UltraParanoia said:
The Elections:
Bush didn't steal the election. He won because people in florida are stupid, and nobody outside of the cities wanted that dumbass Gore in office.
That's a gross simplification. He won in Florida because
someone went around and did everything they could to stop democrat supporters from voting;
Wikipedia said:
At first, Florida specified only exact matches on names, birthdates and genders to identify voters as felons. However, state records reveal a memo dated March 1999 from Emmett "Bucky" Mitchell, a lawyer for the state elections office who was supervising the felon purge, asking DBT to loosen its criteria for acceptable matches. When DBT representatives warned Mitchell that this would yield a large proportion of false positives (mismatches), Mitchell's reply was that it would be up to each county elections supervisor to deal with the problem.[4]
In February 2000, in a phone conversation with the BBC's London studios, ChoicePoint vice-president James Lee said that the state "wanted there to be more names than were actually verified as being a convicted felon".[5][6]
On 17 April, 2001, James Lee testified, before the McKinney panel, that the state had given DBT the directive to add to the purge list people who matched at least 90% of a last name. DBT objected, knowing that this would produce a huge number of false positives (non-felons).[7]
Lee went on saying that the state then ordered DBT to shift to an even lower threshold of 80% match, allowing also names to be reversed (thus a person named Thomas Clarence could be taken to be the same as Clarence Thomas). Besides this, middle initials were skipped, Jr. and Sr. suffixes dropped, and some nicknames and aliases were added to puff up the list.
"DBT told state officials", testified Lee, "that the rules for creating the [purge] list would mean a significant number of people who were not deceased, not registered in more than one county, or not a felon, would be included on the list. DBT made suggestions to reduce the numbers of eligible voters included on the list". According to Lee, to this suggestion the state told the company, "Forget about it".
"The people who worked on this (for DBT) are very adamant... they told them what would happen", said Lee. "The state expected the county supervisors to be the failsafe." Lee said his company will never again get involved in cleansing voting rolls. "We are not confident any of the methods used today can guarantee legal voters will not be wrongfully denied the right to vote", Lee told a group of Atlanta-area black lawmakers in March 2001.[8
Sources cited: [4] http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/21/news/mn-620
[5] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/events/newsnight/1174115.stm
[6] http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4137694,00.html
[7] http://articles.latimes.com/2001/may/21/news/mn-620
[8] http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/election2000/election2000_felons2.html
So as you can see there is a rather large controversy regarding what happened in Florida. Add in the fact that Jeb Bush was the governer and you can see why so many people are skeptical that W. Bush was really the winner of the election.
The Patriot Act:
The Patriot Act was ill-conceived, and I understand the implications of government spying.....but........
Certain programs really are protection initiatives, despite what the internet tells you.
Just because some parts of the ACT can be useful, doesn't justify the program's existence.
How many of your friends and family have really been impinged by the Patriot Act?
Do you know of someone wrongly imprisoned because of the Patriot Act?
Logical Fallacy. Just because nobody here personally has experience with the ACT doesn't mean that the arguements against it hold no weight.
Have you ever even heard of someone wrongly implicated in terrorism because of the Patriot Act?
Steve Kurtz and Brandon Mayfield.
You know what the largest abuse of the patriot act is, that I've been able to find?
A Democratic Congresswoman in the AZ state legislature tried to pass a state-law declaring the Minutemen a terrorist organization under the PATRIOT Act, and to expand the state's definition of Terrorist to include "Private citizens who enforce the law while armed."
That's it. An "evil ploy by conservatives to control us", and the only abuse comes from the party that denigrates it the most.
You something, I think you should have tried looking a little bit harder;
In March of 2007 an audit by the Justice Department found that the FBI had "improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA PATRIOT Act to secretly obtain personal information."
Source - http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2030542,00.html
What about the dismisal of those 7 US Attornies? That was authorised by the USA Patriot Act Improvement and Reauthorization Act which removed the 120 day limit for interim replacements, who do not need Presidential Approval.
Source - http://www.mcclatchydc.com/staff/greg_gordon/story/15610.html
I would rather have a party that listens to shit I say, and does nothing to me, than to go for a party who wants me to be a soul-dead conformist moron who observes everyone's cultural diversity, while being an unarmed, defenseless ward of the nanny state any day.
Strawman much?
There are a lot of us conservatives who didn't agree with the patriot act, me included, but I would rather prefer the lesser of two evils.
Or you could take a third choice and get rid of the evil.
I love how people bitching about the government intruding on our lives, completely overlook the fact that the democrats have been trying to reinstate the fairness doctrine, and have been trying to do the same thing with so-called "net nuetrality"(which we already have).
Just because one side are a bunch of morons doesn't invalidate the morons on the other side.
Katrina:
New Orleans was not his problem, or his fault.
Agreed.
No Child Left Behind:
The No Child Left Behind Act was actually a rebirth of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) of 1965. Since 1965, the law has been reintroduced and reauthorized every four or five years. During the Clinton administration, party politics prevented the law from being reauthorized. All Bush did was reprioritize it and pass it again.
Bottom line is that the policy is decreasing the level of education that children recieve. Considering that Regean already cut the amount of money that the education system recieves,
9-11:
How was this his fault again? And if one of you conspiracy nuts pop up, I will reach through the internet and castrate you.
I'll help.
The intel he supposedly ignored was gathered during the Clinton administration, hell, the saudis tried to give us bin laden on a silver platter, but we didn't take him.
How could the Saudis give him up when he was in another country under the protection of the Taliban? 9/11 is more of a fault of the FBI and CIA then it is of any president's administrations.
Afghanistan:
The only reason afghanistan isn't going well is because we made the mistake of going into Iraq at the same time.
I'd state it's more of a problem of going in half-assesed and not going after Bin Laden for two months.
Iraq:
I've stated this before, I was all for the iraq war, for whatever reasons.
Because the lowball estimates for the number of his own people Saddam killed are always around 400k or more. I happen to believe that when diplomacy fails, it is the first worlds responsibility to take the murderous assholes of the world out of power.
I like to remind you that America trying to be the world's police is the reason why you were so hated during Bush's era. Not to mention it's completely hypocritical that you can support the Iraqi war and yet not demand action of the genocide going on in Africa (the continient, not the country South Africa).
Besides, getting rid of Saddam is all well and good, but they had no plan about what to do afterwoods and now things in Iraq got even worse. They're better now, but it can be argued that Iraq only served to fuel the fire for terrorism against the US and led to things like the bombings in Bali and London.