child support.
I want eminent domain to be outlawed as a tool of "economic development". The idea that the federal, state or local government can take your property away and sell it to someone who will make it worth more and so pay more taxes stands two hundred years of American history on its head. It is wrong and against our basic principle of government "by the people, for the people".
I want baseball's monopoly excemption removed until such time as they name an _independant_ commissioner, rather than a member of the ownership.
I'm sure there is more, but these ae the highlights. I doubt anybody running for any national office in a serious way is behind more than 10% of this.
Mike
Michael D. Turner
"Psyched Up" in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
"Dutchman Rescue"in Continuum SF #6
www.continuumsciencefiction.com/orders.htm
"An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern" in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises:
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
www.fantasistent.com/books/anthologies/BASH.php
"Stains" in Tales of the Talisman 3-1 www.zianet.com/hadrosaur/index.html | | Back to Top | | |
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Daniel
Carl Jung's Waterboy
Date Joined Aug 2003
Total Posts : 4515
| Posted 7/26/2007 4:15 PM (GMT -5) | | | All except number 3, xenophobia, you've got my vote, Mike!
Although, eminent domain seems like a red-herring to me.
I'd substitute "redistricting" for eminent domain.
And I'd put environmental issues to the top, education, and health-care, as well.
I think "the war on terror" would have already been won to some extent had we not been sidetracked in Iraq and had the history's biggest fools in command of our military forces and intelligence agencies.
After 911 the whole world was willing to pitch in and hunt terrorists and some progress was made. The neo-cons who had power in the US and Blair in the UK tried to mortgage this good-will into a Crusade and a PR coup rather than a pragmatic fight against our enemies.
We can't eliminate radical islam. We shouldn't even have to do so. We can make America safe, but no-one on the GOP side has any idea of anything other than overt military war and conflating the fight against terrorism with the spreading of American Imperialism.
Hell, they weren't even apologetic about the empire aspirations calling the war a "product" and raving on and on about cheap gas and spreading "democracy" to the middle east.
You would have thought that just one of these high-salaried geniuses would have opened a history book, just cracked it open, just ONCE, and read what was inside!! Did they all buy their way through college and grad-school? Sheesh.
I guess they were all too busy plotting their next "revenge" trip on whoever didn't agree with their facsist-style political theories.
Morons.
"Art is the celebration of the ego's destruction."
Daniel | | Back to Top | | |
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MichaelEhart
Sage
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 2352
| Posted 7/26/2007 4:22 PM (GMT -5) | | Well ranted Mike. I don't agree on everything, but every item deserves debate.
Read me in 2007!
"The View From the Shotglass Floor" Ray Gun Revival, Feb 2007
"Voice of the Spoiler" The Sword Review, June 2007
"Servant of the Manthycore" The Sword Review, July 2007
"Darkling I Listen; and for Many a Time" Fear and Trembling, coming soon!
"Weaving Spiders Come Not Here" The Sword Review, August 2007
"Six Zombies Doing That Mick Jagger Strut" Damned in Dixie, Summer 2007
"Nothing But Our Tears" The Sword Review, September 2007
"Night of Shadows, Night of Knives" Magic and Mechanica, Fall 2007
"The Scarlet Colored Beast" The Sword Review, October 2007
"The Stars by Law, Forbidden" Unparalleled Journeys II, November 2007
| | Back to Top | | |
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erazmus
Master
Date Joined Jul 2005
Total Posts : 4554
| Posted 7/26/2007 4:31 PM (GMT -5) | | | | |
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Silverdrake
Stablehand
Date Joined May 2006
Total Posts : 49
| Posted 7/26/2007 6:21 PM (GMT -5) | | Daniel said...
All except number 3, xenophobia, you've got my vote, Mike!
It isn't xenophobia to resist foreign invaders. It is, in fact, one of the Constitutionally enumerated responsibilities of the US government. Try looking up MS-13, Nation of Aztlan, or La Raza. The latter's motto goes something like: Por nosotros, todos. Por los otros, nada! (For us, everything. For everyone else, nothing!) If you're against racism, you're against these groups and their members, because they are hard-core, bald-faced racists. MS-13 is a criminal syndicate known to be negotiating with Al Qaeda to use the Mexican "coyote" (human-smuggling) networks to get terrorists into the US.
Don't believe the BS about illegals taking jobs US citizens won't do. My oldest son has a home-builder certificate, and can't get a job in construction because he's not fluent in Spanish and can't talk to the illegals filling that labor niche.
Daniel said...
Although, eminent domain seems like a red-herring to me.
As for the abomination that the US Supreme Court made of the eminent domain law, in one fell swoop, they destroyed property rights in the US. You can no longer own property. You hold it in feifdom from the government, subject at any time to the government taking it from you and giving it to a more deserving vassal who will give bigger kickbacks to the liege lord. This is no different -- except, so far, in the degree of physical violence being used -- from Stalin forcing peasants off their privately owned land and onto collectives.
You really seem to like the Democrats, Daniel. Imagine their "perfect world" and you probably see something approaching utopia. The reality would be a hellhole more like the old Soviet Union. Because that is the end product of every socialist "experiment" everywhere in the world.
Socialized medicine is a disaster everywhere it's in place. Socialist "safety nets" reward the lazy, punish the industrious, and provide unlimited scope for corruption among the officials who run them.
Medical? It's broken. It's been broken ever since mega-corporations got their fingers into the pie. Right now, the medical system is a gigantic scam run by the HMOs and the medical providers. You either pay hundreds of dollars a month in protection to the mega-corps, or you get completely shafted by the providers for not paying said protection. Win-win for the scammers, nothing but a huge loss for you. Yet the Democrats -- those paragon champions of the "little people" -- want to force everyone to buy into this scam by mandating that *everyone* buy medical insurance. Oh, yeah, there go some real enemies of corporate greed.
Education? It's beyond broken. Teachers go by the latest fad in social experimentation and call it a teaching "theory", tell kids that political opinions are scientific and historical fact, and otherwise do their best to turn the kids into good little automatons incapable of any thought or opinion that isn't fed to them in sound bites on the six-o'clock news. A kid doesn't need to be able to read or write, just parrot back whatever load of crap the teacher gave out. "Whole language" leaves kids with no idea that prefixes and suffixes have meanings of their own, or that they even exist except as part of a given word. If a kid can't spell, no problem. If a kid doesn't know that some words sound the same but have different spellings and meanings, no problem. The kid is doing his own thing and communicating in his own manner.
IOW, the kid is a functional illiterate. No problem, say these so-called teachers. Big damned problem, say I. Interestingly, so said both Aristotle and Frederick Douglass. Each addressing the subject of slavery, each said the only way to keep someone a slave is to keep him illiterate, dependent on others to tell him what the words mean and thereby form his opinion of the world.
So who is enslaving our kids, Daniel? Who is forcing them to remain illiterate and dependent on others to form their opinions? When did literacy rates take a nose-dive? Gee, when government decided education was their purview. And you and the Democrats want more government intervention in education. Have you read Hillary's book, _It Takes A Village_? Have you seen the indoctrination program she wants put in place -- *mandated* for all children from the age of 4 months? She even advocates taking kids away from parents who disagree with the party line as being unfit. Her ideas amount to nothing but brainwashing of entire generations. And the Democrats thought it was a really great idea, ate it up and asked for more.
As for the environment, here: http://savageheart.blogspot.com/2005/09/arrogance-of-global-warming.html
Small followup here: http://savageheart.blogspot.com/2007/03/revision-of-earlier-global-warming-rant.html
CO2 is not a pollutant; it's a major component of the Earth's atmosphere. It does not cause rising world temperatures, it follows rising sea temperatures by some 600-800 years. World temperatures are not yet back up to what they were during the Medieval Warm Period. The retreating glaciers on Greenland are uncovering an archeological treasure-trove of pre-Little Ice Age Scandinavian colonies and farms. The Kyoto Accords have failed to be met by every country that has tried to meet them, and leave the worst polluters on the planet (India, PRC, etc.) free to pollute to their hearts' content, with everyone else supposed to pick up the tab. Al Gore is either a fruitcake or a master scammer. In either case, he's using fnords to make millions for himself and his buddies, scaring millions of others into serving their purposes to the detriment of the hoodwinked.
Science needs to be based on science, not political moonbat-ism. Pollution needs to be controlled -- eliminated, where possible -- simply because it's a really bad idea to sh*t where you live.
Which is why I'm almost equally down on the Republicans. Their support of mega-corps who run to countries with the worst pollution rates in the world and virtual slave-labor laws, their "Theocracy Now!" political agenda, their namby-pamby wishy-washy "bipartisan efforts" that amount to nothing more than slightly less socialist moonbat-ism than the Democrats dish out.
The only thing the Republicans used to have their heads on straight about was terrorism. They don't anymore. They've caved to the hard-left socialist agenda that wants to see this country destroyed, subjugated | |
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