~Elation~
Whew!! It’s been a LOOOOOOOOONG eight years. But this morning, I am feeling redeemed. Our country was hijacked for too long by people who co-opted the word ‘freedom’, eroding it all the while bantering it about like a marketing slogan. Freedom and liberty aren’t just words, they’re deeply-held values. So, in celebration of those values, here is the TOP TEN LIST OF THINGS I’M LOOKING FORWARD TO UNDER OBAMA:
10.
No more Sarah Palin! You betcha she’s a great governor for Alaska and all, but can we get her off the national stage? Also? Please?
9.
Justice John Paul Stephens, who at 88 years of age has held out admirably, can now retire. THANK YOU JUSTICE STEPHENS!
8.
Proposition 8 may lose in California, but we are, once again under Obama, a country that stands up for individual freedoms in the face of discrimination. Gay civil rights are coming. Keep fighting!
7.
A more humane response to any national tragedy. Remember Bush when he was notified of the 9/11 attacks? The seven-minute blank non-response? Can you imagine how very differently Obama would’ve handled 9/11 or Katrina? Healthcare, or lack thereof, counts to me as a national tragedy. We are too rich a nation to let our own people suffer without care.
6.
A return to the balance of power between the branches of government. Goodbye to the abuse of executive orders. WOOT!! CHENEY’S FINALLY OUT!
5.
An end to the Bush Doctrine. Pre-emptive strikes? Insanity. And a violation of International Law. A pre-emptive strike in defense is a poorly masked act of hegemony at best, an outright invasion of a sovereign country at worst.
4.
A return to ANY form of fiscal responsibility. Can we say, $10 trillion in debt? According to Kathleen Parker, Bush “spends like a day-wager on a three-day drunk.”
3.
A return to sanity for Women’s Reproductive Rights and international support for Family Planning. Enough with the archaic, anti-woman dogma that led Bush to ban all support for international family planning organizations within hours of his inauguration. You get the feeling that all those millions of poor starving third world babies are invisible to religious extremists. Of any flavor.
2.
Goodbye Gitmo and all the shame it stood for. When detainees protested by attempting suicide, the Pentagon reclassified suicides as “manipulative self-injurious behaviors.” When detainees protested with hunger strikes, they were force fed with tubes down their throats. In June of 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that internees at Guantanamo Bay were entitled to habeus corpus since Combatant Status Review Tribunals were determined to be an inadequate substitute for representation before a fair court to determine if they were held justly. I am looking forward to a return to individual rights and freedoms, even for accused foreign peoples. If they are truly “terrorists” or criminals, the truth will out. Arbitrary imprisonment without review is Stalin’s legacy, not ours.
1.
Most of all, I am looking forward to a sane and reasonable president who instills confidence with his calm, his intellect, and his compassion. This is a man I respect and am proud to call our next president.
Dear Religious Right: It’s My God, Too
I am positively ecstatic about the shift in the cultural tide, away from the stifling narrowness of the neoconservatives. We’re moving towards a more liberal agenda and policies, but we’re also seeing a long-needed resurgence of traditional conservatism with its fiscal restraint and hope for smaller government. While Sarah Palin managed to “energize the base” (whose “base”? “Base” of what exactly?), the backlash has been energizing for the rest of us.
Colin Powell stepped up in support of American Muslims and Jon Stewart led the smackdown on Palin and McCain’s “real America” claims. We’re getting closer, but we’re not there yet. Obama needs to get elected, conservatives need to put forth substantive candidates who don’t pander to the religious right, and the rest of us need to continue to reclaim our country, and especially, our God.
I am not a born-again Christian. Technically, I’m not even a Christian. Neither am I an agnostic. I believe there is most definitely a “God” though I am of the belief that we as humans are too simple to even begin to comprehend the depth and breadth of what God is. I believe we have a sense of God, a palpable sense that we define for ourselves. This definition takes the form of many religions and views. The sooner we come to understand that it’s the same God we all feel, the better, more humble, less punitive, and certainly more tolerant we’ll become.
While I espouse tolerance, I tread the fine line that many of us struggle with: I have no tolerance for zealots. I can’t stand abortion clinic bombers, nor can I bear Jewish or Islamic extremists who sow intolerance and promote war. One thing my palpable feeling of God taught me is that violence is not the answer.
The religious right in this country offends me because, like many religions, they claim to have exclusive 
rights to God. That smug, narrow-minded, ignorant thinking, that Sarah Palin arrogance, has no place in American politics, no place in this country where diversity and religious freedom are two of our greatest accomplishments.
If the World Could Vote, They’d Elect Obama in a LANDSLIDE
I love the Internet. There just so much cool stuff out there. Well, at least now that more websites have come online, cause you know it just wasn’t that long ago that you couldn’t surf very far or very long without running into porn.
Here’s a very cool site called If the World Could Vote where Internet users from all over the world vote for US presidential candidates. The numbers are staggering in support of Obama. When you realize how much of the future of the world is riding on this election, the mudslinging dis-information campaign about Obama as a Muslim terrorist goes beyond absurd. It reaches the level of globally offensive. (I think I’ll coin that term right here: GLOBALLY OFFENSIVE!) And I call bullsh*t on the latest AP Poll that supposedly shows Obama and McCain in a very tight race. I am hoping and praying that sanity prevails. Do we need to pass a Constitutional Amendment right now that counts only half a vote for people who are obviously REALLY STUPID?!
Being the person who practices impartiality and tolerance for all people, I draw the line at that select voter, the willful ignoramus. This quote is from the comments section of a lengthy post by a Christian Republican outlining the verifiable perpetrators of the Obama-as-Muslim rumors:
Read your Quaran- honey.
A Muslim is a Muslim is a Muslim.
If they “say” they are a Christian- they will die,
BUT- If they “lie- for a greater purpose” they are exhonerated. (All those virgins and stuff LOL)
What greater “lie” has Obama told- than by trying to steal (ACORN) the presidency???
Do you know Google?
The ideologues have a problem with the truth!
YOU CAN’T HANDLE the TRUTH!
~CoolPillow
Clearly this guy needs the cool pillow for his hot head. It’s not a good thing when someone can be presented with facts and research but continue to espouse an angry untruth. And, as many have pointed out, what if Obama was actually a Muslim? This would not make him a bad person! It’s really the practice of calling him “an other”, an alien, and I can only guess, substitutes for calling him race-based epithets.
If anyone wants to fund that Constitutional Amendment, I’ll promote it right here!
McCain’s Ball and Chain (and it’s not Cindy)
If Sarah Palin (the woman I am absolutely TIRED of dissing, but who remains a candidate for VP) is a simpleton, a mere mouthpiece for the Republican Party, then I pity her. If Sarah Palin is an outrageous, deluded liar, then I fear her. Either way, she is the awful mistake the McCain campaign has to live with.
The Anchorage Daily News Editorial page spells out the best interpretation of Sarah Palin’s bizarre reaction to the recent report on Troopergate:
She claims the report “vindicates” her. She said that the investigation found “no unlawful or unethical activity on my part.”
Her response is either astoundingly ignorant or downright Orwellian.
Page 8, Finding Number One of the report says: “I find that Governor Sarah Palin abused her power by violating Alaska Statute 39.52.110(a) of the Alaska Executive Branch Ethics Act.” In plain English, she did something “unlawful.” She broke the state ethics law. Perhaps Gov. Palin has been too busy to actually read the Troopergate report. Perhaps she is relying on briefings from McCain campaign spinmeisters. [...] Palin’s response is the kind of political “big lie” that George Orwell warned against. War is peace. Black is white. Up is down.”
According to Newsweek, the Palin camp attempted to skirt the original Troopergate findings by appealing to the Alaska State Personnel Board for a separate investigation. Surprise! They’ve expanded the investigation to address several other complaints against Governor Palin.
Still sure you don’t want to swap out your VP pick, McCain?
Voting for McCain for Your Tax Bill? Think Again.
More bad news on the economic front today, yet more headlines beginning MARKETS PLUNGE WORLDWIDE ON NEWS OF… [enter latest giant insolvency or government bailout here]. I started thinking about how little the election coverage has delved into the implications of McCain’s or Obama’s planned economic approach. When discussing whether I am a Democrat or a Republican (I’m neither) I often quote someone more brilliant than me (author unknown!) that the only difference between Republicans and Democrats is that Democrats want to spend too much on social programs, while Republicans want to spend too much on the military. Bottom line: they both just spend, spend, spend!
Which leads me to the issue of tax cuts. McCain wants to continue to uphold Bush’s tax cut policies, which sounds great on the surface, but really isn’t. Obama wants to raise rich people’s taxes and lower poor people’s taxes. Yeah, that’s gonna get him elected for sure! But in all seriousness (well, as serious as I can get), neither candidate has ANY SUBSTANTIVE PLANS TO REDUCE FEDERAL SPENDING. Instead, we just keep printing money and climbing deeper into the debt hole. My Republican friends and family are holding onto antiquated ideas that the Republican party is somehow less likely to impact your paycheck. The widespread groan is that Liberals and the ANGRY LEFT want to give your money to fat lazy people and their ungrateful children. This is viewed as offensive and unAmerican, terminally at odds with the great Puritan ethic of lifting oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. It becomes an argument about why on earth anyone should give his money to those people. Transfer of wealth.
So, do Republicans not realize that wars are insanely costly? That corporate welfare is insanely costly? That all this “nation-building” is a hundred times more expensive than just leading by example? It’s all just more transfer of wealth, but without the image of a begging lazy person attached to it. Even Alan Greenspan says the country cannot afford McCain’s tax cuts. (Yes, we can say that Greenspan has been entirely discredited, but I don’t believe that. His fatal flaw was to trust banks and other investment entities to follow good business practices. They obviously didn’t. )
It’s not popular to cut spending. Any spending, since it’s coming down the line to someone, and I guarantee that
someone does not want to give it up. But we Americans have been on a wild spending binge for a long time now using our children’s money in the form of loans from China for decades. TIME TO GET OFF THE FUN RIDE!! If you’re a Republican, you should be sensible enough to realize that it’s horribly self-serving to demand tax cuts when we owe so much debt. If you’re a Democrat and want universal health care or other insanely costly programs, be prepared to pay. In the end it’s what makes me a liberal rather than a conservative: I’d rather help Americans than pay for infrastructure in Iraq. We can’t have our cake and eat it too. The Fat Lady’s already singing.
Common Ground
Please welcome our first guest contributor, Kim Meglen from Minden, Nevada!!
_________________________________
So there I was enjoying my newfound camaraderie with the other kindergarten mothers dropping off their children, when I heard someone mention Palin. She is scheduled to be here in Carson City, Nevada tomorrow. One of the gals asked, “Are you going?” And I thought we all had another thing in common. So I replied, “To protest?” And all six of them said simultaneously, “NO, to support her!” What? How can this be? How could these intelligent women support someone who wants to take away their right to choose. Take away their daughters’ rights. And their granddaughters’. The right to govern their own bodies! How could they support a woman who hid her pregnancy from her constituents and family until her 7th month? How could they support someone who tried to ban great literature from her local library? I needed help understanding. And then I realized I would never understand. So as I sat there stunned into silence, the gal sitting next to me put her arm around me and said, “That’s why I never talk politics.”
Looks like it might be time to reinstate my Canadian citizenship!
-
-
About
Welcome to duh pookie where we work hard to bring you sparkly new thoughts.
-
- RSS Feed
-
Visit Political Voices of Women Community
