3 Facts That Could Change This Election

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6430781
3 Facts That Could Change This Election (If We Share Them With Enough People)

Here are 3 Stunning facts that could not only change the outcome of this election, but with regard to the first two points, they could change the results of every election for years to come *if* we make enough people aware of them.

I want to keep this as simple and short as possible, so that the people who need to read this actually do. And again, I encourage you to share this information with as many people as you can, either by recommending and commenting on this thread, by emailing these points out and or by posting a link to this thread on the appropriate websites.

1)-Over 70% of our National Debt was created by just 3 Republican presidents.

Go ahead, get out your calculator and add up debt by president/party. Apparently the party that claims fiscally responsibility thinks it's ok to borrow massive amounts of money from foreign countries like China. Consider that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars in interest payments on this debt each year. That means more and more of your hard earned money is going to make interest only payments on what is basically a Giant National Credit Card. Not to mention the fact our debt/deficits are largely behind the weakness of our dollar, which in turns makes gas more expensive and creates other serious problems.

If you want to learn more about the National Debt, check out these links:
http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock /
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...
http://zfacts.com/p/447.html (A running clock with the cost of the war)
http://abclocal.go.com/wtvd/story?section=news/business...

2)-According to new research from Larry Bartels out of Princeton, real middle class wage growth is double when a Democrat is president compared to when a Republican is president.

"...Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families...grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike...": http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27wwln-ideal...

Here is a short summary of this research: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008...

And here is a good, short audio interview with Larry Bartels: http://youngturks.wmod.llnwd.net/a591/o1/4-25-08Bartels...

3)-90% of Americans would pay less taxes under Obama's proposed tax plan compared to McCain's.

This is according to the non-partisan Tax Policy Institute as reported by CNN:http://money.cnn.com/2008/06/11/news/economy/candidates...

People making under $112,000 a year in individual (not household) income would pay less taxes under Obama's plan.

By contrast, John McCain's tax cuts mostly benefit the top 10% of Americans. Under McCain's plan, people making over 2.9 million dollars in individual annual income would get almost a million dollar tax break.


Conclusion: Countless millions of Americans vote Republican because they believe they'll pay less taxes and that they'll have their money spent more responsibly. As you can see, those beliefs are directly contradicted by the facts. Of course we can choose to ignore the facts and instead focus on which candidate is wearing a flag pin (you ever notice that Hillary and McCain don't wear them? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vi5nbZvS9cg ) but I think we're a smarter country than that.

PS---If you're not sure how to respond to those laughably bad, factually inaccurate anti-Obama smear emails and or you want more information on John McCain, here is a nice resource guide of articles, videos and commentary:http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

Whose Freedom are we talking about? And Free to do what?

As we celebrate our Independence I am sure that all Americans will remember those who have secured our freedoms. The most recent are the unnamed and hidden from the public men and women who have died on the premise that invading Iraq was an effort to secure our freedom and spread “democracy”.
I suppose a convoluted logician may think that to be true if indeed one believes that securing the oil fields of the Middle East secures our freedom. Securing those fields may secure our economy, but does it secure our freedoms, at what price and who pays the price?
A couple of years ago I understood that the war in Iraq was going to cost this nation over a trillion dollars. The current direct cost of the war is a little under a trillion dollars but the indirect cost, veterans care and the demise of our own national infrastructure is well over a trillion dollars.
Sadly the real cost of the war is the human cost, not just the soldiers who have been killed, hidden from the public but the severely wounded, also hidden, and the tragic toll that this Republican war of convenience for the really wealthy in America has taken on our military families. Our Soldiers are sent over and over again into a god forsaken experience and their family members are forced to suffer years of constant worry.
I know that the families of our military personnel will be steadfast and keep their heads up high and always proud of the sacrifices they, their spouses, their children and their parents have made. Unfortunately the bottom line in this so called war, this hidden war, is that no one other than our military and their families know the real pain yet others are profiting from their pain.

Bart

True Prayer

There are two things that I admire in the human spirit: fortitude and patience. I don’t have fortitude, which definitely challenges my patience. My partner has fortitude but depends on me for the patience. I guess that’s how we make it through the day and years.
Recently an editor expressed a comment about a politician offering prayers at a public meeting. Subsequent letters to this editor, which were freely printed, really lambasted her. As the former leader of the Dignity [GLBT Catholics organization] chapter in Sarasota, I totally agree with this editor and her position. Religion and prayer have no place in the public forum. Politicians have made prayer a cliché. If you want to or need to pray, you should do it in silence, and for those Christians who would challenge this, I refer them to Matthew 6:5-8. Politicians on both sides are diminishing the importance of the human spiritual experience. Government in the United States should be oblivious to religion and take no particular religious stand. Most of all, politicians should not be judged based on their religious upbringing. On the other hand, religion, at least Christian religion as I understand it, should be about securing the dignity of all of God’s creations, the poor, the homeless, the sick, the veterans of war, our natural environment, the creatures that are struggling for existence as a result of human greed. Honest Christians should not allow the “professional Christians” the scum who use Jesus to acquire wealth and avoid the laws of this land to diminish their faith and most of all, should never allow those so called leaders to impose guilt, shame and fear on innocent people.
The people of Christian Faith, who have been led astray by those who seek to control them and in turn set this Nation back two thousand years, need to re-evaluate the message of Jesus; His message of Love, Peace and tolerance.
Jesus said “When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites” Matthew 6.5. Amen.

ANWR

One would think that a man who is about to leave the Presidency of the United States with the lowest favorability rating, ever, would make some attempt to redeem himself and act responsibly. Instead George Bush, after having been told a few weeks ago, and to his surprise, that gasoline prices were approaching $4.00 a gallon repeated the mantra of his oil cronies and insisted that we begin drilling for more oil in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). The following facts can be found on the Energy Information Administration’s website; If drilling were to be approved no oil would come out of ANWR for at least ten years, that’s 2018; The biggest field in ANWR would produce, at the maximum, 1.4 billion bbls (barrels), total, secondary fields would produce another 2.8 billion bbls., which is maximum total of 4.2 billion bbls. In 2007 the U.S. imported approximately 4.9 billion barrels of oil, 2.2 billion bbls came from OPEC nations and of that 800 million bbls were imported from the Persian Gulf and the rest from various supplier nations. Considering these production and consumption figures, the most we can expect by drilling in ANWR is to sustain our economy’s thirst for oil for less than one year, ten years from now, but the potential environmental damage is immeasurable. My opinion is that the President should not be promoting the continuation of oil dependence; instead he should, for once, be a trail blazer and initiate a project to promote alternative energy and energy conservation. We’ve been through this before, back in the early 1970s. Had the President and Congress acted responsibly by creating an energy task force we probably would not be in the position we are today.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/methodology.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

Catholic Marriage

There is a conflict when the Catholic Church demands that “Marriage” should only be between a man and a woman. In the twelfth century Pope Alexander III gave the doge of Venice a ring and told him “Receive this ring as the symbol of your empire over the sea…You and your successors be married to her each year, so that succeeding generations may know that the sea is yours and belongeth to you as a spouse to a husband”. And so each year afterwards the succeeding Doge’s of Venice, Italy, dropped a wedding ring into the sea to renew his vow to Venice’s wife, the sea.
After the newly professed nun receives a blessing from a priest, she receives a blessed profession ring, a wedding ring. This ring is to symbolize her contract of virginity and perpetual chastity. The ring is the seal of the Holy Spirit. Through the reception of this ring, she is espoused forever to Jesus Christ. In other words, she is married to Christ.
These things are good things, both examples talk about love. In the case of Venice it is the love of the sea and the great wealth, material and knowledge that the mariners of Venice were able to achieve. Their exploits and the exploits of mariners all over the world gave us the beginnings of good science.
In the case of the good nuns married to Christ, despite all the funny Broadway shows, I personally will always be grateful for their love, their sacrifice and their marriage to Christ. I am not sure where I would be without them.
So there you are, two examples of marriage in the Catholic Church that is not between a “man and a women” but have produced great things, myself excluded my life relationship included.

Bullshit

Oh Good, Candidate John McCain has offered his alternative to the Health Care crises that millions of Americans, 47 million and growing, were waiting to hear from the Republicans. So what is he offering? What he is suggesting is that individual Americans can take a $2,500 tax credit and families $5,000. These tax credits would not be granted to the individual tax payer, instead they would be turned over to the so called “Health Insurance Company” of your choice. Mr. McCain has no option for people with “pre-existing” conditions other than to turn that problem over to the States.
When I was a young accounting supervisor for a major oil company, about 25 years ago, the Vice President of Human Resources understood the need for a National Health Care initiative. He understood that in a Global economy American’s would no longer stay in jobs that would last a lifetime; he also understood that Corporate Sponsored Health Care Insurance would stagnate people of talent.
As it turns out, twenty-five years later, people who depended on their corporate benefits are the losers. Even those who were loyal workers for some corporation or another throughout the years are lost.
John McCain’s voice is the voice of “Greedy America”, it is the voice of the very wealthy who are getting even more wealthy without any concern for the Nation. McCain’s Voice is the voice of fundamentalist so called Christians who pay homage to wealth rather than the spirit of Christ. McCain’s voice is about sending the un-wealthy children of America to fight his and Bush’s wars and not even securing the dignity, health and welfare of our troops.
It is becoming so transparent that John McCain is indeed the epitome of another four years of the incompetent and un-Middle Class American administration of George W. Bush.

If I was Straight

“A wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ. She, being in the image of God as is her husband and thus equal to him, has the God-given responsibility to respect her husband and to serve as his helper in managing the household and nurturing the next generation”.

This is a quote I lifted directly from Rhonda Storm’s Church’s web site. As I read it, it says that the world Rhonda Storm wants to create in Florida would not tolerate a Rhonda Storm. Indeed it basically says that Mrs. Storm should be home baking cookies, wiping noses, making school lunches for her children and, I guess now, grandchildren. Further, She should not voice any opinion in public at all and much less having a voice in the Florida Senate. All opinions and decisions should be left to her husband and she should graciously serve his leadership. But we all know that is just silly, who could imagine putting a muzzle on that clap trap? The real problem with Rhonda Storm is that she is out to reduce the integrity, not only of science but of religion. She and her supporters, if successful, will introduce Florida to the world as “Ignoramus Central” (not that a lot of people don’t already think that), a place where you can learn that God did not give humankind free will and intellect, but only a book, that has not been updated for two thousand years, and indeed her Religious beliefs are only one amongst many. On the other hand, Science is updated every second of every day, we learn new things about this wonderful and at times scary Universe in which we live. In terms of scary things in the Universe, Rhonda Storm’s thinking probably ranks among the highest.