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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: coug who wrote (79524)	2/1/2010 11:39:54 AM
From: longnshort	Respond to of 89467

Johnny Carson nailed lawyers with one of his "how cold was it?” jokes! “It was so cold that lawyers were running around with their hands in their own pockets!!" This is very interesting! I never thought about it this way. Perhaps this is why so many physicians are conservatives or republicans. The Democratic Party has become the Lawyers' Party. • Barack Obama is a lawyer. • Michelle Obama is a lawyer. • Hillary Clinton is a lawyer. • Bill Clinton is a lawyer. • John Edwards is a lawyer. • Elizabeth Edwards is a lawyer. Every Democrat nominee since 1984 went to law school (although Gore did not graduate). Every Democrat vice presidential nominee since 1976, except for Lloyd Bentsen, went to law school. Look at leaders of the Democrat Party in Congress: • Harry Reid is a lawyer. • Nancy Pelosi is a lawyer. • The Republican Party is different. • President Bush is a businessman. • Vice President Cheney is a businessman. The leaders of the Republican Revolution: • Newt Gingrich was a history professor. • Tom Delay was an exterminator. • Dick Armey was an economist. • House Minority Leader Boehner was a plastic manufacturer. • The former Senate Majority Leader Bill Firsk is a heart surgeon. Who was the last Republican president who was a lawyer? Gerald Ford, who left office 31 years ago and who barely won the Republican nomination as a sitting president, running against Ronald Reagan in 1976. The Republican Party is made up of real people doing real work, who are often the targets of lawyers. The Democrat Party is made up of lawyers. Democrats mock and scorn men who create wealth, like Bush and Cheney, or who heal the sick, like Frisk or who immerse themselves in history, like Gingrich. The Lawyers' Party (aka; Liars Party) sees these sorts of people, who provide goods and services that people want, as the enemies of America. And, so we have seen the procession of official enemies, in the eyes of the Lawyers' Party, grow. Against whom do Hillary and Obama rail? Pharmaceutical companies, oil companies, hospitals, manufacturers, fast food restaurant chains, large retail businesses, bankers, and anyone producing anything of value in our nation. This is the natural consequence of viewing everything through the eyes of lawyers. Lawyers solve problems by successfully representing their clients, in this case the American people. Lawyers seek to have new laws passed, they seek to win lawsuits, they press appellate courts to overturn precedent, and lawyers always parse language to favor their side. Confined to the narrow practice of law, that is fine. But it is an awful way to govern a great nation. When politicians as lawyers begin to view some Americans as clients and other Americans as opposing parties, then the role of the leg al system in our life becomes all-consuming. Some Americans become "adverse parties" of our very government. We are not all litigants in some vast social class-action suit. We are citizens of a republic that promises us a great deal of freedom from laws, from courts, and from lawyers. Today, we are drowning in laws; we are contorted by judicial decisions; we are driven to distraction by omnipresent lawyers in all parts of our once private lives. America has a place for laws and lawyers, but that place is modest and reasonable, not vast and unchecked. When the most important decision for our next president is whom he will appoint to the Supreme Court, the role of lawyers and the law in America is too big. When lawyers use criminal prosecution as a continuation of politics by other means, as happened in the lynching of Scooter Libby and Tom Delay, then the power of lawyers in America is too great. When House Democrats sue America in order to hamstring our efforts to learn what our enemies are planning to do to us, then the role of litigation in America has become crushing. We cannot expect the Lawyers' Party to provide real change, real reform or real hope in America Most Americans know that a republic in which every major government action must be blessed by nine unelected judges is not what Washington intended in 1789. Most Americans grasp that we cannot fight a war when ACLU lawsuits snap at the heels of our defenders. Most Americans intuit that more lawyers and judges will not restore declining moral values or spark the spirit of enterprise in our economy. Perhaps Americans will understand that change cannot be brought to our nation by those lawyers who already largely dictate American society and business. Perhaps Americans will see that hope does not come from the mouths of lawyers but from personal dreams nourished by hard work. Perhaps Americans will embrace the truth that more lawyers with more power will only make our problems worse. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 66% of the world's lawyers! Tort (Legal) reform legislation has been introduced in congress several times in the last several years to limit punitive damages in ridiculous lawsuits such as "spilling hot coffee on yourself and suing the establishment that sold it to you" and also to limit punitive damages in huge medical malpractice lawsuits. This legislation has continually been blocked from even being voted on by the Democrat Party. When you see that 97% of the political contributions from the American Trial Lawyers Association goes to the Democrat Party, then you realize who is responsible for our medical and product costs being so high!

To: coug who wrote (79524)	2/1/2010 3:57:04 PM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 89467

;-)

To: coug who wrote (79524)	2/2/2010 7:16:50 PM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Don’t Call It a 'Defense' Budget / by Norman Solomon Published on Tuesday, February 2, 2010 by CommonDreams.org ___________________________ This isn't "defense." The new budget from the White House will push U.S. military spending well above $2 billion a day. Foreclosing the future of our country should not be confused with defending it. "Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors," the New York Times reports this morning (February 2). It isn't defense to preclude new domestic initiatives for a country that desperately needs them: for healthcare, jobs, green technologies, carbon reduction, housing, education, nutrition, mass transit . . . "When a nation becomes obsessed with the guns of war, social programs must inevitably suffer," Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out. "We can talk about guns and butter all we want to, but when the guns are there with all of its emphasis you don't even get good oleo. These are facts of life." At least Lyndon Johnson had a "war on poverty." For a while anyway, till his war on Vietnam destroyed it. Since then, waving the white flag at widespread poverty -- usually by leaving it unmentioned -- has been a political fact of life in Washington. Oratory can be nice, but budget numbers tell us where an administration is headed. In 2010, this one is marching up a steep military escalator, under the banner of "defense." Legitimate defense would cost a mere fraction of this budget. By autumn, the Pentagon is scheduled to have a total of 100,000 uniformed U.S. troops -- and a comparable number of private contract employees -- in Afghanistan, where the main beneficiaries are the recruiters for Afghan insurgent forces and the profiteers growing even richer under the wing of Karzai-government corruption. After three decades of frequent carnage and extreme poverty in Afghanistan, a new influx of lethal violence is arriving via the Defense Department. That's the cosmetically named agency in charge of sending U.S. soldiers to endure and inflict unspeakable horrors. New waves of veterans will return home to struggle with grievous physical and emotional injuries. Without a fundamental change in the nation's direction, they'll be trying to resume their lives in a society ravaged by budget priorities that treat huge military spending as sacrosanct. "At $744 billion, the military budget -- including military programs outside the Pentagon, such as the Department of Energy's nuclear weapons management -- is a budget of add-ons rather than choices," says Miriam Pemberton at the Institute for Policy Studies. "And it makes the imbalance between spending on military vs. non-military security tools worse." Of course the corporate profits for military contractors are humongous. The executive director of the National Priorities Project, Jo Comerford, offers this context: "The Obama administration has handed us the largest Pentagon budget since World War II, not including the $160 billion in war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan." The word "defense" is inherently self-justifying. But it begs the question: Just what is being defended? For the United States, an epitaph on the horizon says: "We had to destroy our country in order to defend it." As new sequences of political horrors unfold, maybe it's a bit too easy for writers and readers of the progressive blogosphere to remain within the politics of online denunciation. Cogent analysis and articulated outrage are necessary but insufficient. The unmet challenge is to organize widely, consistently and effectively -- against the warfare state -- on behalf of humanistic priorities. In the process, let's be clear. This is not a defense budget. This is a death budget. *Norman Solomon is national co-chair of the Healthcare Not Warfare campaign, launched by Progressive Democrats of America. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com