Accepting it
I voted for Mitt Romney and he lost. I was upset about that for a little while, but I can accept it now, and I congratulate President Obama and my friends and neighbors who voted for him.
I think it was a mistake and I don’t think he’s a good president. That doesn’t make me a racist, a conspiracy theorist or a Fox News fanatic. I just don’t think he’s a good president.
But the election is over and I’ll pray for him the same way I would have prayed for Mitt Romney — that God will bless him and lead him to be a good leader for us.
No matter how bad the next four years seem, we will survive. We are Americans. May God bless us.
CRAIG HOLCOMB
Winston-Salem
Come back
Despite the results of the presidential election, sour-grapes Republicans keep trying to distort the facts.
Republicans say that raising taxes slightly on the rich won’t solve the deficit problem. That’s true, but nobody says that it will. It’s only part of the solution and part of the Obama administration’s plan, which includes spending cuts.
Now Republicans think they’re chastising President Obama for arrogantly claiming to have a mandate. What happened was that in a Nov. 14 press conference, a reporter asked Obama if he thought he had a mandate. His reply: “I’ve got a mandate to help middle-class families and families that are working hard to get into the middle class. That’s my mandate. That’s what the American people said. They said, ‘Work really hard to help us.’ ”
He added, “I don’t presume that because I won an election that everybody suddenly agrees with me on everything.”
That’s not the full-of-himself, prideful response Republicans make it out to be. It’s a pretty good response to a loaded question that puts the focus where it should be: on the middle class.
Kudos to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Tom Ricks for telling Fox News TV host John Scott like it is: That Fox is focusing on Benghazi purely for political purposes.
Seriously, would Republicans please stop trying to distort reality and deal with it as it is? This last election shows that the rest of America is no longer willing to put up with their malarkey.
JANE FREEMONT GIBSON
Winston-Salem
Morality and immorality
It makes me so sad to see reactions to President Obama’s re-election like those of the Rev. Franklin Graham, who said, among other things, “Many Christians are very concerned about the country’s moral decline, particularly the president’s position on same-sex marriage.”
But there is no “moral decline.” The truth is the exact opposite. Americans don’t increasingly approve of same-sex marriage because they’re immoral — they approve of it because they’re increasingly moral. They understand the moral principle that all people should have freedom and equal rights. And they understand the immorality of persecuting and discriminating against the innocent.
They also approve of helping the poor, not because they believe that people should get “free stuff,” but because they’ve seen decades and even centuries of exploitation practiced by the rich against the poor. And they understand that there’s more to life than money.
Kind of like Jesus taught.
Maybe this isn’t the kind of morality that conservative Christians are used to; but that says more about a lack in the way current Christianity is practiced than any kind of lack in the general public.
“Treat others as you would have them treat you” is supposedly one of the two highest moral values that Christians practice. Where is the application of that in regard to others’ moral practices?
Perhaps a public discussion about morality is in order. But it’s always a mistake to condemn people without trying to understand them first.
JANE SIMMONS
Winston-Salem
Sum It Up
Now that Harvey Davis is out, will the city of Winston-Salem succeed in transforming his garage into a transportation hub?
Accepting it. I know many here will remember this like it was yesterday: Jefferson Airplane "Volunteers"
ReplyDelete"One generation got old one generation got sold"
From an editorial in Barrons:
"A Warm Thank You
To the Editor:
This 50-something, white, conservative Republican wishes to thank America’s youth for sacrificing their financial futures and standard of living so that boomers, such as my wife and I, can look forward to a long and comfy retirement, which we could easily have afforded on our own. Now we have the youth as our guarantors and providers of a little something extra.
As reported by the national exit poll conducted by Edison Research, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted 60% to 36% for Barack Obama. Prior to Obama’s re-election, I believed that it was morally wrong for my generation to pass a crushing national debt on to the next one.
The debt will top $20 trillion before Obama moves out of the White House, and it will include spiraling retirement-related costs that the administration has shown zero interest in bringing under control, largely driven by baby boomers piling into the Social Security and Medicare systems.
With the president’s electoral crushing of Mitt Romney, my overriding sense of morality and guilt have vanished. Thank you, kids"
I understand this writer and his sentiment. With some practice, I too can put aside my sense of responsibility and say "if you insist".
Yeppers, if young people are stupid enough to vote for Obama, I say, let's take their money and enjoy it.
DeleteHee Hee....liberals. You gotta love 'em.
If you privatize Medicare, who will end up paying the bill if the parents can't. If they have good, honorable and income earning children, then the children will help pay for their parents as many currently do.
DeleteMore adult children will end up subsidizing their parent's healthcare at private, profit motivated, market rates not at Medicare rates.
The income used to purchase private insurance for their parents will divert income from other sectors of the economy.
If you are not self sufficient in your old age or did not produce honorable children to help, then market forces will just let you die. Except for that pesky Hill Burton Act which provides that hospitals must give emergency care regardless of one's ability to pay. Well if they can't pay, guess who does in the form of higher insurance premiums?
These costs will be passed on to the next generation regardless either though higher taxation or payments to for profit insurance companies. Currently, Medicare is the most cost effective payer in our health care system because it is single payer and has low administrative costs compared to for profit enterprises.
These costs will be incurred and they will be forced on to the next generation one way or the other.
"Currently, Medicare is the most cost effective payer in our health care system because it is single payer and has low administrative costs compared to for profit enterprises."
DeleteAbsolutely.
I remember JFHLion was for repealing Hill-Burton and just letting 'em die. He said he had no sympathy. He was all for Medicare benefits for himself though. Ah, memories.
Arthur, and I suspect that you and I are paying for the Medicare benefits for the ones here who complain the most about the entitlement programs and our slide toward European socialism.
DeleteMost people don't mind paying into government programs as a means to provide a safety net for people truly in need. What's happened is that people are coming from other countries and stealing our benefits, and some people are using governmental programs as a way of life. Both situations are destroying America.
DeleteIndeed Wordly. What was that Tea Party sign? "KEEP THE GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE".
DeleteSaid it all right there.
Bucky, you're so mad that there are so many black and brown people in America that you want to limit their access to birth control.
DeleteAnd here is what will happen:
Delete"And God blessed Noah, and his sonnes, and said vnto them, Bee fruitfull and multiply, and replenish the earth."
We don't know exactly what color Noah was, but we can be sure it was not milky white Angle or Saxon, or even Jute, and boy did they do a good job of carrying out god's command.
I seem to recall that Noah turned out to be something of a pervert, much like his namesake, BuckyNoah.
WW, maybe you should heed your own advice about quoting selectively from a text. Remember how "Volunteers" ends:
DeleteWho will take it from you
We will and who are we
We are volunteers of america
I believe that the generation that was sold was ours. Notwithstanding, most of us seem to have done rather well for ourselves.
Maybe because many of us heeded another Jefferson Airplane line:
Remember what the dormouse said
“Feed your head, feed your head”
Not with pills or mushrooms, but with the curiosity and knowledge needed to push homo sapiens a bit farther along the road to wherever we're going.
Yes we did! I read all the "Volunteers" lyrics again and figured the line I pulled fit the pasted editorial I wrote best of all. Our Generation did do well on the whole I agree. This next one though, I'm not too sure. The chasm between the "greatest generation" and us was wide and very different from the chasm between us and what ever the next one is to be called. I'm still waiting for Alice to shrink from 10ft tall.
DeleteCome back. Yes he won, we who oppose him don't like it but it is fact. Those who support him seem to be quite miserable for supporting him. Odd. Maybe it is because most of them have a nagging sense that things in America are in a dangerous place. I don't know.
ReplyDeleteRaising taxes a little bit on the rich has no part in any fiscal solution. That's not the purpose. It has only two purposes: make as many Republicans as possible break their tax pledge, but most importantly, it is Leftist doctrine to tax the rich and keep doing it. Been this way for a century. It is nothing more than ideological masturbation for them....and lasts about as long until the next Congressional election. There will be no "spending cuts" in any Obama plan and there will be no cuts as a result of any Obama plan. With "current services baseline budgeting" the accepted method in Congress, no cuts will happen.
Morality and immorality. Odd letter. Being "moral" and being more accepting of something are two different universes. Moral transcends generations and people. Acceptability of something within a society can be fleeting. Convienient diving in and out of the New Testament can be a mine field. Careful.
ReplyDelete"Perhaps a public discussion about morality is in order". I would gladly buy a ticket for such an event as it should be quite a spectacle, what with all the PC police and speech minders wandering the audience. Any such discussion will need to cover little things like "right and wrong", good and bad". Good vs evil and where do all these concepts come from. Should be a high old time.
Residents of a Southern California suburb are protesting against a hilltop home that they say serves as a maternity center for Chinese mothers paying thousands of dollars to give birth to so-called "anchor babies."
ReplyDelete________
Who cares? Let 'em suck the life and money out of America. America is pretty much done.
If it is so done, why don't you move the Costa Rica with Rush?
DeleteIf I were going to move 'BACK' to Latin America, it wouldn't be to Costa Rica. It's too expensive there. Plus, the girls are not that great looking. Better-Venezuela, Colombia or Spain. Ooooo.....la la!
DeleteROTFLMAO
DeleteYou have family in that neck of woods, don't you Tim?
DeleteWhen Buckboy takes off on one of his fantasy lives, he forgets that some of us live in the real world and have spent a lot of time overseas and/or have many friends abroad.
DeleteThe cost of living in Costa Rica is significantly lower than in Venezuela or Spain. The cost of living is higher than in Colombia, but Colombia is not much safer to live in than Mexico.
Spain is not a particularly safe place to live these days either. A friend of mine who lives in Madrid got off the Metro and was swept up by a street riot a few weeks ago. The police did not handle the situation very well...in fact, there have been charges of police brutality. My friend got hit a glancing blow from a police baton.
Whenever he has the urge to indulge in fantasy travel, Buckboy should resist it and stick to places he knows well, like public restrooms and Chick-fil-A parking lots.
“..it is Leftist doctrine to tax the rich and keep doing it. Been this way for a century…”
ReplyDeleteI am always amused by matters that “everybody knows”, because they are almost always things that are not true.
From the introduction of the income tax in 1911, the highest marginal rate was never higher than 25% until 1932, the last year of the Hoover administration, when the Republican controlled Senate and the Democrat controlled House dramatically increased the top margin to 63%. The bill was signed by Hoover, a Republican.
The rate rose to a peak of 94% during the Great Depression, then declined slightly to 91% by the end of WW II. It remained at 91%, through the conservative 1950s until the “liberal” Congress, with Democrats holding a supermajority in both Houses, slashed the top rate to 77%. That bill was signed by the “liberal” President, LBJ. The next year, the “liberals” cut the rate to 70%.
I might point out that whatever the highest marginal rates, the 1% have been doing quite well for way more than a century.
They think we're like bizarro versions of them -- GOVERNMENT GOOD. TAX GOOD.
DeleteNot really. All we're saying is, some government programs provide a benefit to society, and you have to pay for that somehow. Man cannot live on supply-side magic beans alone.
Well, there are people who are doctrinaire, who see everything as black or white, good or evil, right or wrong. They want a book in which they can look up any situation and be told what to do. Such a book has never, does not now, nor ever will exist. The very idea is absurd.
ReplyDeleteFranklin Graham and people like him are lightweights, as are all single issue "thinkers". WW is right to warn about quoting the bible…anything that you can find there, I can find something else that contradicts it. Some promote the 10 Commandments as a suitable guidebook for morality. Not me.
Perhaps the most troublesome one is #6: "Thou shalt not kill." The greatest scholars ever assembled to work on a single translation project argued about almost every word in the book. For #6, they decided upon "kill". Later, much less astute people changed that to "murder", for a simple reason, to allow the satisfaction of the blood lust that is capital punishment. Of course, later on "god" delivers a list of "crimes" for which capital punishment is not merely allowed, but required. Read it sometime and see the absurdity.
All of the commandments have some inherent problem, but the worst other one is #5: " Honour thy father and thy mother, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee, that thy daies may be prolonged, and that it may goe well with thee, in the land which the Lord thy God giueth thee."
Really? I guess when he was taking an active hand god never made any bad parents. So even if your parents abuse you, verbally, physically, sexually, you should "honor" them? Give me a break.
But the worst part of the commandments is that 40% of them are god's own ego trip:
1. I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of the lande of Egypt, from the house of bondage. Thou shalt haue none other gods before me. I didn't save your sorry asses out of the goodness of my heart, but so that you will be forced to worship me forever.
2. Thou shalt not make thee any grauen image…Thou shalt not bow downe thy selfe vnto them, nor serue them: for I the Lord thy God am a ielous God… Well, that sure butts up against #10, the covet clause, and isn't envy one of the 7 Deadly Sins? In other words, do as I say, not as I do.
3. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vaine: for the Lord will not holde him guiltlesse that taketh his name in vaine. No sass…this isn't a democracy, it's a dictatorship.
4. Keepe the Sabbath day to sanctifie it, as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. Yeah, I want you to sit around all day on Sunday thinking about me.
Any "moral code" blindly followed is a very dangerous thing. The NAZIs had one…so did Stalin, Pol Pot and Osama Bin Laden.
But Ms. Simmons is right to paraphrase Jesus, and it's all right to do so, because the thought in no way originated with the bible. It is found in every culture, predating the bible by centuries. In fact, it was probably the first, and for a long time, only, "law", beginning with the time when the earliest human societies began forming.
And it is the only one that we need today.
Long read, but very interesting in that author basically gave up on the commandments.
ReplyDeleteHow I Lost Faith in the “Pro-Life” Movement
Thanks, Wordly, excellent article. Libby Anne actually gets it.
DeleteI note that an important study came from Washington University, easily one of the 10-15 best schools in the country, yet virtually unknown to almost everybody. And those who have heard about it think that it is in Washington, but it is not, it is in St. Louis. So it sort of fits into the "ignorance" theme of the article.
Those of us who came of age in the pre-Roe era are all too familiar with the stats on unsafe abortions. My friend Fam, who never got any woman pregnant except for his wife, after they were married, got involved in the mid-1960s trying to help his friend, a Phi Betta Kappa who today is a distinguished professor, abort a fetus acquired from a guy who abandoned her as soon as he found out she was pregnant.
The story reads like a James Bond adventure, with a series of flights through national and international airports and ending with an illegal abortion performed in Durham, which led to him having to smuggle her out of her college dorm at 3 AM to rush her to the local emergency room to stop life threatening hemorrhaging, then talk the doctors and nurses into not revealing what happened.