Top Ten Reasons to Vote Democratic in 2006

I agree for the most part with ya there, but when you say... "For the record, Bush went to Yale. I don't think you can be incompetent and graduate from Yale."

There are plenty of people that go to ANY school and graduate completely incompetent to do just about anything. Formal education, especially in schools where money trumps intelligence and knowledge, is not a mesure of competence in any way, shape, or form. That's not to say intelligent people don't come from ivy league schools of course, but to everyone that does is competent at all is just false...let alone competent enough to fill such an important possition.

...especially when you have 6 years of demonstrable, large-scale incompetence to go on. You can't just say "I know this looks like he @!$%#s up everything he touches and furthermore is setting dangerous precedents with regards to executive power, but he went to Yale so that can't be the case."

I don't think Bush is an idiot. I do think he is a terrible president.

and the suspension of Habeus Corpus for "enemy combatants"

Just wondering but when did "enemy combatants" ever have Habeas Corpus? Wasn't this more keeping the status quo than suspending anything?

I was scanning over the actual Military Commission Act of 2006, which is the supposed act that revokes Habeas Corpus, and I did not find anything that just lets the President arbitrarily name citizens as "enemy combatants". It was a decently long bill, so perhaps I've missed it, but I have yet to see anyone who complains about the suspension of Habeas Corpus actually cite the legal language suspending it.

Check out the definitions for "enemy combatant" here

And how it relates to Habeas Corpus here

Basically saying any non-citizen with ties with hostilities to the US, directly or indirectly through people or events they are aware of, can be held without the rights of habeas corpus.

of course thanks to the patriot act, enemy combatant is ALSO any US citizen thought to be involved in any sort of terrorism, domestic or otherwise, so even though they are not "aliens", it still can be applied, and actually with less regulations then for non-citizens...which is scary on it's own.

That law actually only refers to non-U.S. citizens (e.g. U.S. residents, aliens, etc.) It's still a dangerous amount of power given to the Executive, you'd think all these laws would be built with some checks and balances in honor of the founding father's brilliant principles.

Agreed. It's clear to me that the first item on a Democratic congress' agenda would be political vengeance on Bush. The second would be socializing health care and the third would be an astronomical tax increase to pay for it. The fourth would be to avoid any discussion of social security like the plague, the fifth would be to cut off funding for troops in Iraq, and the sixth would be to kill all the federal judicial nominations that have been blocked for the past five years and leave those seats open until a Democrat president is elected. By the time they finish up with a congressional resolution apologizing to Muslims for our country's and Israel's existence, I think we'll be about ready for the '08 elections.

Velcro Van, I wish all of those things were true. If it were then we should let the Democrats have 2006, cause in two years they would screw up the nation so much that they would never be voted back in. Regretfully, I doubt they would be so aggressive. But still, I think Pelosi as Speaker in 2007, will remind everyone that we don't want Hillary as President in 2009.

Actually, isn't that the secret plan? Some victories for Democrats in 2006 will mean another Republican in 2008? Strangely, the groups that provide the liberal report cards list Pelosi as a moderate. I can't fathom what would happen if someone they list as liberal got elected President. Federally subsidized anti-war, gay porn printed on hemp?

Wait. Do not steal that idea, unless I get 10%.

Wow...do people like you really exist?

Larry's post is satire ... must be! or proof that evolution doesnt exit ---- and he certainly believes in creationsim

You need to compare apples to apples. Clinton / Foley is not a valid example because, sure Clinton had out of wedlock sex on Easter Sunday in the Oval Office and lied about it ... but he wasn't a Congressman and she wasn't a page.

So Gerry Studds in 1983 is the better comparison. His gay propositions to underage pages and actual sex with a 17 year old male page was a "mutually voluntary, private relationship between adults." And he ran for election and won five more times after the scandal.

Which goes to show you, Democrats are all about tolerance ... as long as its their gay Congressman having the underage sex.

but whats your point?

Republicans spent 40 mill on the Ken Star Clinton thing? Should Dems be quiet but spend only $20 mill?

Its a false argument to look to the past and say others did nothing. If Clinton was so wrong isn't Foley at least as wrong ... why not say so?

Now if the repiblican party actally took reponsibility then maybe they could speak. But Hastert: "the buck stops here, and I take full repsonsibility, but I did nothing wrong" hehe

Now that we're past the shock, yes - I'm a liberal.

What!?! Oh, you are soooo off my watch list.

;)

Shorter Larry: I'm way too bad-ass to actually read your article and offer up a valid rebuttal, so instead I'll just pull fake talking points out of my ass and then beat the straw out of them. It's just easier that way, because thinking is hard and things like facts and logic are just tools in the scary liberal conspiracy. I don't need any of that stuff, you can tell I'm right because I TALK IN CAPS!!1!1!! That's like YELLING!!!!

Sorry, couldn't resist. Feel free to delete.

LOL x 2 !

ROFLMAO!! hehe that was lovely thanks guys :)

Yikes your above post wasn't satire?

Yikes!

I've been a teacher for the past three years. NCLB is tantamount to sabotage; it offers pitifully meager funding on totally unattainable conditions. For example, the students in my 4th-8th grade special education class were expected to contribute equally to our schools average, despite the fact that few of them could read, write, or speak conversationally. If they were enrolled, their scores were to be included — due to stiff penalties for less-than-100% participation.

We ended up winning a small battle, applying for and receiving permission to administer the federally-mandated state standardized tests individually, and aurally. My teaching assistant and I alternated lessons throughout the day; one of us taught while the other read questions to students, one-by-one, transcribing their responses. However, if they couldn't understand what we had asked, we couldn't explain, clarify, or define for them. We could only read them the directions and repeat the questions. Classroom instruction suffered, with the lack of a second adult presence in the classroom to assist students during instructional time.

The whole mess amounted to two weeks of utter confusion, leaving me, my assistant, and my students stressed and on edge. We got the scores back in May or June, and the results brought little validation; while our students performed respectably in mathematics and natural sciences, all things considered, their English and reading comprehension scores were atrocious.

What could we possibly do? Teaching seventh-graders to analyze parts of speech and punctuation is a herculean task to begin with, of course — but it's an exercise in futility when you're dealing with autistic seventh-graders who can't read or write. The same can be said about having to explain multiplication to a fifth-grader with dyslexia, who can't distinguish 161 from 16, 16.1 from 6,011, or 3 x 5 from 53.

It can be said that, in name, No Child Left Behind is an admirable goal — one to which I aspire — but it is a vicious misnomer. By setting arbitrary, mediocre goals and applying them, across the board, to every student, NCLB attempts to relegate every child to mediocrity, ignoring the exceptional students, and those who are at a technical disadvantage.

Absolute f*cking hogwash. Wash your mouth out.
Try being a "criminal" teacher for a year; let me know how it goes.

Joshua, I don't see your point. That's like telling me I can't comment on murders in Washington, D.C. unless I become a cop. Or you can't comment on the war in Iraq unless you become a soldier. Somehow I doubt your feeling of superiority on every topic is impacted by your actual lack of participation in anything. California, where I live, was first in spending and 44th in results. It's gone up every year since No Child Left Behind. If the old system of blindly throwing money at teachers was so great, California wouldn't have been 44th in the first place.

the NEA broke education long before Bush could.

America has always been a country with contempt for learning. It isn't the teachers' fault, it's the whole culture. Your diatribe is a perfect example of why it isn't the teachers' fault.

That old Republican saw about how you can't fix a problem by throwing money at it makes me wonder why Republicans are always so willing to throw money at the military.

The NEA? How did the National Endowment for the Arts break Education?

I beleive he means the Nuclear Energy Agency.

@cashsblog:

Joshua, I don't see your point. That's like telling me I can't comment on murders in Washington, D.C. unless I become a cop. Or you can't comment on the war in Iraq unless you become a soldier.

It's not that you're commenting — it's that you're expecting me to take you seriously when you call me a criminal, a defeatist, and inferior to my Asian rivals without knowing much of anything about what you're saying.

Somehow I doubt your feeling of superiority on every topic is impacted by your actual lack of participation in anything.

You don't see me running around talking about astronomy or the Yankees' starting lineup, do you? Of course not. I don't know much about that stuff, although I know the Yanks are screwed. And I'm not saying that because I don't like the Yankees, and I certainly wouldn't say it without understanding the premise; I've got experience and data to support that conclusion, namely that I watched the ALDS and I saw the Tigers win.

I don't have to participate, I just have to know what I'm talking about. Do you know how NCLB works? Have you read the minutes of your local school board's most recent meeting? When was the last time you stepped foot inside an American public high school?

California, where I live, was first in spending and 44th in results. It's gone up every year since No Child Left Behind. If the old system of blindly throwing money at teachers was so great, California wouldn't have been 44th in the first place.

Which campaign ad told you about those figures? Granted, they're probably not wrong, but that's not how you go about measuring students' performance. Those rankings are aggregates, and the methods for calculating them are arbitrary — and vary, state-by-state. There is no national standardized test; each state administers its own examinations, although many states purchase institutional tests written by outfits such as Stanford (who produces the Stanford-9 Achievement Test, or SAT-9). Due to this disparity, there is no actual, measurable way to compare the results of students across states, and any data released which draws such conclusions is merely speculative.

Furthermore, I'm not through with the aggregate moniker. When schools release data, they're releasing averages, compiled by lumping together data from the entire student body. Herein lies the rub: schools in rural and urban areas tend to have large special education, English learner, or socioeconomically-disadvantaged populations, and fewer students defined as "gifted" or "exceptional". Suburban schools fare much better, but this doesn't matter! On the state level, the data released is an aggregate of all of the students in all of the schools.

Your state of California is home to several major urban areas and many rural counties. There are lots of suburbs, sure, but the vast majority of California public schools are likely either rural or urban. The deck's stacked unfairly against California, and — I hate to say it — many other states (including my own home state of Arizona, with an unforunately massive English learner population, both legal and illegal). Sidenote: for those of you who are viciously anti-immigration, chew on the fact that the standardized test score of a child whose parents are illegal immigrants is averaged with the scores your own children receive — even if they can barely speak English!

Finally, funding. When you put Congress in charge of it, it's doomed to failure. Teachers want laptops for their students, funding for visits to our National Parks and Monuments, modern supplies for the classroom, and enough desks to go around. Another sidenote — one of my closest high school friends, David Schapira, is running as a Democrat for State Representative in AZ-17. He and I both started teaching right out of college, and he's running on an education-first platform; we agree almost unanimously on all issues regarding NCLB. In his campaign speech, he talks about his first day as a teacher, walking into a classroom with 36 students and 35 desks.

Right, so we want to be able to give our students the benefit of a state-of-the-art, comprehensive education, but there is little power to appropriate funds on the school level. If I want to buy an aquarium for my fourth-grade class in order to teach my students about ecosystems, biospheres, and the food chain, I'd have to apply for the money. I might get 50% — next year.

I hope you can be reasonable here, and listen to what I'm saying. Please believe me — and Killfile — when we say that NCLB is a dead-end of a program that wastes several weeks of instructional time in a vain attempt to try to reward suburban schools whose average scores are higher, while punishing rural and urban schools with unattainable goals and dire budgetary consequences for failing to attain them.

I am no longer a teacher; I'm a small business owner now. My mother is a lifelong public school educator and my father is a public school administrator, but I have no personal stake in making these comments, nor do I feel like my interests are in conflict. I'm just relating my experience, hoping to shed some light on why it appears that America's schools aren't "making the grade."

Am I missing the sarcasm, or are we all not actually thinking of the National Education Association?

You mean the National Education Association? :)

Joshua,

On one hand you tell me there is no metric for performance in education when it suits your point.
On the other hand you tell me you know NLCB is a failure when it suits your point. It's rather convenient that you can find a metric for education only to tell us all NLCB is flawed yet dismiss the same metric when it shows education was broken long before 2001.

Plainly, NCLB hasn't been around long enough to fail. To use your baseball analogy, if you had told me in inning 1 the Yankees lost - I might concede that you could be right in the future but I would know that only time would tell - and it's the same thing with NLCB. You have anecdotal evidence that it is bad and dismiss its successes as irrelevant because you only want to consider data that matches the conclusion you reached in advance. To people without an agenda, it's still inning 1.

As to your other point about someone's point being invalidated if they don't satisfy your arbitrary criteria regarding how many kids they have in school, you use the same flawed logic you used when you insisted I had to be a teacher to know education was crap. I have 6 kids. 4 of them went to or are in public education. The remainder are too young. I participate plenty. I know education is flawed not because I am a teacher and part of the problem, or a caring parent ... but because I run a company that would love to hire Americans and can't find enough of them. And that didn't happen because Bush got into office, it happened because teachers care more about their union than they do kids.

I am sure the teachers in your family are lovely, caring people ... and your personal anecdotal evidence extruded out to cover the entire educational system and reach a conclusion you wanted to reach because you don't like a particular politician will pass muster with plenty of people on Newsvine who will believe anything as long as it speaks against Bush, but it won't work among scientists or businesspeople who don't want to protect a flawed system just because a relative of yours happens to be employed by it.

your personal anecdotal evidence extruded out to cover the entire educational system and reach a conclusion you wanted to reach

Project much?

I know education is flawed not because I am a teacher and part of the problem, or a caring parent ... but because I run a company that would love to hire Americans and can't find enough of them.

I am not sure you know what 'projecting' means - at least not based on the way you just used it. You probably use 'surreal' a lot and 'begging the question' too. Stop using buzzwords and make a real point. Empirical evidence shows education has been broken in America for years. Political posturing is happening among opponents of Bush who want desperately for NLCB to be a failure for their gain. None of them mention that kids are already getting better education in the fundamentals because they are putting politics ahead of kids. I have no problem pointing that out.

You probably use 'surreal' a lot and 'begging the question' too.

You probably shouldn't sell your services as a psychic.

You harshly accused others of committing the exact same sort of fallacy that you centered your own argument on. That strikes me as fitting the bill for projection. But I guess that's what projection is all about, isn't it, concealing your own behavior from yourself.

Well the Democrats have there scandal now its time for GOP to unleash there's. I have a sneaking suspicion that it involves JK and his Armenian Connections. We shall see. I think this because it appears there is an effort to systematically cover up the links. The U.S. government passed the Freedom Support Act on October 24, 1992. It is replete with provisions for financial, technical, and other forms of assistance "to support freedom and open markets in the independent states of the former Soviet Union." Amid these good works, however, is a little-known but important and mischievous clause, Section 907. It prohibits the provision of U.S. assistance "to the Government of Azerbaijan until the President determines . . . that the Government of Azerbaijan is taking demonstrable steps to cease all blockades and other offensive uses of force against Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh."

This means that the Congress has passed and the president has signed into law a provision that singles out and excludes by name a specific country from receiving U.S. assistance. This, obviously, is a very strong step. Why has Azerbaijan been subjected to this special treatment? What are the implications of this provision? Isnt Azerbaijan for BUSH ?

Washington, DC – The Armenian Assembly this week commended Senators John Kerry (D-MA), Jon Corzine (D-NJ) and Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) for cosponsoring a key trade bill that will further strengthen the U.S.-Armenia relationship and help Armenia achieve greater prosperity, security and economic growth. The legislation, introduced by Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY), along with Senators Paul Sarbanes (D-MD) and Barbara Boxer (D-CA) in early August, now has 12 cosponsors.

In 1992, Kerry authored the amendment to the Freedom Support Act (Section 907) that said aid to Azerbaijan is conditional on that country's demonstrated steps to end its blockades against Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh. During the 106th Congress, both he and Mikulski voted to retain the Assembly-supported amendment. The Senators are also cosponsors of the Armenian Genocide resolution (S.Res.164), which was introduced by Senators John Ensign (R-NV) and Corzine in June to commemorate the 15th anniversary of the U.S. implementation of the Genocide Convention. The legislation invokes the Armenian Genocide as an example of man's inhumanity to man.
The Senate trade bill follows similar legislation in the House of Representatives that was introduced by Congressional Caucus on Armenian Issues Co-Chairmen Joe Knollenberg (R-MI) and Frank Pallone, Jr. (D-NJ). The House bill, known as H.R. 528, currently has 110 cosponsors.
The Armenian Assembly of America is the largest Washington-based nationwide organization promoting public understanding and awareness of Armenian issues. It is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt membership organization.

Given the current OPctober surprise build up in the Mediterainian and the Arms build up on the Turkish Armenian borders and the dispute over the support for the PKK I think this will bite the Democrats on there Commie Luvin Pink arses. :)

I think I urgently need to do a Nation States on Armenia. Youdo know they have been combat ready and able to deal with US aircraft since 2003.?

I second that. It does go in line w/ #2 of the list though.

We need someone to hold the one party gov't accountable. Enough is enough.

Then once we have that, we should all work towards removing the two party system. The interent has given us something we didn't have just a few years ago. If we put our energy and time into it, we can (seriously).

How about publically funded elections from the Pres all the way down to local officals?? NO more fund raisers, no more 'donations' (aka bribes and buying of the elected officials).

You get enough signatures - you get free air time and money to make your case. Then we vote and you work for us the poeple - not your 'party' or the big corporation that just paid you hundreds / thousands of dollars -.

What do you think?? Can we do it??

- Not without also revamping the FCC's rules for equal coverage to include cable networks and not just over-the-air networks.
- Not without doing something to get lobbyists out of Congress, and particularly eliminating the K Street Project and it's effects (and similar projects). Good luck with that.
- Not without taking serious the numerous allegations of vote fraud, electronic voting machine and tabulator software hacking, etc. and then doing something to ensure the integrity of every person's vote.
- Do you seriously want your tax dollars paying for the campaigns of the Guns-n-Dope Party, or maybe the Party Party? You'll never get that past the Republicans or Libertarians...

Not without also revamping the FCC's rules for equal coverage to include cable networks and not just over-the-air networks.

Or in other words, not without getting rid of the pesky first amendment. Equal coverage applies to the over-the-air networks because they are using the public air waves. The cable companies own their cables, or rent them. The government has little to do with cable other than crappy regulations. Part of the first amendment is that not only can the government not stop you from saying what you want, but the government cannot tell you what to say either.

The very first television broadcast did not occur over the public airwaves, it happened over telephone lines. (BTW, that link is to a speech by FCC Chairman William E. Kennard in which the merger of Yahoo! and Broadcast.com is discussed in detail.)

FYI, the FCC regulates wireless spectrum, including broadband, as well as regulating media ownership and acquisitions, transfers of ownership, the Emergency Broadcast System / Emergency Alert System, Internet and Over-the-Air Radio, etc., and very soon (if not now)... digital TV.

Times have changed, and we should evolve, too - for the better of course.

You mention these obstacles... but aren't they worth getting past if we have a better gov't, better life, better world???

I think we can get past it - as long as we don't allow our vision and dedication to be dampered by the big hill ahead...

They used to say you can't climb Everest.......

They are indeed worth getting past. My point was that the changes you would like will require work on these obstacles as well, and many of these obstacles have an effect on ALL political parties, not just the two most powerful ones, and also on the voters.

Australia has a partial system of funded elections. They simply have a cutoff - if you didn't win at least 4% of the vote at the election you get no reimbursement (ie: no funding for the next election.) The amount is about US$1.50 per vote. Trouble is, the parties are allowed to spend more...

It's had an interesting (and bad IMO, although it needn't be) effect on the Labour Party, because it freed them from financial dependence on the unions. They didn't use this to get rid of the cronyism and corruption, unfortunately they used it to collude in the destruction of the unions and play for the "centrist" vote... a big shift to the big end of town.

Arghawon- I favor a system where candidates have to collect a certain amount of money in small donations, after which they will be publicly funded. That means they will have to show good faith in their effort to get elected (no Party Party).

Publicly financing a few slackers who are only in it for the matching funds is worth it to get the corrosive effect of legal bribery out of the system.

Jimmy, You're not supposed to trickle all over their economic theories...