only right wing or republician views

[Whitacre_Girl]

With that being said, I fear this post is turning into a “Why my political party is better than yours” game. No fun for anyone.

I highly doubt anyone is going to change their minds about who/what they support, so in an attempt to keep my blood pressure normal, I’m done with this specific thread. Lol

I hope everyone has a wonderful night! Yay for weekends!!

I’m sad you’re leaving because I was just gunna say that I want in on this “why my political party is better” fight. My political party has cookies. And chips and salsa…and gaming. So I win.

Besides

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/9/27/128985687423641517.jpg

(someday I’ll make a serious post…but it’s not this day…just trying to diffuse the tension!)

 

[JenniferB]

Ouch for that poor bull!!

I want some cookies, please!!!

 

[Whitacre_Girl]

Ouch for that poor bull!!

I want some cookies, please!!!

Then you must come over to my side…the dark side…the Party for the Advancement of Delicious Desserts…or PADD for short

http://static.neatoshop.com/images/product/76/476/Come-To-The-Dark-Side-We-Have-Cookies_1921-l.jpg

 

[MillTownCath]

As a devoted Catholic of 60 I am some what bothered that our faith is being used by Catholic media to push views of the right wing only, why certainly we are against abortion,for morality,and support the holiness of the Family all are fine and also right wing issues how ever other issues are closer to left wing views such as feed the hungry Jesus did not say we should only feed those who can afford it.To cloth the Naked to give shelter,to help those who are really sick and need it.he cured the leaper healed the lame raised the dead and never said a word about judging their personal conduct.I feel that to do good for others of course we must never take away their ownership for them selfs,but still their those who are in real need of help anyway to do good must be from God to do nothing must be evil because the absence of good must be evil for what else is their.If a baby dies from lack of correct medicial attention is it no as dead as the aborted child both are wrong if a older person dies for lack of resourse to bye correct perscriptions are they to in a sence aborted by being denied the rest of their life.My issue is that both sides are wright on somethings and wrong on others I see the issues of life and treatment as one as taught by Jesus .who keep numbers on those who suffer or die because of or societys neglect of these other issues who. God bless All

Right on. Solidarity my friend.

 

[Brendan]

Where are the studies that show conservatives give more than liberals? I take great offense to that. I’m a proud liberal and donate alot of my time and money to helping both humans and animals in need.

Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.

Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so.

“When I started doing research on charity,” Mr. Brooks wrote, “I expected to find that political liberals — who, I believed, genuinely cared more about others than conservatives did — would turn out to be the most privately charitable people. So when my early findings led me to the opposite conclusion, I assumed I had made some sort of technical error. I re-ran analyses. I got new data. Nothing worked. In the end, I had no option but to change my views.”

Conservatives also appear to be more generous than liberals in nonfinancial ways. People in red states are considerably more likely to volunteer for good causes, and conservatives give blood more often. If liberals and moderates gave blood as often as conservatives, Mr. Brooks said, the American blood supply would increase by 45 percent.

And all this from a liberal columnist

nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html

 

[FaithBuild18]

And all this from a liberal columnist

nytimes.com/2008/12/21/opinion/21kristof.html

Psh. Stop trying to use logic. It has no people on effect.

 

[Ender]

I whole heartedly agree! Maybe I should be Independent , too, as I agree with the left concerning social justice/welfare, tolerance, and environmental issues and I agree with the right concerning moral issues.

Clearly there are many people who support the politics of the Left on (e.g.) social justice/welfare and environment issues. It needs to be pointed out, however, that those are all prudential issues; they are not, unlike the “moral issues” of the Right you alluded to, well … moral issues.

The mistake made on these issues is to believe that because someone opposes your preferred solution to some issue - like the environment - they are unconcerned about it. We are told to be good stewards of the environment but we are left to our own devices to determine what that means. Unlike abortion, environmentalism is not a moral issue. I think this is where silent celt went wrong in the OP where he implied the Right doesn’t care about feeding the hungry or helping the poor. The Left/Right debate on those issues is not about whether to help but rather about how to help.

I just feel like because I don’t see an end to abortion any time soon, I’d rather my vote go for something that I can possibly see changes in.

This statement is true - for just so long as there are large numbers of people who say they oppose abortion but still vote for politicians who enable it.

Ender

 

[davidmlamb]

It is a fundamental misunderstanding:

The left - Government responsibility to take care of the needy (That way they don’t need to do it themselves? Just a thought)

The right - Charity comes from the heart, not a government check.

*ARTICLE 2
PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL LIFE

I. AUTHORITY

1897 "Human society can be neither well-ordered nor prosperous unless it has some people invested with legitimate authority to preserve its institutions and to devote themselves as far as is necessary to work and care for the good of all."15

By “authority” one means the quality by virtue of which persons or institutions make laws and give orders to men and expect obedience from them.

1898 Every human community needs an authority to govern it.16 The foundation of such authority lies in human nature. It is necessary for the unity of the state. Its role is to ensure as far as possible the common good of the society.

1899 The authority required by the moral order derives from God: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment."17

1900 The duty of obedience requires all to give due honor to authority and to treat those who are charged to exercise it with respect, and, insofar as it is deserved, with gratitude and good-will.

The diversity of political regimes is morally acceptable, provided they serve the legitimate good of the communities that adopt them. Regimes whose nature is contrary to the natural law, to the public order, and to the fundamental rights of persons cannot achieve the common good of the nations on which they have been imposed.

1902 Authority does not derive its moral legitimacy from itself. It must not behave in a despotic manner, but must act for the common good as a “moral force based on freedom and a sense of responsibility”:21

1903 Authority is exercised legitimately only when it seeks the common good of the group concerned and if it employs morally licit means to attain it. If rulers were to enact unjust laws or take measures contrary to the moral order, such arrangements would not be binding in conscience. In such a case, "authority breaks down completely and results in shameful abuse."23

1904 "It is preferable that each power be balanced by other powers and by other spheres of responsibility which keep it within proper bounds. This is the principle of the ‘rule of law,’ in which the law is sovereign and not the arbitrary will of men."24

II. THE COMMON GOOD

1905 In keeping with the social nature of man, the good of each individual is necessarily related to the common good, which in turn can be defined only in reference to the human person:

Do not live entirely isolated, having retreated into yourselves, as if you were already justified, but gather instead to seek the common good together.25
1906 By common good is to be understood "the sum total of social conditions which allow people, either as groups or as individuals, to reach their fulfillment more fully and more easily."26 The common good concerns the life of all. It calls for prudence from each, and even more from those who exercise the office of authority. It consists of three essential elements:

1907 First, the common good presupposes respect for the person as such. In the name of the common good, public authorities are bound to respect the fundamental and inalienable rights of the human person. Society should permit each of its members to fulfill his vocation. In particular, the common good resides in the conditions for the exercise of the natural freedoms indispensable for the development of the human vocation, such as "the right to act according to a sound norm of conscience and to safeguard . . . privacy, and rightful freedom also in matters of religion."27

1908 Second, the common good requires the social well-being and development of the group itself. Development is the epitome of all social duties. Certainly, it is the proper function of authority to arbitrate, in the name of the common good, between various particular interests; but it should make accessible to each what is needed to lead a truly human life: food, clothing, health, work, education and culture, suitable information, the right to establish a family, and so on.28

1909 Finally, the common good requires peace, that is, the stability and security of a just order. It presupposes that authority should ensure by morally acceptable means the security of society and its members. It is the basis of the right to legitimate personal and collective defense.

1910 Each human community possesses a common good which permits it to be recognized as such; it is in the political community that its most complete realization is found. It is the role of the state to defend and promote the common good of civil society, its citizens, and intermediate bodies.

1911 Human interdependence is increasing and gradually spreading throughout the world. The unity of the human family, embracing people who enjoy equal natural dignity, implies a universal common good. This good calls for an organization of the community of nations able to "provide for the different needs of men; this will involve the sphere of social life to which belong questions of food, hygiene, education, . . . and certain situations arising here and there, as for example . . . alleviating the miseries of refugees dispersed throughout the world, and assisting migrants and their families."29

1912 The common good is always oriented towards the progress of persons: "The order of things must be subordinate to the order of persons, and not the other way around."30 This order is founded on truth, built up in justice, and animated by love. *

 

[Brendan]

SHOULD we look to kings and princes to put right the inequalities between rich and poor?

Should we require soldiers to come and seize the rich person’s gold and distribute it among his destitute neighbors?

Should we beg the emperor to impose a tax on the rich so great that it reduces them to the level of the poor and then to share the proceeds of that tax among everyone?

Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing, and do much harm. Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of making themselves rich again.

Worse still, the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful; while the poor who received the gold from the hands of soldiers would feel no gratitude, because no generosity would have prompted the gift.

Far from bringing moral benefit to society, it would actually do moral harm.

Material justice cannot be accomplished by compulsion, a change of heart will not follow. The only way to achieve true justice is to change people’s hearts first — and then they will joyfully share their wealth.

St John Chrysostom, Doctor of the Church, “On Wealth And Poverty”.

Is our current system the truely Catholic system that the Golden Saint calls for, where charity is not compelled by the State, where the rich feel the joy of giving, and thepoor feel gratitude tp the people who give to them?

 

[St_Francis]

Silent Celt,
I could never be a or vote for a democrat that I have seen in real life (recalling that in the first presidential election I could vote in the choice was between Jimmy Carter and Ford–I wasn’t thrilled with Ford but Carter seemed, well, as it turned out, Carter was a bad choice.)

Why? Because the Dems have weird agendas based on fantasy. They do not base their ideas or proposals on reality. They have some “pie in the sky” vision that id we set up the right environment, everyone will be good. They ignore the reality of human nature.

The Dems also ignore the realities of economics. I have children; I hope one day I will have grandchildren. But I sincerely hope that they will not be saddled with the debt we are piling up. Democrats seem to think that we can bleed the economy dry and it will continue to produce for them. That ain’t the way it works. There is an amount you can take in taxes without much affecting the economy, but if you take too much, the economy will start to go downhill and then no one will be in good shape: everyone will need a safety net but it will be gone. While I am not against government provision for those in need, our current situation is that of every dollar collected by the government “for the poor,”'only 27 cents actually gets to a poor person. Would you give to a charity with 73% administrative costs?

A third problem I have is that Democrats in the long run seem to hurt those they claim to want to help. I do not think that African-americans or women are better off for the changes we have made. Young black men grow up fatherless and too often turn to criminality. Women are freer to have sex with men they don’t want to marry, but they are less free to save themselves for marriage, and they seem to bear the brunt of all this license, so overall it seems like men have benefitted more than women, Women are freer to have careers, but less free, due to economics and social mores, to stay home and raise as many childten as they want.

So I tend to vote for Republicans and be more in favor of Republican ideas, not that I always agree with them! But, despite the fact I think they are lousy at politics and do not explain themselves adequately and allow themselves to be pushed around by the Dems, I do think that the Republicans are at least grounded in reality instead of fantasy. And I do not by any means always agree with the Republicans.

As a Catholic, I would be very happy for a third option, but I hope I have explained why I tend right and agree more with Republican ideas than Democrat.

 

[estesbob]

ARTICLE 2
*PARTICIPATION IN SOCIAL LIFE *

*I. AUTHORITY *

*. *

And the point is?

 

[silent_celt]

To Brendan I to could post many quotes by Saints and Popes my issue is that their is virtue in some of what both sides have to offer their is also a down side to both and I believe that We all must be open to the truth different for you and me but their must be a lot of common ground to many are so closed minded and automaticly rebuff any thing the other side my offer,as a younger person I believe all were Americans first now I believe that people see them selves oweing more loyalty to political parties than than to the country as a hole. God bless you all

 

[Jaypeeto4]

When Clinton was elected in ‘92, and after his Jan 93 inauguration,
I was so shocked and appalled at the Dems’ attitudes on morality,
that I started sending TONS and TONS of money to Christian-Right and
Republican groups ((and got myself ultimately into unbelievable debt because of that)).
I was overjoyed by the Republican congressional and senate Victory in the 1994
mid term elections, too. I thought they would go to work rolling back Clinton’s
assault on traditional moral standards.

Well, January 1995 came and the new Republican congress was seated.
Immediately, they went to work. They were gonna cut the wasteful spending.
First thing they did? Well, one of the first things?
Announced that they were going to severely cut back the school lunch
programs for poor kids.
What?? I didn’t vote for them for THAT. I wanted them to stand up for morals.
They campaigned on that, but as is so often the case, that took the back burner
once they took office. All I heard was **** about reduucing capital-gains taxes, etc,
on the wealthy and on the big corporations. And you know what the big corporations DID
with those tax breaks, then and after Bush gave them even bigger tax breaks in 2001?
Did they create scads of new jobs, as we were all told they would?
I can speak definitely about what I saw.
With their tax breaks in their pockets, the corporations kept eliminating American
jobs and out-sourcing those jobs. Sending the jobs to India and other countries.
That is diabolical, and I am sick to death of it.
In one company with which I am familiar, all the Customer Service jobs were sent to India.
The company has NO stores in India. The average citizen of India knows little to nothing about this Company. Yet, if you call the 800 or 866 numbers to talk to Customer Service,
guess who answers? Yup. Somebody in Bombay / Mumbai. Getting paid maybe a dollar an hour, if they are lucky.
I am sick of hearing the talk about how the big tax breaks stimulate the economy.
In theory, they could, but the bigwigs take the money and run, sending jobs overseas.
Enough.

 

[Ridgerunner]

When Clinton was elected in ‘92, and after his Jan 93 inauguration,
I was so shocked and appalled at the Dems’ attitudes on morality,
that I started sending TONS and TONS of money to Christian-Right and
Republican groups ((and got myself ultimately into unbelievable debt because of that)).
I was overjoyed by the Republican congressional and senate Victory in the 1994
mid term elections, too. I thought they would go to work rolling back Clinton’s
assault on traditional moral standards.

Well, January 1995 came and the new Republican congress was seated.
Immediately, they went to work. They were gonna cut the wasteful spending.
First thing they did? Well, one of the first things?
Announced that they were going to severely cut back the school lunch
programs for poor kids.
What?? I didn’t vote for them for THAT. I wanted them to stand up for morals.
They campaigned on that, but as is so often the case, that took the back burner
once they took office. All I heard was **** about reduucing capital-gains taxes, etc,
on the wealthy and on the big corporations. And you know what the big corporations DID
with those tax breaks, then and after Bush gave them even bigger tax breaks in 2001?
Did they create scads of new jobs, as we were all told they would?
I can speak definitely about what I saw.
With their tax breaks in their pockets, the corporations kept eliminating American
jobs and out-sourcing those jobs. Sending the jobs to India and other countries.
That is diabolical, and I am sick to death of it.
In one company with which I am familiar, all the Customer Service jobs were sent to India.
The company has NO stores in India. The average citizen of India knows little to nothing about this Company. Yet, if you call the 800 or 866 numbers to talk to Customer Service,
guess who answers? Yup. Somebody in Bombay / Mumbai. Getting paid maybe a dollar an hour, if they are lucky.
I am sick of hearing the talk about how the big tax breaks stimulate the economy.
In theory, they could, but the bigwigs take the money and run, sending jobs overseas.
Enough.

And so, for you, the answer is what? To support Democrats?

I’m not a Republican, but a lifelong Democrat (left behind by the party). I once held party office. But I never support the party anymore because of its single-minded devotion to abortion on demand. Now (as if I needed more reason) it is also devoted to homosexual “marriage”, and is going to force it on the entire nation.

I have a LOT of problems with both parties, but fair is fair. Bush had the Iraq war, (or really, Iraq War Phase II) but nevertheless, the federal deficit went down constantly until 2008. Unemployment dipped below 5% until then. Underemployment was virtually unknown. That prosperity did not only benefit callers from Mumbai. (And were they really undeserving, when this country had full employment?)

And lots of seniors depend on their dividends and capital gains. Should they be allowed to pay lower tax rates on that income? Well, if the deficit was decreasing throughout, why should we assume they should not? Just because wealthy people of younger ages also benefit, that alone doesn’t mean we should raise those taxes.

And is there any reason to believe higher corporate taxes will cause corporations not to send jobs overseas where taxes are lower?

I don’t mean to offend, but I think you need to think this out again. We’re in a bad time, and no question about it. But we’re in for a worse one if small businesses (who provide 60 or 70% of all new jobs) won’t expand because of their fear of increased taxes, increased interest rates, more regulation and totally unpredictable healthcare costs. And do we want that?

 

[Jaypeeto4]

No, I will not be throwing my support behind the Democratic Party either.

But in all fairness, for all his terrible faults,
when Clinton left office, we had no debt but a surplus.

I don’t know where it is coming from that the deficits were steadily
decreasing during the Bush years?
I never heard anything of the sort. They kept going up and up.
Yes, the collapse of 2008 made them much worse than they would have been.

The Iraq War?
I never, ever supported that.
Mind you, I had no affection for Saddam Hussein, but he was a secular socialist dictator,
not an Islamic fanatic, and there was never any reason to believe that he had ANYTHING to do with Osama bin Laden.

 

[Jaypeeto4]

Oh, one more fruit of the Iraq war:
Thanks to the replacement of the secular Iraqi regime,
the oldest continuously-existing Christian community
in the Middle East, has been decimated and driven out.

 

[Ridgerunner]

No, I will not be throwing my support behind the Democratic Party either.

But in all fairness, for all his terrible faults,
when Clinton left office, we had no debt but a surplus.

I don’t know where it is coming from that the deficits were steadily
decreasing during the Bush years?
I never heard anything of the sort. They kept going up and up.
Yes, the collapse of 2008 made them much worse than they would have been.

The Iraq War?
I never, ever supported that.
Mind you, I had no affection for Saddam Hussein, but he was a secular socialist dictator,
not an Islamic fanatic, and there was never any reason to believe that he had ANYTHING to do with Osama bin Laden.

The Clinton years did end with a budgetary surplus. One could argue that it was becasue he had a Republican congress at the time, but I won’t.

Because, it seems, of Bush’s institution of “Part D” Medicare, increased military spending, TARP 1 and increased education funding, he did run a deficit in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005; a deficit that then began to shrink significantly until 2008, when it again increased significantly. Beginning in 2009, the deficit massively, massively increased over 2008. blog.heritage.org/2009/03/24/bush-deficit-vs-obama-deficit-in-pictures/

Personally, I did not favor increasing federal spending on education, which is fundamentally a state and local responsibility, and which really seems more like a sinkhole than anything else, because public education never seems to improve simply by throwing money at it.

Nor did I support Medicare Part D. Some seniors with very limited resources and very high prescription costs could have been aided by programs that were not “across the board”. Some people can afford their prescription drugs, and I think adding yet another layer of mostly middle class welfare was a mistake. If it was up to me, we would all admit that Social Security and Medicare are essentially welfare programs and should be means tested like other welfare programs.

I did support the Iraq War, or what I think of as the continuation of Desert Storm. The Iraq War never ended. There was only a truce; a truce that Saddam Hussein broke time and again. The fighting certainly died down after Desert Storm, but it never actually ended.

Sure, Saddam was a secular ruler, sort of. He was secular in the sense that he didn’t support a militant brand of Islam, but he certainly did persecute shiites and favor sunnis. In that sense, he was not secular. But he was also a mass murderer. He was responsible for upwards of a million deaths and started two wars of aggression, one of which was a world war. he starved his own people. In a way, he was an “equal opportunity murderer”, gassing tens of thousands of sunni Kurds. So one might maintain that he was a “secular-minded murderer” for the most part. He never gave up his WMD programs, though, toward the end he deactivated most of them. Bush never, ever claimed that Saddam Hussein had any part in the 911 attack. Nor did Congress in approving the resumption of the war. That’s just a myth. Saddam did, however, provide training facilities for all kinds of terrorists and financially supported suicide bombing against our Israeli allies. Iraq is now the only functioning democracy in the Middle East other than Israel. I do not argue that it is all that good or stable a situation, however. The possibly worst thing about Saddam Hussein, though, is that in his murderous madness, he tried to provoke Israel into the Gulf War. Israel refrained, but just barely. If Saddam had had better weapons with which to attack Israel, the 21st century might have seen its first atomic strike, and Baghdad might now be a sheet of glass.

I did support the retributive strike against Afghanistan…up to the point we became engaged in “nation building”. In my opinion, we should have torn the Taliban infrastructure up, killed as many of them and Al Quaeda as possible, and left, promising to return with much worse if any further aggressive acts were perpetrated against the U.S., and arming the Northern Alliance and other groups opposed to the Taliban, to the teeth. Those people have been at war with each other since the dawn of history and will, in my opinion, be at war with each other until history’s close. Neither will they ever become anything but tribal and given to fundamentalist Islam, in my judgment.

I did support TARP 1 B, except for the bailout of the “too big to fail banks” (the non-bank bailouts were Obama’s) Much of the TARP 1 B money went to solvent banks to enable them to take over failed banks, and the government will make a handsome profit on that part of it. I don’t have a problem with that.

But forget about my “policy preferences”. The fact is that no matter how you look at it, the Bush administration increased the deficit, and the Obama administration hugely increased it. My budgetary concern now is that the insane Obama deficits will now be taken as a “baseline” for bogus deficit reduction and tax increases on the middle class. And one should not be fooled. The Obama tax increases are, indeed, fundamentally tax increases on the middle class. I have the further concern that this administration’s oppression of small business is primarily what is stifling job recovery and that this administration has no intention whatever of changing its policies in that regard. Finally, my concern is that in view of the radical policies and orientation of this administration and the democrats in congress, a second Obama term will make the first one look like a picnic.

 

[Jaypeeto4]

And is there any reason to believe higher corporate taxes will cause corporations not to send jobs overseas where taxes are lower?

I’ll put it bluntly.
They need to be FORBIDDEN to do this.
They are taking decent-paying American jobs and sending them
overseas where they can pay people what, here, would be considered worse than
a Slave-Labor wage, and that is absolutely, utterly, dead wrong.

One huge corporation, that benefitted enormously from the tax-breaks granted
by President Bush II, actually laid off thousands of it’s workers and centralized
all operations. They had no monetary need to do that.
They betrayed the trust of all the people who had ever worked faithfully for them.
And even before the massive layoffs, there was a habit of letting people go
just before they reached retirement age, via “eliminating a position.”

THAT practice needs to be forbidden too.
Then look at all the mortgage lenders who ripped naive people off,
by letting them by properties worth a third of a million dollars, with practically zero
down-payment and very low mortgage payments. They HAD to know that those
ballooning property values were not realistic and were not going to last.
I knew it. And I am very, very, very far from being very smart.
But when a $60,000 property skyrockets to a value of $230,000 within three years,
anybody can tell that that is not going to last, and that something is very, very wrong with that picture. And that was happening everywhere all over this country.
All over my neighborhood, small homes that were selling for about $65,000 to $75,000 were suddenly selling for $300,000 and up. That was obscene, that was artificially inflated prices, that people could tell were NOT going to last, and people were being duped into buying those homes at those sky-high prices by the banks and other lenders. When the property values collapsed, as they were destined to, the total amount of the mortgage owed did not go down. Thus these hapless people were stuck with $300,000 mortgages on a property that had gone back down to below $100,000.
This is crazy. And this is the stuff that the money elite pull on people any time that they think they can get away with it. The homeowners get very little help to deal with such terrible reversals of fortune. The big banks and corporations, they get bailed out. You and I are told to either sink or swim. That’s not right.

 

[Jaypeeto4]

And I do agree with you about
NOT raising taxes on the Middle Class.

I also agree that there are large numbers of upper-middle class and
wealthy elderly, whose income or insurance, enables them to pay for their
own medications WITHOUT a further entitlement program being needed across the board.
Bush was wrong to do that.
My parents, however, are not among those well-to-do elderly, not by a long shot.

I also agree that Social Security should be means-tested.
THAT will make many people howl, because they say,
“If I paid INTO it, I have the right to get money OUT of it.”
Well, that is facetious. I pay income taxes every year, and never cheat on them,
and have paid into the Treasury now for over 25 years, and I don’t feel that I have
a “right” to receive a check from the government because I paid my taxes.
People who make a lot of money, or who are personally wealthy, do not need
the safety net of Social Security and should not get it.
I look at Bal Harbour on Miami Beach, and I see all those wealthy people over 65 driving their Mercedes-Benz and Bentleys, and shopping at Pratesi in the Bal Harbour Shoppes, spending thousands of dollars on a set of towels and washcloths that would cost
only $50 at JC PENNEY, and you know those millionaires are collecting Social Security to boot. That is not right, either. What I FEAR is the possibility of draconian measures to cut Social Security, whereby the low-income and middle-class elderly lose their benefits or have them scaled back. The benefits aren’t that great to begin with, they can’t afford to have them cut back. Let the Rich give up their Social Security checks. They are rich, they don’t need it.

 

[Ridgerunner]

Oh, one more fruit of the Iraq war:
Thanks to the replacement of the secular Iraqi regime,
the oldest continuously-existing Christian community
in the Middle East, has been decimated and driven out.

A bad thing indeed. Would you have preferred, though, that he kill yet another million people?

The Christians have not been driven out of Iraq, and not by its government, though certainly, many have fled Islamic terrorism. Many have sought haven in Syria, another murderous state in which a minority (Alawites) murder and dominate a majority (Sunnis). How long will that last? Nobody knows, but Obama is calling for Assad to step down. If he does, the Christians there will have to flee again, only this time it will be a lot more of them.

The Kurdish region has offered sanctuary to Christians and can probably provide it. Possibly there is a good reason why so many have not taken the Kurds up on it, but if there is, I don’t know why they would prefer Syria to that alternative.

One thing needs to be remembered in all of this. Christians in Iraq were protected because they had no power and no hope of gaining any. Consequently, they could be relied on by any government to serve it, however evil it might be, because they had no power base of their own. Since Christians in the region tend to be well educated, they were useful. Tariq Aziz, for example, is a Chaldean Catholic, but he feared for his life and that of his family every day. In that way, they somewhat resembled Medieval Jews in Russia that could be favored and employed one minute, and persecuted the next. That arrangement predated Saddam and predated Assad. It is a terrible thing that militant Islam has/is/will be driving Christians out of middle eastern states like Iraq, Egypt and someday, Syria and Lebanon. Without the old relationship (which is actually imperialist Turkish in origin, not secular) they will all have to leave, no matter what. Arabic Islam does not tolerate Christians unless they are supine and useful, and even then only by a little.