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Obama Launches Change.gov
mallumax writes "Obama has launched Change.gov. According to the site 'Change.gov provides resources to better understand the transition process and the decisions being made as part of it. It also offers an opportunity to be heard about the challenges our country faces and your ideas for tackling them. The Obama Administration will reflect an essential lesson from the success of the Obama campaign: that people united around a common purpose can achieve great things.' The site is extensive and contains Obama's agenda for economy and education among many others. They first define the problem and then lay out the plan. Everything is in simple English without a trace of Washington-speak. The site also has details about the transition. According to many sources, Obama's transition efforts started months ago. The copyright for the content is held by 'Obama-Biden Transition Project, a 501c(4) organization'."
Shouldn't there be blogs and forums so users can actually communicate with each other and make their opinions known to each other? That would be a powerful force, as they could band together to keep Obama in line if he strays too far from his promises. The way it is set up currently, it simply is a bullhorn for Obama, while his users can "share their vision" with a recycle bin. I don't see much (yet) to get excited about. It reminds me of CNN's "talkback", which is heavily censored and filtered.
We have mandatory community service in Ontario, to complete their highschool education, I for one was glad I was far out of reach of such policies. I'm not a fan of forcing people to go out and do things such as 'voluntary-mandatory community service'. With any luck, if he does decide to pull this bullshit through the air, people will run across fellows who remember this and happily do one thing(should it be a requirement for say graduation/etc), pay them for it; like many do here now.
Community service should remain that, a choice. Do it, great, nice job on you. Don't do it...well, it doesn't look as good and you might get passed over, but it doesn't matter in the end. It's the choices that make you what you are, not what the government is telling you what you should do.
Om, nomnomnom...
as well as many others, have fought important wars with drafted soldiers
"Mandatory community service? Great, let's send a bunch of unmotivated kids to do stupid work. Hell, that kind of shit would have been a nightmare for me at that age when I had massive social anxiety and was extremely uncomfortable in such situations."
so you have a problem with the fighting forces of world war i and world war ii? where we gave 18 year olds guns and made them serve on the front lines of mayhem and death? i'm just saying, you'd better have a problem with the idea of a military draft, for the sake of intellectual honesty
although, i've heard stories of many countries with mandatory military service as nothing more than a chance to learn smoking and peel potatoes. so mandatory civil service might prove stupid... or really good, can't tell
but i do like the idea of paying off part of your student loans this way. because it serves as a carrot and a stick. if your civil service effort is poor, you would be punished by having to still pay your loans in full, for example. this at least provides motivation
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Joe the Plumber has launched:
http://www.secureourdream.com/
Yes, sadly now that his dreams of owning a plumbing business have crashed to the ground, he decided to become a political watchdog and "take it to the streets."
Who knows what we'll be saying about him 4 years from now? A 1 year "Freedom membership" costs a mear $14.95 .
Freedom, who among us is against that?
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
Exactly which part of the constitution are we deliberately misinterpreting to give the federal government the authority to do this?
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
Did You Read It?
Expand Service-Learning in Our Nation's Schools: Obama and Biden will set a goal that all middle and high school students do 50 hours of community service a year.
seems reasonable to me, i remeber doing a lot more than that in school, I imagine most schools aready do that... think canning drives, fund raisers etc...
Require 100 Hours of Service in College: Obama and Biden will establish a new American Opportunity Tax Credit that is worth $4,000 a year in exchange for 100 hours of public service a year.
again seems reasonable to me. You want money, do some work for it. Where else you gonna make $40 bucks an hour in college?
I live in the US and, though community service wasn't required in my area to graduate high school, believe it should be mandatory for troublemakers.
For instance, instead of cramming all the troublemakers into the cafeteria for Saturday school, they could me made to do various community service. The community would benefit and it would be more fun for the troublemaker than the alternative. Many would rather paint over graffitti or pick up trash as long as they could socialize with their fellows.
The GP laments about how that would've been torturous to his introverted psyche, but what he dosen't realize is that it may have been very beneficial to interact with others who have a common gripe(having to serve out their "sentence") as a team-building exercise.
Additionally, there are many high school organizations which do community service and offer some kind of carrot(say, a trip to a theme park), as a reward. Working with the mentally challenged is a very eye-opening experience...those little funny-looking bastards are much smarter than we think they are.
land of the free. where freemen understand that freedom is protected by banding together, and fighting off threats to freedom. threats that exist abroad, in battle with evil ideologies that are antagonistic to freedom, or domestically, in poor areas of the country where freedom is threatened by economic misery
you are not free if you are poor. the battle for maintaining freedom is a domestic and a foreign battle. if you think it is only a foreign battle, you do not truly understand the nature of freedom
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Still not quite getting it. Community service is supposed to be a choice, that's it. Good moral standing character, doing good for the community, looks good on applications, looks good on whatever else. Telling everyone to do it, not only removes that, but it also add in resentment for various things.
Ontario requires 40, I had to see if I could find the original pamphlet "Students are to volunteer for compulsory community service." I always loved that sentence. So yes, bullshit. Don't try to sugar coat, forced labor to me.
I should say I graduated probably 7 odd years after they brought it in or more.
Om, nomnomnom...
"Begin Intellectual Property Reform: rather than just the usual extension of copyright terms, Obama's staff recognizes the "need to update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated." That includes "opening up the patent process to citizen review [to] reduce the uncertainty and wasteful litigation that is currently a significant drag on innovation."
"Obama's running mate has been criticized for supporting current policy on copyright, but an exposure of government policy to sources of light outside of the lobbyists currently illuminating the dark caves of Washington is likely to change things dramatically."
What an Obama Presidency Means for Technology
For what it's worth, Finland is one of the few countries in Europe with an army strong enough to withstand a direct onslaught. They never joined NATO because they have their own defense covered and proved their mettle by driving the Russians back twice. The idea that welfare states only exist because the US is picking up the defense tab is therefore false. Welfare states and strong armies can coexist just fine
I didn't vote this time (the first time in 20+ years) as I didn't like either the Facist (McCain) or the Socialist, and there were no other important elections locally. So who won is really no disappointment to me--at least, not more than I was expecting anyway. McCain would have engaged in blatant idiocy as well, it only would have been different idiocy.
One thing's for sure: there's not going to be the money for all the big, glamorous nanny-state programs that Obama has spoken so fondly of in the past. The markets are currently giving Bush Jr a supreme jackhammering, and they'll deal one to Obama's fairly-tale economics as well in due time. So when it comes to what Obama can really do, that leaves the free stuff (gun prohibition) and stuff that actually saves money.
The BIGGEST thing Obama could do to save money would be to bring troops back home, but it doesn't seem we'll be seeing that--as Obama looks to be a pawn of Israel just like Bush was, and many US presidents before them.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/04/AR2008060403508.html
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When Obama promised "change", somehow I didn't think reversing his campaign promises was what they had in mind.
Oh well,,, how's that old saying go?
"People know what kind of government they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard"
~
It's not so much racism among black voters, as the racism of the Republican party. Hell, the Republicans would, if not for the racism thing, be a good pick for at least a portion of that voting bloc, as they frequently lean socially-conservative on plenty of issues. (Take Prop 8 in California, for instance.) But in attempting to appeal to their own racists--the white kind--who make up the party's base, they alienate everyone else.
Consider this: the election was heavily influenced by Latino voters, who were previously a very Republican constituency, especially in Florida. But due to the influence of Tom Tancredo, of Lou Dobbs, of Michelle Malkin, of the Minutemen and all their ilk, Latinos are now considerably more Democratic.
So, no, black people didn't vote for Obama because he was black. They voted for Obama because the other part is the party of white racists. I'm not saying that all or even most Republicans are racists, but there's one party that's made its bones by courting them, and there's one party that hasn't; it's not hard to tell which is which.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca