I say yes, you say no, OR People are Strange

Belinda44

BinVA...best wishes to both you and your friend. 

Belinda44

Thanks for the info and facts, Happy Libby!

Maria_Malta

I used to lurk here a year ago when I was recovering from my op, and then the thread seemed to disappear for months, only to reappear on my list of active threads a few weeks ago. I 'know' a few of you from another thread and really enjoy your discussions, both political and not.  I'm finding all the talk of Obama/Romney very interesting, and I must say that from a European perspective I think that many people on this side of the Atlantic would be pretty worried if Romney were elected US president.  We are still suffering the after-effects of the last Republican president's (and UK PM's) policies in Iraq, and I really don't think we need that kind of bravado again, especially with the extremely sensitive and complex situations in Syria, Afghanistan, etc.. Hope you don't think I'm intruding! 

Belinda44

Great to hear your perspective, Maria!  Thanks!

River_Rat

Hello Maria, nice to see you here! I think you'll like joining in the conversation.

Your perspective is similar to the sentiments I've heard from other friends who live overseas.

River_Rat

I just ran across something that has upset me. It's really hard to see pictures such as the one at this link and not ponder on how much the disrespect and outright hatred that is shown President Obama is racially based:

Link to photo on Getty Images

Maria_Malta

Thanks for kind welcome!  River rat, yes a horrific image, but on the other hand it could also upset the undecided and create the opposite effect to that intended.

RetiredLibby

I saw that, RR.  People who say that the largest part of the virulent, violent hatred against the President isn't racially-based are delusional.

This is the President who killed the man who orchestrated the murder of 3,000 people in this country.  He actually accomplished what we allegedly went to war (in TWO countries!) to do -- he killed Osama bin Laden.  If he were a white Republican, they would have already carved a mountain in his honor.

Disgusting isn't nearly strong enough for that picture.

L

RetiredLibby

Maria, welcome -- I lurk on the other thread (I used to post way back when under a different name).  It's good to see you found your way here!

L

AnneW

Bren, thinking of you. Please give NC Brenda a hug. I don't know her, but she's from the neighboring town where I grew up.

All, THANK YOU for expecting certain behavior in our home here. Your comments to the drive-bys were calm, rational, and appropriate. I am so proud to be in the midst of such intelligent and articulate women.

Today is Metastatic Cancer Awareness day. No pretty pink ribbons allowed. My thoughts go out to all our sisters with metastatic disease. A cure cannot come soon enough.

1Athena1

Beesie: There is a HUGE difference between saying something you KNOW is not true (a lie) and not being able to meet your goals. Romney, and especially Ryan, have peed on the facts just in the statements they make. Nothing to do with policy promises.

Let's welcome all posters and views here. Barbara is someone I consider a friend. We shouldn't practice intolerance here - the only thing I will not tolerate are bullies, and deleters and others who want to shut us down - and that includes goats! Neither Barbara nor Beesie fit that description in the least.

rosemary-b

Athena

Like

Bren

Give Bren our best wishes

lassie11

If you want to blame anyone for Guantanamo not closing as soon as hoped, you might look at Canada's Conservative governement who put every block possible in place to avoid bringing back to Canada the one Canadian there. he (the prisoner, not our PM) was convicted only by the powers that be there even though he was a wounded 15 year old when captured. In the last couple of weeks there were no more stall tactics left and Omar Khadr came back to maximum security prison in Canada.

QuinnCat

In one way it is good to be challenged....I've seen some eloquent and cogent retorts here this morning.  Alexandria - how well you summed it up!  HL - on the Libya subject, exactly, and so nice to hear from someone who actually served in the Foreign Service.  I will add, I use to work on serious accident investigation teams....fatalities, extreme property loss, etc.  Given full reign, it could take weeks, if not months to track down witnesses, gather evidence, develop timelines and a list of facts that helped us understand the actual cause of the accident or loss.  What happenned in Libya, well, it is immensely more complicated....a foreign country, language issues, goverment issues, a different way of doing business, instability and as Governor Schweitzer said last night, in Libya, a friend in the morning could be your enemy in the afternoon.   The Republicans are not helping the progress of this investigation by making this into political hay.  Yes, the Democrats united with the Republicans after 9/11.  What happened to the other side - shame on them.

I'm starting to dislike debates.....for the way they are run -- someone can just lie and not be challenged by the Moderator?  I'm also sad for how the pundits yearn for a close election and spin accordingly and to those partisans who can't objectively look at the substance over the style, when it's their guy who lost on the facts.  It's almost equatable to voter suppression, imho. 

While on the topic of voter suppression, this is shocking in my opinion.  While the 6th Circuit has twice shut down voter suprression laws proposed by Ohio, one related to early voting (3 days before election) for military but barring non military from doing the same (knowing less affluent minority voters tended to vote the weekend before Election Day) and the other relating to Ohio wanting to toss out more provisional ballots (thousands of them), of legal voters, based on voting at the wrong precinct (when in these cases they are relying on poll workers for precinct location), Ohio is taking this to the SCOTUS with 15 states signed on to the supporting amicus brief (all Republican governors) for an emergency stay of these voter suppression laws.

http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2012/10/in_resisting_final-weekend_vot.html 

http://sblog.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/12A338-15-states-amicus-brief.pdf

http://electionlawblog.org/ 

YramAL

I'm not very good at making long posts with facts and statistics, so I don't do it. I do enjoy reading others' posts, however. 

What I really like and appreciate about this thread, and the people on it, is that when we are disappointed by something our candidates do or don't do....we express that disappointment and talk about it. When we're unsure about something, we talk about that as well. 

In other places, it seems to be all rah-rah and nothing is ever questioned, and disappointment is certainly never expressed. It's as if the candidates on the other side are infallible. WE know our candidates are not infallible.

That's why I like it here, and so appreciate all of you.

Mary 

RetiredLibby

For those who love to bash Feds for doing nothing:

Federal employee wins Nobel Prize in physics

Congratulations to federal employee David Wineland for winning the Nobel
Prize in physics.

David Wineland is a physicist with the Commerce
Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). He is the
fourth person from the agency to win a Nobel Prize since 1997.

Wineland was awarded the prize, which he shares with Serge Haroche of the
Collège de France and Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris, "for ground-breaking
experimental methods that enable measuring and manipulation of individual
quantum systems."

Thomas O'Brian, chief NIST's time
and frequency division, explained what that means at a news briefing Tuesday. O'Brian said projects
Wineland "has worked on are related to making better atomic clocks. Atomic
clocks are involved in modern technology infrastructure in all different kinds
of ways, from GPS that pretty much everyone has on his or her cell phone now, to
telecommunication systems and a whole host of other things."

Wineland said many people share in the prize, including his NIST colleagues.

"Obviously, it's a great honor," he added. "I don't have any plans of
changing my course of action until they drag me out of here for being too old.
But I think the thing to say is, you know, the real reward is the science itself
and the work with our colleagues and that's what keeps us going, not the awards
you sometimes get along the way."

1Athena1

Obama wanted to close Guantanamo but the issue arose over where to put those prisoners. Unfortunately, in creating Guantanamo Bush-Cheney put us in a terrible legal and human rights quagmire from which it will take many years to recover.

Obama would also have been able to meet many more of his first-term goals if republicans in congress hadn't declared their outright lack of patriotism by indicating they hoped he would fail.

Obama broke a significant promise in an historic way: he said he hoped to have health care reform by the end of his first term. He had it done closer to the beginning.

Big, big difference to LIE versus to not be able to fulfil one's agenda on time.

Oh, and unemployment? It would likely be lower now if the republicans had not prevented the stimulus package from being as big as it needed to - Obama wanted twice the cash, and that likely would have spurred growth more. But republicans (and European Union officials) seem to forget the lessons taught by the great Keynes and by the Great Depression: in times of slump, the only way out is for the only cash cow available - the government- to increase spending. Government spending will create jobs and grow revenues. Fiscal prudence is a laudable long term goal, but it is the worst pill in times of economic crunch.

It also doesn't help when republicans refuse to consider taxes increases as part of a fiscal prudence package - and when they hold hostage the country they claim to love by threatening to oppose an increase in the debt ceiling. I think some republicans do it out of bad policy - they just have bad ideas, period, or they are not very sophisticated thinkers. But others do it because they just don't want the black man to succeed.

So when we're talking about goals not met, let's remember that this country is ruled by three co-equal branches of government, and that the president cannot do it all himself.

Remember Dumbya's promise (laudable as it was): every child should reads by nine? Not yet! Including some in congress.

Finally woke up!

Saturday Brain Droppings of indifferent quality.

RetiredLibby

Thanks, Kam.  My husband is also a Federal law enforcement officer and I have also worked in Federal law enforcement, so I understand the painstaking care needed in investigations and how easy it is to compromise evidence, compromise a crime scene, and compromise any potential prosecution of a crime later down the road by flapping gums to score political points.  Investigations are difficult enough in the United States with all the resources available at one's fingertips.  An investigation in an unstable country of a crime scene that has been trashed and contaminated beyond redemption is impossible.

Here is another perspective on who actually may have failed in Libya, from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

 http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-letting-us-in-on-a-secret/2012/10/10/ba3136ca-132b-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

"Republicans were aiming to embarrass the Obama administration over State
Department security lapses. But they inadvertently caused a different picture to
emerge than the one that has been publicly known: that the victims may have been
let down not by the State Department but by the CIA. If the CIA was playing such
a major role in these events, which was the unmistakable impression left by
Wednesday's hearing, having a televised probe of the matter was absurd."

1Athena1

Maria - welcome! You are no intruding at all. Sit down and have some coffee.

HL: I can't take the Republican posturing over Syria very seriously because it is so baseless. We all know that issues like US security abroad are long-term, non-political administrative matters that continue from administration to administration. I suppose right wing fanatics don't understand what it is to be a civil servant whose master is the flag and not the political talking point.

Maybe they have a problem understanding this because the Bush administration tried, for 8 years, to ideologize and politicize every nook and cranny of the United States so as to render the country's reputation useless in matters as varied as science, weaponry and space. We are still dealing with that current which does not think facts matter.

I mean, really: if you can stand up as vice presidential candidate and say, on the record, that you never asked for stimulus money when in fact you requested it in TWO letters - then you are living in a country that has turned it's back on common decency. A country where you can torture and call it "enhanced interrogation techniques," where you can attempt to partially privatize Social Security and call it "not privatization - personalization" - is a country where I am not surprised that people make it up about Benghazi.

Obama is responsible for what he is responsble. But some presidents do so much harm that their terrible legacy extends way beyond their tenure. Bush broke so many taboos that it is hard to undo them in four years. The taboo against human rights violations, the taboo against non-scientific facts ("Polar bears are not endangered"; "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction"), the taboo against politicizing civil service. It is taboo for Katrina to leave New Orleans the way it did and for a government to be unprepared in the face of disaster when we are the world's richest country. Bush and Cheney almost destroyed this country, and the fact that we are having to argue on such a basic level where the facts should not be in dispute is a sad consequence of that.

Four more years of that would leave us asking UNICEF for money for our children.

The Republican party is moribund. It is out of ideas. As long as it continues to parley liars, flip floppers and madmen like Rush Limbaugh as politicians and mouthpieces it will not win a presidency. Luckily, there are enough people in this country who see that.

rosemary-b

Oh Athena

That was very eloquent.

Rosemary

The spouse of a retired Civil servant

Belinda44

Great post, Athena!

Belinda44

Belinda44

Belinda44

"President Obama has a plan to bring jobs back to the U.S.

Mitt Romney has a plan that would encourage companies to ship jobs overseas"

http://www.barackobama.com/plans/jobs-economy

http://www.barackobama.com/economy

Belinda44

YramAL

Someone else I know  shared this on facebook.

 

Mary 

alexandria58

Belinda:

Like.

Athena, HL, Kam: well said.

River_Rat

Mary, I agree with your Facebook friend. - Love that post

gardengumby

All I can say, Athena, is that I truly hope you are correct.  I will admit, however, that when I read some of the statements that people swallow as fact, simply because it is convenient to their desired world view, I believe that idiocy and unreasoning hatred are on the ascendency in this country.

Chickadee

Humbled to be among such articulate and well informed women. Too bad the candidates aren't forced to debate you ladies in a public forum with a pit bull moderator.