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Do you honestly believe that someone would be allowed to run for president of the USA who wasn't in big media's pocket?

I honestly believe, that if your (cynical) point of view was connected to reality, we wouldn't have seen the sort of media bias on display in the last two elections.

Its a single party system with big media trying to give the illusion of choice.

USA and North Korea have more in common than just taxing overseas income of their citizens...

Do you honestly believe that someone would be allowed to run for president of the USA who wasn't in big media's pocket?

I honestly believe, that if your (cynical) point of view was connected to reality, we wouldn't have seen the sort of media bias on display in the last two elections.

You mean kind of like exposing the identity of an active duty undercover CIA agent?

Plame being a CIA agent was an open secret. Also, leaking her name was — whether legal or illegal — a deliberate act. Whoever did it, knew, what they were doing. On contrast, Biden did not mean to reveal the secret. He simply has demonstrated himself to be a fool again, who does not know, what he is doing or saying... His plagiarist prime is decades behind him — he is simply an old fool now, whose mind has long deteriorated either from health decline or just arrogance...

Its been clear since the vice-presidential debates last fall, that having Sarah Palin be "within heartbeat from presidency" would've been a lot safer for the US and the world... But hey, how much was spent on her clothing was deemed more important, than the giant errors in his foreign policy "experience" and other problems.

Palin stated that "You can see Russia from parts of Alaska" which is a true fact. She did not state "I can see Russia from my house" which was a quote from a comedian doing an impersonation of Gov. Palin.

For more info please see this documentary.

You mean this isn't the BIG CHANGE everyone was HOPING for ?

Emphasis added, where appropriate. Barack Obama — with the aide of his trusty Media — has skillfully mesmerized a lot of people. To the point of simply "feeling good" about him, but unable to state, what exactly the like so much.

And as for bad things, he managed to neutralize them all too. When asked, the vast majority of his supporters proved rather ignorant and, in particular, could not recognize some damaging facts as having to do with Obama. Yet almost everybody "knew", Sarah Palin claimed to be able to see Russia from her house (she never said that, Tina Fey did).

Looks like we replaced one set of idiots with an even more morally bankrupt set.

Obama is not an idiot (neither was Bush, but that's a different story). He is a determined politician, in there for the money, power, and prestige — and with a chip on his (and his wife's, in particular) shoulder... He figured out long ago, that poorer people are always a majority, and is shamelessly manipulating them to get his way.

His support is waning, though, America just needs to persevere 'till 2010, when Republicans will, hopefully, get their act together and regain some standing in Congress... Until then, bills like the one we are discussing will be sailing through unhindered.

some slight marketing concern overrode what they were told was a matter of national security.

Marketing over national security (as well as other real issues) is how Obama got elected in the first place. Even if we continue to give him the benefit of the doubt regarding past nasty associations (racist pastor Wright, terrorists Bill and Bernardine Ayers, governor Blagojevich), and not (yet?) question his personal integrity, the man's lack of experience (or, more harshly, lack of substance) is showing already: many of his appointees and would-be appointees are either a disgrace already or on their way to infamy. Today FBI raided the office of Vivek Kundra...

People who can use punctuation, capitalization, and spell properly. Actually, I think he was referring to those who voted the President into office.

Actually, no, most of the people voting for Obama didn't know some very basic things about him or the opposition. And what they did know, was often wrong.

In the particularly striking example, the vast majority attributed the infamous I can see Russia from my house! to Sarah Palin, when, in fact, the phrase was coined by Saturday Night Live, who were mocking her lack of foreign policy experience, while willfully ignoring Joe Biden's — whom Obama picked for the supposed foreign policy expertise — lunacies.

What's much worse, though, is that these supposedly educated and well-versed people are now trying their damnest to keep the truth from becoming known — people trying to add mentions of Obama's association with (unrepentant) terrorist Ayers to Obama's Wikipedia entry have their changes reverted within minutes and their accounts banned for days...

Three reasons.

1. The media downright worshiped him during the campaign. Read this book and watch this documentary.
2. He's excellent at reading from a teleprompter.
3. The majority of Americans have been dumbed down and poisoned with sodium fluoride to the point that plants are smarter than them.

Also, watch this to see the complete ignorance of Obama voters.

Three reasons.

1. The media downright worshiped him during the campaign. Read this book and watch this documentary.
2. He's excellent at reading from a teleprompter.
3. The majority of Americans have been dumbed down and poisoned with sodium fluoride to the point that plants are smarter than them.

Also, watch this to see the complete ignorance of Obama voters.

Yes, and they can often be a very quick stimulus, but they aren't necessarily the best stimulus. Lots of people believe (from what I've heard and read) that some kinds of spending can do better (you hear about the "multiplier").

Tax hikes also have a "multiplier", though - most taxes don't just hit the price of goods/services once, they hit them every time an affected economic transaction is made. Take fuel taxes; we buy fuel once (to bring raw materials to production), twice (to bring finished individual parts to the assembly factory), thrice (to get the product to the store), quadrice (for the consumer to bring it home), and possibly quintice or beyond if there's a warehouse stop anywhere along the way.

the question that tends to be a sticking point is "what's 'working' and what's 'unnecessary'?"

THAT is the point that needs to be argued, but instead of individually arguing, Congress/Obama has been lumping all their pork and waste into a big bill, called it "stimulus", and dishonestly screamed "OMG we have to do something now the sky is falling" when people questioned the need for all the garbage in the bill.

Yeah, and what some people seem to miss is that even if they don't technically "jack up" your taxes, the government will be spending money they don't have,

Only if the government fails to cut their spending from the things they don't absolutely need - hey, if I'm $100 below budget, I have to find something to cut. That's how budgeting works.

Our roads and bridges are crumbling,

Which means we should discuss what investment we should make into them, make wise investments that are sustainable rather than simply throwing $billions of band-aid "repairs" down the hole...

our Internet infrastructure is sub-par.

Funny. Internet infrastructure and phone lines are not government services. Implement equal-access laws similar to phone service for internet providers so that we get real marketplace competition, and watch it grow. The real reason our Internet infrastructure is crap is that 90% of America is stuck in de facto monopoly environments being charged far too much while the companies, having no competition (because quite literally no other company is allowed to enter the area), do nothing to expand/improve the infrastructure.

Also, our education system is in the shitter, partially because of an attitude that education is a personal investment or a privilege for the rich (or at least well-off) rather than something that benefits our society at large. (having a poorly educated citizenry in a democracy is a huge problem.)

Yeah, the uneducated do things like electing Obama.

But you don't fix education by simply throwing money at it - trust me, I work in the education sector. You fix education by making sure that parents are more involved, by stratifying classes to make sure that the bright kids are encouraged, and yes, by occasionally holding back the dimwits a grad or two or even sending them to special schools that can handle their problems.

On top of that, our healthcare system really is in bad shape.

And again... our healthcare system isn't a government system, unless you're specifically speaking of medicare/medicaid. The solution here isn't "government spends money", it's "the people/government smack the HMOs and so-called insurance agencies over the head and stop them from defrauding us."

I heard one of the things Republicans focused on cutting was food stamps-- as though $3 a day is too extravagant a food budget.

Actually, what they were speaking of was making sure food stamps go to those who need them rather than handing them out willy-nilly and to people who don't even have the legal right to be in this country.

Try researching what you are saying before spouting nonsense please.

I wouldn't mind if Republicans were asking for sensible things

See also: How Obama Got Elected.

Consider this one.
From that site:
On November 4th, 2008 millions of Americans were shocked that a man of Barack Obama's limited experience, extreme liberal positions and radical political alliances could be elected President of the United States.

Let's look at these by themselves:

*limited experience
True, from what I hear, Obama's not very experienced. On the other hand, having seen what experience did in the hands of George W. Bush I'm not sure experience is a good way to judge someone's competence. And while I'm not an expert on that subject, I don't think someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. had a lot of political experience before his rise to fame. After all - what we look for in a leader is not always that they're experienced, it's that they inspire us.

*extreme liberal positions
Which ones are they? Granted, I'm European, so a lot of the ideas that we have over here are quite radical in the US. Like the right to abortion (least up here in the civilized countries in Northern Europe), socialized medicine (personally I'd skip socialized road works over medicine), free educations for everyone (up to and including university). They don't say what these dangerous and "extreme liberal positions are" so we're left to guess. Maybe it's his idea that you should be able to vote when you're 18?

*radical political alliances
And again - which ones are they? Joe Biden as VP? That's hardly any worse than Sarah Palin for VP. And if experience is a requisite for being president, then how the hell can you elect Sarah Palin as the VP candidate? She had less experience than Obama to begin with. And being a mayor of a city with 8,000 people is hardly indicative of ones ability to lead a nation. I'm not judging, just curious about why "these people" don't settle for one standard instead of two

But, in the end I think Obama was elected because he presented himself of much more of a change away from Bush' policies than McCain. The Daily Show (the horrorible embodiment of liberal media bias) had a nice segment where they contrasted McCain's campain comments with Bush' from 2000, and it certainly sounded like they had the same speech writer. Of course the nice clip where they contrast Karl Rove's ridicule of a potential VP candidate for Obama for only having been the mayor of a city with 200,000 people followed by the same Rove's grandstanding and overstating Palin's work as mayor for Wasilla, a city with less than 6,000 people (according to the 2000 survey).

Maybe the public in general figured "New guy or the guy who wasn't as good a candidate as Bush was in 2000? Fuck it, I'm not going for the guy that'll be even worse than Bush!"

But the fact is, making good playable games is less profitable than making lousy games with pretty graphics.

That's because society, as a whole, has been breeding for stupidity for quite a few generations already.

You don't believe me? Consider this one. Or just the number of people who think that "reality TV" and (c)rap music are entertaining.

It may seem cool to get your news from bloggers but they aren't news sources they just voice opinions they aren't held to any standards.

Newspapers haven't had standards at least since the 1970s.

Even broadcast news is all opinion pieces these days.

"Duh." Anyone who watched the insane rush to anoint Barack Obama and the nastiness with which every member of the press treated the other side (not to mention the witch-hunt mentality towards the few actually neutral reporters who dared to ask Obama/Biden the TOUGH questions) will realize this.

Of course, there's plenty of other evidence why this was the case.

Objective news is a dying thing.

Again, "Duh." The populace hasn't demanded balanced news, so it's dying. The recent push for the reinstitution of the "Fairness Doctrine" by the Dems is not really about "fairness", it's about their trying to take a stab at media outlets that don't carry their party line; you can be damn sure they would claim the "big" news networks are already "fair" and so "don't need changing" while they try to censor out anyone that doesn't agree with them.

Free speech and freedom of the press were separate things in the Constitution for a reason. One is opinion and one is supposed to preserve the right to objective news that isn't controlled by the government.

"The right to objective news that isn't controlled by the government" - sadly, the idea of "objective news" is nigh impossible to find. There are so many ways to tilt a story:

- Weasel words
- Incendiary words
- Selective sourcing
- Abuse of statistics ("counting the hits, forgetting the misses", etc)

And that's just a few.

It'll be a sad day when the last newspaper closes.

Funny, I think the opposite. Newspapers will either adapt, or they won't. I'd rather have a lot more, smaller newspapers (and local papers seem to do just fine, because they can get locally-targeted advertising) competing and catching each other's mistakes than one big conglomerate that simply wants to indoctrinate, lie to, deceive, manipulate, and tilt the story over and over and over again.

just a reality resulting from the demographics the parties draw from... poor non-english speaking people trend as democrats

In other words, the Democrat party and their policies are defined by getting the votes of the stupid, uninformed, and clueless.

Glad to know they're being guided by an informed electorate as George Washington warned us we needed... uhm whoops!

Really? What voting system requires you to have a majority of the POSSIBLE votes?

The electoral college.

All that I've ever seen have required you to have the majority of CAST votes.

See above re: democrats voted for primarily by the uninformed and the stupid. Which are you, merely uninformed or stupid?

Its pretty lousy policy at the -federal- level that you can even have swing states that decide elections.

No, it's great policy for a country consisting of states themselves. The US presidential election is decided not by one "national" election, but by 51 (50 states plus DC) simultaneous STATE elections.

Of course you would know this were you not a democrat and therefore at very least uninformed if not worse by your own admission.

which is fitting if they can see Russia from their house.

86.9% of pro-Obama voters, thought Sarah Palin actually made that claim. In reality, it was Tina Fey, who said it, while playing Sarah Palin on TV.

Allow me to point you to something that explains much of the disagreement you are having:

People who hold the same views as you are morons.

In perspective:
- I saw the signature Moryath had before he put it on hiatus during the election. It wasn't provocative and had been there long before Obama was even nominated (or won enough votes to be the "presumptive nominee"), yet Obamatons were routinely verbally attacking Moryath and downmodding incredibly insightful, well-thought-out and sourced posts for the mere presence of the signature.

- For some reason, the same downmodding on slashdot does NOT happen to people for having some pretty disgusting anti-Bush/"antiwar" hippie signatures.

- For anyone who is a fan of the movie Idiocracy, or who has paid attention to their Civics and History courses, there comes a time when they realize that the current form of "Democracy" is having problems because the vote is not an informed choice.

Seriously, I want you to think about this. Not just in America, but everywhere, what percentage of voters do you think are actually of decent IQ and possessing enough knowledge to understand what they are voting on?

This is the point of the Mencken quote that Moryath posts, and whether or not you like it or not, I think it's a valid insight into the problems we are facing today. Far too many "votes" are cast, from the Presidency on downwards, with the people pulling the lever having absolutely no fucking clue what they are doing except that "that guy has X skin color", "I ain't voting for no ticket with a wimmin on it", or other reasons that have no place in the ballot box.

In short, the "right to vote" and "responsibility to vote" are bad ideas. Citizens should carry the responsibility to educate themselves on the issues and candidates and then, only when educated, cast an informed ballot so as not to fuck the rest of us over with their cluelessly random "choice."

As for the other things you write:
His generalization that the left needs to do "homework" because they lack an understanding of the Geneva Conventions has no basis. Many people on the left have studied the Geneva Conventions quite thoroughly.

And many more have absolutely no fucking clue what the Geneva Conventions say , but shout about "war crimes" in between taking bong hits anyways. see above: YOU may have studied the Geneva Conventions thoroughly. I guarantee that most of your fellow travelers have not, because there are people who hold the same views as you who are morons.

Those statements are faulty generalizations on which he seems to have built at least part of his argument.

No, those statements are pretty accurate generalizations of the course of history surrounding Islamic society in warfare, both in wars between competing Islamic factions and between dar al-Islam and dar al-harb, as they refer to societies of Muslims and exterior non-Islamic societies (and please note, dar al-harb literally means "domain of WAR", which is another point against your theory).

Many Islamic groups adhere quite strictly to a moral code, and, in fact, many of the Islamic militants fighting in Iraq are acting on the conviction that our culture and our invasion of Iraq go against that code.

If you insist on claiming that the Koran's "moral code" is in any way compatible with the Geneva Conventions, how about I start going through the list of things the Koran lists that are completely contradictory to them, starting with the taking of slaves from the battlefield or the killing of prisoners who fail to convert to Islam (unless they're valuable in which case they are to be ransomed for tribute)? I warn you now, I'll have a field day with this one.

Yes. But, all terrorists are gun owners.

Hey! No gun was used on 9/11...

Seriously though, who could Obama pick to fill these offices?

You are asking me? I was from, you know, the other side. The camp, which tried to call attention to Obama's total lack of executive experience, of Biden's lunacy, and other flaws of the Democratic ticket's personalities and ideology (see my current sig).

But we were all drowned out by Obama's highly negative campaign — 86.9% of Obama's voters thought that Palin said that she could see Russia from her "house," even though that was Tina Fey who said that. So, now, that you realize, that Obama's promises of "Change" were just as phony as Clinton's were in 1992 — much to their side's chagrin, just as then too, don't blame us... Hold that thought 'till 2012.

http://www.howobamagotelected.com/