Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine
The most important issue in the next election is providing a good education for all youth. I want to see that young people have a good and clean environment to learn in, and I'm most worried about their education and technical literacy.
The election result that would make me angriest is if people don't bother to vote. What would make me happiest is if we had the largest turnout in history.
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The one thing the next president could do to make things better is defect to Israel, taking Jonathan Pollard with him. At least people would know who the president works for. The most pressing problem looming in the next decade is Jewish supremacism and third world fecundity.
I'd rather see Chris Rock get elected than George Bush, John McCain, Bradley or Gore. At least he's funny. Once each party elects a nominee it won't look like a wrestling match or a roller derby. It'll look like a bar mitzvah.
If I had George Bush, John McCain, Bill Bradley and Al Gore over for dinner I'd ask them why they have all sold out their heritage for 30 million pieces of Zionist money and media approval, and then I'd let them all wash the dishes and hope the garbage disposal sucks like a black hole.
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Camille Paglia, author and Salon columnist
The overwhelming political issue for the next quarter century is the restoration of credibility and competence to our foreign policy team, which the inept Clinton administration has turned into the gang that couldn't shoot straight. The U.S. military, which saved the world from Hitler, has been abused and misused to bomb civilian targets and now languishes as a police force in minor outposts, wasting our financial resources and compromising our national security.
The next president must be someone who respects the military and who will restore it to full readiness. The military should not be a laboratory for p.c. social engineering. My own Democratic Party could lose the White House to the Republicans because of this one issue alone. The Northeastern major media have woefully misjudged the depth and breadth of unease about military matters among the electorate.
As for the leading presidential contenders, George W. Bush seems like a nice fellow with lots of testosterone to spare, but he's intellectually underprepared and marginally talented for geopolitics and can't seem to get a coherent sentence out under stress. John McCain, the pampered pet Republican of myopic liberal journalists, is a dried-up twisted sister who's quick with a quip but who has no perceivable talent whatever for national leadership.
Al Gore has squandered his once solid vice-presidential dignity in desperate, yammering stridency. People are just plain sick of him, and even many Democrats are dreaming of a Clinton-free millennium. Bill Bradley seems far more centered and trustworthy, but I have nagging reservations about his management style. We don't need another imperial presidency like that of the moody, reclusive Richard Nixon.
Finally, both political parties had better move their asses to nominate a woman for vice president, or there will be hell to pay.
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Stanley Crouch, author and Salon's newest columnist
What we have in front of us is the possibility of putting together a program cultivating our most important natural resource -- the population. Society can't progress properly with the high drop-out rates and illiteracy. People either become a burden or a menace to society. We're heading toward international warfare, but instead of land, it's markets the world will fight for. You take those markets by a well-trained work force.
The next president can help by identifying people across the country who have a high success with the uneducable population, like the Kipp Academy in the Bronx, and use them as models for the public school system. We need a task force formed with people who have met the dragon and taken his head.
We also need to legalize drugs to break the back of the drug industry. Twelve-year-olds are making $50,000 untaxed. We have to make that impossible. Whole families in the inner city are getting corrupted by the easy money.
None of the candidates have shown me enough to decide. I like what McCain and Bradley are saying, though. McCain is an extraordinary breath of fresh air for the Republican Party. Forbes too, he's got blacks as senior campaign managers. I'd like to see the Republican Party liberate itself from being a white party.
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Al Franken, former cast member of "Saturday Night Live" and author of "Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot"
The 2000 election will determine whether we continue going in the direction Clinton started -- a sort of common-sense, doable liberalism -- versus going back to the tax-cut, anti-environment conservative agenda. The best thing the next president can do is to find a way to keep the economy going so we don't have to make the awful cuts we did in the 1980s, like closing psychiatric institutions and making the mentally ill homeless.
The biggest problem we'll face depends on which neighborhood you live in. If you're in a bad neighborhood, it's crime and violence. If you're an international businessman, it's terrorism. My biggest fear about the election is that Americans will decide George W. Bush is a lightweight and vote for him anyway. I'd love to have Bush, McCain, Bradley and Gore over for dinner. I'd serve lots of wine and get them looped. I'd ask Bush about the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act). Just to see if he knows what it is. I'd also ask him what part of Jesus' philosophy he draws on. He said Jesus was the biggest influence on him, but he seemed to have trouble explaining why. He didn't seem terribly familiar with Christ's teachings.
I doubt I could cross the line and vote Republican. I have tremendous respect for McCain but I don't buy the war hero thing. Anybody can be captured. I thought the idea was to capture them. As far as I'm concerned he sat out the war.
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The next president and the next majority party in Congress will decide the direction our nation will go at the dawn of this new millennium: toward policies of further economic growth, greater freedom from big government's constraints and more opportunity for our children and grandchildren; or toward the old models of more regulation, litigation and taxation.
While I believe that neither Democrats nor Republicans can solely take credit for economic upswings, Washington can create a fertile environment for it to occur. How? In most cases, by getting out of the way, removing the barriers to opportunities through lower taxes and less governmental regulation and dependency.
The most pressing problem we have is helping those left behind in these good economic times. Over the last 40 years, we've spent over $5 trillion on social programs and we have even deeper poverty today than we had in 1969. Until we move toward more incentive-based approaches through targeted pro-growth tax benefits, increasing home ownership opportunities and involving faith-based organizations in the solutions, we may never be able to eradicate poverty.
I have never been angry about any election result. Certainly, I am pleased to have more Republicans elected who are willing to fight for greater freedom, less government intervention into our lives and more opportunities for all Americans.
President Lincoln, regardless of his political views, had the courage to do the right thing regardless of the consequences. He was a man of principle and conviction. These are the qualities that we must return to the White House and demand of our president.
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What's at stake? Not a whole lot, and that's the problem. The mood is that we need a president to preside rather than lead. Certainly our continued prosperity and world leadership is at stake but the stakes don't seem to be visible to the public.
In some countries people don't vote because they don't think it will make a difference. In the U.S. people don't vote because they don't want to make a difference. We're coasting; life will get tougher and we may not be prepared. We're completely ignorant of foreign affairs and we're taking our economic prosperity for granted. Kids used to take history to learn America's role in the world; now they only learn that the world wants to copy us. It's harder to make the distinction between advertising and editorial. We're cynical but not very sophisticated. As Oscar Wilde said, we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
We need a Roosevelt to shake us out of our complacency. Things are going so well we no longer honor courage. Roosevelt himself was courageous and he brought it out in other people. He wasn't afraid to tell us life isn't supposed to be easy, that we have to band together. We don't have anybody doing that right now. I'm a big believer in free markets, in knowing your customers and giving them what they want, but not in politics. Politicians shouldn't be looking at polls to find out what we want, they should be persuading us of what we want.
We need someone with a Steve Jobs level of vision. Jobs didn't give customers what they wanted, he gave them what they didn't know they wanted. Politicians should persuade us, not ask us what we want. They should try to change our minds rather than pander to our prejudices.
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