Welcome from the neighboring state of Arizona!

Hello, and welcome to all the newbies!

Welcome!

Last week was good and bad for me ... my picks went 10-4, but three of the four losses were VERY "high-point" games! [And that Eagles game at Oakland ... ]

Ah, well ... it's a brand new week of games, so here goes:

SF @ HOU - 6

MIN @ PIT - 3

IND @ STL - 13

NE "@" TB - 12 [Game to be played in London]

SD @ KC - 1

GB @ CLE - 11

BUF @ CAR - 9

NYJ @ OAK - 8

ATL @ DAL - 7

NO @ MIA - 10

CHI @ CIN - 2

AZ @ NYG - 5

PHI @ WAS - 4

DemocracyCorps, a polling agency founded by James Carville - yes, THAT James Carville - and Stanley Greenberg, issued a report earlier this week that stated, among many things, that the Republican opposition to Obama is not based on racism. Here is the relevant portion of the report, taken from their website:




Now, I don't generally trust James Carville (or any pollster or political strategist, for that matter) as far as I could throw him, and I think some of the other conclusions he draws are a bit overstated. However, it was a surprise to find this on his site, and I thought it was worth sharing. There are some people on this site who have their minds made up that race is the primary motivator behind ANY criticism of Obama. It's a real shame for them that it just isn't true.

That is not the least bit by accident, either.

By making your blanket statement, you were implicitly saying that anyone who shares the traits of being a white and a man is dangerous simply because of those traits.

The world is full of history outside the United States, and that history proves that ANYONE, regardless of their race, creed, gender, etc., can be "dangerous". There are also countless examples of people being kind and good. Some of them, I assure you, are white males. However, I'm sure you would consider them anomalies, rather than ponder the possibility that perhaps it doesn't matter what race or gender they are, because they are individuals.

No, it doesn't count, because each of us is an INDIVIDUAL. We each have our own brain, our own talents, our own experiences, etc. The fact that you would lump a whole lot of people together based on a factor about which they can do nothing (e.g., the color of their skin) is not only absurd, it is downright disgusting.

You know ALL "white folks" intimately?




Wow ... and I don't even remember that ...

Bummer ... I remember laughing hysterically at his antics when I was a kid. Thank you, Soupy, for using your talents the way you did.

OK, I'll tell you what, Dragoness ... in order for it to be believed that you're "not a leftist", and that you may possibly be an independent, there should definitely be some (fairly major) issues about which your position is consistent with the right. One doesn't really cut it, but we'll start with that for the moment. Can you name one issue for us where your position would be considered conservative/libertarian/small-government?

Hopefully enough to break something.

Some very excellent points made here. The only one with which I would disagree is that people don't yearn to be free. Notice, I did not say that "democracy" is the only way to be free. [Nor am I under the misguided assumption that many in this country are that we are some sort of democracy. We were intended to be a republic. Democracy is mob rule. Not a good thing, in my book.] To say that people long to "live without the shackles of oppression" is to say that they desire freedom. The people of an oppressed society, however, are not always able to throw off those shackles themselves. They very often need some help to do so.

Aside from that, everything in the post was spot-on.

While I am definitely not a proponent of Bush, I think some of the criticism that is heaped on him by others is motivated by something other than the truth. [Not saying you fall into that category, msharmony, just making the point.] The figure that is generally used to show how Bush mucked things up is the 10-year projection from the CBO. The problem with that projection is, it assumes that everything remains unchanged. In case you've forgotten, there was a bit of an incident less than eight months into Bush's Presidency that changed things ... just a little.

Oh, this is going to be fun ...

First of all, the tripling of the budget deficit is not a "talking point", it's a reality. The budget deficit will at minimum be $1.4T this year, which is triple the deficit of the last Bush budget. If you don't know that, then you need to get your head out of the sand and start paying attention.

As far as the promises you mentioned ... the original talk of a 16-month troop withdrawal (which, if implemented during Obama's first month in office, would have had us out of there by summer of 2010) has more than doubled, leaving many troops there until the end of 2011. He also said that the one of the reasons we would do that is so that we could focus more on Afghanistan. Now he's giving signals that he's not even going to do that.

Making everything transparent? That would be hilarious, if it weren't for the fact that you seem to actually believe it has happened. There has been no transparency whatsoever, not that it's a surprise to many of us. Government isn't interested in their own transparency, no matter who's in charge. Just as an example, though, the big O specifically said that the people were going to have five days to read ALL bills BEFORE they would be voted on in Congress. Not only have the PEOPLE not had five days, the CONGRESS hasn't even had five days to read some of the bills that they've been commanded to vote on, even when the bills are over 1000 pages long!

What tax break did he give to 95% of Americans? Are you talking about the $7 and change per week (to singles), which itself was still subject to all taxes once it was back in your paycheck? Wow, what is anyone going to do with all that money? Besides, once he lets the previous REAL tax cuts expire, it will amount to a net increase in taxes, so that was all a smoke-and-mirrors claim anyway.

I tried to find something about the bill you mentioned. Please feel free to provide a link to a detailed article about the bill that helps veterans.

While I certainly cannot speak for anyone that I don't know, I can tell you that my opposition to anything that is going on with this administration is purely ideological. That is also true for the people I know personally who are opposed to the things happening over the last several months. You seem to want to bring race into it, but it rings hollow, because it just isn't true.

The people of the countries in which we're fighting DO want freedom, it's those in power there who don't want to see that happen. It is a basic yearning of the HUMAN (not merely American) spirit to be free.

Though I couldn't give you names off the top of my head, I guarantee you I could very likely do some research and find far more than ten terrorists that we've captured in the course of the entire war. Just because Osama himself hasn't been found (probably because he's been buried somewhere for quite some time) doesn't mean that everything has been for naught. The only way one could say that "nothing changed" as a result of Sept. 11th is if you make the case that we were in danger before and we're in danger now, but even then, there are many of us who were blind to the danger before and are not now, so at the very least that has changed.

Exactly. Straight-ticket voting is, as you pointed out, the lazy and ignorant person's way to exercise their suffrage.

You could've edited one of them to say the same thing

So not only was this woman peeping in somebody's window and calling the police on them in their own house, but then she stood there and continued to watch! This woman is nothing but a pervert who is teaching her child to be the same.