Im so glad to see this! You get the feeling every sprots fan is a conservative, but it's good to see that at least some Knicks fans are rational human beings.
Lets hope Kerry unconcedes and his brother Cameron collects ebough evidence of foul play!
We might have to fight for Democracy like our forefathers once had to do against Great Britain.
Posted by toodarkmark:
Im so glad to see this! You get the feeling every sprots fan is a conservative, but it's good to see that at least some Knicks fans are rational human beings.
Lets hope Kerry unconcedes and his brother Cameron collects ebough evidence of foul play!
We might have to fight for Democracy like our forefathers once had to do against Great Britain.
So conservatives arent rational? The same could be said of liberals.
Why is it ok for a movie like F-9/11 to be put in theaters (arguably the biggest piece of propoganda the world has ever seen) and when conservatives run a movie on TV in 3 states it is wrong.
Why is it Kerry's third party groups can run attack adds on Bush saying he didnt serve in the guard when he said he did, that he waited too long to respond on 9/11 because he was in a room full of children and just got the worst news any president has heard since Pearl Harbor, but when conservatives say Kerry lied about his service in vietnam (which he chose to make the centerpiece of his losing campaign) it is wrong.
Why is it that a man like Tom Daschle of South Dakota calls press conferences for 3 years condemning the president and his actions - blaming him for every problem in the US and calling him stupid, but when he runs for re-election he chooses to run adds of him embracing the president on 9/11 and calling him a great leader.
Why is it that the media purposly skewed its coverage to make it seem like Kerry was winning (showing their liberal bias) but when the conservatives show up to cast their vote in record numbers obviously something illegal happened because they did everything in their power to make Bush look so bad that nobody in their right mind would vote for him? Even though all night long is you watched the bootom right of your screen on election night Bush never trailed Kerry - in the popular vote or in the electoral college.
Read the newsweek article that just came out about the 2 campaigns. They had reporters travelling with both men from the start and did not report a word until after the election was over. It shows that John Kerry is completely incapable of makin his own decisions. His staff even had to take his cell phone away from him because he called so many people to ask their opinions on his decisions - and he would keep changing his mind. Is this the man you want leading the US? The kind of guy who got beat up in high school, turned his nose up at people in college because he thought he was smarter then everyone, and then married a woman who has a funny way of letting everyone know that John F Kerry is her second husband and she still loves her first husband very much....
I mean I could go on for a dozen more paragraphs but I will save it. The most important part of the process is that if you were 18 or over, you shuold have registered and gone to the polls. Every vote does indeed count in this country - the system is not perfect but it is what has allowed us to be free for so long. Each side has its wins and its defeats - but we always find a way to adjust to the leadership and continue to lead the world. If you cannot accept the fact that america spoke on Nov 2 and picked a man who has been in office for 4 years - hasnt been perfect by any measure, but has done some good things that we should be proud of - then maybe america isnt the place for you.
You don't think there'd be some benefit in an investigation into potential irregularities in the voting process? What if it were a bipartisan commission?
Posted by MaTT4281:
1,452.
Good morning dude. Check out Frank Rich's article in this weekend's Times.
Posted by MaTT4281:
1,452.
Good morning dude. Check out Frank Rich's article in this weekend's Times.
Don't get the times and can't seem to find it on www.nytimes.com
Care to sum up the bright spots?
Let's see if they post it tomorrow. It's actually the Sunday paper but they deliver 1/2 of it on Saturday.
Aight, lookin forward to reading it.
FRANK RICH
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
Published: November 14, 2004
FAREWELL to Swift boats and "Shove it!," to Osama's tape and Saddam's missing weapons, to "security moms" and outsourced dads. They've all been sent to history's dustbin faster than Ralph Nader memorabilia was dumped on eBay. In their stead stands a single ambiguous phrase coined by an anonymous exit pollster: "Moral values." By near universal agreement the morning after, these two words tell the entire story of the election: it's the culture, stupid.
"It really is Michael Moore versus Mel Gibson," said Newt Gingrich. To Jon Stewart, Nov. 2 was the red states' revenge on "Will & Grace." William Safire, speaking on "Meet the Press," called the Janet Jackson fracas "the social-political event of the past year." Karl Rove was of the same mind: "I think it's people who are concerned about the coarseness of our culture, about what they see on the television sets, what they see in the movies ..."
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And let's not even get started on the two most dreaded words in American comedy, regardless of your party affiliation: Whoopi Goldberg.
There's only one problem with the storyline proclaiming that the country swung to the right on cultural issues in 2004. Like so many other narratives that immediately calcify into our 24/7 media's conventional wisdom, it is fiction. Everything about the election results - and about American culture itself - confirms an inescapable reality: John Kerry's defeat notwithstanding, it's blue America, not red, that is inexorably winning the culture war, and by a landslide. Kerry voters who have been flagellating themselves since Election Day with a vengeance worthy of "The Passion of the Christ" should wake up and smell the Chardonnay.
The blue ascendancy is nearly as strong among Republicans as it is among Democrats. Those whose "moral values" are invested in cultural heroes like the accused loofah fetishist Bill O'Reilly and the self-gratifying drug consumer Rush Limbaugh are surely joking when they turn apoplectic over MTV. William Bennett's name is now as synonymous with Las Vegas as silicone. The Democrats' Ashton Kutcher is trumped by the Republicans' Britney Spears. Excess and vulgarity, as always, enjoy a vast, bipartisan constituency, and in a democracy no political party will ever stamp them out.
If anyone is laughing all the way to the bank this election year, it must be the undisputed king of the red cultural elite, Rupert Murdoch. Fox News is a rising profit center within his News Corporation, and each red-state dollar that it makes can be plowed back into the rest of Fox's very blue entertainment portfolio. The Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson's "How to Make Love Like a Porn Star" and the Vivid Girls' "How to Have a XXX Sex Life," which have both been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News by willing hosts like Rita Cosby and, needless to say, Mr. O'Reilly. There are "real fun parts and exciting parts," said Ms. Cosby to Ms. Jameson on Fox News's "Big Story Weekend," an encounter broadcast on Saturday at 9 p.m., assuring its maximum exposure to unsupervised kids.
Almost unnoticed in the final weeks of the campaign was the record government indecency fine levied against another prime-time Fox television product, "Married by America." The $1.2 million bill, a mere bagatelle to Murdoch stockholders, was more than twice the punishment inflicted on Viacom for Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction." According to the F.C.C. complaint, one episode in this heterosexual marriage-promoting reality show included scenes in which "partygoers lick whipped cream from strippers' bodies," and two female strippers "playfully spank" a man on all fours in his underwear. "Married by America" is gone now, but Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton ("The Simple Life") and wife-swapping ("Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy").
None of this has prompted an uprising from the red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with "moral values." They all gladly contribute fungible dollars to Fox culture by boosting their fair-and-balanced channel's rise in the ratings. Some of these red staters may want to make love like porn stars besides. (Not that there's anything wrong with that.) An ABC News poll two weeks before the election found that more Republicans than Democrats enjoy sex "a great deal." The Democrats' new hero, Illinois Senator-elect Barack Obama, was assured victory once his original, ostentatiously pious Republican opponent, Jack Ryan, dropped out of the race rather than defend his taste for "avant-garde" sex clubs.
The 22 percent of voters who told pollsters that "moral values" were their top election issue - 79 percent of whom voted for Bush-Cheney - corresponds almost exactly to the number of voters (23 percent) who describe themselves as born-again or evangelical Christians. They are entitled to their culture, too, and their own entertainment industry. And their own show-biz scandals. The Los Angeles Times reported this summer that Paul Crouch, the evangelist who founded the largest Christian network, Trinity Broadcasting Network, vehemently denied a former employee's accusation that the two had had a homosexual encounter - though not before paying the employee a $425,000 settlement. Not so incidentally, Trinity joined Gary Bauer and Fox News as prime movers in "Redeem the Vote," the Christian-rock alternative to MTV's "Rock the Vote."
But the distance between this hard-core red culture and the majority blue culture is perhaps best captured by Tom Coburn, the newly elected Republican senator from Oklahoma, lately famous for discovering "rampant" lesbianism in that state's schools. As a congressman in 1997, Mr. Coburn attacked NBC for encouraging "irresponsible sexual behavior" and taking "network TV to an all-time low with full frontal nudity, violence and profanity being shown in our homes." The broadcast that prompted his outrage on behalf of "parents and decent-minded individuals everywhere" was the network's prime-time showing of Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List."
It's in the G.O.P.'s interest to pander to this far-right constituency - votes are votes - but you can be certain that a party joined at the hip to much of corporate America, Mr. Murdoch included, will take no action to curtail the blue culture these voters deplore. As Marshall Wittman, an independent-minded former associate of both Ralph Reed and John McCain, wrote before the election, "The only things the religious conservatives get are largely symbolic votes on proposals guaranteed to fail, such as the gay marriage constitutional amendment." That amendment has never had a prayer of rounding up the two-thirds majority needed for passage and still doesn't.
Mr. Wittman echoes Thomas Frank, the author of "What's the Matter With Kansas?," by common consent the year's most prescient political book. "Values," Mr. Frank writes, "always take a backseat to the needs of money once the elections are won." Under this perennial "trick," as he calls it, Republican politicians promise to stop abortion and force the culture industry "to clean up its act" - until the votes are counted. Then they return to their higher priorities, like cutting capital gains and estate taxes. Mr. Murdoch and his fellow cultural barons - from Sumner Redstone, the Bush-endorsing C.E.O. of Viacom, to Richard Parsons, the Republican C.E.O. of Time Warner, to Jeffrey Immelt, the Bush-contributing C.E.O. of G.E. (NBC Universal) - are about to be rewarded not just with more tax breaks but also with deregulatory goodies increasing their power to market salacious entertainment. It's they, not Susan Sarandon and Bruce Springsteen, who actually set the cultural agenda Gary Bauer and company say they despise.
But it's not only the G.O.P.'s fealty to its financial backers that is predictive of how little cultural bang the "values" voters will get for their Bush-Cheney votes. At 78 percent, the nonvalues voters have far more votes than they do, and both parties will cater to that overwhelming majority's blue tastes first and last. Their mandate is clear: The same poll that clocked "moral values" partisans at 22 percent of the electorate found that nearly three times as many Americans approve of some form of legal status for gay couples, whether civil unions (35 percent) or marriage (27 percent). Do the math and you'll find that the poll also shows that for all the G.O.P.'s efforts to court Jews, the total number of Jewish Republican voters in 2004, while up from 2000, was still some 200,000 less than the number of gay Republican voters.
On 'Moral Values,' It's Blue in a Landslide
Published: November 14, 2004
(Page 3 of 3)
When Robert Novak writes after the election that "the anti-abortion, anti-gay marriage, socially conservative agenda is ascendant, and the G.O.P. will not abandon it anytime soon," you have to wonder what drug he is on. The abandonment began at the convention. Sam Brownback, the Kansas senator who champions the religious right, was locked away in an off-camera rally across town from Madison Square Garden. Prime time was bestowed upon the three biggest stars in post-Bush Republican politics: Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Arnold Schwarzenegger. All are supporters of gay rights and opponents of the same-sex marriage constitutional amendment. Only Mr. McCain calls himself pro-life, and he's never made abortion a cause. None of the three support the Bush administration position on stem-cell research. When the No. 1 "moral values" movie star, Mel Gibson, condemned the Schwarzenegger-endorsed California ballot initiative expanding and financing stem-cell research, the governor and voters crushed him like a girlie-man. The measure carried by 59 percent, which is consistent with national polling on the issue.
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If the Republican party's next round of leaders are all cool with blue culture, why should Democrats run after the red? Received Washington wisdom has it that the only Democrat who will ever be able to win a national election must be a cross between Gomer Pyle and Billy Sunday - a Scripture-quoting Sun Belt exurbanite whose loyalty to Nascar does not extend to Dale Earnhardt Jr., who was fined last month for saying a four-letter word on television.
According to this argument, the values voters the Democrats must pander to are people like Cary and Tara Leslie, archetypal Ohio evangelical "Bush votes come to life" apotheosized by The Washington Post right after Election Day. The Leslies swear by "moral absolutes," support a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage and mostly watch Fox News. Mr. Leslie has also watched his income drop from $55,000 to $35,000 since 2001, forcing himself, his wife and his three young children into the ranks of what he calls the "working poor." Maybe by 2008 some Democrat will figure out how to persuade him that it might be a higher moral value to worry about the future of his own family than some gay family he hasn't even met.
[Edited by - kwazimodal on 11/14/2004 09:22:36]
Thx for posting it Kwazi.
Yeah that's it. Thanks for posting.
I think I may need to some prozac for the next four years. It's getting harder and harder to accept the fact that this man represents our country.
http://www.sorryeverybody.com/gallery/1/
This is a website where thousands of Americans send in their pictures and apologize to the world for voters that "re-elected"
Bush.
Ha, my 2 favorite pics through the first 4 or 5 pages-
I sent in one spoofing "planet of the apes",hope they put it up!
