romeotuma wrote: 
Good article, eh?

 jadewahoo wrote: 
Wasn't Washington born in Virginia?  I mean, not technically the USA yet, but still...

 hippiechick wrote: 
But we live in a global community now ...

...Time has come today...

 jadewahoo wrote: 
...
...water runs up the spout
... let it all hang out !

 jadewahoo wrote: 
The reason for this is obvious, to prevent split loyalties to another country.

 kurtster wrote:You do realize, don't you (and this can be verified with just a bit of searching the internet), that George Washington was not born in the United States of America? Yet he turned out to be a pretty good president, by all accounts.

 romeotuma wrote: 

We know cows are a documented measurable source of methane. 

The question of where Obama took his first breath is irrelevant  with open, undefended borders.  When you don't defend your sovereignty, what else matters ?

At this point in time we might as well ammend the Constitution to allow Arnold to run for President.  I would vote for him, in a heart beat.

 hippiechick wrote:  

So ...  what she's saying is forgive the poor souls for they know not what they want ?  You just can't believe what you hear with your own ears ?  I take it as she believes that the majority of the citizens opposing Obama are just plain whacked as opposed to a smaller minority who just don't get it. 

With the present make up of registered voters (as of 2007) being :
37% I
33% D
27% R

The numbers just don't add up to only one point of view explaining the growing distrust of Obama and his agenda.  With the right only composing 27% of the vote, the current support polls are evenly split and with disapproval numbers at roughly 50%, the make up of the 23% must come from elsewhere, and that is assuming 100% of the right disapproves of Obama.

So lets not give a blanket dismissal to the majority of those that are opposed to the present plans on the table are misinformed or misguided.  Perhaps they have verified their sources and don't like what they see.  Perhaps we have a divide between the sheep and the informed.

An interesting take on peoples beliefs:

 

Lies of Mass Destruction

Not being a complete idiot (contrary to the assertion of many readers I've been hearing from), I was not exactly surprised at the e-mails I got in response to my story analyzing why the myths about health-care reform—even the totally loony ones, like death panels—have gained such traction. One retired military officer called me "nothing more than an 'Obama Zombie' that has lost touch with reality," while a housewife sweetly suggested that I sign up for "socialistic medicine" and die, the sooner the better. (My kids get upset when people wish me dead, but hey, they'll survive.) But now I think I understand people who believe the health-care lies—and the Obama-was-born-in-Kenya lie—even better than when I wrote that piece.

Some people form and cling to false beliefs about health-care reform (or Obama's citizenship) despite overwhelming evidence thanks to a mental phenomenon called motivated reasoning, says sociologist Steven Hoffman, visiting assistant professor at the University at Buffalo. "Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief," he says, "people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe." And God knows, in the Internet age there is no dearth of sources to confirm even the most ludicrous claims (my favorite being that the moon landings were faked). "For the most part," says Hoffman, "people completely ignore contrary information" and are able to "develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information."

His conclusions arise from a study he and six colleagues conducted. They were looking at the well-known phenomenon of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 9/11 attacks. Some people, mostly liberals, have blamed that on false information and innuendo spread by the Bush administration and its GOP allies (by former members of the Bush White House, too, as recently as this past March). (As Dick Cheney said in June, suspicion of a link "turned out not to be true.") But the researchers think another force is at work. In a paper to be published in the September issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry(you have to subscribe to the journal to read the full paper, but the authors kindly posted it on their Web site here), they argue that some Americans believe the Saddam-9/11 link because it "made sense of the administration's decision to go to war against Iraq . . . he fact of the war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties between Iraq and 9/11," they write.

For their study, the scientists whittled down surveys filled out by 246 voters, of whom 73 percent believed in a Saddam-9/11 link, to 49 believers who were willing to be interviewed at length in October 2004. Even after the 49 were shown newspaper articles reporting that the 9/11 Commission had not found any evidence linking Saddam and 9/11, and quoting President Bush himself denying it, 48 stuck to their guns: yup, Saddam Hussein, directly or indirectly, brought down the Twin Towers.

When the scientists asked the participants why they believed in the link, they offered many justifications. Five argued that Saddam supported terrorism generally, or that evidence of a link to 9/11 might yet emerge. These counterarguments are not entirely illogical. But almost everyone else offered some version of "I don't know; I don't know anything"—that is, outright confusion over the conflict between what they believed and what the facts showed—or switched subjects to the invasion of Iraq. As one put it, when asked about his Saddam-9/11 belief, "There is no doubt in my mind that if we did not deal with Saddam Hussein when we did, it was just a matter of time when we would have to deal with him." In other words, holding fast to the Saddam-9/11 belief helped people make sense of the decision to go to war against Iraq.

"We refer to this as 'inferred justification,'" says Hoffman. Inferred justification is a sort of backward chain of reasoning. You start with something you believe strongly (the invasion of Iraq was the right move) and work backward to find support for it (Saddam was behind 9/11). "For these voters," says Hoffman, "the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war."

For an explanation of this behavior, look no further than the psychological theory of cognitive dissonance. This theory holds that when people are presented with information that contradicts preexisting beliefs, they try to relieve the cognitive tension one way or another. They process and respond to information defensively, for instance: their belief challenged by fact, they ignore the latter. They also accept and seek out confirming information but ignore, discredit the source of, or argue against contrary information, studies have shown.

Which brings us back to health-care reform—in particular, the apoplexy at town-hall meetings and the effectiveness of the lies being spread about health-care reform proposals. First of all, let's remember that 59,934,814 voters cast their ballot for John McCain, so we can assume that tens of millions of Americans believe the wrong guy is in the White House. To justify that belief, they need to find evidence that he's leading the country astray. What better evidence of that than to seize on the misinformation about Obama's health-care reform ideas and believe that he wants to insure illegal aliens, for example, and give the Feds electronic access to doctors' bank accounts?

Obama's opponents also need to find evidence that their reading of him back in November was correct. They therefore seize on "confirmation" that he wants to, for instance, redistribute the wealth, as in his “spread the wealth around” remark to Joe the Plumber—finding such confirmation in the claims that health-care reform will do just that, redistributing health care from those who have it now to the 46 million currently uninsured. Similarly, they seize on anything that confirms the “socialist” label that got pinned on Obama during the campaign, or the pro-abortion label—anything to comfort themselves that they made the right choice last November.

There are legitimate, fact-based reasons to oppose health-care reform. But some of the loudest opposition is the result of confirmatory bias, cognitive dissonance, and other examples of mental processes that have gone off the rails.

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 bokey wrote: 

 WideRange wrote: 
Yeah, he was so old he couldn't even figure out how to use the caps lock.

yOU ARE ALL NUTZ - kENNEDY WAS RELIC OF TIMES PAST.

 kurtster wrote: 
As it should be . I turned 18 the last semester of high school, and I  REALLY did not need to have the legal right to buy beer at that time, especially since back then you couldn't get a DWI unless you were involved in an accident or were a smartass with the cop.

 Of course, I would have gotten my beer anyway, it just would have been harder.

 pjcle wrote: 
The Viet Nam War was is why 18 year olds got the vote.  They were old enough to be drafted, fight and die, therefore they got the right to vote and drink.  It was a national tide that swept the nation.  I remember.  We were gonna get the right to vote, even if we had to burn down the country to get it.  The war brought about change, not Kennedy. 

The drinking age has since rissen to 21 again, maybe we should do the same with the voting age.  The war is over and there is no draft. 

.
Edit:  I don't need a history book to tell me that, I lived it.  Is that how the new revisionist history books explain how 18 year olds got the right to vote, because of only Kennedy ?

 pjcle wrote: 
Yes they do... How did you know?

 arsenault wrote: 
It wasn't my intention to argue.  In fact, instead of listing bad deeds, I listed good deeds.  And would say again, I don't know of any that Thurman or Delay have to their credit.  Please enlighten me.

Carter is a hero to me.  You will disagree.  But I am asking you sincerely and politely to please instead of criticizing me, tell me something good about Tom Delay or someone you admire so I can try to understand.  I think Carter is a hero because: I, and I think most of the world don't think Carter had any eff ups in Iran, hence for example, the Nobel Peace Prize.  Also, I believe that standing up for human rights doesn't have anything to do with anti-semitism.  It has to do with what is right.  If he feels that Israel intentionally killed hundreds or thousands of innocent women and children, he feels a moral imperative to stand up and say it.  It should not take a strong man to stand up for innocent people, but sometimes maybe it does.  Again, we will disagree on this point.  You may want to criticize him.  I am saying that instead of criticizing, tell me something good about Tom Delay or someone you admire.

 pjcle wrote: 
Carter was the worst president ever. his eff ups led directly to the mess in Iran and the knock on effects..
He did good work with Habitat, i will grant you that. His latest anti Semitic pronouncements have been disturbing.

Kennedy, the tax proponent has tax shelters that ensure he pays none...

edit: deleted: just heard Senator Kennedy died..not appropos to unload as I intended.

RIP condolences

I do agree..Tom Delay is no role model.

Strom also, but he was a democrat first. again no giant in my book.

I call it a draw..

Carter does get karma points for Habitat...
so maybe he wins by a nose in this hapless race.

But let's remember the Republican party is the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Martin Luther King Jr....

Democrat party have a 'former' KKK senator!!
Robert Byrd... called MLK a trouble maker!

 arsenault wrote:  

Jimmy Carter won the Nobel Peace Price, and is our most respected leader internationally, who also started building homes for people in America.  He's a marvelous human being.  T Kennedy is why people between the ages of 18 and 21 can now vote, he's why women have sports in schools (Title 9) and a million other things.  He's contributed greatly to making our country better and better.  I could list numerous accomplishments we would most likely agree are all great. 

I have never heard of Strom Thurman doing anything good for anyone but himself.  Same with Tom Delay.  If they have done anything good for their country, please inform me.

 pjcle wrote: 
that's what i call a tie.... a low end tie...

We give our government guys like Ted Kennedy and Jimmy Carter, they put in guys like Strom Thurman and Tom Delay.