Re: OT: To be a Republican


"Pathetic Bush Voters" <akaatz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:75796cbb-e908-4a7e-acfb-0262800ca88c@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Feb 26, 10:35 am, "Ross" <brow5...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
As much as I dislike and distrust Hillary, I thought her lampoon of Obama
was right on point and quite funny - "We'll all join hands, and come
together...and celestial choirs will sing..." or words to that effect.
Kumbaya does not put food on the table.

Obama is probably a nice guy and an honorable person, but where's the
beef?
He's gonna have to get specific with his proposals and programs. That's
when
the price tag for his presidency will become clear.

Have you added up the price tag of the Bush presidency yet? That moron
has wasted more money than the last three democratic administrations
combined.

I'm no Bush acolyte. He has disappointed me in amny ways. Where was his veto
pen for the first seven years, for example?



It's a legitimate debate, how much the federal gov't should be involved
in
people's lives.

Yeah? Where do you stand on the Terry Schaivo case, abortion,
marijuana laws, etc etc etc.

IMO, Terry was gone many years before they unplugged the vegetable that had
been her body. I understand her parents wanting to hold on, but her husband
was right. She was a potted plant for over a decade before they let her go.
Besides, if one belives that the spirit must stay with the body as long as
there is biological function, then they were doing her harm keeping her
here. The best reason to let Terry die was that she deserved it.

Abortion represnts the collision of two very important principles - people's
dominion over their own bodies, and the right of a person to life. No decent
person would argue that women should not make their own medical decisions.
On the other hand, no right thinking person would assert that infanticide is
acceptable. The only real point of contention is, when does a fetus get to
be a baby?

One extreme point of view says, at the moment of conception. The other
extreme says, at birth. In most matters, the wisest answer usually lies
somewhere between the extremes.

I am a libertarian, so I think fewer laws is generally better than more
laws. I believe every abortion is a tragedy. However, in the first half of
pregnancy, I do not think it should be legislated. I think it should be
between the mother, the doctor, her conscience, and, hopefully, the father.
However, when the baby becomes viable outside the womb, it should get to be
a person, dammit. Abortion after the mid-point of gestation should be
outlawed, except to save the mother from death or grievous health
consequences (which is, by the way, a red herring - it's virtually never the
case.) My youngest son was born at 24 weeks. When I think of fetuses being
aborted that were farther along than he was at birth, it makes me sick to my
stomach. It is nothing short of barbarity.

As far as pot laws, I couldn't care less. It's up to me to stop my kids from
smoking pot, not the gov't. The whole War on Drugs has been a ridiculous
farce which has failed completely. If drugs were legal, crooks would have to
do without one of their main sources of income. Am I gonna tell someone that
his dying, suffering mother can't ease her pain with pot? Not me. Pot is no
big deal, and medical marijuana should be available. There are a lot more
dangerous drugs prescribed and used every day. Anxiolytics and barbiturates,
for example.

However, when someone gets stoned and gets behind the wheel of a car, it is
very much my business. DUI should always be aginst the law, regardless of
the intoxicant.


I think everyone should have equal protection under the law
and equal opportunity. However, it would be a disaster for the gov't to
get
into the business of trying to engineer equal outcomes (aka, socialism.)
I
see no justification for my tax dollars being used to save others from
their
own poor choices.

It's a "poor choice" if your mom is a crack addict? Typical bull***
from the right. You guys keep talking about social Darwinism, but have
you ever lived in a country where there is no safety net? It's not
pretty. A society that is highly unequal is not a stable one. It's
actually in the best interests of society as a whole that there be
some economic parity. "Survival of the fittest" in a social sense is
a bunch of crap. What you end up with is the survival of the rich and
powerfulat everyone else's expense. The law of the jungle -- that's
not civilization.

I don't believe there should not be a safety net. But there's no logical
reason why I should have to pay for other people's bad behavior. If a mom is
a crack addict, she shouldn't be raising any children. Her children should
be taken out of her care, and raised elsewhere.

The liberal-conservative debate is often feelings vs facts. Wouldn't be nice
if everyone were equal, just like a john Lennon song. But they're not, and
you cannot make them so. People differ in every dimension. We're all
different height, different weight, different IQ, different level of
ambition,etc. If you took all wealth away from everyone and then divided it
equally among the populace, pretty soon the rich would be rich again, and
the poor would be poor again. The rich would keep doing what made them rich
in the first place, and the poor would keep doing what made them poor. You'd
just have to go through a terrible period of very low production until
society re-settled into its natural strata, income-wise. When you put the
"...best interests of society..." ahead of the best interests of the
individual, you start getting into Lenin/Mao/Hillary land. Our nation is
great because the gov't stayed out of the way of individuals, not because it
tried to fix everybody. The Nanny state would be the destruction of the USA.

And, by the way, the rich do not get ahead at everyone else's expense. The
economy is not a zero-sum system. If I achieve more, it takes nothing away
from you. It just means I spend more - creating more jobs - and hire more
people - creating more jobs. Some people think it's a tug of war, but we're
actually all pulling in the same direction. Actually, the top 20% in income
are responsible for 40% of consumer spending. The 'evil rich' are the main
engine that drives the economy. They are also, as I often point out, the
most hated minority that everyone else would like to join.


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