Robert Ariail for November 23, 2012

There is an interesting article written by a reasonably liberal political commentator that addresses the Republicans current situation and makes comparisons to the situations the Democrats were in after the 1988 election. I do agree with the cartoon as far as the Republicans being out of touch with much of the electorate today, but one shouldn’t forget that Obama is a superior politician. I am a Libertarian and disagree with both parties in many ways, but don’t count the Republicans out, they still carried close to half the country. Link to the article:

http://news.yahoo.com/don%E2%80%99t-get-cocky—democrats—the-post-romney-gop-looks-just-like-you-did-two-decades-ago-13564462.html

I would love to see people toning down the rhetoric though, it’s poison to any constructive change.

If at first you don’t secede…

After 2016, Dems 2 best politicians will be out of office. They’ll need someone with the guts to continue Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, or they could be quickly marginalized to the west coast and the northeast. Not sure the current group has it in them.

Just when I thought narrowminded’s post was the most ignorant on this particular thread, along comes Ima—-

“Worthless people”…yep, you are a shining example of Christianity, you sad little person.

Jesus wept.

not only that, it would eliminate the deficit

narrowminded is extremely well-named

Maybe just calculate the value of the property and let them pay an exit fee.

Every time I see the Confederate battle flag, I wonder if the person using it even knows what the actual flag of the Confederate States of America looked like. So far, when asking, I’ve never found one of them that knows the difference.

It makes me think also of the right-wing “Christians” we see here, and in so many places in the U.S. today. They’re ready to battle, and kill, but don’t get the real message, or know the real “story” of their own “religion”, let alone any others that they want to wage war on.

Ima: btw you might want to find “An End to Evil, how to win the war on terror”, by David Frum and Richard Perle, written in 2003. It contains all the lies you like to spread, and makes the final conclusion that destroying Islam, the U.N., and every nation on Earth EXCEPT Israel and the United States, is the only answer. It’s total Cr*p, but right up your sewer, ’er, alley.

While Frum (a Canadian speech writer for “W”, who invented the term “Axis of Evil”) obtained U.S. citizenship in 2007, and has “mellowed” considerably in recent years, which got him thrown off his job at AEI, Richard Perle hasn’t changed a bit, and still runs AEI.

Frum, and another true conservative, Andrew Sullivan (a gay Roman Catholic of staunch faith no less) DO often speak today of actual conservative values, while dropping the hatred and insanity coming from the “ultra-right” and neocons, who don’t know what “conservative”, or even “Republican” (capital “R”) mean.

A troll is someone who posts comments that they are unable to back up with facts. When they are called on their bologna, they resort to personal attacks. Trolls don’t contribute to discussions, and lma generally doesn’t contribute.

Case in point on being a troll. Where on earth did you get this nonsense and why don’t you look up the facts before repeating it?63% of Democrats in the House voted for the Civil Rights Act. 70% of Democrats in the Senate voted for the Civil RIghts Act. 98% of Northern Democrats voted in favor, only 85% of Northern Republicans supported the Civil Rights Act.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964#Vote_totalsThe Civil Rights Act would not have passed without Republican votes, but the bill was proposed by JFK and pushed through Congress by LBJ. The Democrats provided more votes for the Civil Rights act than the Republicans did, in both Houses.This was the last decent moment of the Republican Party, as far as I’m concerned. Republicans embraced the “Southern Strategy” as a means to power. Segregationist Democrats either reformed their views as Robert Byrd did, or switched parties like Strom Thurmond.

Maybe a nice new vanity plate? “Hell no – I ain’t rememberin’!” They forget the lost 100 years, before air conditioning rebuilt their manufacturing economy. Until then they survived on federal $ and military bases.The South will inevitably change, but slowly, as Northerners come down for the warmth.

The people here who keep harping on Obama not having a mandate, that he won because he gave away stuff, etc. remind me of the Japanese soldiers stranded on islands that still thought they were fighting the WWII years after it ended. The GOP leaders who got them all riled up have now realized that they have to either become more moderate and inclusive or they will become a marginalized party. But the extreme right-wing of their party doesn’t seem to believe that their leaders have moved on.

“A person who demands respect of others would show that respect in a debate”? I guess you reap what you sow’ eg. Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter, O’reilly, etc. Righties have had a great run because advertisers see the size of the audience, not the political philosophy. But with “Mother Clear Channel” controlling so many marketr, they get to set the bar. They keep saying there is no market for “Liberal” radio, but they keep going back to LOWER RATED sports programming, CONVENIENTLY just after a Democratic win!

You and denis 112 are missing an important point: All the Republicans who backed the Civil Rights Act are either dead or retired from government! So are all the Democrats who opposed it! It’s an indication of how bankrupt your party is when you have to go back 50 years to think of the last decent thing Republicans have done!

“We won’t worry about seeing you in heaven.”—That could happen for two reasons… you know.

“I’ll do that now for you….Obama won primarily due to his mastery of the ground game and use of all the new media to get out the vote again inthe swing states.(Even though his only experience was as a community organizer.)”__… and, of course, his four years as POTUS. Right?

There’s still a lot of work to be done on race and poverty, but anyone my age can easily look around and see that the situation for African-Americans is a lot better than it was sixty year ago — and it’s left/liberal policies that made the difference, while conservatives stood in the door trying to block progress.

Cite???

We could start with school desegregation. Voting rights are important, though perhaps they don’t show up in the pocketbook right away. All kinds of equal access laws. Affirmative action policies — I know a lot of conservatives don’t like them, but they helped a lot of African Americans get into college and then get jobs. Getting rid of laws against intermarriage. None of those made people more dependent on the government. That’s a start.

Note that I never said Democrats and Republicans, I said left/liberal and conservative. In those days there were liberal Republicans, and there were a lot of conservative (Southern) Democrats. Things have shifted around somewhat. The Democrats had to be pushed into supporting civil rights. But they did move that direction, whereas the Republicans moved the other direction.

Well, I can’t comment on this in detail, since I don’t know the circumstances. My bet is that this plan takes into account where each group sits now and calls for a reasonable improvement for each group.

Let me explain the affirmative action policy where I work. The policy begins with an acknowledgement that certain groups have been historically disadvantaged in hiring. Applicants for positions are encouraged to identify themselves if they believe they belong to such a group. (In other words, if an applicant does not self-identify, the policy does not take effect.) The group most effected where I work has been women – it’s well known (and very obvious) that the vast majority of college and university professors hired even twenty years ago were male, even when a majority of students were female. But there are other groups in the affirmative action group, including members of visible minorities. (We had an interesting case a few years ago when a Jewish applicant self-identified as a member of a visible minority. As it happened, he wasn’t qualified for the position, so we never had to deal with it, but there was some disagreement on the committee about the validity of the claim.) Each hiring committee includes an affirmative action officer, who doesn’t vote, but who makes sure that the affirmation action policies are followed. The rule for women is that if the number of women faculty in the department is below 40%, then, if there are two applicants, one man and one woman, who are equally qualified for the position, then the woman must be offered the job first. (There are other percentages for other groups.) As it happens, my department is now over 40% women, so we don’t have to worry about that any more. I believe that this kind of affirmative action program works pretty well. Note that we are not called on to hire anyone who is not qualified, nor are we called on to hire anyone who is less qualified than the other applicants. The program only comes into effect if two applicants are equally qualified.

I don’t know how old you are, but I grew up in a little southern town before the civil rights movement, and I saw first hand what racial discrimination meant in people’s lives. First, there was simply no black middle class. Second, the schools were segregated. Even when the schools began to be integrated, we had streams, and in my year there were no black students in the academic stream. Zero. They were almost all put into vocational dry-cleaning and vocational auto-body shop, and there were a few in the commercial course. Third, blacks were not allowed to sit at the drug store counter, and certainly they couldn’t eat at restaurants, though I doubt that very many had enough disposable income to think about eating out. Now we were in a fairly moderate area. By this I mean that when change occurred, no one was beaten or killed. A few years later I went through a training program with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Dr. King’s organization, and I got to know a lot of people who had been through the Freedom Rides and through the voting rights campaigns in Mississippi and the integration campaigns in Nashville and the school desegregation campaign in Little Rock, and in those campaigns people were beaten and killed. Younger people today often don’t really appreciate what that time was like.

You lost, learn from it… or don’t.