Earnie Shavers
Rock n' Roll Doggie VIP PASS
US military spending is something gone very wrong and/or very wild. But I don't think you ever stand even a remote chance of even having that discussion.
The amount of lobbying money that is circulating around government in D.C. as far as military contracts is more than enough to keep a war or two on. It's the American way.
Obummer's raising our condo association fees! Damn Muslims!!!!!On a side note it's interesting to me that the audience, not once but twice don't understand the difference between local and federal governments. I see this all too often in the Tea Party...
It's what Jesus wanted, the rich to keep their money and create larger gaps!!!
On a side note it's interesting to me that the audience, not once but twice don't understand the difference between local and federal governments. I see this all too often in the Tea Party...
It's what Jesus wanted, the rich to keep their money and create larger gaps!!!
On a side note it's interesting to me that the audience, not once but twice don't understand the difference between local and federal governments. I see this all too often in the Tea Party...
What are you saying?
Ugh, stop quoting his empty posts and forcing me to unhide them to readYou know what? I'm going to answer because that's what adults do.
To describe Dunham as a white woman from Kansas turns out to be about as illuminating as describing her son as a politician who likes golf. Intentionally or not, the label obscures an extraordinary story—of a girl with a boy’s name who grew up in the years before the women’s movement, the pill and the antiwar movement; who married an African at a time when nearly two dozen states still had laws against interracial marriage; who, at 24, moved to Jakarta with her son in the waning days of an anticommunist bloodbath in which hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were slaughtered; who lived more than half her adult life in a place barely known to most Americans, in the country with the largest Muslim population in the world; who spent years working in villages where a lone Western woman was a rarity; who immersed herself in the study of blacksmithing, a craft long practiced exclusively by men; who, as a working and mostly single mother, brought up two biracial children; who believed her son in particular had the potential to be great; who raised him to be, as he has put it jokingly, a combination of Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Harry Belafonte; and then died at 52, never knowing who or what he would become.
The white woman and her half-African son made quite a pair traveling in Indonesia together. Elizabeth Bryant, an American who lived in the city of Yogyakarta at the time, remembers a lunch held at another expatriate’s house that Ann and Barry attended. Ann arrived in a long skirt made of Indonesian fabric—not, Bryant noticed, a look that other American women in Indonesia seemed to favor. Ann instructed Barry to shake hands, then to sit on the sofa and turn his attention to an English-language workbook she brought along.
...Over lunch, Barry, who was 9 at the time, sat at the dining table and listened intently but did not speak. When he asked to be excused, Ann directed him to ask the hostess for permission. Permission granted, he got down on the floor and played with Bryant’s son, who was 13 months old. After lunch, the group took a walk, with Barry running ahead. A flock of Indonesian children began lobbing rocks in his direction. They ducked behind a wall and shouted racial epithets. He seemed unfazed, dancing around as though playing dodge ball “with unseen players,” Bryant said. Ann did not react. Assuming she must not have understood the words, Bryant offered to intervene. “No, he’s OK,” Ann said. “He’s used to it.”
“We were floored that she’d bring a half-black child to Indonesia, knowing the disrespect they have for blacks,” Bryant said. At the same time, she admired Ann for teaching her boy to be fearless. A child in Indonesia needed to be raised that way—for self-preservation, Bryant decided. Ann also seemed to be teaching Barry respect. He had all the politeness that Indonesian children displayed toward their parents. He seemed to be learning Indonesian ways. “I think this is one reason he’s so halus,” Bryant said of the president, using the Indonesian adjective that means “polite, refined, or courteous,” referring to qualities some see as distinctively Javanese. “He has the manners of Asians and the ways of Americans—being halus, being patient, calm, a good listener. If you’re not a good listener in Indonesia, you’d better leave.”
Indonesian schools in the late 1960s and early 1970s were inadequate; there were not enough of them, the government controlled the curriculum, teachers were poorly trained. Westerners sent their children to the Jakarta International School, but it was expensive and difficult to get into. Obama attended two Indonesian schools, one Catholic and one Muslim. The experience cannot have failed to have left a mark. The Javanese, especially the Central Javanese, place an enormous emphasis on self-control. Even to sneeze was to exhibit an untoward lack of self-control, said Michael Dove, who got to know Ann when they were both anthropologists working in Java in the 1980s. “You demonstrate an inner strength by not betraying emotion, not speaking loudly, not moving jerkily,” he said. Self-control is inculcated through a culture of teasing, Kay Ikranagara told me. Her husband, known only as Ikranagara, said, “People tease about skin color all the time.” If a child allows the teasing to bother him, he is teased more. If he ignores it, it stops. “Our ambassador said this was where Barack learned to be cool,” Kay told me. “If you get mad and react, you lose. If you learn to laugh and take it without any reaction, you win.”
With time, Ann’s thinking about Barack’s future changed. “She had always encouraged my rapid acculturation in Indonesia,” he wrote in his memoir. “It had made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared with other American children. She had taught me to disdain the blend of ignorance and arrogance that too often characterized Americans abroad. But she now had learned, just as Lolo had learned, the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere.”
When we spoke last July, Obama recalled those serial displacements...“She was a very strong person in her own way,” Obama said, when I asked about Ann’s limitations as a mother. “Resilient, able to bounce back from setbacks, persistent—the fact that she ended up finishing her dissertation. But despite all those strengths, she was not a well-organized person. And that disorganization, you know, spilled over. Had it not been for my grandparents, I think, providing some sort of safety net financially, being able to take me and my sister on at certain spots, I think my mother would have had to make some different decisions. And I think that sometimes she took for granted that, ‘Well, it’ll all work out, and it’ll be fine.’ But the fact is, it might not always have been fine, had it not been for my grandmother..Had she not been there to provide that floor, I think our young lives could have been much more chaotic than they were.”
But he did not, he said, hold his mother’s choices against her. Part of being an adult is seeing your parents “as people who have their own strengths, weaknesses, quirks, longings.” He did not believe, he said, that parents served their children well by being unhappy. If his mother had cramped her spirit, it would not have given him a happier childhood. As it was, she gave him the single most important gift a parent can give—“a sense of unconditional love that was big enough that, with all the surface disturbances of our lives, it sustained me, entirely.”
Human beings are creatures that function on self-interest and self-preservation, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not.it's amazing how much gas prices affect the public mood.
Human beings are creatures that function on self-interest and self-preservation, whether we acknowledge it consciously or not.
You can pull through an economic downturn with your job intact and the world's problems seem an ocean away...until you get hit in the wallet on the way to work/school/Pilates/Tea Party meeting.
it's also a very visible loss. like when you see what you lose out of your paycheck to taxes. very, very easy to get outraged about that.
You know what? I'm going to answer because that's what adults do.
What I'm saying is that most of the Tea Party Conservatives are hypocrites. He's using Biblical covenant talk and equating it with not raising taxes on the rich?
I can't remember Jesus telling the rich they should keep as much of their riches as they can, do you?
Now you won't answer this, everyone in FYM knows this, but just apply some critical thinking...
YES.Most Tea Party Conservatives are hypocrites?
Of course...Are there any liberal hypocrites?
Did you not watch the video or read the link that I was commenting on? You can't miss it.Who is using "Biblical covenant" talk?
exactly.I love how religion and this birther issue are just covering up the fact that people don't like having a fucking black person for president. ... No one has doubted McCain is an American Citizen.....so what's the difference? Fucking racists.
what are they even basing this off of?
I consider myself a conservative, but all this ridiculousness about Obama's birth certificate makes me embarrassed to be a republican. Seriously, what are they even basing this off of?