AstroProdigy

The fact that you don't understand this shows how little grasp you have of living with no real hope. You're gonna give millions of dollars to your kids? And what are they going to do with their lives? Lounge around? I come from immigrant parents so I know why they do what they do whereas the poor in the US do something else. It's not a simple clear cut thing and the policies we have don't make things better. Of course you don't want to give your money. It's human nature. That's why laws are required because you can never expect people to give to charity freely.

Oh the "gateway" drug idea. You understand that if you're using an illegal drug you're more likely to try another illegal drug because hey you're doing something illegal anyway right? If pot was legal this argument would be a falsity. Saying smoking pot might lead someone to do other drugs that are dangerous is like saying drinking might lead to over drinking which kills. The idea is that pot itself is less dangerous than alcohol or smoking so you should have the freedom to use it. You can just as easily say sex can lead to STD's so let's make sex illegal. It's just not a productive argument. If pot itself was more dangerous than alcohol or smoking then I'd agree that it's right to have it illegal. If you look at the history pot used to be acceptable like drinking. Then they went and made it illegal. However today, people get pot illegally all the time. They don't pay taxes to the government for it because it's illegal. I can draw the same parallels for pot that you drew for prohibition of alcohol. Studies have proven a gl!@#$%^&* of wine a day is beneficial and then more studies come around and say it's harmful. That means it's not conclusive. In general it's not particularly harmful unless you consume large quan!@#$%^&*ies regularly. Pot is not particularly harmful unless you consume large quan!@#$%^&*ies regularly. Why is pot so different from alcohol then?

Yeah but then you should make it illegal to drink over a certain limit. Besides I know people who need more than 1 joint to get dissoriented. If they plan on driving a car then arrest them, but come on getting wasted in your house is perfectly legal so why isn't getting high? I mean it's safer to get high. Also, there are chicks who get buzzed at 1 beer. Just a point to the hypocritical nature of these laws. Alcohol has long term sideaffects. Smoking pot is harmful to the lungs. What about say special brownies? Smoking cigarrettes and drinking while pregnant are more destructive to your body. Of course there are side affects, but the argument isn't if pot is bad for you it's is pot any worse than cigarrettes or alcohol? It's a fact that you can't overdose on marijuana and die. However you can over drink and get alcohol poisoning and die. Smoking cigarrettes has much worse long term sideaffects than marijuana as it's extremely addictive and you are forced to drink packs a day of cigarrettes whereas even the hardcore potheads dont smoke more than a few joints a day. Again, there should be restrictions on pot smoking like not smoking in public places like they do in New York for ciggarettes. You can also ban smoking and driving like they do for alcohol. However there is no real proof that marijuana is worse than either cigarrettes or alcohol so either ban them all or ban none of the 3. Don't forget it's been proven in countries where it's legal that their societies are not falling apart. I don't understand why people ignore this very obvious fact.

Why have pot illegal in the first place? Countries where it's legal have obviously proven that it's no worse than alcohol. Same thing with gay marriage countries where it's legal have proven that their divorce rates haven't skyrocketed nor has everyone suddenly turned gay.

No one said the rich don't have to be rich. The rich don't have to be so grossly rich that they can support thousands of themselves in luxury. That's completely unnecessary. That's the thing about education. It's very decidedly pro rich in the US and it feeds into a cycle. That's a major reason why a child born to a ghetto will probably stay in the ghetto while a person born to luxury will probably stay in luxury. People succeed in the stock market by buying low and selling high. When you do this you're inevitably taking money from people who invested less wisely/with less luck. Corporations could not be as successful without the stock market. I know big corporations make a country more competetive, but in the long run they just hurt the little people. A major corporation's responsibility is only to its shareholders. That means it needs to do everything in its power to turn a profit and less government controls means a greater ability to do whatever it takes to make money. You don't seem to understand the basics of sociology to grasp what I'm saying here.

Worked hard for? Working class citizens work hard for the money they earn. CEO's make other people work hard for the money they earn. Sorry if investing in the stock market doesn't seem like hard work to me. See people want a quick rich scheme with the stock market like a lottery when hard work in an educated field you enjoy is the best way to go. Money doesn't come from nowhere in the stock market. When you make money you're essentially stealing it from someone else. Stock brokers are completely meaningless in society. They provide no gain to the advancement of humanity in any way. They in fact hurt us by enticing inexperienced people into throwing away their hard earned money in the stock market. Seriously all the get rich schemes that get people very large sums of money I have no respect for. It teaches kids to go for greed at any cost and this is probably why we still have so many poor along with rich who have enough money to support all the poor, but don't because of their greed. Hopefully one day people will be enlightened enough to see that this is more important than keeping Gays from marrying and stop voting in people like Cheney. My viewpoint may be too optimistic of humanity's potential though so who knows.

It helps drastically. It's not a punishment seriously. They have more money than they know what to do with. If we didn't promote such a greedy society in America then we might not need to tax them, but we do. Not everyone knows to do something about it (hence why education is so crucial). You can do it, but you can't tell me that you wouldn't have had a much easier time with the free ride money provides. You're right they do keep raising prices and the best schools are usually the most expensive and the ones the rich have the greatest bias towards getting in easier. State universities like the one I go to are much cheaper and they give you an actual chance. However most states aren't like New York so a kid in Alabama has little chance to move out of poverty.

Rewarding someone for not working? Do you understand what the vast majority of the working class that works much harder than the rich and still can't afford to send their kids to college so their kids end up trapped in the same cycle? It's not a free ride. You still need to get in even though the rich get a superior education and more opportunities. Sorry if I don't see punishing a generation of kids because they're not rich as the right thing to do. Just because you had to pay doesn't mean everyone else should do the same because you're angry. Your parents' money isn't what needs to be taxed for others education it's the money of the extreme rich who live in extreme luxury with millions left over and complain that they want to be more rich. I like how the GOP has pulled the vail over your head that taxes would be on the poor and not just the rich. Try getting rid of the tax cuts they made after taking control. That'l cover it and then some. It's not just the poverty line it's the people who can't pay for any college which covers working class. You go tell a kid that if he works hard he's still !@#$%^&*ed because he doesn't have money already. You need money to make money or else you'll stay des!@#$%^&*ute. That's the American dream eh?

Yes well working your !@#$%^&* off is admirable, but it's still vastly unfair to someone who's had it all handed to him.

College education should be made free for the poor. This happens to some extent in some states, but a national standard would be better. Think back to when you were a kid. That's when your sense of self get's built up. Now imagine having to work from a young age to support your siblings and not having good values about education instilled in you. Every parent want's their kids to live good lives, but when it get's to the point where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer and where hard working kids never had a chance to compete against lazy self righteous rich kids then our government supporting it is fundamentally wrong.

It's not that Canada offered to help. It's that we needed help even with our mamouth resources and ability to clear the area easily. Sorry if I don't expect a foreign and much smaller nation populationwise to do our job for us, but I foolishly expected a quick response to save our own citizens. I guess that's too much to expect. What about the rich that are born rich and get the best education because of their money and then they stay rich? You think that's not handed to them? You would agree that your parents tried to provide the environment for you to succeed right? Now imagine living in a broken home where you need to work to support siblings and there's no push to succeed. That's why it's important for the government to help. They don't need to simply cut you a check. How about they pay for your college education? Why do we need the best schools to be the most expensive and the ones that accept you if your parent is an alumni? Everyone knows a high school education doesn't mean diddly squat these days so why not move to make college free? I mean if the poor are expected to move out of poverty on their own then why don't we give them at least a more fair opportunity to do so? Oh yeah cutting taxes for the rich is more important of course.

"Due to security and logistics issues in the disaster area surrounding New Orleans, the team started operations on September 3, saving 30 people that day. They returned to Vancouver on September 6, reportedly saving over 110 people during their deployment. It has also accepted some evacuees to stay in Canada." I don't know how you missed that. The fact that we couldn't handle it on our own in an efficient manor even though we have tremendous resources is the humiliation America endured to the rest of the world. That's the thing about your argument. It doesn't reflect the reality of all those people who have been there for generations. I wasn't born with money so trust me it's really a !@#$%^&* to do anything meaningful with your life when you don't have loads of money for it. I can see how the vast majority of people born poor stay poor because they grow up thinking they can't accomplish anything and the federal government sure as !@#$%^&* doesn't give them a different opinion. Thank god I live in New York where they have cheap state colleges and give you financial aid when you need it and that I had good parents who pushed me to go to college because if I came from a broken home I'm sure I would end up working at McDonalds. So please get off your high Conservative loving horse and realize the reality of why there are poor people in America. This country has the ideal that anyone can move up from poverty, but the reality is very different. Thank god Democrats still have some influence because if Republicans were running the whole show I'd be working at McDonalds with no future. That's why I'm a Democrat because the Republican Party is a fuse of greedy amoral economic policy as well as self righteous social policy that promotes ignorance and seems to ignore the very glaring contradiction that supporting the poor is a major part of being a Christian and Republican economic policy is wholly anti Christian. That's also why I find it hilarious that Republicans claim to be the party of God when their major policy is anti God. I guess keeping Gays from marrying is more important to God than the suffering of the poor right?

Real estate website? You'd need a computer and an internet connection and even then you'd still need to know to look. If your great granparents had a house that was passed down to your grandparents and your parents and then to you then you have not bought a house. Case and point: many if not most of the poor people in New Orleans were already born there. I guess they should apologize for not expecting the levees to break or trusting the government would save them quickly if they were in trouble right? The government felt it more important to focus on how they'd spin things than actually helping poor people who wouldn't vote for them anyway. It's funny that you say FEMA was helping even though it still took them way too long to get things done. Our capacity to clear a disaster area of people is very high. That's why leaving people there for days with no food or water. It takes humans a few days without water before they die. As for the elderly they'll die even faster. The rich were ok though because they were educated and had an easy ability to leave. They're the ones who matter because they voted for "God's party" right? Ummm no their first mission to help was not the 6th as clearly stated by the article. As you can see from the timeline of our own response it's riddled with incompetence and Bush "cutting his losses". That's what mattered the most to him.

Here's a timeline of the federal government's response: http://thinkprogress.org/katrina-timeline Canada's response: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_resp...rricane_Katrina Sorry I guess the response of a different country that's way up north and much less capable to respond to our disaster was on par with our own reaction. Maybe if they knew the US federal government was gonna take their goddam time they'd have responded sooner. The people in the Superdome could have been evacuated any day had there been a real response from the start. I guess spinning the story was more of a priority. Not everyone is educated and knows where to look. Statistics are nice, but if people are poor and uneducated they don't know the statistics. They should apologize for that too right?

If you're poor you have to live wherever you can afford which leaves you a lot less options. Many of these people have been in New Orleans for generations. They can't afford to up and buy a house somewhere else now. It's generally not about greed. Sorry I'm too lazy to find sources for poor people in New Orleans if you honestly believe they're not there then there's nothing to say. Other countries reacting faster than us in our own disaster is also a well known fact. I don't need to cite every little thing.

Some people don't have millions to buy in the safest places. I guess they should apologize for being poor. If things were worse it'd be said that Bush purposely left them there to die. Other countries reacted faster to our problem than we did. That's a disgrace.

I'd expect someone like James Witt, but I guess it's too much to expect Bush to get passed cronyism and put a qualified director of FEMA like Clinton did. But hey let's blame the incompetence with Katrina on Clinton like they're blaming 9/11 on him right before elections. Most people weren't petty criminals. That's enough reason to not be incompetent isn't it? I guess not.

Sorry if there were people there that did nothing. The real response took a week. When law and security break down it turns to anarchy. Considering the number of people there I'd hardly be so ready to condemn them all as criminals. Please don't stereotype everyone trapped in New Orleans as drug addicts, murderers, and rapists just because it keeps Bush from looking incompetent. The government's response to the tsunami was quick even though the area affected was on the other side of the globe. The government response to a domestic disaster was slower than a global disaster on the other side of the world. Two things about this. For one this proves the federal government could have easily responded quickly if FEMA wasn't downgraded tremendously and left in the hands of cronyism. You use cronyism for something not important not the person in charge of disaster relief in the US. On top of that this only shows that the federal government won't help it's own people even though they can. What's wrong the people weren't rich enough to matter enough for an efficient response as expected from a First World country and the most powerful country in the world at that. Hey guess what happened to Michael Brown after Katrina? First he was largely scapegoated to ignore the person who put him in charge in the first place. Then he was hired as an advisor to FEMA for the same pay. That's quite the cronyism there.

Like I said not everyone was looting for profit...

Forced conversions and persecution has happened within hundreds of years to Jews pretty much everywhere in the world except the US. That's why they needed a state because they didn't want to be at the whim of whatever is going on in the country they're in all the time. I don't think Iran could even massacre the Jews there since Israel would immediately step in. Some looted, but some were just looking for food. Not everyone who stole stuff was just looking for a profit. Blaming the victim is a natural human response though.

The levies breaking is Louisiana's fault. The federal government being slower than even other countries to respond to their own disaster is Bush's fault. Brownie you're doing a heck of a job. Some people didn't have cars. Try walking out of Louisiana. Sorry they don't have enough money. If Canada can deploy to help us all the way down in the Gulf Coast faster than we can do anything then we've got a broken system. Sorry people didn't decide not to live somewhere because there's danger. why don't we clear out all the earthquake and tornado zones too because that's dangerous. New York City isn't safe either because of terrorists let's all move down to some magically safe place. Blame the local and state government for the levy breach. Blame the federal government for not giving a !@#$%^&*. A plane hit the Pentagon. What's your point?

Handing out money wasn't the question the first 7 days. The problem was that we weren't trying to save the people trapped. Sever I don't think if Bush suddenly decided people born in Europe are not allowed to visit Europe and contact with people in Europe can be called conspiracy and you live with people who hate Israel and by proxy Jews all around you. So many people emigrated because they were afraid all of a sudden Iran would go "hey we're gonna kill you now because we can and maybe it'l show Israel that we're serious". The Kurds are a minority...doesn't mean Iran treats them fairly. Just because you're recognized as existing doesn't mean you're protected from whatever a theocracy of a religion that runs counter to yours feels like doing to you.

If it's an interstate disaster that takes out very large portions of multiple states then it's the Federal government's responsibility. The fact that Canada was ready to help us faster than our own government is humiliating. 9/11 didn't take out a large portion of the east coast so it was much easier to clean up.

It doesn't really matter I just thought you were trying to show a larger group of Democrats than there are willing to pull all the troops out of Iraq now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

Newsflash Steig...Bush doesn't care. Sever lemme see your source for your quotes. From what I've read Jews in Iran can only contact Jews that are opposed to the existence of the state of Israel (practically no one). The Jews in Iran are forcibly isolated so I'm not sure one source covers things. From what I've read Jews, like other religious minorities are oppressed by the government. 1 seat in parliament out of 290 doesn't mean doodly squat if the Jews are still oppressed not to mention the clerics make all the final decisions. They're forbidden from travelling to Israel. The figures of the percentage of Jews that left Iran is 85%. Please use real facts from now on.