Posted on 02/12/2008 9:47:41 PM PST by Mr170IQ
| By Orson Scott Card |
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February 3, 2008 |
The Insanity of Parties
I'm writing this as the Super Tuesday results are starting to come in, and you know what? I'm going to be miserable no matter who wins.
And do you know why? Because there's not one candidate who comes close to representing my positions on all the issues I care about.
Love McCain's position on the war. Happy with his position on illegal aliens, at least as it used to be. Loathe his position on almost everything else. Hate the McCain-Feingold campaign finance law. And the man himself is scary -- a real hater, a grudge-holder, and almost eager to lie about anyone he conceives to be his enemy. If you liked Nixon's ugly side, you'll just love McCain -- he's Nixon without the charm.
Love Romney's ability to govern with compromise, moderation, wisdom. The only candidate still left in the race who has proven, again and again, that he knows how to be top executive of complicated, troubled organizations and make them work better. He successfully governed a state whose legislature was in the hands of the political opposition. But I worry about his learning curve on foreign affairs. And I hate his cruel and ultimately ineffective position on illegal immigrants.
Like Obama as a human being, at least insofar as we're seeing the real Obama. His personality seems to be appropriately presidential -- measured, moderate, but definitely in charge. He thinks before he speaks and acts -- sort of the opposite of McCain. But his statements on foreign affairs make it clear that he has absolutely no idea how such matters are conducted and what the repercussions of the policies he has announced would actually be. And on the war, his position is to kick victory in the butt and go off in search of a nice, permanent, devastating defeat.
Despise everything about Hillary that I don't active hate. She's a bribe-taker (cattle futures), a liar, a complete phony. ("Oooh, look at me, I cried again! I can feel my own pain! I'm a real woman!") Her entire political qualification consists of saying I Do to Bill Clinton and then not divorcing him any of the thousand times he deserved it. In short, she's a "stand by your man and he'll get you into the Senate and back into the White House" kind of woman. She's the anti-feminist candidate. And she's absolutely terrifying on health care ("We'll just have to make you stay healthy") and the war ("We've got to hurry up and wreck this victory George W. Bush has managed to bring us!").
What a nightmare.
Except it's usually like this. In election after election, I've had to vote for the least nauseating candidate. And yes, you Reagan lovers, I know you didn't feel that way, but you should have: imagine paying ransom to hostage takers, and in the form of weapons, no less! Signing a law banning aid to the contras, and then defying the law he signed. Not to mention instantly withdrawing our troops from Lebanon, thus teaching our enemies that terrorism totally works against the United States.
You may not have been holding your nose to vote for him, but I was.
The only candidate I've actually been proud to vote for in my lifetime was George W. Bush; if I'd been old enough to vote, I would have felt that way about Eisenhower.
But hey, it's our political system, so we choose among the people ambitious and crazy enough to run for President.
Here's the source of our problems. The best candidates rarely run because they are too moderate to be chosen by either party.
And the parties have now become so dominated by their lunatic fringes that you have to accept an insane melange of doctrines in order to be considered a true conservative or a real progressive.
Let's say you think abortion should be restricted to only those cases where the fetus is nonviable, and only when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest, or when the life of the mother is at stake. That would be my position, too.
So what rule of logic, what great universal principle then requires you also to think it's a great idea for assault weapons to be available to the general public, or for any clown to carry a handgun concealed on his person? How do these topics overlap?
Yet you'd better be "right" on both doctrines or you'll be excommunicated from the Republican Party.
Of course Mitt Romney had to claim to support the NRA. He had to kiss that particular collective tush because you can't get nominated without it. He couldn't possibly say what he really thinks, which is probably this: "I haven't thought about owning a gun since I was a kid with a cap pistol. Get a life."
It goes the other way. Suppose you absolutely oppose the death penalty -- which, by the way, I do, though only because I believe that there have been too many miscarriages of justice to entrust our police and prosecutors to tell the whole truth to juries. Still, by what remote logic should this mean that I must also be in favor of erasing the privileged position of marriage (i.e., a permanent heterosexual union recognized by the community) under our laws?
Yet if you're running for President as a Democrat, you have to be "right" on the death penalty and on "gay marriage" or you might as well not run. And this year, opposition to protecting the world from insane jihadists has been added to the Democratic Party's list.
I could go on and on -- and in private conversation, I do, until people cover their ears and run away screaming. There is no coherency to either party, yet both parties now insist on ideological purity!
The only way to be genuinely ideologically pure on either side is to switch your brain off and never have a thought of your own. Because even a cursory effort to educate yourself on any of these issues will make it clear that both parties are wholly or partly wrong on everything.
How can a person who is honest, intelligent, and educated possibly hold every single "correct" position of either party?
So ... what do you do?
You can become an "independent," I suppose, but that just means you're cut out of the nominating process in most states and you're still stuck with whatever clowns the major parties nominate in the general election.
You can join a fringe party -- Libertarian, say, or Green. But that means you're tossing your vote down a sinkhole in our two-party, loser-takes-none electoral system. Plus, it's not as if the Libertarian or Green parties are any smarter or more rational. They have fewer contradictions only because they each have a single idea that they care about and flog that one to death.
Or you join one of the parties, holding your nose all the while, and call yourself a moderate. (Or, I guess, if you're holding your nose, a "boderate.")
For thirty years I've been an "embarrassed Democrat"; flip a coin and I would have been a "humiliated Republican." But what I've always been is a moderate.
Here's what a moderate isn't:
You aren't a moderate because you can't make up your mind. Indeed, you're a moderate precisely because you do make up your mind, all by yourself, without letting anybody else determine a whole ideology for you.
You aren't a moderate because you're so mild-mannered that you just don't want to upset anybody. On the contrary, you're used to upsetting everybody, because they all get so agitated when they find out you're right about A and B bot hopelessly, stubbornly "wrong" about X and Y.
You aren't a moderate because you shunned the extreme positions and found a middle ground. On some issues there is no middle ground. What would the middle ground on the War against Terror be? Invade but apologize? Fight but try not to win? (Oh, wait -- that was our Vietnam policy, wasn't it?) No, moderates often take a hardline, all-or-nothing position -- but not the same list
of positions that either party's groupthinkers demand.
And here's the clincher: No two moderates are alike. I call myself a moderate Democrat, but I can imagine another moderate Democrat who took the opposite position from me on everything. How are we then alike? Yet since we both differ from the ideologically pure position of either party, we have to belong somewhere, right?
Here's what a moderate is: We think about the issues and make up our own minds based on the evidence we believe in and the policies we think might work in the real world.
We listen to everybody (though we don't have to keep listening to those who are just chanting the same tune over and over again). When new and better information comes along, we change our minds -- and we don't apologize for it. (That alone would disqualify us from being a Republican candidate, because if a Republican changes his mind, he's a "flip-flopper.")
We try to discuss political differences with civility -- at least when we're talking to civil people. (We tend to turn our backs on the screamers.)
And in the real world of politics, moderates are willing to take less than everything they want, hanging on to the most important bits while giving the other guy what he needs most. It's called "compromise," and it can get you politically smeared in both the Democratic and Republican parties.
Moderates make the most effective legislators and executives and judges. They are far more tolerant of difference of opinion than the diehards of either party. You can actually talk to them.
And except for a rare fluke -- George W. Bush being anointed by the Republican elites because he had great name recognition, for instance, or Dwight D. Eisenhower's having been commander of the Allies in Europe -- you will almost never see a genuine moderate at the head of either party's ticket.
In fact, they almost never run for the office, unless they have such a consuming ambition that they're willing to pretend to be a purethinking ideologue long enough to get the nomination.
Here's the saddest thing: Most Americans are moderates -- or would be, if they had ever been taught any history so they could listen to the news with some perspective.
(In fact, as the ideologues take over the schools, have you noticed that the first thing both the Left and the Right try to do is turn history into propaganda? It terrifies them that if kids ever learned real history, they wouldn't grow up to be their groupthink buddies.)
Even my most partisan friends have some nonstandard opinions -- they just keep them a secret from their other partisan friends so they seem ideologically pure. That's what groupthink does to us -- it makes us ashamed of our own ideas.
Moderates: Passionate, committed, educated, open-minded, civil, rational, unpredictable yet completely reliable.
Why won't anybody invite us to the party?
http://www.ornery.org/essays/warwatch/2008-02-03-1.html
Sounds to me like you should vote for a Democrat! They would most likely go along with mostly what you believe in.
> Sounds to me like you should vote for a Democrat! They would most likely go along with mostly what you believe in.
Me? I didn’t write this article, and I definitely don’t agree with everything that Orson Card believes. In the past, he has shown a great deal of sense about certain issues (War on Islamofacism, family values, honor and honesty), and a great deal of stupidity about others (i.e. illegal immigration).
Read some of his older columns and you will understand why many people here like to read his stuff.
.
Card is an immature romantic pansy
Case closed
Uncle Orson Reviews Everything ^ | November 18, 2007 | Orson Scott Card
In the News & Record last Sunday, Lewis Beale of Newsday wrote about how "War films can be hard for Hollywood to peddle." It seems that "of the four flms released in the past six months dealing with the current world situation -- all with big-name stars and the full Hollywood studio push -- none earned a profit in its initial theatrical release." Stephen Bochco explains the failure of these war films (as of his own TV series on the war, Over There) by saying, "It's a hugely unpopular war, and there's a staggering amount of depressing coverage.... I don't...
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 12/10/2007 8:40:09 PM PST · 15 replies The Rhinoceros Times ^ | December 1, 2007 | Orson Scott Card | WorldWatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card December 1, 2007 A Stand-up President I keep hearing how Ronald Reagan was such a great president because he always stood up for what he believed and did the right thing no matter what. Funny -- that's not the Ronald Reagan I saw. I watched Ronald Reagan start us down the long ugly road of capitulating to Muslim terrorists. Maybe there was no choice but to withdraw the Marines after the barracks was bombed in Lebanon in 1983. Certainly... |
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| OSC rips Hollywood for its crummy anti-war movies. |
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| Word from a Soldier in Iraq [a letter from a sergeant in Iraq to Orson Scott Card] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 11/12/2007 4:48:58 AM PST · 20 replies Rhino Times, Greensboro, NC ^ | November 08, 2007 | Orson Scott Card On Monday I got a letter from a friend of mine who is a sergeant in the US Army. With permission of his commanding officer (he does not reveal any classified information), I'm sharing it with you. He writes: I've been on the ground in Iraq for a few weeks now, and thought I'd chime in with a grunt's-eye view. In Sadr Al-Yusifiyah, an area to the East of Anbar province (just across the Euphrates from Anbar, actually), things are moving in a very interesting and hopeful direction. About six months ago, something happened that the Americans are calling "The... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Civilized Religion |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 11/05/2007 11:16:12 AM PST · 37 replies The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC ^ | November 01, 2007 | Orson Scott Card There are those who would like to tell you that no religion is civilized, but these tend to be people whose ignorance of history is so profound as to appear deliberate. Human beings sometimes do terrible things, and when they do, they invariably find reasons to invoke their belief system, whatever it is, to excuse their bad behavior. Thus Communists have committed their barbarities in the name of "the good of the people," just as Christians and Muslims and practically everybody else, when they decided certain people needed killing or oppressing, found a way to excuse themselves in the name... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Nobel Prize for Literature Awarded to Roomful of Monkeys?[AlGore & Global Warming] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 10/23/2007 1:45:31 PM PDT · 49 replies Rhino Times ^ | October 18, 2007 | Orson Scott Card So Al Gore gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and my wife says to me, "Wow. First time they ever gave the peace prize for religion." So true. And so sad. What has Al Gore done for the world? Ran loaded hearings in the Senate to promote the idea of global warming with no evidence worth a bucket of ... whatever it was John Nance Garner said was in such a bucket. Then he was President Clinton's pet veep, treated with genial contempt, which he earned by his incompetence at running even an inconsequential office like that. Then he tried to... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Phony Soldiers and Patriotism |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 10/23/2007 11:57:55 AM PDT · 60 replies The Ornery American ^ | October 7, 2007 | Orson Scott Card It was quite a spectacle. Democratic Congressmen and Senators standing there denouncing Rush Limbaugh for attacking American soldiers by calling them "phony." We already know how much they hate Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show personalities. Talk radio is the only part of the American media that the Left does not already control, one way or another; that's why they're trying to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine (equal time for all points of view) only for talk radio, while the media the Left controls remains "unfair." But if they can make Rush Limbaugh look unAmerican, unpatriotic, well -- then all... |
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| Phony Soldiers and Patriotism |
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| Posted by ventanax5 On News/Activism 10/14/2007 8:59:55 AM PDT · 14 replies greensboro.rhinotimes.com ^ | Orson Scott Card It was quite a spectacle. Democratic congressmen and senators standing there denouncing Rush Limbaugh for attacking American soldiers by calling them "phony." We already know how much they hate Limbaugh and other conservative radio talk show personalities. Talk radio is the only part of the American media that the Left does not already control, one way or another; that's why they're trying to reintroduce the "fairness" doctrine (equal time for all points of view) only for talk radio, while the media the Left controls remains "unfair." But if they can make Rush Limbaugh look unAmerican, unpatriotic, well – then all... |
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| Who Gets to Define "Christian"? |
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| Posted by restornu On Religion 07/13/2007 7:28:01 PM PDT · 328 replies · 2,183+ views Beliefnet.com ^ | Thursday June 28, 2007 | By Orson Scott Card Each time a group of Christians comes up with an unfamiliar way of understanding the scriptures and our relationship with God, there are other Christians who are quick to insist that anyone who believes like that can’t really be Christian. Much blood has been shed over these doctrinal differences; wars have been fought, boundaries have been changed, and people have gone into exile. Whether it was the often bloody struggle between Arians and Athanasians, between Lutherans and Catholics, between the Church of England and the Puritans, people have been willing, it seems, to die, to kill, and to deprive others... |
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| Learning from History |
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| Posted by ventanax5 On News/Activism 06/10/2007 1:22:38 PM PDT · 20 replies · 632+ views greensboro.rhinotimes.com ^ | Orson Scott Card History does repeat itself. Never exactly – there are always enough differences in the details that people who are determined not to learn anything from the past can find an excuse. But history shows patterns precisely because human beings don't change. After the First World War (then called the Great War), Britain and France were exhausted. They had triumphed – barely – but they had left more than a million dead soldiers on the battlefields. |
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| Civilization Watch - Don't You Dare Ask for Proof - Orson Scott Card |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 05/09/2007 3:29:10 AM PDT · 28 replies · 1,144+ views The Ornery American ^ | April 29, 2007 | Orson Scott Card | Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card April 29, 2007 Don't You Dare Ask for Proof! In last Sunday's News and Record, columnist Andrew Brod heaped ridicule on those who dare to contest the religion of global warming. What is his proof? He doesn't think he needs any. In fact, he's against proof. He likes it when governments make massive changes without any evidence that those changes are necessary. He spends his whole column citing political documents like the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Honor |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 04/13/2007 7:18:36 AM PDT · 144 replies · 1,858+ views rhinotimes.com ^ | April 05, 2007 | Orson Scott Card Warning: don't get hung up on a few disagreements with a democrat Orson Scott Card - we have overwhelmingly more points of agreement. If you disagree with me, see my tagline :^)Duty. Honor. Country. Once these words could inspire the hearts of patriots. Now, in our benighted era, the elite in our nation sneer at the words and at those who still believe in them. ::: But there is such a thing as honor, and whether we name it by its right name or not, we depend on it. Honor is akin to the word "honest." We say a person... |
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| The Most Important Movie You'll See This Year |
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| Posted by restornu On Religion 03/19/2007 8:42:39 AM PDT · 19 replies · 310+ views Meridian ^ | March 2007 | By Orson Scott Card It's not going to be the best movie you see this year, but it might be the most important. Amazing Grace is the story of William Wilberforce, the man who was most responsible (though he certainly did not work alone) for abolishing the slave trade and, ultimately, slavery itself, beginning with the British Empire, but ultimately around the world. The trouble with a story like this is that while Wilberforce's effort was heroic, fighting in what seemed to be a losing cause — yet one that could not, morally, be abandoned — the great moments consisted of speeches and... |
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| All in a Good Cause [Orson Scott Card] |
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| Posted by Parody On News/Activism 03/15/2007 1:34:48 PM PDT · 8 replies · 629+ views www.ornery.org ^ | 03/04/2007 | Orson Scott Card All in a Good Cause Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have. An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann." The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the... |
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| All in a Good Cause (if you torture the data long enough, eventually it will confess to anything) |
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| Posted by ventanax5 On News/Activism 03/14/2007 12:39:12 PM PDT · 16 replies · 637+ views ornery.org ^ | Orson Scott Card What Is Driving Global Climate? Science isn't done by consensus. It's done by rigorous testing. When a hypothesis -- or a computer model -- fails to correspond to the actual real-world data, you throw it out. That's what the real climate scientists are doing. They have found, in recent years, a very close correspondence between global climate and variations in the amount of radiation the Earth receives from the Sun. The light and heat we get varies depending on the distance and position of the Earth and the amount of radiation the Sun puts out. The Earth's distance and position... |
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| All in a Good Cause (Global Warming) |
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| Posted by restornu On News/Activism 03/13/2007 11:13:00 AM PDT · 54 replies · 1,451+ views Rhinoceros Times of Greensboro ^ | March 2007 | By Orson Scott Card Here's a story you haven't heard, and you should have. An intelligence source, working for a government agency. He's not a spy, he's an analyst. He uses computers to crunch numbers and at the end of his work, out pops the truth that was hiding in the original data. Let's call him "Mann." The trouble with Mann is, he has an ideology. He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to... |
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| Evil Fiction |
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| Posted by ventanax5 On News/Activism 02/26/2007 12:22:15 PM PST · 17 replies · 1,148+ views greensboro.rhinotimes.com ^ | February 22, 2007 | Orson Scott Card Let me tell you about an audiobook that I hated. I didn't hate it because it was badly written – it was mediocre in the way that mediocre thrillers usually are, and that means it would ordinarily have been tolerable. No, the reason I stopped listening to Steve Berry's The Alexandria Link is that this book is evil. I don't mean it's about evil. I don't even mean that it is evil-porn, like those horror books whose authors are pervertedly devoted to thinking up cool ways to torture and kill people. I mean that this book, to the degree that... |
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| Orson Scott Card: The Crisis of the Islamo-Fascist War |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 01/29/2007 10:25:38 AM PST · 24 replies · 1,431+ views The Ornery American / The Rhinoceros Times ^ | January 14, 2007 | Orson Scott Card President Bush is a genuinely awful speaker. Wouldn't it be a shame if we lost a war for the survival of western civilization because we had a President who reads his speeches in a dispassionate drone? It's been interesting to watch the media respond to the speech. Not that many months ago, the media was reporting on the speeches of Democrats and other critics of the war, talking about how Bush's plan in Iraq had failed because we always needed "more boots on the ground." None of them -- not even the generals who hated defense secretary Rumsfeld with such... |
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| Keeping Things Civil |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 01/25/2007 7:53:31 AM PST · 22 replies · 609+ views The Ornery American ^ | Jan. 2007 | Orson Scott Card Keeping Things CivilAfterword to the novel Empireby Orson Scott Card The originating premise of this novel did not come from me. Donald Mustard and his partners in Chair Enterainment had the idea for an entertainment franchise called Empire about a near-future American civil war. When I joined the project to create a work of fiction based on that premise, my first order of business was to come up with a plausible way that such an event might come about. It was, sadly enough, all too easy. Because we haven't had a civil war in the past fourteen decades, people think... |
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| How Our Civilization Can Fall |
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| Posted by B-Chan On News/Activism 12/22/2006 8:06:16 PM PST · 68 replies · 1,867+ views The Ornery American ^ | 2006.12.03 | Orson Scott Card Here's how it happens: America stupidly and immorally withdraws from the War on Terror, withdrawing prematurely from Iraq and leaving it in chaos. Emboldened, either Muslims unite against the West (unlikely) or collapse in a huge war between Shiites and Sunnis (already beginning). It almost doesn't matter, because in the process the oil will stop flowing. And when the oil stops flowing, Europe and Japan and Taiwan and Singapore and South Korea all crash economically; Europe then has to face the demands of its West-hating Muslim "minority" without money and without the ruthlessness or will to survive that would allow... |
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| Honoring Those Who Died |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 12/19/2006 12:11:13 AM PST · 16 replies · 474+ views The Rhinoceros Times ^ | Dec. 17, 2006 | Orson Scott Card Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card December 17, 2006 Honoring Those Who Died I was on my way home from speaking to officers at an air base, so when, during a brief layover, I saw a young man in uniform waiting for the same flight as me, I thought nothing of it -- I was used to uniforms. It happened that during boarding, we were nearly alone at the back of the plane for a few minutes. We struck up a conversation. This young man was nearing the end of his... |
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| Orson Scott Card's 'Empire' coming to big screen |
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| Posted by MinorityRepublican On General/Chat 11/30/2006 10:26:22 PM PST · 26 replies · 727+ views moviethunder.com ^ | November 14, 2006 Producer Joel Silver's Silver Pictures has optioned Empire, an upcoming book from bestselling sci-fi author Orson Scott Card, for a big-screen adaptation. The novel is currently slated to hit bookshelves on November 28. According to the Card's official Web site, here is the story of Empire: The American Empire has grown too fast, and the fault lines at home are stressed to the breaking point. The war of words between Right and Left has collapsed into a shooting war, though most people just want to be left alone. The battle rages between the high-technology weapons on one side and militia... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Doonesbury vs. America [OSC debunks Trudeau comparing Bush and Clinton] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 11/30/2006 9:32:18 AM PST · 84 replies · 2,567+ views The Ornery American ^ | November 19, 2006 | Orson Scott Card Does anybody here remember when Doonesbury was funny? Never mind. It was funny this past Sunday, in a bitter, ironic kind of way. The comic strip, by Garry Trudeau, shows a professor teaching a class, in which he compares two presidents -- Bush and Clinton. Of Bush he says, "The first president initiates a bloody, costly, unending war on false premises ... and approves covert policies of illegal detentions, kangaroo courts, extraordinary renditions, torture, and warrantless wiretapping of thousands of Americans." Of Clinton, he says, "The second president lies about hooking up with an intern. Question: Which one should be... |
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| Orson Scott Card: America just lost. What now? |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 11/17/2006 5:02:37 AM PST · 25 replies · 1,390+ views RhinoTimes / The Ornery American ^ | November 09, 2006 | Orson Scott Card I believe in two-party government. I especially believe in it when it prevents Congress from doing anything – because that prevents them from doing stupid things. Of course, the Republicans were already doing a fine job of keeping even one-party government in a permanent logjam. Plus, the Republicans were also proving themselves just as unable to remain worthy of power while holding it as the Democrats did during their decades of dominance from 1954 to 1994.This election proves only that the monolithically leftwing mainstream media can make the public believe we are losing a war that we are winning. As... |
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| Orson Scott Card: The Only Issue This Election Day [the War on Terror] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 11/01/2006 7:09:07 AM PST · 44 replies · 1,610+ views The Ornery American ^ | 10/29/2006 | Orson Scott Card There is only one issue in this election that will matter five or ten years from now, and that's the War on Terror. And the success of the War on Terror now teeters on the fulcrum of this election. If control of the House passes into Democratic hands, there are enough withdraw-on-a-timetable Democrats in positions of prominence that it will not only seem to be a victory for our enemies, it will be one. Unfortunately, the opposite is not the case -- if the Republican Party remains in control of both houses of Congress there is no guarantee that the... |
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| Homework, Part I - The Worst Job in the World |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 10/05/2006 2:02:08 AM PDT · 117 replies · 2,066+ views The Ornery American ^ | Sept. 17, 2006 | Orson Scott Card Civilization WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card September 17, 2006 Homework, Part I The Worst Job in the World What if you had a really lousy job? You're only employed for seven hours a day, but you have to ride the bus for half an hour each way. While you're there, they only let you go to the bathroom at certain times. You only have ten minutes to get from one work station to another, and somehow you also have to use the toilet and get your new work materials from a... |
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| The Shadow Party: FrontPage Interviews Co-Author Richard Poe |
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| Posted by Richard Poe On News/Activism 08/29/2006 3:12:51 PM PDT · 189 replies · 3,762+ views FrontPageMagazine.com ^ | August 29, 2006 | Jamie Glazov A new book by David Horowitz and Richard Poe has enraged the Left and alarmed many conservatives. It exposes the machinations of a radical clique working at the highest levels of government and finance to undermine American power. That book is The Shadow Party: How George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Sixties Radicals Seized Control of the Democratic Party. It hit the New York Times bestseller list in its first week in print. Here to tell us about The Shadow Partyis co-author Richard Poe, our esteemed colleague at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, where he serves as director of research. Mr.... |
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| VFTT/BootMurtha mans booth at Patriot Biker Event in PA -- finds voters saying 'no' to Murtha! |
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| Posted by IPWGOP On News/Activism 08/27/2006 12:38:59 PM PDT · 72 replies · 1,178+ views BootMurtha.com ^ | 8/27/2006 | IPWGOP August 26, 2006... Operation Street Corner Action Report! Boots on the Ground for the soldiers in the fieldOSC goes to the Great Patriot PA Biker Event!– A hot day outside of Monaca, PA –Aug. 26, 2006, Monaca, PA... Vets for the Truth / Boot Murtha took its traveling OSC displays to the Rolling Thunder (PA Chapter 4) Great Patriot Biker Event. The event was held just outside Monaca on a great strip of land right along Route 18 at the Midway Bar & Grill. We were able to meet multitudes of great people and American patriots and discussed issues one-on-one with our... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Lies and Catastrophes [words are supposed to have meanings] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 08/25/2006 7:25:09 AM PDT · 57 replies · 1,227+ views The Ornery American ^ | August 13, 2006 | Orson Scott Card I think it's about time we remembered that words are supposed to have meanings. It's sort of a quiet agreement among all the speakers of a particular language, that you try to use a word according to its agreed-upon meaning. For instance, I recently heard a Democratic congressman refer to the War on Terror -- specifically, the Iraq campaign -- as "catastrophic." He seemed to be a reasonably educated guy. I think if a doctor told him, "What you have is a catastrophic illness," he would understand what the word meant and prepare for death or permanent disability. Or if... |
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| Boot Murtha's Operation Street Corner sets up anti-Murtha displays in Murtha's hometown! |
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| Posted by IPWGOP On News/Activism 08/23/2006 6:09:13 PM PDT · 22 replies · 670+ views BootMurtha.com ^ | 8/23/2006 | IPWGOP OSC Show on the Road!- Beautiful Day in Johnstown – August 22nd found 12th District OSC Director Nikki Sheppick and her Second-in-Command, District Assistant Laura Hough (pronounced "Huff," for those who are wondering), traveling to Johnstown for one of their traveling Operation Street Corner display events. The day was beautiful, and Johnstown has a very nice Central Park with large beautiful shade trees. We were in the nicest of environments. Two of our Johnstown colleagues, Harry & Tony, volunteered to accompany us during our 10:00 AM to 3:00 PM event. Incidentally, the Johnstown City Manager was most cooperative in giving us permission... |
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| OPERATION STREET CORNER / BOOT MURTHA holds first event in Murtha's PA District 12 |
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| Posted by IPWGOP On News/Activism 08/03/2006 6:24:38 AM PDT · 15 replies · 485+ views www.BootMurtha.com ^ | 8/3/2006 | IPWGOP July 29, 2006... Rain Day Festival in PA: first planned Vets For The Truth / Boot Murtha & Operation Street Corner (OSC) activity by OSC District 12 Exec. Director Nikki A.C. Sheppick We enjoyed ourselves immensely that this special Annual Greene County event, which has been taking place here in Pennsylvania since 1874. The day was cloudy with the threat of rain - but it never did - at least in Waynesburg, PA, during the Rain Day festivities. The VFTT - OSC was blessed with a nice corner space and the town officials were not in any way non-supportive of... |
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| Know Thy Enemy |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 07/23/2006 11:53:55 PM PDT · 22 replies · 759+ views The Ornery American ^ | July 16, 2006 | Orson Scott Card | World WatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card July 16, 2006 Know Thy Enemy I do hope that the readers of this column already know that no decent person could ever advocate that Israel negotiate with Hamas and Hezbollah or give in to their demands in the slightest in order to get their kidnapped soldiers back. The slightest concession would only guarantee that more and more Israelis would be kidnapped in the future. The only way to extinguish kidnapping is to make sure that it never,... |
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| Orson Scott Card: American Soldiers and How We Use Them |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 04/27/2006 10:54:19 AM PDT · 31 replies · 1,109+ views RhinoTimes ^ | April 20, 2006 | Orson Scott Card When our young men (and women) volunteer to serve in our military, it is usually with an eye to serving their country, even at the risk of their own lives. In the process of their service, they will take orders, constantly. Sometimes those orders will come from people they respect – even love. Sometimes, though, the orders will come from people they dislike, or disdain, or fear or hate. Yet the ones who last in the military learn to submerge their own will and keep silent, except when some truly outrageous or dangerous or illegal order is given – whereupon... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Freedom of Religion: For Everyone, Everywhere |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 04/05/2006 7:40:30 AM PDT · 32 replies · 1,184+ views The Ornery American ^ | March 26, 2006 | Orson Scott Card Poor Abdul Rahman. He lived in Germany, where there is freedom of religion. He forgot that freedom of religion only applies to non-Muslims who convert to other faiths. Muslims aren't allowed to follow their individual consciences. If you're born a Muslim, then in your entire life you will never, never have a choice about what religion to belong to. Because if you convert from Islam to another faith, good Muslims have a right -- no, a duty -- to kill you. Oh, wait. How can I say that? I keep forgetting -- we've been assured ten thousand times since 9/11... |
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| World Watch - Three Books That Name Names |
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| Posted by Mr170IQ On News/Activism 03/07/2006 6:40:53 AM PST · 10 replies · 474+ views The Rhinoceros Times ^ | February 12, 2006 | Orson Scott Card WorldWatchFirst appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC By Orson Scott Card February 12, 2006 Three Books That Name Names Bernard Goldberg, 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America (And Al Franken is #37). Kate O'Beirne, Women Who Make the World Worse: and How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Families, Military, and Sports David Horowitz, The Professors: the 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America We Americans have been through massive cultural and social revolutions in the past two generations. We've drastically revised the way we marry, the way we have sex, the way we educate... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Iraq -- Quit or Stay? [a very comprehensive review] |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 01/26/2006 8:53:17 AM PST · 39 replies · 1,530+ views The Ornery American ^ | January 15, 2006 | Orson Scott Card I keep wondering why I'm getting flashbacks to the 1960s. I never took any hallucinogenic drugs. And yet I keep hearing people on TV saying we need to bring the troops home now. Of course, back in the 60s, the people saying that were all wearing long hair and, if they were of the guy persuasion, beards; now it's people in suits. So it occurred to me that maybe they're the ones having the flashbacks. They really think this war is Vietnam. Having romanticized the anti-war movement of the 1960s, they think they're wrapping themselves in the mantle of heroes.... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Freakonomics |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 09/20/2005 11:55:10 AM PDT · 89 replies · 3,159+ views Rhino Times ^ | September 15, 2005 | Orson Scott Card This is the most provocative article by Orson Scott Card I've ever read. But don't rush with the judgment and flame throwing before you read till the end. If you just skim the beginning, you might think he makes a conclusion that he is NOT making... A bit of a spoiler from the very end: "...I pick A. I think B and C are both vile. That’s my opinion. But at least I took the available information into account when I reached it. Mark my words, many people are going to be outraged at my opinion – I can see... |
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| Republicans Eye Expanding U.S. Offshore Drilling |
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| Posted by jasoncann On News/Activism 09/09/2005 9:25:19 AM PDT · 22 replies · 534+ views enn.com ^ | September 09, 2005 | By Chris Baltimore, Reuters WASHINGTON — Barely a month after President Bush signed a $14.5 billion energy bill into law, Hurricane Katrina's destructive dance through the U.S. oilpatch is being seized on by Republicans as a reason to open more federal offshore waters to drilling. The House and Senate energy committees are also looking at measures to help the energy industry, such as incentives to build the first U.S. refinery since 1976 and cutting the array of fuel blends required by anti-pollution rules. Before Katrina shut most of the Gulf of Mexico's oil and gas production and 10 percent of U.S. refining capacity, Republicans... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Weapons of Mass Destruction |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 08/02/2005 9:23:08 AM PDT · 30 replies · 1,120+ views RhinoTImes / The Ornery American ^ | July 28, 2005 | Orson Scott Card A week before the London bombings, I was in England for a US Defense Department-sponsored conference on the future of weapons of mass destruction. It was held in Sussex, as part of the Wilton Park conference series, which is well attended by diplomats and military people from many European and Middle Eastern countries. This time, they also brought along some science fiction writers, in the hope that we would actually know something about the future. (Whether we delivered on that hope is another question. The other guys did great. As for me: I warned them in advance that I wouldn’t... |
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| Orson Scott Card: Killing the Common People |
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| Posted by Tolik On News/Activism 07/19/2005 7:47:15 AM PDT · 55 replies · 1,609+ views Greensboro Rhino Times ^ | July 14, 2005 | Orson Scott Card When the bombs went off in London, you could practically feel the relief on the part of those who hate the war in Iraq. Of course, they regretted the deaths of so many innocents, and of course they were outraged at those who committed the act. But they also felt vindicated, and some of them said so. They gloated a bit that Rumsfeld had recently said that Al Qaeda was on the ropes, so to speak. Here was proof positive, they believed, that our war in Iraq – far from limiting terrorism – had created new recruits and spread it... |
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In an electorate of around 130 million people, why would anyone expect to find a candidate that agrees with all their personal positions? A candidate has to straddle enough issues to win over 60 million votes. Any one of us should feel lucky to find a candidate who agrees with 50% of our positions.
, you’ll just love McCain — he’s Nixon without the charm.
I, for one, do not care about a persons religion, sexual preference, or how good of a public speaker they are. A used car salesmen can sound publicly "slick" and most psychopathic killers comes across as "nice guys".
That isn't what I'm looking for in a POTUS. Bill of Rights enforcement and stances in line with the restrictions and expressed duties listed in the Constitution are all I require.
I suppose that this is too much to ask in todays "bread and circus'" entitlement prone environment...
McCain doesn't have what it takes to do any better. A REAL choice (Hunter, Thompson, Paul, Huckabee) would have provided a sharper contrast to the Dems candidate and possibly stirred the base more.
You don't ignore 30% of your likely voters hoping you can pander to the Left far enough to make up the votes.
But that's the very core of what people mistakenly think is good about his position on "the war". McCain is remarkably consistent - he's an angry man who lashes out at his perceived enemies on all fronts with equivalent vitriol, including the Islamofascists. Which means he isn't really "good on the war" - a sober-minded realist would be a huge improvement over either the angry, unstable McCain or the utopian, selectively-blind Bush.
More sticking points than a porcupine; e.g., Romney's "cruel and ultimately ineffectual" position on immigration.
Felipe Calderon agrees with that take, pero yo no.
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