U.S. Elections 2008

[kEiThZ]

^ I wouldn't get too enthusiastic. He still has to deal with Congress. Yes, its a solid D house and senate, but many of those folks are conservatives who will have reservations about stem cell research.

Aside from that, it really doesn't matter that much if the US doesn't pick it up. The rest of the developed world is pushing ahead on this research....

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

^ I wouldn't get too enthusiastic. He still has to deal with Congress. Yes, its a solid D house and senate, but many of those folks are conservatives who will have reservations about stem cell research.

Aside from that, it really doesn't matter that much if the US doesn't pick it up. The rest of the developed world is pushing ahead on this research....

they passed a stem cell bill already and bush vetoed it. bush was the only thing stopping it. that's my understanding.


P.S look what the japanese did... http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081106/ts_afp/healthsciencestemcelljapan

TOKYO (AFP) – Japanese researchers said Thursday they had created functioning human brain tissues from stem cells, a world first that has raised new hopes for the treatment of disease.

 

[Brandon716]

they passed a stem cell bill already and bush vetoed it. bush was the only thing stopping it. that's my understanding.

The Democrats did pass a stem cell research package in Congress just to have Bush veto it, so it'll pass now. Same goes for a lot of other pro-science priorities that should now see the light of day in the USA.

 

[Brian69]

The Democrats did pass a stem cell research package in Congress just to have Bush veto it, so it'll pass now. Same goes for a lot of other pro-science priorities that should now see the light of day in the USA.

What a relief. I still can't get over the bass-ackwards thinking among the cons that pushed war and the death penalty and forced women to have children they didn't want yet wouldn't help save people's lives (or their quality of life) using stem cells harvested from discarded embryos. Pro-life my ass.

Given their resources and people America should still be leading the way in science; it's nice to know science won't be hamstrung from the White House this time around.

And it's a relief that Obama believes in evolution, something that should keep Ben Stein and his ilk out in the cold for the foreseeable future.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

What a relief. I still can't get over the bass-ackwards thinking among the cons that pushed war and the death penalty and forced women to have children they didn't want yet wouldn't help save people's lives (or their quality of life) using stem cells harvested from discarded embryos. Pro-life my ass.

republicons are pro-misery & pro-death, anti-human & anti-american. flying flags and saying god bless america are empty gestures of patriotism. patriotism is making your country succeed, not tearing it down while wearing a flag pin.

 

[Mongo]

Why I am hopeful about the direction the incoming Obama administration will take: Part XXIV, Ethics and Transparency

From http://www.governmentexecutive.com/pdfs/092208ts1.pdf

Barack Obama has made ethics reform and transparency a cornerstone of his career. As a state senator, Barack Obama passed the most sweeping ethics reform in Illinois history. In Washington, he helped push Congress to pass the most ambitious lobbying reform legislation since Watergate. The legislation Obama championed bans gifts from lobbyists and eliminate Senate floor, gym, and parking privileges for former senators who are lobbyists. Obama’s decision to not accept donations from Washington lobbyists and political action committees has put his campaign in the hands of everyday Americans, who have made more than 2 million donations averaging less than $100.

Every day, government agencies make decisions that impact the lives of Americans. These decisions require public deliberation and input. But at many agencies, these deliberations are conducted out of the public view. For example, several agencies, including the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Federal Communications Commission, hold public meetings only one or two days a month. On all the other days, the commissioners and staff members host lobbyists and lawyers in private meetings, and operate outside of the public eye. In these private meetings, companies can make their case for the regulation that they want. Average citizens cannot participate in this process, and consumer groups just do not have the resources to offset the waves of corporate lobbyists that constantly walk the halls of these agencies. Barack Obama will require his appointees who lead the Executive Branch departments and rulemaking agencies to conduct the significant business of the agency in public, so that any citizen can see in person or watch on the Internet as the agencies debate and deliberate the issues that affect American society. Videos of meetings will be archived on the web, and the transcript will be available to the public. Obama will also require his appointees to commit to employ all the technological tools available to allow average citizens not just to observe, but to participate and be heard on the issues that affect their daily lives. Obama will require Cabinet officials to have periodic 21st Century Fireside Chats, restore meaning to the Freedom of Information Act, and conduct regulatory agency business in public.

Make a Government Spending Database Available on the Internet: Building on his successful bipartisan “Google for Government” initiative, Barack Obama will create a user-friendly website with the details of all government spending. Currently the Obama-Coburn USASpending.gov includes information on grants and contracts and will soon include information about subgrants and subcontracts as well. Obama has introduced bipartisan legislation to expand the information accessible on this public website to include a copy of the contract itself as well as information about contractor performance, violations of law or regulations, and the bidding or Request for Proposal process.

Expose Corporate Welfare and Special Interest Tax Breaks to Public Scrutiny: Barack Obama will shine a light on corporate welfare by creating an agency charged with identifying recipients of corporate subsidies and evaluating the effectiveness of these subsidies in promoting growth and opportunity. The agency will help identify wasteful subsidies that should be eliminated, and help prevent new corporate welfare initiatives from being passed. Obama will ensure that any tax breaks for corporate recipients – or tax earmarks – are also publicly available by directing the Office of Management and Budget to post them on its website in an easily searchable format.

Centralize Ethics and Lobbying Information for Voters: Under current law, enforcement of ethics and lobbying laws is spread widely among a variety of different agencies, which do not frequently work together, and do not provide the public information in an easily accessible format. As president, Barack Obama will create a centralized database of lobbying reports, congressional ethics records, and campaign finance filings that is made available on the Internet in a searchable, sortable and downloadable format, and compiled and maintained by one agency and under one roof. This database will allow Americans to see easily and in one place who their legislators are meeting with; who they are collecting money from and how much money they are collecting; and to review their ethics records.

Sunlight Before Signing: Too often bills are rushed through Congress and to the president before the public has the opportunity to review them. As president, Barack Obama will not sign any non-emergency bill without giving the American public an opportunity to review and give input on the White House website for five days. In addition to ensuring that the public has the ability to review legislation, the sunlight will help ensure that earmarks tucked into appropriations bills are exposed. And Obama will sign legislation in the light of day without attaching signing statements that undermine the legislative intent.

Enforce Executive Branch Ethics: Today the Office of Governmental Ethics (OGE) is only an advisory agency with no enforcement authority. Ethics decisions are made by roughly 4,000 individual ethics officers appointed by the head of each executive branch agency. These officers rarely have any ethics training and routinely reject the advice given by OGE. An Obama administration will give his OGE strong enforcement authority with the ability to make binding regulations, and it will work with inspectors general in all the federal agencies to enforce ethics rules, minimize waste and ensure federal officials are not using their offices for personal gain. The OGE will also be the clearinghouse of all public records relevant to ethics in the Executive Branch and place this information on its website, including records of waivers from conflicts-of-interest that are requested and granted, personal financial statements of appointees and the career histories of senior executive branch staff who enter and leave public service. Finally, the OGE will promulgate rules and procedures to record all oral and in-person “lobbying contacts” between registered lobbyists and political appointees and make those records available to the public in a searchable computerized database.

Ban Gifts to Executive Branch Employees: Gifts from registered lobbyists harm the political process because they give lobbyists an avenue for building and maintaining relationships that advance their agendas. As president, Barack Obama will issue an executive order banning registered lobbyists or lobbying firms from giving gifts in any amount or any form to executive branch employees. An Obama administration will make decisions that affect the country based on what is in the public interest, not simply what is best for lobbyists.

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled as they have been during the Bush administration. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

Sunlight on Corporate Tax Loopholes: The tax code is riddled with corporate loopholes and preferential regulations that benefit a handful of companies at the expense of the rest of the business community as well as ordinary families. Some large companies have managed to secure tax breaks or to hide their profits in overseas tax havens to not pay any American corporate taxes at all. Barack Obama will require any tax bill considered by Congress to include a Corporate Tax Impact Statement that would disclose which industries or specific companies would be expected to benefit from the new tax breaks.

Other websites of interest:

http://obama.senate.gov/press/060216-senator_obamas_1/

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Barack_Obama/Elections_and_Government_Policy

 

[Brian69]

republicons are pro-misery & pro-death, anti-human & anti-american. flying flags and saying god bless america are empty gestures of patriotism. patriotism is making your country succeed, not tearing it down while wearing a flag pin.

True, that.

The Republican party used to be focused on small government economic conservatives who liked hands off government policies. Over time it was hijacked by the neo-cons, social conservatives and the fundamentalists and their restrictive social policies. Funny this is, they have become the same groups who spend like drunken sailors in Dartmouth while practising corporate welfare and running up the deficit. The Republicans haven't just betrayed their social roots but their economic roots as well.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

True, that.

The Republican party used to be focused on small government economic conservatives who liked hands off government policies. Over time it was hijacked by the neo-cons, social conservatives and the fundamentalists and their restrictive social policies. Funny this is, they have become the same groups who spend like drunken sailors in Dartmouth while practising corporate welfare and running up the deficit. The Republicans haven't just betrayed their social roots but their economic roots as well.

if you wanna see just how retarded some conservatives can be, go to conservapedia and look up the articles on atheism or agnosticism. they go out of their way to say (not prove) these groups donate the least to charity***. one moment they will criticize welfare and social policies which redistribute wealth but when it suits their cause, they'll say others don't donate enough. they don't like charity but they'll criticize other groups that aren't supposedly charitable.

this parallels the pro-life issue. they're against abortion because they wanna raise live american babies so they can grow up to be dead soldiers. and in the process, they want as much non-christians to be killed as possible because they think that's WWJD?. they support the termination of life only if it suits their cause; which is suffering.

***p.s, i believe two of the largest charity givers in our times is bill gates and warren buffet, both agnostic.

 

[Brian69]

Yes, I checked out conservapedia awhile back and was amazed how much people could be so out of touch with the supposed values they espouse.

Things are ripe for a split within the Republicans as the more sensible conservatives have become fed up with the hijacking of the party by the nutbars. I hope the split happens and Palin runs for some evangelical offshoot of the Republican Party in 2012 just so the rest of the country can flush away the yahoos into irrelevance.

 

[Prometheus The Supremo]

the jesusland independence party?

 

[Mongo]

Don't they already have a branch of that in Alaska?

How in the world did they pick a VP candidate who apparently was a former member of the AIP (along with her husband, who still supports them), before joining the Republicans? Didn't the Republican-led government of the 1860s fight AGAINST separatism?

 

[Brian69]

Style over substance and another example of the GOP ignoring those minor details that others might call history.

 

[adma]

Kind of interesting to see if there's some kind of comical mass implosion in the works among Republican types--maybe not on the scale of Communist bloc states falling like dominos in the wake of Perestroika, but...

In that light, considering how all this was fueled by the rise of conservative talk radio, it's interesting to note that the commercial radio biz in the States has sunk to penny-stock purgatory, and it ain't just the overall woes on Wall Street; it's the net effect of technological change, generational change (how many under-30s still give a darn about radio?), and perhaps retribution for pandering to mouth-breathers and bigots while pretending it's "mainstream"...

 

[Brian69]

the jesusland independence party?

 

[Moonmoth]

republicons are pro-misery & pro-death, anti-human & anti-american. flying flags and saying god bless america are empty gestures of patriotism. patriotism is making your country succeed, not tearing it down while wearing a flag pin.

Yeah the Republicons/neo-conservative evangelical NUTJOBS that (apparently there are a LOT of them in both Canada & the US) had their eight years of ripping their country to pieces in the name of "patriotism", "war on terror" and "freedom" are finally reaping the fruits of their labour: the richest country in the world is 3 trillion dollars in debt and BROKE and took the global economy with it.

WHY do conservatives espouse being fiscally responsible and WHY DO PEOPLE BELIEVE IT???? When conservatism is just another word for "make my friends and me obscenely RICH and who cares about repurcussions". It happened in Ontario (Mike Harris) and now Canada (Harper) and it happened on a massive global scale in the US with Bush.