Obama will be giving his acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination. I intend to be blogging live and commenting as it goes.
At this point, to be honest, I’m not loving Obama’s chances come November, for three reasons:
1) He’s black. A lot of people in this country don’t like blacks.
2) He’s intelligent. A lot of people in this country don’t like intelligence.
3) He’s not Hillary Clinton. A lot of people in this country are pìššëd øff about that.
That is, of course, as of this writing. A lot can happen on both sides. Gaffes. Missteps. Lies that take hold and become truth through repetition. Anything.
But as of this writing, to me…looks like President McCain. I hope I’m wrong.
PAD
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I wouldn’t say removed, but the Patriot Act and the general ignoring of laws has restricted the right to privacy.
Wiretapping of American citizens without warrants isn’t always illegal anymore, it’s just “illegal.” The difference being that when it was illegal they could go to jail for doing it. Now that it’s “illegal” they can ask the phone companies to just hand over our lives and most of those companies will bend us over en masse with no hesitation and no consequences.
This has definitely been a tough 8 years on the constitution. Right now the Bush administration is negotiation a deal with Iraq. It’s having a lot of trouble getting through the Iraq side because their Parliament has to approve it. Meanwhile, the American Congress is completely removed from the process, which is against the Constitution. The President explicitly does not have the right to negotiate a treaty with another country without consult and approval of Congress. Yet he is.
Hmmm – let’s start with the idea of innocent until proven guilty, which used to be the foundation of American law. Throw due process in there as well. How about separation of church and state? How about unreasonable search and seizure? How can we say we have not lost the constitutionally given right of freedom from cruel and unusual punishment when the VP himself is frothing at the mouth promoting waterboarding and torture, and our spineless Congress, more obsessed with re-election stats than protecting the constitution, looks the other way whistling and pretends nothing’s wrong? That might be fine in James Bond’s world, but Ðìçk Cheney is no James Bond. More like an Auric Goldfinger. The first thing GW did in office was quickly curtail service women’s right to an abortion, and whether you approve of abortion or not, it remains a serious blow to women in that it blatantly allows the government to interfere in women’s healthcare. Ditto even our right to die, with the President trying to interfere in the death of Terry Schiavo. Again, it’s not to pick a fight over whether you approve of pulling plugs or not, but the fact that the President has absolutely no business trying to make policies in this area.
These are the ones I can think of while still half asleep. It’s not just me personally, it’s the country as a whole that has lost. Once a precedent is set, the door’s wide open.
I know some civil rights that have been removed from Susan:
Where the hëll have you been?
Iowa Jim, I don’t know.
Past month I’ve read a magazine article about (straight) married couples that are not interested in having kids, ever. They exist, and they’re not a rarity, particularly when both husband and wife are successful professionals with intense lives, living in the big city.
Contrast that to gay couples who want to adopt or use surrogate mothers, and the issue isn’t so clear-cut.
But a case could be made that only Churches should perform the marriage part, while the law would call it “civil union”, even for straight couples who are not religious.
But what about a religion that recognizes gay marriages?
Fun stuff.
Maybe in the end we’ll not have “marriage” anymore, but Christian Marriage, Jewish Marriage, Wiccan Marriage…
Susan: So…if Obama is elected, as seems likely, what steps will you demand he do to restore the civil rights that have been lost? And how long will you give him to do so? And what will you do if he doesn’t?
Given his lack of resolve on the FISA bill it would seem that you may have to get used to thinking that your civil rights are gone for good, if that’s the position you take.
I’m not picking on you particularly, it’s just that I suspect a lot of the people who think that Bush has taken away their rights will not be so upset when it’s Obama with the exact same powers. Haven’t seen too much outrage on the left over the way the protesters at the Democratic convention have been treated (and the way one reporter was roughed up by the cops really should result in some firings).
Obama is the people’s only hope for access to the full extent of the damage Bush has done. The surge was known as the McCain Doctrine. You want to shelter the dysfunctions of the Bush administration, vote for McCain.
Bill Mulligan, I do worry about Obama’s willingness to roll back the expansion of the Executive powers that we’ve seen lately. I wish he’d been tougher on the FISA issue. Right now it feels like neither party is interested in rebalancing the power, they just both want to make sure they’re the ones holding it.
I agree with you, codeguy. I hope that Obama is interested in rolling back executive power, but I can certainly see how keeping it would be tempting.
That’s the problem with any one party trying to expand control to such a degree: they rarely think about what happens when the other guy has it later.
TWL
Ack. That codeguy comment was from me. I screwed up the login. I really wish I didn’t have to retype it for every single comment.
Bill, I’m angry at Bill Clinton for starting the new torture policy, or as they call it, “extreme rendition”.
A friend recently asked me who I thought would win the election.
“Obama,” I said.
“Really?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “But the sun will go supernova the day before the inauguration, so none of us will be here for his presidency.”
He figured that, yeah, it’ll probably work out that way.
But I do think Obama will win. It may be a close race, but I think he’ll win. And if he doesn’t, it’d still be close and he’d probably have enough political capital to make a successful run again in 2012.
Rick
P.S. I asked this before on another thread, but I guess it got overlooked. From time to time PAD mentions parallels with The West Wing. If Obama wins and offers McCain a place in his administration, should he take it, the way Vinick took a job in the Santos administration? In short, is this McCain’s last shot at the presidency, or could he realistically try again in four years if he loses (by a narrow margin) this year?
Bill M: So…if Obama is elected, as seems likely, what steps will you demand he do to restore the civil rights that have been lost? And how long will you give him to do so? And what will you do if he doesn’t?
Susan O: Honestly, I don’t think they’ll be restored any time soon, if ever. That window has passed. The Supreme Court has the ability to pull things back, but they’re picked by … the President, and they serve for life, so who will they support? Absolute power corrupts, and until our lawmakers can look beyond their paychecks, vacation homes, massive retirement checks, and popularity numbers and refocus on the job of protecting the laws, or the public en masse suddenly rises up and demands a change (of which I have a better chance of passing through a black hole and popping out the other side), the changes will slip away in the mists of history. The best I can do is be an unamerican thorn in Congress’s butt and remind them of it.
Not that Lieberman cares one bit.
Well, this is why this blog holds a warm place in my heart–with a few predictable exceptions you have people who haven’t let their political passions overrule their reason.
So Bill Clinton was the first to take away our civil rights? But listen to the cheers he gets. Amazing what you can get away with if you smile while you do it.
(For the record, can any modern president compete with FDR on the violation of civil rights front. Great man but the internment of innocent Americans for no reason other than their ethnicity will forever stain his many accomplishments).
4) He doesn’t have the work experience to run this country.
From a Luigi Novi post:
“Iowa Jim: Would you mind giving your source for this statement?
Alan Coil: Nope. My brain, after many hours of thought and observance over many years. It’s called an informed opinion.
Luigi Novi: He didn’t ask for your opinion. He asked for a source for your assertion on a matter of empirical fact, one that he can verify himself. “Your brain” is not a source for a matter of public record, nor is an opinion, unless you’re admitting that you made that assertion up.”
Me:
The problem here is that you say I must only state facts, yet 90% of this blog is people giving their opinion. If only facts are allowed, much of the discussion here simply ceases to exist.
And I do, in fact, sometimes make up stuff for the sake of discussion. It’s called being the Devil’s Advocate.
You’ve already stated facts. You were asked to demonstrate their fidelity to reality. And refusing to demonstrate their fidelity to reality is in no way playing devil’s advocate. It’s you being needy, and leaving everyone else wondering why you felt the need to say anything in the first place.
Alan Coil: The problem here is that you say I must only state facts, yet 90% of this blog is people giving their opinion. If only facts are allowed, much of the discussion here simply ceases to exist.
Luigi Novi: Stop changing the subject. No one here said anything about “only stating facts” or “only facts are allowed”. Those are your words, not mine, and in deliberately distorting the record of our exchanges, you demonstrate your dishonesty.
The issue is that you asserted that Republicans regularly get most of their money from a few uber-rich familes, and from corporations and that corporations give millions to organizations that set up to run anti-Democratic-ideas ads. That is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of empirical fact. Facts are determined by the evidence and reason presented to support them. You were asked by Jim to provide the source from which you gleaned this information, and your response was a statement that seemed like an admission that you fabricated the statement. This has nothing to do with whether opinions are “allowed”, since opinions and facts are not interchangeable things.
Alan Coil: And I do, in fact, sometimes make up stuff for the sake of discussion. It’s called being the Devil’s Advocate.
Luigi Novi: No, it’s not. A devil’s advocate question or position is one adopted, sometimes in opposition to the one truly held by the examiner, in order to explore the testability or falsifiability of an idea. What you did was make an assertion that you now admit was untrue. That’s not called a devil’s advocate. That’s called lying. Please don’t use phrases in a fraudulent manner. They only hurt your argument, and further hurt your credibility, a decline that began on the prior thread in which you deliberately misrepresented yourself as having helped resolve a dispute between myself and Micha, which the thread shows you did not do.
I like how every time somebody diesagrees with Luigi Novi he immediately starts calling them dishonest, even going so far as to put the word liars in bold. Way to adopt the tactics of the right wing, Luigi.
And obviously, Luigi doesn’t understand tongue-in-cheek humor re: my statement in another thread about resolving an argument. Way to be too literal, Luigi.
There is a distinction between mere disagreement and deliberate mendacity, one that I am more than capable of making, and one which I indeed make on this site. Anyone who has read my posts for any considerable length of time knows that I only point out deliberate dishonesty when it is evident, to the exclusion of other things, and that I have never accused anyone of lying merely for “disagreeing” with me. You admitted to making an assertion on a matter of fact, and hiding behind the false excuse of calling it an “opinion”. In other words, you lied. “Disagreement” has nothing to do with it, and to refer to your fabrication as a “disagreement” further illustrates your attempts to ignore such distinctions to cover up your own lousy character, which is hardly party-specific.
Don’t make me turn this car around, kids…
Aw, golly gee whiz, dad!!!
Luigi wins.
I wasn’t sure who PAD was talking about when he said “A lot of people in this country” the first two times (“don’t like blacks”, “don’t like intelligence”), but the third time cleared it up for me. When he said “A lot of people in this country are pìššëd øff about [Obama not being Hillary Clinton]”, he certainly wasn’t talking about Republicans, and I don’t think he was talking about them the first two times either.
This may sound like a dodge, but I wasn’t talking about GOP or Democrats as a voting block in the first two instances; I was talking about undecideds of all political stripes. Let’s face it: There are people who will vote for Obama, there are people who are going to vote for McCain, and that’s that. But I think there’s a whole lot of people who simply haven’t decided yet, and those are going to be factors.
PAD