I take NO freedoms for granted, which is
Posted By: sm on 2009-06-22
In Reply to: think back... - cj
why I am adamant about getting Obama out of office....PERIOD! He should be impeached!! He is stripping us of our civil liberties left and right and everyone just sits on their complacent butts and lets him!!
No, I believe our military, if not voluntary, should be a "private entity" to fight foreign wars. They signh up themselves to fight.... and believe me, there would be plenty!!
I don't want anyone fighting for this country who really doesn't believe in the cause in the first place and there are plenty of young disillusioned young people (and for good reason) who feel that way.
I had many military men in my family who fought in WWI, II, Korea, Vietnam, and I would never take that honor from them.
If you think the same mindset is in our young people now that was back in WWI and II, you are living in a dream. Generations ago, many of those folks had fled with their parents to the U.S. to escape tyranny and onslaught of their freedoms!! They understood what was going on and had good reason to want to fight.
It is not the same now. Most young people in this country have no earthly idea what is going on in history, let alone being taught the truth about history.... they are taught liberals lies, one-sided agendas, now having "lifestyle" choices FORCED down their throats in school!!
Heck no.... it is a different country. I want volunteer military. Otherwise, it is forced servitude and that is NOT what our founding fathers meant by bearing arms!! That was for OUR benefit! Government was to oversee a strong military and nothing else, let alone oversee ME or YOU! That was the very thing they were fleeing.
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The problem is that our freedoms, our..
civil rights are being chipped away little by little. While I may not care if the NSA is listening in on my phone calls because I'm not doing anything(I do care though) and I go along with it, maybe not now but eventually there will be a freedom/civil right that I do care about being eroded or eliminated. That is how it works. First the smaller things with lots of fear thrown in along with a healthy dose of intimidation...i.e. there are terrorists under each and every bed and if you do not go along with this wiretapping, you will be enabling, promoting another 9/11...or you dare question the government in this time of terrorism...you unpatriotic, pinko, commie Marxist. This works on most people for awhile but as I said, eventually there will be some part of the Bill of Rights that will be rewritten and it will be something you care desperately about. That is why the government needs checks and balances. Go with you hopes, not your fears.
But he is part of the freedoms that symbolize this country
Whatdya wanna do? Have him shot? Muzzled? Yeah, it's unfortunate that he has said some of things he did.
It's just every time you mention him rather rabidly he gets more attention and more power. As I said, there are right-wing crazies or religious crazies I could rant about, but hey, they're not worth it.
Granted, noone wants to see stuff like that, but...(sm)
these people are not strangers to violence and humiliation (including the civilian population). They also saw what their own countries have done to prisoners (again including their own civilian population), which, as has been pointed out numerous times on this board, is just as bad, and probably worse. I think that has to play a role in it. We're talking about a different culture with different views of punishment and "rules of war."
Power not granted to Bush
Power We Didn't Grant
By Tom Daschle
Friday, December 23, 2005; A21
In the face of mounting questions about news stories saying that President Bush approved a program to wiretap American citizens without getting warrants, the White House argues that Congress granted it authority for such surveillance in the 2001 legislation authorizing the use of force against al Qaeda. On Tuesday, Vice President Cheney said the president was granted authority by the Congress to use all means necessary to take on the terrorists, and that's what we've done.
As Senate majority leader at the time, I helped negotiate that law with the White House counsel's office over two harried days. I can state categorically that the subject of warrantless wiretaps of American citizens never came up. I did not and never would have supported giving authority to the president for such wiretaps. I am also confident that the 98 senators who voted in favor of authorization of force against al Qaeda did not believe that they were also voting for warrantless domestic surveillance.
On the evening of Sept. 12, 2001, the White House proposed that Congress authorize the use of military force to deter and pre-empt any future acts of terrorism or aggression against the United States. Believing the scope of this language was too broad and ill defined, Congress chose instead, on Sept. 14, to authorize all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations or persons [the president] determines planned, authorized, committed or aided the attacks of Sept. 11. With this language, Congress denied the president the more expansive authority he sought and insisted that his authority be used specifically against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda.
Just before the Senate acted on this compromise resolution, the White House sought one last change. Literally minutes before the Senate cast its vote, the administration sought to add the words in the United States and after appropriate force in the agreed-upon text. This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas -- where we all understood he wanted authority to act -- but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens. I could see no justification for Congress to accede to this extraordinary request for additional authority. I refused.
The shock and rage we all felt in the hours after the attack were still fresh. America was reeling from the first attack on our soil since Pearl Harbor. We suspected thousands had been killed, and many who worked in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were not yet accounted for. Even so, a strong bipartisan majority could not agree to the administration's request for an unprecedented grant of
authority.
The Bush administration now argues those powers were inherently contained in the resolution adopted by Congress -- but at the time, the administration clearly felt they weren't or it wouldn't have tried to insert the additional language.
All Americans agree that keeping our nation safe from terrorists demands aggressive and innovative tactics. This unity was reflected in the near-unanimous support for the original resolution and the Patriot Act in those harrowing days after Sept. 11. But there are right and wrong ways to defeat terrorists, and that is a distinction this administration has never seemed to accept. Instead of employing tactics that preserve Americans' freedoms and inspire the faith and confidence of the American people, the White House seems to have chosen methods that can only breed fear and suspicion.
If the stories in the media over the past week are accurate, the president has exercised authority that I do not believe is granted to him in the Constitution, and that I know is not granted to him in the law that I helped negotiate with his counsel and that Congress approved in the days after Sept. 11. For that reason, the president should explain the specific legal justification for his authorization of these actions, Congress should fully investigate these actions and the president's justification for them, and the administration should cooperate fully with that investigation.
In the meantime, if the president believes the current legal architecture of our country is insufficient for the fight against terrorism, he should propose changes to our laws in the light of day.
That is how a great democracy operates. And that is how this great democracy will defeat
terrorism.
The writer, a former Democratic senator from South Dakota, was Senate majority leader in 2001-02. He is now distinguished senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
© 2005 The Washington Post Company
Granted, the stimulus bill will help alleviate.......sm
our dependency on foreign oil. However, the green plans will take quite a bit of time to institute and will not completely replace gas and oil. Some people will not be able to afford new automobiles that run on green fuel or hybrid vehicles; I know I can't. As far as the foreign oil, that may be a moot point anyway if OPEC terminates our contracts in March and we start getting the leftovers instead of a regular supply. This was discussed below.
True, we will pay taxes no matter what, but the amount of those taxes over the course of our lifetime as well as that of our decendents for possibly generations to come will far outweigh the overall benefit of this package to the average tax payer. I personally don't play disc golf and I have no need of dog park.
I sure hope you have deep pockets and can afford both to pay your taxes and be able to eat as the economy circles the drain of government overspending and out to the cesspool of government programs.
Granted, there are people who bought more house.....sm
than they could afford, but there are also people who are now unemployed through no fault of their own who would benefit from this measure. Like my dear old friend often says...."There but by the grace of God go I."
People take for granted being able to have any choice whatsoever in what doctor they see
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