Theresa Kerry trashes Big 3

It's OK... Orrin hatch is proposing a constitutional amendment stating that you can be born out of the country and still run for President. He REALLY wants Arnold in that office.

(as crazy as this sounds, it's the truth)

 

Arnold would be an improvement over what we've got now. But that amendment ain't gonna pass, IMO.

 

You never know with 4 more years of republican rule. It's almost a given that Roe vs. Wade will be overturned if the "right" justices are appointed.

 

My daughter would like it to. She sees no reason her friend shouldn't be able to be president just because she was born in India. Since they are only 11 years old, she might still have a shot, it wouldn't have to pass for 24 years.

 

i dont see that american born lasting another 30 years.

when you get right down to it, it is simply another form of discrimination. there have been many thousands of immigrants that have proven their loyalty above and beyond the most patriotic of american born citizens.

we have also had waaaay too many born here that screwed the country bigtime. most people know it and it will take a bit of time to move out the old stubborn backwards way of thinking for the new blood and when that happens, i see that american born requirement as one of the first to go.

if you dont think so, well, there was a time just over 40 years ago where it was nearly unthinkable to have a catholic in the white house. Kennedy shot that down in 1960

in the 70's blacks started moving into higher offices including mayors of several of the US' largest cities and governors of many of it states.

in the 80's Geraldine Ferraro made a bid to get a woman one BIG step closer to the white house.

in 2000 we now have a significant gay representation in government other than San Francisco.

its pretty obvious that barriers to office are falling by the wayside as they should be. to have a blanket environmental characteristic as a mandatory requirement for elected office is pretty pathetic.

 

"makes Hillary Clinton look like a shrinking violet"!!!!!! Good for her! She may end up as a campaign liability among those who prefer the goodie-two-shoes Mrs. Bush. Now if she could just transfer some of her fire to John, the Democrats might just have something.

 

This was not a discriminitory amendment in the Constitution. The entire thought process on this, was to prevent a group of people, hostile to the US, from moving in, and gaining power in office, where they could do real damage to the entire country.

One such example is easily Adolph Hitler. He was born in Austria, and a German immigrant. Had Germany had the same barriers in place in regards to political office, it's quite likely that WWII would never have happened, and millions of Jewish people would still be alive today.

The US Constitution was written in such a way as to actually limit the power of government, as well as gurantee the rights of the citizens. Our countries founding fathers had tremendous foresight when that documnet was drawn up. The fact that the it has remained so valid after 228 years, is testament to their efforts.

 

im sorry but you will never convince me that ones birthplace determines their suitability for public office.

 

None of the examples cited above of "nobody ever thought..." required a Constitutional amendment.

Agreed that no place else in the world could produce a person less suited to govern than 7 of the last 8 presidents, but politically, this amendment ain't gonna fly.

BTW, I don't think the American-born requirement was an amendment. I think it's part of the original document. The requirement was that a president must have been born in the U.S. or have been a resident of the U.S. at the time of independence. The second half is now moot.

 

I'm curious Daniel. Who among the last 8 Presidents do you consider the one that was suited to govern? I tend to agree with a lot of your political views and was just wondering.

 

I may have given the wrong impression. I don't believe that any president in my lifetime has been suited to govern. What I said was:

"... no place else in the world could produce a person less suited to govern than 7 of the last 8 presidents."

I believe that a few of the more despotic countries of the world could produce people less suited to govern than Jimmy Carter. Carter was incompetent, but less unsuited to govern than, say Vladimir Putin or Carlos Salinas, to name just two.

 

i agree... Jimmy Carter wasnt a crook and it showed.

he was basically waay too nice a guy to govern.

being a president does require you to be tough and Jimmy simply had too much southern manners to be effective.

 

I had a feeling that Jimmy Carter would be the one. I also feel he was the only President with a moral grounding, and that made him ineffective in the Washington political circle. I cannot, for the life of me, understand why the 'Christian Right' supports a man like G.W. Bush, who has repeatedly lied to the citizens and sold us down the river to special interests.

 

"Christian right" is an oxymoron. W is a belligerent militarist (in spite of being a draft-dodger) and is a social reactionary. The so-called Christian right is fearful of the outside world and intensely antagonistic toward social programs for the poor, whom they regard as lazy and undeserving, even though the majority of the poor work full time. "Christian" is merely a name that W and the right apply to themselves to deny the basic selfishness and violence of their political stand.

Remember that there is a large segment of the population that would really like to nuke the entire rest of the world and gas all the poor. They have no understanding of how dependent they are on the cheap labor of the poor, and the cheap resources of the world.

Leave off the word "Christian," which has no meaning in the context in which they use it, and their support for him is easier to understand.

 

Teresa Heinz Kerry married her first husband, John Heinz, in 1966. She became a naturalized American citizen in 1971 and joined the Republican party. John Heinz, a Republican, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1971 and to the Senate in 1976. He introduced his wife to Senator Kerry at an Earth Day rally in 1990. Senator Heinz died in a plane crash in 1991. Teresa Heinz married Senator Kerry in 1995. Only recently did she change her political affiliation to the party of her current husband.

 

...unless Stalin's Red Army, unmolested by the Weirmacht, rolled across all of Europe. The "go back in time and kill Hitler" scenario is a pretty popular example of how humans have no idea how far reaching a small decision could be. But back to the current topic: if the US can't find a single, qualified candidate among the millions and millions of natural-born citizens, then we're in pretty big trouble as is.

Aren't most war hawks generally people who haven't served in combat (at least in this administration?) People who have seen the hell of combat tend to say "lets not go there." Sure, they might advocate massive military spending as a deterrent, or as patronage to their former colleagues, but they tend to shy away from actually committing troops to battle. For Dubya, I think its pretty easy to be a 'tough guy' who wants them to 'bring it on' if you've never been shot at by enemy troops.

 

And to paraphrase Senator Jim Jeffords from Vermont - That's not the Republican Party that I grew up in.

 

There are plenty of Americans qualified to serve. The problem is that the qualities necessary to get elected, and the qualities necessary to serve, are mutually exclusive. To get elected you need to be egotistical, selfish, ruthless, and hard-skinned. To serve well, you need to be self-effacing, sensitive, and giving. As Douglass Adams put it: "Nobody who wants to be president should ever be permitted to be." And I'd extend that to legislators as well.

Daddy Bush was in combat, and still took the country to war, first enticing Hussein to invate Kuwait, and then acting outraged over it. On the other hand, he did it in such a way as to maximize Iraqi bloodshed, both military and civilian, and minimize loss of American life. He's been criticized for not "finishing the job," but as we're seeing now, "finishing the job" is a quagmire. So I'd say you're half right: the combat vet took us to war, but showed much more concern for the American soldiers than the draft dodger is showing.

 

The Civil Libertarians "Free State Project" sounds like just that. They want to move 20,000 of their ilk into a state with a small enough population they can vote their party in, thus taking over government. Thankfully for us, they chose NH and not VT. If they succeed, I suspect they will start pushing east and west to suck in Maine and Vermont as well since they were #6 & 7 on the top ten list.