Right On The Right

-There needs to be a hands off Lebanon campaign. Those folks have been though a lot.

"Where's the Outrage?"
No Jews, no America involved, so all is well as far as the America-haters are concerned.

At some point, I would love to hear why you've been so antagonistic towards me
when I've been trying to be polite and explain my thoughts and feelings. I'm sure there's some stuff we have to agree on.

Anyway...
I know some people who believe in capitalism, that free, unregulated, unpoliced kind that people of 'your ideological stripe' spout on about. I got tech friends who got certificates and degress in the late 90s, expecting to get all those awesome, 30-40 buck an hour, white collar jobs. Then all those started to go away. Now some work in video game shops, some work at Call centers filled with white trash, getting the fisheye from some armed guard that stands at the door (one pal told me he can't believe he's pretty much working at an inner city high school, with armed guards and metal detectors), all are barely making it with 9-13 buck an hour jobs. Those jobs went to India, they stayed here.

Same story goes with some older guys I know, who worked at Packard Electric, and were asked to make a gamble. Take a 100,000 buyout, and give up their pensions and benefits or stick around and risk the place being closed in a year or two anyway.

Now, a 100,000 is a lot of money, but when you realize these guys aren't going to cash out, and move right into another 25.00 an hour job, to keep them and their families in the lifestyles they WORKED HARD to achieve, that cash ain't going to do much past keeping them afloat for a year or two. Maybe they can move out west and find stuff. I don't know.

I personally don't know people who lost their pensions due to corporate malfeasance or scandal, so I won't use those examples. I like to speak in the facts that I know.

At one time, the number one employer was General Motors with all those benefits and pensions. Now its Walmart. I don't recall any GM memos printed saying shit like 'we get the same amount of productivity out of an 8 dollar an hour employee as we do a 16 dollar an hour employee' like that walmart memo that was leaked a few years ago. This used to be a country of people who made things. Now its a country of people who buy things.

Even people who work hard, go through all the motions you expect of them, get smacked hard by that invisible hand of yours.

I believe in captitalism, but there needs to be safeguards against the corporate sector doing all the stuff its been doing the past 30 years. That's all. Flame away, my dear.

-My name is Josh. I am 30 years old. I live right smack in the old industrial rustbelt that gave birth to Justin. I manage a book and hobby store. I took a heavy history load in college, 1999-2001, standard 19th-20th century stuff, with barely a tint of leftist bias. It was YSU after all...

I had no real thoughts on politics, until the summer of 2001. I read Joe Sacco's Palestine graphic novel. His account of living and reporting in the Gaza Strip. It blew me away. I was raised Jewish. Sunday school, Hebew school twice a week. My dad's death when I was 13 put a stop to me going though with my Bar Mitzvah, but I considered myself a decent jew. But wow, when I read that book, I thought, noway. No way are these people treated like that. How come nobody talked about these struggles, these stories?

And I put the book away and didn't give it much thought.

911 hits. I'm driving to work, thinking 'holy shit', maybe I'll join the CIA. Or the military. I almost joined the reserves in 1995 when I found out the money I thought I had for university wasn't there, so the thought of joining up in Sep 2001 wasn't too far out of my mind. That whole week I slept on my feet, like a zombie. But for some reason, the things I was being told on Fox news, from NBC, from CNN...None of it made much sense to me. I wasn't too sure of the world, but I really doubted that people kill themselves, and scores of others, because they hate our freedoms. I dived into a library of current news books from whole bunches of places, from Hitchens to Chomsky to Brooks to O'Reilly to Limbaugh...but it seems the only people who made sense to me were those on the left.

I think:
The Death Penalty is a wonderful thing. If only so it gives closure to the familes of the victims. They deserve to know the killers of their family member is GONE.

Government should be seperate from business. Politicians should be public servents, business people should be private sector folk and never the two shall twain.

The morals of America of a wonderful thing. Freedom, liberty, democracy for all... It is fucking awesome and should be how we act in the face of the world.

Immigration is great. Borders should be guarded. Which brings me to-

Business should stand on its on, made or broken by the market. No more subsidies, no more tax breaks, none of that. You want to cure this mexican illegals thing? Enforce fair wages for american busineses operating outside the US and don't dump subsidized agro all over our hemisphere.

Capitalism is great. The idea that someone can start a business is fantastic.

You want to own guns, awesome! Have fun, keep a lockbox so the youngsters can't get to them and enjoy! You want to hunt? Fire away! Do try to eat what you kill though. Waste not, want not.

Someone invades our country, gimme' one of those guns and show me who to shoot.

People from opposite ends of whatever spectrums we like to put ourselves in should never turn down the chance to have a civil discourse.

History gives me a boner. Everyone should learn about history. Everyone, especially in America today, should know something about 20th century labor history. Just my opinion...

Bad enough actors and celebrities lie to our faces everytime they get in front of an ET camera, I don't want to be lied to by our leaders. Ever. I am not a mass to be managed.

Give us a flat tax on income or a flat sales tax. Make it fair. If I make 10,000, I'll pay 500. If I make 100,000 a year, I'll pay 5,000. If somone makes a million, they should pay 50,000. Make it fair and even, up and down.

We should have a Warrior Class in this country. The military should be overpaid, overeducated, and the exception to my tax thingee. Their families should not be on food stamps, their families should not be made prey to shifty cash advance places. They should have free education when they get out, anywhere they want to go. And health care. They fight for this country, this country should take care of them.

A mercenary for blackwater, being paid out of a government contract, should not be paid 10X as much as the kid from Ohio who joined the army. That ain't fair, ain't right.

Cops, firefighters and teachers should also be paid well. There should be a flat fee paid per student, per classroom, per neighborhood, paid from tax money. Every school should be a castle of education regardless of neighborhood or income bracket.

That ain't everything, but its enough to maybe put this leftard thing to rest.

-but I really haven't done any of those things. I haven't called anyone a liar. I haven't called anyone stupid. You find one post of mine on here when I did either and I'm gone.

You posted a story about Turkey that did not contridict anything I stated about it, it was very recent news about Turkey backing down. You posted that as if it pointed out some sort of lies that I was posting. That seems to be kind of lazy to me, as if you're barely paying attention to what I was saying.

I'd say conservatives deal in feelings rather than facts, but you say tomato, I say tomatoe.

I'm headed to your site now.

Cao's blog

And my group blog is here.

The Wide Awakes

but they'd be stupid leftards like you. Doesn't mean it's correct. David Horowitz, is a former card-carrying communist - reformed. And I like to learn from the lessons that turned his loonyleftardness around to think a different way.

Go to my site and find the answers to your questions yourself.

Leftards tend to be very ignorant and lazy and expect us to do all the thinking and work for them, and when they don't like the answers to their questions, they call us liars. We deal in facts, leftists deal in feelings. That's pretty much the high level assessment I've developed over a long period of time dealing with people of your ideological stripe.

And sorry, people who believe in Capitalism aren't like that; they tend to think for themselves, believe that hard work will get them rewards, and are willing to find things out for themselves rather than look for entitlements.

There are differences between us, of which you're not all that aware, I take it.

-How old are you? Give me some general ideas about yourself, if you don't mind. Age, what you do for a living, where you were raised. I'll share mine with you afterwards. I am generally curious about you.

And of couse, I could take out 'stalinists' out of that and replace it with 'conservatives' and there's tons of people who would agree with it.

in four years. If you get to call me leftard, I'm gonna call you caoksucker. That cool?
I said nothing about Israel being 'evil'. I was raised jewish, for fuck's sakes.

-you don't want me here, ask Justin to pull my membership. I think I've been nothing but nice the past week here, trying to be a part of some sort of discourse. You yourself have gone out of your way to toss bullshit at me.

Honestly, I don't think of myself as a leftist as I've strived to have a view of the world not ordained to me by someone else. My handle on here was just for fun.

Which is something we should all try for. To look at the news and world in ways not shaped for us by Norm Chomsky or David Horowitz or Howard Zinn or Rush Limbaugh or Howard Zinn or Sean Hannity.

You're parroting "The Nation", leftard.

And of course it is Israel – not Syria, not Iran, not radical Islam that is responsible for the terrorists, but the Jews: “Whether we like it or not, Hamas, like Hezbollah, is mostly a by-product of an oppressive occupation.”

Apologetics for fanatical Islamicists -- for genocidal terrorists -- has become the Nation’s raison d'etre.

Fellow Travelers

The Nation is a fellow-traveler of the new Nazism, just as surely as it was a fellow-traveler of the old Stalinism.

In point of fact -- and as everyone knows -- there is no Israeli occupation of Lebanon or Gaza that might have precipitated this war. Quite the contrary. It is the lack of an Israeli occupation of Lebanon and Gaza – of a controlling authority to enforce the peace -- that has precipitated the present war. Israel’s withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza have created the vacuum the terrorists have filled. These withdrawals, on the other hand, were successful in one sense, and one sense alone: They were designed to disarm the arguments of the terrorists and their apologists, who have now unmasked their own propaganda as a cynical sham. But the Nation goes on repeating it all the same.

Wasn't I right, up until this news that broke today? There was talk of an invasion, it was politically motivated for an election, troops were massed, and then they pulled back? How does the news you quoted from contridict what I was saying?

It is in the nature of Stalinism for its adherents to make a certain kind of lying – and not only to others but first of all to themselves – a fundamental part of their lives. It is always a mistake to assume that Stalinists do not know the truth about the political reality they espouse. If they don’t know the truth (or all of it) one day, they know it the next, and it makes absolutely no difference to them politically. For their loyalty is to something other than the truth. And no historical enormity is so great, no personal humiliation or betrayal so extreme, no crime so heinous that it cannot be assimilated into the ‘ideals’ that govern the Stalinist mind, which is impervious alike to documentary evidence and moral discrimination.– Hilton Kramer

that doesn't remotely reflect reality.

With more than 100,000 troops on the border, Turkey's military has been talking about the strategic value of Iraqi operations for months. But it needs parliamentary permission to cross into Iraq. Mr Miroglu, one of 24 deputies to be elected from Turkey's Kurdish nationalist party, says he will oppose an invasion. "We've had enough war," he says.

I think you've got your 'facts' mixed up, leftard.

As Turkey's government savoured an overwhelming electoral victory yesterday, regional analysts agreed that the immediate impetus for an invasion of northern Iraq had receded.

Sunday's clear mandate for the Islamic-rooted AKP of the Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been received as a snub to his secularist and nationalist opponents, who put the fight against Kurdish separatist guerrillas across the border at the centre of their failed campaign.

Not that facts ever bother leftists.

Editorial: The March To Save Saddam

All the marches were organized by supporters of Communist and other totalitarianisms, and by the fifth column agents of Islamo-fascism. All the demonstrations promoted Iraqi war propaganda -- myths about starving children and about alleged mercernary interests behind American policy; all of them had one purpose -- to disarm the American force already in the Middle East and allow Saddam to fight another day.

a couple of looney leftard turkeys have struck this blog

GOE Cordially invites ALL Eagles to…
Posted in Intel, Military Groups, Guest Authors, Briefings, Logistics by Gabi on July 19, 2007

eagle.jpg

The First Annual Eagles of Valor Dinner

held in Hoffman Estates, Illinois (30 miles north of Chicago). The Eagles of Valor Dinner is an event held by Gathering of Eagles and their co-sponsors to honor Veterans of all Wars.

Veterans will be treated like royalty to a four-course plated dinner, an open bar, and inspiring key speakers. The night’s mission is to present Veterans with the “Celebrity Treatment.”

Please join Gathering of Eagles in honoring the true heroes of America, our Veterans.

R.S.V.P. is required.

Please RSVP to Gabi at gabrielle.pike@gatheringofeagles.org

-research the story on your own, for Christ's sakes. Both times you've responded on this you've aired yourself out as really not knowing anything about the circumstances, which include-

1) Saber rattling during the course of an election season.
2) Mortar (shell) attacks against against Kurd villages(our pals) in northern Iraq.
3) Decades of anti-Kurd sentiment within Turkey---Going so far as to make the language of the Kurds illegal to speak and locking up Turkish authors who dare mention the idea of Kurdish independence.

This is way beyond the usual 'Country A has in its military archives feasible plans to invade Country B'

The left didn't wait until the war to start to protest the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Why can't we start bitching about the next step in the continuing assault against attempts by the Kurds to have an independent Kurdistan? The US has promised the Kurds such in the 70's under the Nixon and Ford administrations and again during the Clinton/Bush the Younger years.

Okay, so what you're saying is that a plan is the same as an invasion. In other words, if a country writes down a plan to invade another country, they should be held to the same standard as a country that sends it's soldiers over the border and takes over land from another country.

Interesting.

Do you apply the same logic to crimes? In other words, should a person who says, "Geez, I'd like to kill that guy" be punished exactly the same as a person who rapes, tortures, and mutilates someone?

What you're saying is just silly. PLANNING an invasion is NOTHING like a country that actually takes land of another country by force! This post describes, in detail, how one country has done just that -- gone beyond it's borders and physically taken land from another. I have no idea why you think that anyone should care about the "plans" of another country -- especially when that other country has done nothing in the recent past to indicate that they're actually going to invade another country.

PLANNED! Jesus, is the reading comprehension really that bad around here? Planned!

And I assure you, the Kurds do not want Turkey in northern Iraq. IF you want me to give you a rundown on Turkey and the Kurds, I'll do that at some point. I think you would be hard-pressed to find folks, even around here, who would think the Kurds would want Turkey in Iraq.

Here's what you can do, go to google.com. Do a search for 'Turkey' 'invasion' 'Iraq'. But if you saw that there really is news of a PLANNED invasion, you wouldn't have all the fun of responding in this thread.

All countries should stay the fuck out of places they don't belong. 9 out of 10 times this is common sense.

So, Turkey has invaded Iraq? Do you have the satellitte photos and detailed mappings to show this? I'm sure there are many military officials and political officials in both the US and the UN who would really like to have this information. And when you provide some detail about this invasion (as the post does about Syria and Lebanon), I, for one, will certainly condemn that action as well. Until that time, however, I'll focus on condeming those who ARE actually invading foreign countries.

And no, it's not an invasion if the current people actually WANT you there.

When are you going to cover Turkey's planned invasion of northern Iraq? Its been a big campaign issue within Turkey. At the least, it'll put the US in an interesting position. Turkey is an ally on the War on Terror(tm), but the Kurds are the one group in Iraq who do not have factions of its members blowing up US troops. Northern Kurdish Iraq, of course, is where alot of those feel-good success stories come from. This will be great thing to watch, to see where the US swings on this.

At least the Powers That Be that run the UN (i.e. the US) are consistent here. There wasn't much outrage from the usual sources with Israel's occupation of Lebanon.