The Dems are far worst, some of the moderate ones are ok. I mean I'm sure they eat little kids but still they are not to bad.:D

The super liberals are the spawn of satin, very scary creatures. They come out of there hybrid cars with anti Bush stickers and cause all sorts of trouble.:eek:


Now the Rep's are mostly pretty good, I mean no party is perfect we may have a bad member. Not sure on that though.

Really when it comes down to it you are always better of with a Rep in office over a Dem.:D

Hell no,once you place a person/persons in a position of power human nature generally wins out and there's your corruption.

I'm far too thick headed to have any answers save that career politicians are a club or confraternity with it's own language,rules and codes of conduct{don't get caught}anyone ever hear of term limits and DON'T VOTE FOR LAWYERS??

Someone above cited Karl Rove as somebody who first divined what the public thinks,au contrair mon frere,politicians of any stamp have had machiavellian advisers for thousands of years who's job was to gauge public opinion.

I'm sure that's true. Maybe Rove's insight has been to make it work in today's world of 24/7 cable news, internet, etc.

That's my point exactly.

Yes I know of term limits. It is kinda unfair tho. Why is it a president can only have 2 consecutive terms and a member of the legislative branch can serve till he is dead and burried? However, what you are asking for is that enough legislators vote against themselves. Kinda like asking me to vote a pay cut for myself. Going to be a real difficult sell. Don't know about the lawyers. Not sure it makes a difference.

Plenty of Demo pols give me a serious pain. Shortly after the drumbeat for touch screen machines took up, some well respected IT engineers in Silicon Valley expressed serious reservations saying it would be a piece of cake to game the system.
:D Most cases, I'll agree with that. Where did men like Washington go? They more or less appointed him pres. by popular acclaim and then after serving he chose to go back to what he really wanted to do, work on his farm, when he could have been virtual king for God knows how long.

I think there are a few pols with integrity. Biden can be an idiot at times but I always get a kick out of seeing him and Lugar, (r) Indiana, on news shows together (they're the top ranking guys from each party on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee). They seem to genuinely repsect each other and neither one is a dummy. (all the time anyway)

There might be some real shYte hitting the fan over this Foley guy. Word I've heard is that the Repo house leadership has known for some time of this and they sat on it, hoping it wouldn't come out. Jeez, is that guy going to unwelcome on his previous social circuit or what? :fork_off:

You're young yet. The scales will fall from your eyes eventually.

well, yes and no. I look at it as having a left person in office and then a right
person to balance it out followed by a left.

The party that's in power is in more of a position to proactively take things too far, and rarely refrains from making use of that opportunity. The Republicans are in the unusual (for them) position of controlling the presidency and both houses of congress, with particularly weak (Bush, Hastert, Frist), venal (Rove, DeLay) and surprisingly incompetent (Rumsfeld) characters in positions they really shouldn't be. Tired accusations of fascist intentions aside (yawn..), the pendulum's swung too far in one direction, and these things have a tendency to self-correct through public irritation.

I personally don't think Clinton was an especially bad president, but he and his team produced any number of actions and statements that pissed off major portions of the public as much as Bush does today. The web + 24 hour cable news constantly looking to stir up s--t wasn't in place in the early '90s, so it's not as easy to dig up incidents, but Rostenkowski going to jail, the Clinton runway haircut while LAX shut down, firing the White House travel staff, etc., come to mind easily enough. Those were more innocent days, though (post Berlin Wall, pre-911), so it seems in retrospect to be petty squabbling and "politics as usual" while the same games today are considered unprecedented, earth-shattering, and threatening the future of the republic. They're not. One major difference, the quality and gravitas of Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole in opposition was striking compared to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, a couple of old-style party hacks - the Democrats' choice of those two plus Dean to run the show makes me think they'll blow a historic opportunity for a '94 level re-alignment this fall.

It'll shake out soon enough anyway, and we'll have some new set of administration boogey-men to piss off half the country.

PC Dave seems to have it right, except for:Newt likes to think of himself in those terms. I don't see it.

Dole is an odd sort of guy. He is a serious guy who has given more to his country than I could ever hope to give, but every now and then he says something ridiculous and comes off as a mean-spirited oddball.

I see Dole and Newt as opposites. Newt is a clown who fashions himself as a deep thinker and a man of substance. Dole is a man of substance who acts clownish from time to time.

I'm obviously rambling here. Sorry about that.

Okay, gravitas may be the wrong word for Newt - he's no Acheson-like elder statesman, but he did have a core set of ideas (which you may not agree with), and he pulled together and disicplined a 40-year minority party and led them to a remarkable win that's managed to stick through six congresses (so far). Right place/right time, perhaps, but also the right man. My point was that in retrospect, a '93 era Newt was an opposing Party chairman's nightmare (whether he knew it or not), while Pelosi's win had a lot of Repubs high-fiving each other, and she's done nothing since to prove them wrong. We'll see what happens in five weeks, but I don't see that changing. If the Dems take over the house, it'll be despite Pelosi, not because of her, and given the Repubs' advantages in money and incumbency, the Dems can't afford that kind of leadership deficit.

I agree with you there, although the ideas were so lame that I have a hard time giving Newt much credit for them. He lead an effective insurgency, but that's about it. I don't see where Pelosi is any worse than Newt, but I've been wrong about that sort of thing about as often as I've been right. I suspect that the same bunch of Republican losers will be running things next year, although with slimmer margins. At least Frist will be gone. That's got to be an improvement.

I'll have to agree on the Pelosi, Reid, Dean triumvirate. Some substance there but a good measure of flakiness and weany-ness thrown in.

Really, when you at look who`s running the show... bush/rove, Frist, Hastert, Reed, Pelosi, the two opposing party hacks.... there`s no wonder we are up ****e`s creek without a paddle. When will leaders with real substance ever step forward? If ever.

When will leaders with real substance step forward? When you step forward. Why don't you run then? Could you do a better job given the circumstances? I can't.

Why would anyone really want to assuming they were this wonderful person you talk about? They can earn much more in the private sector with a lot less grief. See Bill Gates. Think he wants that job?

I know enough to believe that I am not qualified to run for state or national office, which is what I believe we are refering to here. And I am just not cut out to do what needs t be done to win such an office seat.... pander. I am a member of our town`s planning commission and participate a good deal in local civic situations with glee.

Do you give of yourself to your community aklim?