Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Poll: Which US presidential candidate do you like best?

Just curious to see how the FoLC vote would go. Doesn't matter if you live in the US or not. If you have an opinion, express it! It's not like this actually counts for anything.

(Candidates appear in alphabetical order. Huckabee and Gravel are not included, as they have little actual chance of being nominated.)

And to help you sort things out, here's a quick chart put together by the Associated Press which shows the major candidates' stances on most issues.

Personally, I'm with Obama. Clinton and Obama have fairly similar policies. Clinton has more experience, but that also means that Obama hasn't been as jaded by the political process. To me, the main difference is lobbyists.

Hillary has taken more money from lobbyists than any other candidate. Obama won't take any money from lobbyists, and has pledged to do what he can to reform the political process so that money can't buy laws. Instead, he's raised far more money than anyone else, and he's done it through small donations - over a million individuals have contributed to his campaign, with an average donation of just over $100. It's an incredible level of grassroots support. He owes his campaign to the people, not corporations and special interests.

As for McCain, well... What can I say? I'm dyslexic. I believe Left is right and Right is wrong.

Obama!

Don't know!

:p

Problem is, i could write out the list of major issues, and I'd need both McCain and either Hillary or Obama to cover everything. I guess I'll just have to decide which issues are more important...

JD

I chose none because your poll says which do I LIKE. I don't LIKE any of these candidates and under their leadership our country is going to SUCK for the next four years. I will vote McCain when the time comes, though. He's the only one I trust in the matters of keeping the military strong. Other than that tho, HE SUCKS.


TEEEEEEJ

To nobody's surprise, I would vote Democratic. I chose Obama, but that was not an easy choice. I think Hillary is better when it comes to health care and when it comes to spreading the amazing American wealth a bit more evenly among its citizens, which, I think, would probably do more than anything else to avert the looming recession. Also, a somewhat greater economic equality would probably strengthen the, well, "cohesiveness" of the United States and just generally make the country stronger. Additionally, such an increasing economic equality would probably do a lot to improve other nations' perception of America and make America once again look like a great inspiration to the rest of the world.

Unfortunately, I think Hillary creates an incredible amount of ill will among her opponents. I think she generates a lot more resentment than enthusiasm among Americans. While the fact that George W. Bush is his father's son was brought up hardly at all during the campaigns of 2000 and 2004, Hillary's close association with Bill seems to be regarded as a very big problem.

All in all, Hillary seems to generate so much resentment that I fear that she would be unelectable, and if indeed she was elected it could be that those who dislike her would concentrate all their efforts into stopping Hillary from getting almost anything accomplished at all. I'm afraid that she could become a "lame duck" from the day she was sworn in as a President.

Obama, on the other hand, is not only an unspoilt force in politics, but he is so very inspiring and charming, too. It will be hard for his opponents to join forces against him without looking bad themselves for doing so. Compared with Hillary, he is eminently electable.

Also, chances are that Obama's charm will not only win the Americans over, but it should reach and touch people in other countries, too. While I think that Hillary's politics could probably do more than Obama's to make the United States look good in the eyes of the world again, I'm convinced that Obama himself can do more than Clinton to make America admired among foreigners again.

Ann

I don't actually have the right to vote in the US, but if I did, I'd vote Obama.

Obama, for a lot of what Ann mentioned. And because what's coming out of Hillary's side has been really ridiculous recently IMHO.

alcyone

IMO, they're all bad choices. I voted for Romney.

As far as I'm concerned they all suck. I may not even vote for the presidential slot. The rest of the ballot is another matter.

Nan

If the poll were widened to encompass all presidential contenders, current and dropped out, I would have chosen none of the above. In the poll, however, I went ahead and chose who I would vote for on election day.

I would vote for McCain on election day because I am not in the least bit liberal. Oooh, shock. Yeah, I know.

While McCain is a decent social conservative, he is an anathema to the Reagan Republicans, supporting such things as McCain-Feingold and not supporting tax cuts. He is more of a Keynesian, economically, believing that tax increases actually increase revenue and tax cuts reduce them in all cases, something that is demonstrably false. Even Bill Clinton cut taxes on yachts after raising them in 1993 only to find out the only thing the tax did was put all the yacht builders out of work with revenue drying up to almost zero. Also against the mainstream of the party, McCain supports increasing immigration and opposes large crackdown on illegal immigration. Probably surprising to most here, I generally agree with McCain on this issue, believing that widening legal immigration is the best way to diminish illegal immigration, not a wall or increased Border Patrol.

But compared to Clinton and Obama, there's no contest. Clinton and Obama would not protect the country properly as shown wonderfully by Bill Clinton, whose major feats in office were selling military secrets to China for campaign donations and advancing Chinese ICBM technology 30-50 years so that their missiles can now target America, allowing North Korea to develop atomic weapons by basically ignoring the premise of trust but verify after signing a worthless treaty, treating terrorism as a crime after ignoring the first World Trade Center bombing and raising a wall between the intelligence services and the law enforcement agencies, and completely ignoring the economy and basking in the false prosperity of the dot com boom and handing a failing economy to his successor after the dot com bust. McCain, at least, can be trusted to defend the nation. I'm queasy on what he'll do with the economy, but not nearly as queasy as I'd be with Obama or Clinton in charge.

I've always had this interesting (at least to me <g>) theory about America's popularity. Whenever America is on its knees, as shown in the hostage crisis in 1979 or the immediate aftermath of September 11, America is never more popular in the rest of the world. Whenever America is strong and projects power, its popularity reaches those of Richard Nixon after Watergate. Ronald Reagan was about as popular in Europe or Central America as President Bush is now, for instance, yet he was proven right as he successfully toppled the Soviet Union and took out every communist foothold in the western hemisphere except Cuba. I remember the calls of "warmonger" when he tried to deploy Pershing II missiles in West Germany or when he pushed ahead with SDI, walking away at Reykjavik when the Soviets demanded its dismantling before any treaty could be agreed to. In all cases, he was criticized heavily by America's allies, yet in the end, he won and defeated America's enemies in the Kremlin and in the streets of Managua. Germans owe him their thanks with a reunited Germany, no longer East and West facing each other across barbed wire and mine fields.

Bill Clinton, on the other hand, was loved by America's allies, mostly because he did nothing. And also because he was a left-winger like most of Europe. His biggest issue was school uniforms, which he failed at, btw. Yet his popularity was astounding for a guy with nearly no accomplishments, except welfare reform which was heavily criticized by his own party as a betrayal. As usual, though, the left was wrong. Welfare reform was an amazing success. Instead of soup kitchens, we got the lowest unemployment in decades. Europeans would kill for our levels of unemployment. Using Sweden again as an example, their "public" unemployment rate is 8%. In reality, most studies put it at around 20% with an equally astounding statistic that on any given day, an average of 14% of the entire work force is on sick leave. Isn't that universal health care supposed to prevent that? <bg> Then there's the six weeks of paid vacation a year whereas most Americans get two. That's what you get with cradle-to-grave care with no incentive to do any work. The rest of Europe is hovering at 10% unemployment, plus or minus.

My belief is that Bill Clinton remained incredibly popular in polls because he was perceived to be a victim of crusading, self-righteous Republicans, not because of anything he actually did.

Enter our current president, George W. Bush. He was the most popular guy in the world after the twin towers fell. Even Rosie O'Donnell wanted to meet him. America was a victim. That good will all disappeared right after he had the gall to actually take action against the enemy. What he should have done to be wildly popular was to arrest a dozen people and to hold a trial and to leave it at that. Instead the US military went into a war footing. It wasn't about popularity, though, unlike the poll-driven Bill Clinton who would change the part of his hair if it would gain him an extra point in the polls and would avoid any issue that would cost him points. It was about defending against a mortal enemy who had declared they would kill us all. Afghanistan fell in a matter of weeks after his opponents moaned about quagmire, yet Bush put together an amazing coalition among the Pashtuns and the Pakistanis in defeating the Taliban and chasing al Qaeda into hiding. While fighting continues, a fairly popular elected government has ruled Afghanistan for years now.

In Iraq, we have the biggest point of contention and the biggest reason for his fall in popularity. For most of that, I blame the media for its appalling lack of knowledge of history. In Iraq, we have a friendly government in place, remarkably light casualties, and Sunnis turning against al Qaeda, now our principle enemy in the country. We've practically pushed them out of Baghdad and out of the formerly deadly Anbar province. With al Qaeda on the run, we still get calls for immediate withdrawal, i.e defeat.

I ask all those who ask for withdrawal today, if al Qaeda is the main enemy in Iraq today, what are all those al Qaeda fighters going to do if we leave? I'm sure they'll all take up knitting or become honest business people and love Americans. Isn't the entire reason we went to war because of al Qaeda? Didn't Osama bin Laden say that Bill Clinton's weak responses to terrorism were the reasons New York was attacked? Doesn't it make more sense to kill them there than have to face them at home? Even President Bush's harshest critics will have to admit he's kept the country safe for six and a half years. Yet he gets no credit. In fact it hurts him because Americans have turned to other issues that are more "important." So successful was he that Americans have completely lost the sense of urgency that we all had in 2001. Few even know of incidents such as the attempted attack on the Brooklyn Bridge where intelligence led the FBI to the plot, neutralizing the threat before it fully formed. al Qaeda's failures aren't for the lack of trying.

As for the media's woeful lack of historical knowledge, just look at all the other wars America has ever fought. Did you know we lost over 400,000 in World War II? 70,000 on the Korean peninsula? 59,000 in Vietnam? 116,000 in a single year of World War I? 600,000 in the American Civil War? 25,000 in the 8-year Revolutionary War? Today, we stand at roughly 4,000, about 800 of them due to accidents. To put that in perspective, the American military averages roughly 1,000 deaths per year from accidents in peacetime, which is higher than our casualty rate in a shooting war. I'll bet most people didn't know that about our accident rates in the military. At the end of the Civil War, a riverboat caught fire and sank while taking Union soldiers home from the war. 4,000 died in that accident. A single training accident in preparation for D-Day in WWII cost 2,000 lives. Yet, Iraq somehow is considered one of our costliest wars and somehow more inept than the charge by Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor, Virginia, which had 12,000 Union soldiers shot down in 15 minutes. Soldiers pinned their names to their uniforms, many of them knowing they wouldn't be returning from that charge towards Lee's center. Grant lost 60,000 men in one month and was nicknamed "Grant the Butcher" in the North. How do historians see Grant today? He's considered a great general and is credited with winning the Civil War. The people of the time elected him president a few years later. Historically, Iraq has been one of our best-run wars, something you wouldn't know by reading our media. The only better run war would have been the one run by the other President Bush, the Gulf War.

The media obsessed over every single bomb and every single name on the casualty lists. They focused on nothing but for four years, almost ignoring everything else happening in the country. That had the effect of beating down the morale of the country and in the allied countries. There was a reason why attacks were always close to the Green Zone where the reporters sat, safe in their hotels, just in time for the next American media cycle. Sentiment nose-dived with every roadside bomb. It cost Tony Blair his job. Today, our president would not win re-election, even if only Republicans were voting. People outside Iraq were never told by the media that in 15 of the 19 provinces, there are no threats of car bombings and kids play freely in the streets. When WMD were actually found in Iraq, only Fox News covered it. I checked every other major news source I could find that day, wondering what the reaction would be in the mainstream media to this earth-shattering event. Not one other bothered to report it. Even knowing the incompetence and bias of our media, I couldn't believe it.

Ann had this theory that America would become popular if we were only to become more liberal like Europe or Canada. That would probably make us more popular, but it would also bring our economic engine to its knees. The reason why most innovation comes out of America is because of its lack of high, burdensome taxes and government regulations (in comparison to others). In Europe, it's nearly impossible to be laid off. Here, a laid off employee can potentially establish the next eBay or Federal Express. By spreading wealth more evenly, we'd end up just like the permanent economic basket cases of Europe with less overall to go around. There should be no surprise that America leads in almost every high-tech industry in the world. There is no equivalent of Hollywood in any other country. All major computer companies are here like Intel, Microsoft, Apple, IBM, AMD, etc. Even in wireless communications where Nokia leads in handset sales, it's the innovation of American companies like Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Flarion, and others that created our 3G and 4G communications technologies behind those phones (3G WCDMA was based on Qualcomm's CDMA while 4G LTE was based on Flarion's OFDM). And in terms of innovation, be honest, would you rather have an iPhone by Apple or any Nokia phone? American universities created the Internet. (Sorry, Al Gore <g>) The only place where America tends to lag is in manufacturing, a place where innovation is not very important and where cost of labor is king. While it's impossible to eliminate the business cycle, it's cutting taxes and eliminating regulatory burdens that will get our economic machine humming again, not imposing high taxes and cradle-to-grave services. If Europeans want continuing innovation, they don't want us to be like them.

My response does not include Nader because he is an idiot...He will NEVER win.

I had to chose none of the above.

I cannot, in good conscience, vote for any of them. Only McCain has a stand against abortion but all of them would allow embryonic stem cell research, which is abhorrent to me.(still with GW on that one.)

I'm with Nan, the other slots are going to get my attention....

James

Oddly enough, last election I was the complete opposite. I voted for most of the ballot, but I wasn't familiar with the local candidates. I happily voted for the bonds and law votes. I was more focused on the presidential election, figuring that my one vote would express my extreme dislike of the current president.

I answered "Don't know." As I think I've mentioned before, I'm only keeping an eye on the election for right now. Being registered as independant means I can't vote on the primaries, my state having closed primaries. So I'm waiting until the ballots are final before investing any time and energy on researching the current hopefuls.

OMGosh!! I'm in awe! Can I vote for YOU???

Seriously, THAT was the most amazingly astute response about political thinking I have ever read.


TEEEEEEJ

Thanks TEEEEEEJ. I appreciate it. You can't vote for me, unfortunately (maybe fortunately. Who'd want a job like that?). I was born in Taiwan, being one of them gosh darn immigrants who became a citizen when I was ten. I'm not eligible to run.

Ditto.

I teach Poli Sci/US History and I tell my students that all the time about casualties. How many were lost on DDay alone? Something like 6000 [not going to look it up right now to double check]. One question I pose to them... Given today's news media, could we have won WWII? Would CNN et al been calling for a pull out of Europe by June 10, 1944? What about Iwo Jima or Guadalcanal, etc?

Anyway - I will probably vote for McCain because DH and I work hard for our money and I want to keep it and he's more likely to let us than the others. Before I get attacked for not caring, I do. We give lots to charitable causes. We've been on Medicaid and Food Stamps but for a short period while we got on our feet. We'd give more if we had it. I have issues with universal health care. We pay out the nose for good coverage and I'm grateful we have it. We've lived on next to nothing and always made health care a priority. It's there [for most people] if you are willing to pay for it. We never went out to eat and gave up other things like cable, but that was one of our priorities [rent, food, utilities, insurance - then other stuff]. It is possible to live on cash [Terry's? post in the other thread] even as a broke college student. We did it, we know others who did it and are doing it now. We didn't do stupid until later.

I like the Fair Tax and have little desire to support the IRS. Those who work for them, should it ever manage to get abolished, should be able to find work elsewhere and then the average American won't have to pay something like 400/yr to get their taxes done.

Obama and Hillary both scare me. Pulling out = losing. We're not if you believe the soldiers I and others I know have talked to rather than the media.

Our primary was on Super Tuesday and it came down to the lesser of about 7 evils [and it wasn't McCain]. Heck of a way to pick a president...
Carol

This is probably stupid, but...

1. Al Qeada wasn't in Iraq until we invaded, threw the region into chaos, and earned the enmity of the people who were supposed to have "greeted us as liberators."

2. I don't even want to think about what Bush has done for our national security. The man hasn't made a single decision I've agreed with since before he took office. (He announced, a month before taking office, that he was expecting a recession. Even if true, doing so could only make things worse.) I will mention that angering our major allies and giving our enemies more reason to hate us is not, in the long run, good foreign policy.

3. As for the good will our president had after 9/11... He squandered it. People gathered around in sympathy and patriotism after the attack, but his follow-up left much to be desired. Actually, I was cursing him on the 12th, when he completely mishandled (IMO) his response to the country. It should have been a time for reassurance. A call for unity and healing. "Take care of each other. We can rebuild. And don't worry about the guys who did this. We'll send in covert teams to find them and get them." Instead, he called for vengeance and sent an army to rip Afghanistan (a country whose greatest natural resource is landmines left by previous invaders) apart with brute force when the job called for subtle and intelligent work.

As for our allies... When you treat them as if you don't care what they think and just charge ahead and do whatever you want... It tends to wear away their goodwill.

4. Clinton's administration specifically warned Bush that Bin Laden was going to attack us. He ignored it. And, while I can't dispute that we haven't been attacked again, I'm not sure how much credit for that actually goes to Bush. Nor is there any way to say what would have happened under a different president.

5. Casualties are to be expected in a war, yes. But you have to have good reason for the war in the first place. We had no place in Iraq. There were no WMDs. Al Qaeda wasn't there. We weren't granted an easy victory and greeted as liberators. Heavy casualties are one thing, when the war is for a good cause. But when it's based on lies, incompetence, and mismanagement, then it's unforgivable. (And the casualty lists we do see from Iraq don't include our friendly neighborhood mercenaries, who aren't officially part of the army.)

6. As for the economy... no one really understands it. Any decent expert will tell you that. But I'll point out that our economy was a lot stronger under Clinton than it was with the Republican "let's give money to the rich and hope they decide to make things better for everyone else" plan. (Not to mention that Clinton not only balanced the budget, he had a budget surplus. Do you know what Regan and Bush, Jr. have done for our national debt?)

Sure they were. Ansar al-Islam was an affiliated al Qaeda group. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (remember him?) was already in Baghdad long before one US soldier stepped foot in Iraq. He took over the group and renamed it al Qaeda in Iraq. Plus there are many intelligence links to a Fedayeen Colonel who met many times with al Qaeda. The fear was that Iraq, full of WMD (there wasn't a single Democrat of note who actually thought there weren't any), was about to turn over large quantities of chemical weapons over to al Qaeda. That would have been a disaster waiting to happen. A president would be negligent to ignore a danger like that.

Angering allies is a lot better than letting the bad guys kill us. Any time the US projects power, our allies hate us. What else is new? Should Reagan have given up SDI? Should he have meekly surrendered on the issue of Pershing II missiles or the MX missile, the only threat we had to get them to the START talks? We'd still have a Soviet Union and an Iron Curtain if he had. The US public at the time was fully supportive of invading Afghanistan and demanded significant action.

The reason Bush said a recession was coming was to get his tax cut package passed. Remember that the Senate hinged on a 50-50 split with Jim Jeffords defecting to the Democrats to make it 51-49. Without the argument for the need for stimulus, why would a 50-50 Senate pass the bill? We needed the cuts and the Senate wasn't going to agree without that need.

You make it sound like he said it just for the sake of saying it. We were suffering from the hangover of the dot com bust in 2000 that Bill Clinton did nothing about. His economy was good up till then because he had the full benefits of a dot com boom where tons of people were making money from the stocks of companies that hadn't a prayer of ever making a profit. He didn't have to lift a finger to do anything. The one time he did was in passing a huge tax increase in 1993 when he first took office. Guess what? In the fourth quarter before he took office, the economy grew at over a 4% rate (not bad for the "worst economy in the last 50 years"). When the tax increase was passed, the next quarter slumped to a 0.7% growth rate. He's lucky the dot com boom got us out of that.

The thinking that doing anything against our enemies would just give them reason to hate us more ignores the fact that it was our weakness that caused us to be hit in the first place. bin Laden said that the 9/11 attack was in direct response to the pathetic response Bill Clinton had towards the first World Trade Center attack. A quick strike against a paper tiger would defeat us and force us to pull completely out of the Middle East, leaving Israel and other friendly governments completely at their mercy.

To do nothing would be to invite another attack, even more deadly than the last. There are severe limits to covert activity and that's why it would have been an untenable response.

They already hated us to the point of threatening death to every American and then actually killing 3,000 of us. Can they hate us more than they did?

Our allies would have had us appoint a commission to study the problem and to talk ourselves, literally, to death while al Qaeda planned its next attack. The Europeans never want to take action on anything. They couldn't even handle Bosnia right in their own back yard. The European reaction is always inaction. That's what got us in trouble with Neville Chamberlain and that's why the US is the leader of the free world. We take action when others fear to tread. The American public was fully behind the invasion of Afghanistan. Iraq was a different matter but the consensus was still there.

And you believe Bill Clinton? His concern was protecting his own legacy of inaction. If he was so concerned about an attack by al Qaeda, why didn't he do a thing about it? Clinton claimed he had left detailed plans to take out al Qaeda. Both Bush and Rice indicated there were no such plans. Clinton's own advisors, including his CIA Director George Tenant, told us that he had had numerous opportunities to strike against bin Laden. He passed them all up, getting cold feet each time. That sounds to me like he didn't care enough to act.

And I disagree. There were no lies told. From all information available to us, we believed there were large stockpiles of WMD in Iraq. The French and the Germans even told us that they had more information than we did and that confirmed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the massive stockpiles were there. Despite their own intelligence, they still wanted to do nothing. We now know why the French and Russians opposed it since they had very lucrative economic deals with Saddam. The Germans probably opposed it because of their violent history and newfound pacifism (within the previous 50 years).

BTW, there were WMD's if you read the report by the ISG. At least 500 chemical warheads were discovered there, including about 17 rockets containing still-active, deadly cyclosarin that was about to be sold to al Qaeda. The Poles got wind of it and outbid them, buying the rockets right out from under al Qaeda. The press ignored the entire latter half of the ISG report, focusing on the part that said there were no large stockpiles. The latter half showed that Saddam had many communications with the French to get their help to overturn UN sanctions. The second sanctions were removed, his weapons programs would be immediately started at full tilt.

Later Saddam admitted that he had tried to make the world believe he had large amounts of WMD because he was using that threat as a deterrent against Iran. In the ten year war against Iran, Saddam had used huge amounts of chemical weapons against the Iranians. The sanctions were getting in his way, though, so he absolutely needed them removed before he could resume production since it would have been too easy for inspectors to find them. He also said he never believed the US would invade and therefore never tried to convince the allies that he didn't have an active weapons program.

So if our intelligence said he had them and Saddam tried to make us think he had them, plus he has a history of using them against the Iranians and even against his own Kurdish population, what possible conclusion could we draw? We never did elect a clairvoyant to the office of president. So how's that a lie?

I've already given my opinion on how well the war has been managed. From a historical perspective, this operation has been fairly well run with a minimum of casualties. There were mistakes made, but what war doesn't have them? As an avid student of history, I could tell you about dozens of mistakes made in every war we've had.

In this day and age of video game warfare and the 24-hour news, people expected immediate results and perfection. That just doesn't happen in the real world. They completely ignored the president saying this war would be a long one that could last through our lifetimes. He never promised a quick victory with no bloodshed.

Tax cuts actually prevented the recession of 2001. The third quarter went into the red while the fourth quarter eeked out a small gain, which accelerated after that. A recession, as any economist will tell you, is two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth. Bill Clinton was essentially handed a 4% growing economy, got lucky with the dot com boom after nearly sabotaging it with tax increases, and then handed a failing economy to Bush. Bush, meanwhile, had 9/11 happen on his watch, costing 1 million jobs over two months, mostly in the transportation industry. Then Hurricane Katrina hit, damaging the economy again. Even then, the economy weathered the storm.

Our current slow growth period is due to the overexuberance of the real estate boom of the early 2000's where subprime mortgages were plentiful and cheap. When the stock market fell apart in early 2000 (I remember because my company's stock was at 185 in January 2000 and dropped to 40'ish a few months later) investors routed their money to real estate. With rising interest rates as a result of a growing economy, the foolish mistakes people made in overinvesting in real estate came back to haunt them, leading to the current subprime mortgage credit crunch and depreciating housing values.

Basically, it's the business cycle. People spend more than they ought to followed by holding back more than they ought to after overspending. Clinton got the beginning of the good part of the business cycle and handed over the back end of it. Bush got it going again with the tax cuts and now the cycle is coming to a close unless the Fed in conjunction with tax cuts can get it going again.

As for a budget surplus, do you think the economy can take a hit on both the dot com bust and 9/11 and maintain that surplus?

One point made above hit me as horribly wrong, but unlike Roger, who explains things so eloquently so immediately, I really had to think about why I felt this way about this statement: Honestly, the best I can come up with is what a load of complete hogwash that statement is. Spreading earned money out EQUALLY??? Makes no logical sense to me at all. I become absolutely incensed to think someone in the government should have any say in how MY money is spent. I worked for the $29,000 I made last year. I'm the one who got up 5 days in a row, spent 40 hours away from my family for that money and I will be fargon blasted if anyone has *any* right to tell me why some of my money should go to someone who DOESN'T do that. Before you think I'm a heartless miser let me say, I have no problem GIVING to charity. I consider it an honor and priviledge that I have enough to GIVE to charities, but I choose charities that actually get around to helping folks(Salvation Army, my local Christian radio station, my church) not this blasted red tape bureaucratic hogwash of taxing for welfare.

It's proved a complete waste in Lousiana where you had grown able-bodied people unwilling to move away from a FARGON HURRICANE without government assistance and unwilling to assist neighbors who WEREN'T able-bodied. That was a shameful sight even aside from the inability of the LOCAL government to tow the mark.

Yes I realize it all may seem selfish and harsh to those used to living on a government dole or maybe the enlightened elite, so let me invite a comparision for the "educated" who might think differently.

Say you're a straight A student in college, you study hard and miss out on parties and fun to get those A's. Then you find out your flunkly classmate who has partied all semester and hasn't done a lick of homework will be getting some of YOUR points to "equal" everything out. Sounds pretty far beyond logical to me and it's the same gorram thing with money. Anybody who tells me different is very likely getting a cut as far as my opinion is concerned.

DONE!!!
TJ

I'm mostly with Roger. Shocking, I know But I don't know who I'm gonna vote for this November, because (as has been mentioned by several people) THEY ALL SUCK.

For my primary (in May, when it's long past time that anyone cares what my opinion is) I'm planning on writing in Fred Thompson.

Side note, as a language-lover it's distressing to me to see the way "lying" has been re-defined since 2003. There is such a thing as a sincere, well-intentioned statement that you *later* find out is untrue. That is not the same thing as lying, which means you're knowingly speaking an untruth with the intent to deceive.

Specifically, about Iraq -- just Google it. Everybody who was anybody -- left, right, or center -- believed that Saddam had WMDs stashed all over the place. Turns out, we were mistaken (mostly) -- but being mistaken is not the same thing as lying. [/side note]

It is fascinating to watch the Democratic primary fight, though, since it's looking like neither Hillary nor Obama will have enough delegates to clinch the nomination before the convention. I expect it will get ugly. As a Republican, I can only say... pass the popcorn!

PJ