Common Sense Democracy

This transcript below was supposedly from Andy Rooney said on “60 Minutes” a few weeks back. I’m usually not a big fan of these “we are the United States, so screw yourself” diatribes, but I must admit that some of what he says is logical. I tend to lean towards the view that we, as Americans, need to realize we are part of a larger group of humanity. That we live in a world community and are not just isolated on our own little planet of America. We are the new kids on the block as far as world history goes. We need to learn to play well with others. That doesn’t mean we can’t be patriotic, but it should mean we aren’t blind to the culture around us.

Anyway, here is his thoughts:

I don’t think being a minority makes you a victim of anything
Except numbers. The only things I can think of that are truly discriminatory are things like the United Negro College Fund,
Jet Magazine, Black Entertainment Television, and Miss Black
America. Try to have things like the United Caucasian College
Fund, Cloud Magazine, White Entertainment Television, or
Miss White America; and see what happens…Jesse Jackson
Will be knocking down your door.

Guns do not make you a killer. I think killing makes you a killer. You can kill someone with a baseball bat or a car, but no one is trying to ban you from driving to the ball game.

I believe they are called the Boy Scouts for a reason, that is
Why there are no girls allowed. Girls belong in the Girl Scouts!
ARE YOU LISTENING MARTHA BURKE?

I think that if you feel homosexuality is wrong, it is not a phobia, it is an opinion.

I have the right “NOT” to be tolerant of others because they
Are different, weird, or tick me off.

When 70% of the people who get arrested are black, in
Cities where 70% of the population is black, that is not racial
Profiling, it is the Law of Probability.

I believe that if you are selling me a milkshake, a pack of
Cigarettes, a newspaper or a hotel room, you must do it in
English! As a matter of fact, if you want to be an American
Citizen, you should have to speak English!

My father and grandfather didn’t die in vain so you can leave
The countries you were born in to come over and disrespect ours.

I think the police should have every right to shoot your sorry ass if you threaten them after they tell you to stop. If you can’t understand the word “freeze” or “stop” in English, see the above lines.

I don’t think just because you were not born in this country, you are qualified for any special loan programs, government
Sponsored bank loans or tax breaks, etc., so you can open a hotel, coffee shop, trinket store, or any other business.

We did not go to the aid of certain foreign countries and risk our lives in wars to defend their freedoms, so that decades later they could come over here and tell us our constitution is a living document; and open to their interpretations.

I don’t hate the rich I don’t pity the poor.

I know pro wrestling is fake, but so are movies and television. That doesn’t stop you from watching them.

I think Bill Gates has every right to keep every penny he made and continue to make more. If it ticks you off, go and invent the next operating system that’s better, and put your name on&nbs p; ; the building.

It doesn’t take a whole village to raise a child right, but it does take a parent to stand up to the kid; and smack their little behinds when necessary, and say “NO!”

I think tattoos and piercing are fine if you want them, but
Please don’t pretend they are a political statement. And, please, stay home until that new lip ring heals. I don’t want to look at your ugly infected mouth as you serve me French fries!

I am sick of “Political Correctness.” I know a lot of black people, and not a single one of them was born in Africa; so how can they be “African-Americans”? Besides, Africa is a continent.
I don’t go around saying I am a European-American because
My great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather was
From Europe. I am proud to be from America and nowhere else

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Today in 1959, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev is denied access to Disneyland.

Read more about it at Snopes.com –> http://www.snopes.com/disney/parks/nikita.htm

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1759: In response to pressure from religious organizations, Pennsylvania lawmakers forbid the performance of plays and would fine offenders 500 pounds.

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A new book has just been published by Stephen Kinzer. If anyone has read it and has a review or a comment to share, please post a comment to this post below.

Overthrow : America\’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq

From Publishers Weekly
The recent ouster of Saddam Hussein may have turned “regime change” into a contemporary buzzword, but it’s been a tactic of American foreign policy for more than 110 years. Beginning with the ouster of Hawaii’s monarchy in 1893, Kinzer runs through the foreign governments the U.S. has had a hand in toppling, some of which he has written about at length before (in All the Shah’s Men, etc.). Recent invasions of countries such as Grenada and Panama may be more familiar to readers than earlier interventions in Iran and Nicaragua, but Kinzer, a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, brings a rich narrative immediacy to all of his stories. Although some of his assertions overreach themselves—as when he proposes that better conduct by the American government in the Spanish-American War might have prevented the rise of Castro a half-century later—he makes a persuasive case that U.S. intervention destabilizes world politics and often leaves countries worse off than they were before. Kinzer’s argument isn’t new, but it’s delivered in unusually moderate tones, which may earn him an audience larger than the usual crew of die-hard leftists. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Today in 1868, the House of Representatives voted to impeach President Andrew Johnson for his lenient policies toward the South after the Civil War.

Read more about Andrew Johnson at Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: andrew+johnson, president, impeachment, history, civil+war

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Here’s an interesting graph of yearly US budget deficit or surplus from 1961 to 2004. Many argue that the war on terrorism is expensive and has required more government spending in areas such as Homeland Security and that GW Bush has had to deal with events during his administration that cannot be compared with previous administrations. Well take a look at the chart during 1960 to say, 1975. Can you think of any siginificant event that might have also potentially caused a major drain on the US budget… maybe some kind of war? Like maybe Vietnam? It didn’t though. It’s all about how smart the guy at the helm is. Clearly GW has no idea how to run an economy.

There’s not much more to say… the picture says it all.
Click on image to view full size.

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I just ran across an interesting tidbit of information at Wikipedia.org. Wikipedia is one of those sites where you can just get lost for hours. Each page links to a bunch of new pages and you can follow link to link to link through an entire history of definitions and explanations.

One such link I ended up on today was about the Pledge of Allegiance. I was surprised to learn that the original pledge, written by Francis Bellamy in 1892, also included a salute with it. Today we commonly place our right hand over our heart but this is the modified version of the original salute, which required the reciter to fully extend the arm toward the flag much like the Nazi salute. After World War II the outstretched hand salute was changed to the current version.

Guess you learn something new everyday!

Technorati Tags: Pledge+of+Allegiance, flag, Nazi, Francis+Bellamy, pledge

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These days we are surrounded with reports of government eavesdropping, spys being outed and secret intelligence documents being falsified. Sometimes it seems like our modern day government is filled with escalating corruption but in fact the government (or members of it) have been breaking the rules since the beginning. Today in 1811, Massachusetts Senator Timothy Pickering becomes the first US senator to be censured after being accused of revealing secret documents between the president and senate.

Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

The Most Exclusive Club: A History Of The Modern United States Senate

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President Bush’s vacation reading list:

  “When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House,”
by Patricia O’Toole

  “Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground,” by Robert Kaplan

Technorati Tags: Imperial+Grunts, President+Bush, literature, politics, political+books, When+Trumpets+Call, Roosevelt

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  Our Endangered Values : America’s Moral Crisis
  The Truth (with jokes)
  Team of Rivals : The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
  The Assassins’ Gate : America in Iraq

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Today in 1773, Colonists stage their historic Boston Tea Party, as colonists dressed as Indians board three British ships in Boston harbor throw 342 chests of tea overboard in an act of rebellion against unfair taxation represented by England’s enactment of the Tea Act passed earlier that year.

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Today in 1976, Georgia governor and former peanut farmer Jimmy Carter along with Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate, defeated incumbent Gerald R. Ford to become the 39th president of the United States.

Today in 1983, in honor of the slain civil rights leader, President Ronald Reagan signs a bill designating every third Monday in January as Martin Luther King Day, the first such federal holiday to be established since the annual celebration of the birth of George Washington.

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So everyone will say, “Here it comes… the political mud-slinging”. Well, let me say right up front that the horrific catastrophy of Hurricane Katrina is by no means a political issue. It was a natural event and we only have God to question why and how. That being said, I’m paying special attention to how this government and this administration is chosing to explain how we can be left so unprepared for something like this.

How can we invade countries such as Iraq with such extreme precision and meticulous logistics and yet fail to provide adequate planning and support for our own people at home. Am I being too much of a naysayer? I honestly don’t think so. I consider myself pretty objective when it comes to issues of common sense. Seriously, how did the evacuation result in such rediculous conditions? Every single report and prediction about a hurricane of that magnitude hitting New Orleans estimated equally or greater devastation as an almost certainty. Where is the domestic support?

Well I wasn’t too surprised when I ran across this article at Spiegel. Apparently, “In 2001, FEMA warned that a hurricane striking New Orleans was one of the three most likely disasters in the U.S. But the Bush administration cut New Orleans flood control funding by 44 percent to pay for the Iraq war.” The second most likely disaster was a terrorist attack on New York City. We already know what George Bush did when he took office upon hearing the intelligence reports of a imminent terrorist attack on US soil - nothing. And so it’s not surprising that again, he did nothing to prepare his country for this disaster.

Am I being too hard on GW? Is it back-seat driving? Well maybe I just expect more from our President. Maybe I expect more from our National leadership. Where are the systems in place to keep Americans safe at home? We are spending so much money to secure and rebuild Iraq that we failed to properly fund our own domestic infrastructure.

Nobody can be held accountable for the arrival of the storm, but they most certainly can be for the manner in which they handle, or fail to handle the aftermath.

Read the full story at “No One Can Say they Didn’t See it Coming” - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News. [ Via Proceed at your own risk ].

Technorati Tags: FEMA, Hurricane+Katrina, New+Orleans, Katrina, President+Bush

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Via Yahoo! News.

The Supreme Court has ruled that the government can take a person’s home or business for new development projects.

By a 5-4 vote, the high court upheld as constitutional the taking by New London, Connecticut of 15 properties belonging to nine residents or investment owners for a project to complement a nearby research facility by the Pfizer Inc. drug company.

….
Stevens upheld the city’s plan under the U.S. Constitution, which allows the government to take private property through its so-called eminent domain powers in exchange for just compensation.

In her dissenting opinion, Justice Sandra Day O’Conner wrote, “Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random. The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”

I suppose historically, this isn’t a new policy of our government; they’ve been pushing people off private lands since the pilgrims first landed on Plymouth Rock. It does seem, however that in this day and age, and given our country’s rich tradition of the American dream and owning land, individual rights would prevail in the face of big business, power and influence.

If you can’t feel safe and secure and proud in the home you’ve worked for and earned for your family, what do you really have as an American. Our rights seem so temporary when the government collectively swings it’s might.

Makes me think back on John Steinbeck’s novel, “The Grapes of Wrath” (novel, movie). We have not come very far.

Read the full article at Yahoo! News.

Technorati Tags: Supreme+Court, eminent+domain, constitution, land+ownership, Pfizer, New+London, Justice+Sandra+Day+O’Conner, government, John+Steinbeck, The+Grapes+of+Wrath

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I’m citing the post of another blog today but it’s a good read and I enjoy passing along bits of information that I think are worthy of a good discussion. The Blogging of the President has posted an interesting blurb on the history of Presidential impeachments in our country. 9 Presidents have had impeachment charges filed. Every President since Nixon, with the exception of Carter and Ford has run into.

The premise behind the post is that in almost every case of impeachment being brought against a President, it was for purely political purposes, thereby “contradicting that assertion that misleading the nation into war isn’t grounds for impeachment.”

Read the entire post at The Blogging of the President.

Technorati Tags: impeachment, Presidential impeachment, republican, democrat, Bush

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The Washington Monthly Political Animal posted a blog entry in follow-up to the story of Billy Ray Johnson of Texas, a 42-year-old mentally retarted black man who was beaten and then dumped on the side of the road on a mound of stinging fire ants. What caught me as surprising with this particular post was not so much the story itself but rather the reaction to it by people commenting on the blog. Most of the reaction is to a comment made by the town’s mayor,

The town’s mayor says none of this was racially motivated. “The black boy was somewhere he shouldn’t have been,” he told the Chicago Tribune, “although they brought him out there.”

Just the mere fact that the mayor chose the words, “the black boy” to describe a 42 year old black man, makes me wonder if there is anything that goes on in Linden Texas that isn’t racially motivated. “The black boy” just reeks with good ol’boy racism and supremacist language. That’s not an opinion or a position on the issue, that’s just fact. I think stories like this are clearly race motivated and I don’t know why the argument has to turn to politics and whether republicans or democrats have the right to declare it as such. As one commenter points out, it’s about human decency not politics.

Browse through the comments, some of them are quite disturbing. The optimist in me thinks that maybe some of these people are just posting to cause a stir and get people enraged but I think that the reality here is that there really are sick people out there who can rationalize stories like this in their own mind and not give it a second thought, like the mayor, who seems to think it’s not about the tragedy, it’s that the black boy was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Does that somehow justify the actions of the “white boys”?

Read the full post at Political Animal.

Technorati Tags: racism, discrimination, minorities, media, liberal, conservative

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Here are a couple of interesting graphics I ran across on bopnews.com. The first one shows the counties that voted for Kerry in the last election. The second image in red shows those counties that voted for Bush. It’s an interesting cultural separation. Almost without exception, the country is divided into distinct regions: rural country versus major metropolitan cities, religous belts versus areas of cultural diversity, major universities and top educational regions versus lower education, technology, research and top medical centers versus blue collar industrial and farm regions.

More on Archipeligo.

More on Bushistan.

Via The Bloggin of the President: bopnews.com.
Technorati Tags: John Kerry, George Bush, 2004 election, voters, voter turnout, election results, presidential election

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The number one book on the New York Times best sellers list is
The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century

It’s rated 4 out of 5 stars at Amazon.com, where you can read more reviews.
Technorati Tags: best sellers, books, Amazon.com, New York Times

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Via Political Animal.
Bob Woodward tells the story of how his relationship with Deep Throat, Mark Felt, came to be. The article appeared in today’s Washington Post. How Mark Felt Became ‘Deep Throat’.

Technorati Tags: deep throat, Bob Woodward, Watergate

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Via MSNBC.com

Several news agencies have broke with the story that former deputy director of the FBI, W. Mark Felt, was “Deep Throat”, the secret source to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein during the Nixon Watergate scandal. Bob Woodward has previously said that the identity of the source would not be revealed until after the person’s death, but Vanity Fair magazine ran with an article revealing the source, which was later confirmed by the Washington Post and Woodward.

Read more at MSNBC.com.
Technorati Tags: Watergate, Nixon, deep throat, President Nixon, Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein, Washington Post, FBI

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